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You’ve landed a new client, so now it’s time to set the stage with your strategic recommendations. But first, you need to better understand the company and the industry in which it operates. Your research has to go deep. How can you be sure you are covering all your bases? Where should you start?
A marketing SWOT analysis may be the answer.
SWOT analysis is a competitive analysis framework that helps you get to know a company and the industry it operates in. A SWOT analysis in marketing examines the company and its industry from the promotional and marketing perspective. The four parts of a SWOT analysis — strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats — give a well-rounded view of where your client stands, relative to its customers and competitors.
Strengths and weaknesses stem from the client’s internal capabilities — things the company does well or poorly. Opportunities and threats are external factors beyond the control of the client — trends or developments in the industry at large.
To conduct a marketing SWOT analysis, you will examine each of these parts in turn. Then, with this information, you will have a solid foundation for your strategic marketing recommendations.
It’s helpful to start by auditing your client’s strengths and weaknesses.
To find your client’s strengths, look for resources that a company has or activities that it is succeeding at. Your client may be able to capitalize on these further. Examples of strengths might include an active following on Twitter, knowledgeable subject-matter experts who write for the company blog, high-quality backlinks to the company website, and relationships with leading publications in the industry.
Weaknesses are, of course, the opposite — look for gaps or deficiencies in skills or resources. These may be areas your agency can bolster for your client or that your client needs to address internally. The following would be considered weaknesses: a company website with poor usability, a lack of social media presence, poorly rated customer service, and no or low-quality blog content.
When conducting a marketing SWOT analysis for a client, look at the company’s skills, resources, or performances in the areas listed below. These are the most common areas where you will find strengths and weaknesses.
After thoroughly understanding your client’s strengths and weaknesses, it’s time to step back and look at the industry. The next part of your marketing SWOT analysis examines external opportunities and threats.
As we mentioned above, opportunities and threats are factors that are external to your client, such as trends or situations happening in the industry. It’s considered an opportunity when your client can take action to benefit from it. Threats are the opposite. They are risks. Your client must decide whether to take action to mitigate the risk.
The most powerful marketing strategies arise when you spot an opportunity that aligns with your client’s strengths. For example, let’s say that questions about the types of products your client sells are on the rise on Reddit — an opportunity. You know that your client has several employees with an established presence on the platform. Your strategy can apply the strength to the opportunity. In this example, your recommendation could be to form a task force of employee ambassadors who are willing to answer inquiries on the platform.
The most powerful marketing strategies arise when you spot an opportunity that aligns with your client’s strengths. Click To Tweet
You will also need to look for threats that your client should defend against. Threats can include competitors with a strong or growing presence in your industry or an emerging trend toward customers using do-it-yourself solutions, for example.
The opportunities and threats you unearth will vary widely by industry. However, they are likely to fall into these categories:
Where can you find this information? You can start with these sites for market research for general market data. Then you’ll need to pinpoint sources of market information for your client’s specific industry. Look for industry journals, which often report on emerging trends and issue state-of-the-industry data.
To find competitor data, you can use our Audience Overlap tool to first identify a set of competitors. Then you can analyze their websites and social media performance using our content and competitive analysis tools.
Compiling data is the first step in a marketing SWOT analysis. You can use Alexa to find the data you will need about your client’s website and digital marketing channels. We’ll look at a SWOT example for a small-business banking service below.
If you don’t yet have an agency account, you can get an overview of strengths and weaknesses for a site with the free Site Overview tool, where you can gather data on the following for your website:
We can see that our example company gets a higher percentage of its traffic from search than competing sites do (13.4% vs. 6.2%), showing strength in SEO. The data also points out a weakness: a higher bounce rate than the competitive average (18.1% vs. 11.7%). It has more sites linking in than competing sites do (50 vs. 31), too, which can be a strength.
You can drill down to see more information on backlinks for your client’s and competing sites.
Digging further using the tools in an Alexa Agency plan, we can see the client’s site has a high percentage of traffic from direct sources (84.3%), showing that the company enjoys high brand awareness among its users.
However, it has a low share of voice for some popular keywords.
The SEO Audit tool will point out issues with your client’s site, showing you weaknesses that should be addressed. The Competitor Keyword Matrix (above) shows what keywords—both paid and organic—you drive traffic for that your top competitors don’t, and vice versa. This can reveal topic areas that Google thinks your client is an expert on (a strength) as well as areas where competing firms have an edge (a weakness).
Check out the Content Exploration tool for insight into social media engagement for your client’s content. Our example business does not post content to social media yet. At first glance, that may appear to be a weakness. But we can see that competitors don’t post to social media either. Is this an opportunity, instead? Let’s explore that.
Looking at the popularity of “small business banking” posts on social media by other publishers, it looks like the topic resonates with readers. This may be an opportunity for our example company to surpass its competitors in a channel they are not tapping into yet.
You can use the Content Exploration tool to see which sites are getting shared most often for topic areas that are core to your client’s business. You’ll also be able to see which articles are getting the most engagement, to help you pinpoint opportunities that align with the client’s strengths.
Examining keyword gaps and easy-to-rank keywords via our Keyword Difficulty tool will help you find the white space or keywords your client doesn’t drive traffic for yet. You can use filters to see low-competition keywords. These can be powerful opportunities. The Competitor Keyword Matrix can be used to see keywords for which competitors are ranking that your clients aren’t yet, which represent threats.
Using the Audience Interests tool, we can see which other websites our client’s customers visit. Our example client’s audience also visits other sites that publish content about small-business banking, such as nerdwallet.com. This may be an opportunity for exposure via guest publishing or advertising on those sites.
Alexa’s Share of Voice metric sums up a client’s online position amongst industry competitors. Looking at our example, we can see that two competitors dominate organic search rankings for this set of sites. One of those also holds 95.4% of paid keywords amongst the competitive set. So, although search engines are an important source of traffic for us, we have a very small share of voice in the industry for that channel.
As you gather data during your SWOT analysis, classify it according to whether it’s a strength, a weakness, an opportunity, or a threat. Create a simple marketing SWOT analysis template that lets you organize it into a matrix.
Here’s what this matrix looks like for our example client:
By organizing your data into a matrix, you make it easy to consume and interpret. You can find tools to help you, like this SWOT analysis maker by Gliffy or this SWOT analysis workspace by Redbooth.
Now it’s time to interpret your analysis and create recommendations for your client. After you’ve done a marketing SWOT analysis, you will see clear areas for improvement for your client. Your next step should be to pull together a report.
Your report will provide insights and action items based on what you learned in your analysis. You’ll want to discuss which opportunities the client is best suited to exploit, based on its current strengths and which threats it might need to address. It will make sense to point out weaknesses that your agency can help address, to further reinforce your relationship. If this includes areas beyond the client’s current plan or work with you, it may even lead to expanding that relationship.
And now that you’ve gone through this process for one client, you can use the resulting data and report as a detailed SWOT analysis example that you can use time and again with each new client.
Alexa offers agency accounts specifically designed to help agencies win and keep more clients. Learn more and try our Agency plan free today.
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