I recently finished reading a whitepaper on the importance of conducting a SWOT analysis in digital marketing and thought it would be good to share its highlights.
One of your key responsibilities as a social media marketer is to ensure that your campaigns are on track and a SWOT analysis on a regular basis represents the best way to do this.
SWOT analysis is a basic, straightforward model that assesses what an organization can and cannot do as well as its potential opportunities and threats.
Strengths and weaknesses relate to internal efficiencies of an organization and they are things that are within your control. On the contrary, opportunities and threats are external elements that are beyond your direct control. However, you can create strategies that deal with them.
Strengths
Strengths are those things that you are doing very well and include the following points:
- Presence on major social media networks relevant to your industry and where your target audience spends much of their time on
- Contagious and compelling content
- Adequate campaign funds
- Professional looking social media brand pages
- Large, focused and highly engaged fan base or followers
- High volume and velocity of conversations, shares, comments and likes on the key sites.
Weaknesses
The next step is to make a list of all the weaknesses and limitations of your social campaigns. This list will be long when you initiate your first social media marketing campaigns but it will gradually become shorter over time as you acquire experience. The secret is to turn weaknesses into strengths.
Examples of weaknesses include:
- Few fans/ followers
- Inadequate advertising funds
- Inactivity on social media sites
- Few or no comments
- Few likes and shares
- Poor fan engagement
- Quite a lot of negative comments
Opportunities
As a marketer you must always be on the lookout for growth opportunities in your market. I remember very well a billboard along Seke Road that satirized this failure to identify opportunities. It carried the picture of a hyena passing an antelope without recognizing that its prey because it is used to scavenging! Think outside the box and get out of your comfort zone.
As a social media marketer growth must be your true north and you must be aggressive in your pursuit of dominance. Seek ways of widening your social media presence by creating uncontested market space. I encourage you to be creative and adventurous.
Take advantage of these opportunities:
- Few or no competitors
- Having influential people as fans on your page
- New social media trends and platforms
- Increase in the number of people having internet access
- Breaking news you can rely on to start an engagement
- Linking your business page to your website or blog
- High quality digital products that you can sell when you wish.
- Partnering with influential people on social media.
Threats
Any business environment has got some inherent threats in it but you must learn to either neutralize or navigate around them through innovative strategies. Typical threats might be:
- Many competitors
- Negative comments
- High number of dislikes on Facebook
- Presence of major brands in your niche on the key social media platforms
- Aggressive campaign by competitors
When you conduct this SWOT analysis regularly and diligently, you will receive valuable feedback on where you are doing well and also where the performance of your campaigns is not up to scratch. This gives you the opportunity to come up with corrective interventionist strategies and tactics.
This article was written by Joseph Neusu, a digital marketing specialist for Yookos which is an emerging social networking site headquartered in Johannesburg, South Africa. He is an avid researcher of digital media trends and best practices with special focus on the African markets. Joseph is a social media marketing trainer, consultant and writer and helps brands to build awareness, enhance their market penetration, promote the brand-client relationship and customer service. He can be reached on joseph@digitalmediaintelligence.com
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