SWOT analysis is an essential step in the development of a digital marketing strategy. Indeed, it can help you understand your strengths and weaknesses as well as the opportunities and threats that come your way.

Currently, consumers rely heavily on digital means to search for products. Digital marketing then becomes a key element in selling a product or service. Which means that spending time figuring out both negative and positive capabilities of your business will be critical to the success of your digital marketing strategy.

What is SWOT in digital marketing?

Digital marketing can come in many forms. This can be an online sale or advertisements on digital channels such as: search engines, websites, social media, emails and mobile applications. However, the speed of technology growth requires a disciplined approach in order to survive, hence the need for SWOT analysis.

The term « SWOT » stands for : Strength, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. It is both a well-known business term and a formidable strategy development tool. The SWOT analysis will therefore help you identify what makes your digital business or brand different from your competitors and the resources you have.

The first step in the analysis is to determine the strengths and weaknesses that the company can control itself.

These are strengths such as:

• years of experience of key personnel,
• your brand reputation ,
• A significant number of followers on social networks.

There are also weaknesses including:

• limited resources,
• lack of access to skills,
• a bad location of your business.

The second step of the analysis boils down to determining the opportunities and threats that are part of the external environment. They cannot control themselves by the company.

Opportunities may include:

• a forecast of growing demand for the product,
• new market trends,
• potential markets not reached.

As for the threats, they concern:

• negative impacts on your business or the sector as a whole,
• Adverse trends that may lead to a deterioration in revenues or profits,
• Competitors.

Why do a SWOT analysis in digital marketing?

A SWOT analysis is divided into two parameters: internal and external. The first is to identify internal factors including the strengths and weaknesses of your business. On the other hand, the second makes it possible to determine the external factors , namely the opportunities and the threats.

Each component of a SWOT analysis plays an important role in your digital marketing projects:

• Strenghts (forces): they touch the points to be found in the force. These points relate to all the positive attributes of your business, whether tangible or not. After identifying your entity’s strengths, you can find a way to maintain and develop them to become your assets.
• Weaknesses: These refer to the weak points that you need to strengthen or make competitive and better to stand out from your competitors. Plus, when you identify your weaknesses accurately, you’ll know a little more about your own business. Thus, you could improve.
• Opportunities: These are external factors that represent new high-potential markets that you can later exploit to your advantage. Identifying opportunities will be an integral part of your company’s purpose and growth.
• Threats: These indicate factors beyond your control that may threaten the existence and growth of your business. Once threats are discovered, you can easily develop a plan to deal with them. Because of this, you won’t have to fear the threat when it’s there, because you’ll already have a strategy to overcome it.

The SWOT Analysis Process in Digital Marketing

In a SWOT analysis, strengths and opportunities represent the positive factors, while weaknesses and threats focus on the negative factors. SWOT analysis is an essential part of an online marketing plan. Indeed, it helps to illuminate the long-term vision of a company.

Overall, the insights gained from a SWOT analysis can help you develop smarter strategies and lead you to greater success. To do this, you need to ask yourself a series of questions to determine strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.

Forces:

• What capabilities do you have that the competition doesn’t?
• What are the quality or profitable resources you have, but not the others?
• What are the factors that give a certain turnover?

Weaknesses:

• What are the internal processes that need to be improved?
• What activities should I avoid?
• What are the factors that contribute to lost sales?

Opportunities:

• Are there any interesting trends you can benefit from?
• Are there good opportunities in sight?
• Is there something the target audience is looking for and your company can offer?

Threats:

• What are the obstacles?
• Can government regulation hurt your business?
• Are competitors working on a better product/service?

How to make the SWOT profitable in Digital Marketing?

SWOT analysis can be applied to the company as a whole or used to evaluate specific departments, products and marketing methods. Exploring the factors that could hurt your business will help you know how to use your strengths and be on the lookout for potential threats.

Using a SWOT analysis in digital marketing can be very beneficial provided you know how to make it profitable. In this case, it is necessary to:

• Capitalize on your strengths: To know your strengths, you need to identify products that are selling well in the market. Then you have to figure out how to make them work or make them an even greater force. For example, if a specific product is much more in demand than others, you can try to improve its design to make it even more attractive.
• Reduce weaknesses: If you don’t pay attention to your weaknesses, they can lead to loss. For example: if you lack communication tools, it will reduce your exchanges with your customers that you risk losing later. Besides, if you are not aware of a failure in your system, it can grow and slowly destroy your business from within. On the contrary, if you are aware of it, you can easily tame the problem, reverse it or reduce its effects. As soon as the weak points are identified, you can put in place an effective action plan to try to solve the problems.
• Identify an opportunity when it arises: The digital world is getting bigger and bigger. As it grows, new opportunities open up for Digital Marketing. In addition, changes in trends related to marketing or your latest product can lead to opportunities. For example, if you tailor your product to customer suggestions in comments, you might see an increase in user satisfaction. Therefore, your profits will double, as your product or service will be more in demand.
• Recognize threats: Threats can directly destroy your business. By proactively anticipating and identifying them, you can limit their negative effects. Among other things, you can make a list of negative factors depending on the urgency. Then you can see how the strengths could reduce the outcome of the threats.
• Develop a strategy: Once you’ve completed the online marketing SWOT analysis, it’s time to translate the data you’ve collected into short- and long-term strategies. Indeed, SWOT analysis is only the theoretical part of your marketing strategy. To do this, you need to use the information you’ve gathered to make a change to your action plan.