The Elementary yet Empowering SWOT Analytics in Digital Marketing
Making a pros and cons list is a great way of ensuring that you’re making right decisions. However, in a complex business operation, this simple activity develops multiple layers of intricacies. In such cases the simple pros and cons list certainly needs to get more elaborate - and that's were comes in the SWOT analysis method. The acronym SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. SWOT analysis gauges the relative performance and environment of any organization, and is always a trustworthy practice when making significant changes for planning, staffing, introducing a new system, or assessing any new idea.
Strengths and weaknesses are consequences of various internal factors. All the areas of your company that are under your control, which you can improve, fall under this category. The other two categories are a collection of external factors. While these factors aren’t under your direct control, their influence on competition is the same as it is on your company. Let's look at every element of the SWAT analysis in detail.
Strengths These qualities contribute to an enterprise’s success and superiority over rival companies. Strengths can be your extensive resources, superior technology, wider outreach, and innovative teams in the workforce, and anything else that puts you on top of competition.
Weaknesses While in your control, these factors are limitations of your company, preventing you from maintaining a competitive edge. They include lack of experience, resources, access to technology and poor locale for your market. These weaknesses will aid in assessing which areas to focus on for the growth of your company.
Opportunities These external factors give you the same chance as your competition. People’s lifestyle changes, new solutions or alternatives to current industry problem, and anything that can facilitate your market’s development without any expenditure of resources is an opportunity.
Threats These external factors put your business at risk, the most prominent of which is competition. No matter what the industry is, you will always face competition. Other threats include bad press coverage leading to loss of brand image, shifts in consumer trends, which can be unexpected. Economic downturns, price increase of supply resulting in a drainage of resources, and many more are uncontrollable factors enterprises need to watch.
SWOT analysis and digital marketing of IT services and products SWOT analysis delivers smart insights for digital marketing, especially given the innumerable digital marketing options that every product or service has. From choosing the campaign-specific digital marketing strategy to website, SEO, and social media analysis, SWOT analysis provides a 360-degree point of view of every decision you are taking. For example, let's assume that your organization has to select an ideal social media option for your HR employee engagement app, and you are analyzing whether Facebook is the right option. The SWOT analysis would assess the strengths, weakness, opportunities and threats with this decision.
Strengths ● ●
The incredible reach of this social media option ensures that you can reach out to a huge percentage of your target audience Multiple options to target specific audience for your posts and ads significantly rule out white noise in terms of misdirected campaigns
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Multiple content options of Facebook - from text to image to video and even live videos improve scope of delivering a strong variety of interaction with your audience
Weakness ● ● ●
There will be significant expenses involved in reaching out to your audience There are multiple restrictions in using specific terminologies in Facebook ad; you might not be able to get your exact thought across all the time Facebook is an informal form of social engagement - would a technology-based solution create enough interest here
Opportunities ● ● ●
Facebook is continuously improving the features it has to offer the business world - especially through Facebook business The option that your audience has to share an interesting content multiplies your scope for visibility The multiple HR-related groups on Facebook proves to be a great target market
Threat ● ●
In this open mode of digital marketing, your competitors can easily follow and mimic your approach and steal away your target audience Just as how a great digital media campaign grabs a million eyeballs, so does a digital marketing blunder gain equal relevance
This is just an example of how SWOT analysis in digital marketing can help you make timely and accurate decisions.
SWOT and digital marketing The key to an accurate SWOT analysis is in the available information you have to assess. SWOT analysis being such a critical step in digital marketing warrants conducting it regularly, especially while making significant product- or service-related campaign changes, or company-wide structural developments. However, SWOT should only be a step in these changes instead of taking over the complete process itself. The employment of a SWOT analysis will lay out a clear picture of your digital marketing roadmap and help you understand which direction to take for connecting with your target audience. Image source: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/0b/SWOT_en.svg/910px-SWOT_en.svg.png