The Importance of SWOT Analysis
A SWOT analysis is used to determine the overall pros and cons of a brand by compiling and utilizing internal and external data. This report gives social media managers, C-suite executives, and ownership a comprehensive picture of their business. A SWOT analysis is the best tool if the organization is looking to grow or explore ways to remain steps ahead of the competition.
What Exactly is a SWOT Analysis?
- Strengths: What the brand is good at (product, service, reputation, etc.)
- Weaknesses: Areas for improvement, factors that can give other brands a competitive edge
- Opportunities: Competitive edge (new products, rebranding, competitors closing, etc.)
- Threats: This can be any disruptor that will negatively impact the business (competitor, covid-19, natural disaster, etc.)
A SWOT analysis is crucial when planning strategically and a huge benefit to brands. These benefits consist of:
- The primary source of information from the past and present to help plan the future
- Building organizational strengths
- Helps set obtainable objectives
- Provides insight to help overcome threats to the organization
- Overturn weaknesses
- Determine core competencies
SWOT & Social Media
In most industries, there is some form of a SWOT analysis performed. SWOT requires you to assess your business objectively and based on hard numbers. For this post, I will focus on its impact on the digital landscape. The data pulled for this report goes beyond social media channels and follower counts. The information discovered can be used in e-mail marketing generation, SEO, and more. By regularly conducting a SWOT analysis, brands can stay on top of their strategies and formulate new strategies to remain competitive and not fall behind.
Social Media Managers must know who their target audience is before developing any communications campaigns. Ultimately, a social media target audience will help you market your product effectively and prioritize who you’re targeting. To narrow down the target audience, brands should conduct a SWOT analysis in conjunction with social listening and audience segmentation. In building a target audience, these are the types of questions that social media managers should be able to answer:
· Do you predominantly focus on one of the genders, or do you target both males and females?
· Which age groups are you most hoping to reach? Do you appeal to some generations more than others?
· What types of incomes do your typical customers have? Do you target people with plenty of spare money or people who tend to have money issues?
· What types of values does your target audience have in common?
Social listening is a dynamic analysis of any activity that happens on social media channels. Social Media Managers can then use the data compiled from social listening in developing future communications and marketing campaigns. Social listening helps you to attentively build and curate a community around your brand, by replying to untagged mentions and using the insights and analysis to guide your strategy, analyzing what worked and what didn’t. Audience segmentation is the grouping of individuals into clusters based on similar characteristics and behaviors. Segmentation is an essential starting point for introducing personalization into your efforts. Within segmentation are variables pulling from individual demographics, geographics, psychographics, behavioral, and firmographics. Audience segmentation is one of the most consistent ways to ensure the right content connects with the intended audience.
When Social Media Managers review opportunities, they can potentially find new social media channels to explore, partnership opportunities, strategies to penetrate new markets, find a new audience to target, or brainstorm new promotional offers to add to their social accounts. Social media managers also need to be conscious of threats to the brand. For example, Covid-19 is a threat that has impacted how it increased/decreased revenue, determining if the current social media posting schedule should remain or modified to tailor to the target audience that is now home with more time to scroll. Another component would be exploring if you and your competitor are now fighting for the same timeslot and have unique or similar marketing campaigns. A positive to threats is that there is always room for that threat to become an opportunity. By identifying a brand’s strengths, weaknesses, threats, and opportunities, social media managers can strengthen their strategies to reach the target audience and make the respective modifications.
