How To Use SWOT Analysis In Your Online Marketing Plan?

By Mary,

The SWOT analysis is most commonly use in marketing, but it can be used for other business proposes.  In marketing,  SWOT comes up quite often. In fact, when building an online marketing plan, the SWOT analysis is an essential part of it. So here is the skinny on SWOT analysis. SWOT stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.

• Strengths: Consider the strengths of your business from your own perspective, but also from the customer perspective and ask these questions:
  • What advantages does my organization have?
  • What do I (or my business) do better than anyone else?
  • What unique or lowest-cost resources can I draw upon that others can’t?
  • And my favorite: What is my organization UPS (unique selling proposition)

• Weaknesses: Consider this from the internal and external point of view. Offer a very honest and realistic view and ask yourself:
  • Do other people seem to perceive weaknesses that you don’t see?
  • Are your competitors doing any better than you?
  • What can I improve?
  • What should I avoid
  • What factors lose my sale?
  • What is the market perception of weakness in my industry?

• Opportunities: Opportunities can come or be spotted for different reasons. Changes in technology, changes in policy that relates to your industry. As well as changes in social patterns, population profiles, and life styles, etc. Opportunities can also be approached from the Strength and Weakness stand point. Ask yourself whether these could open up any opportunities.
  • What good opportunities can I spot?
  • What interesting trends am I aware of?

• Threats: It could be from external factors like Technology changes or government regulations, that instead of favoring your business could harm it, like a raise in taxes, a technology that comes out that makes your business obsolete. An example of this could be Red box DVD one dollars rental, or amazon download, or on demand movies on TV. These types of technological changes have put DVD rental stores out of business. Blockbuster has closed a lot of its store-fronts because there is not enough profit coming in, yet they simultaneously started to allocate more resources to their online store www.blockbuster.com/‎

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