Tag: SWOT

How to Do an Effective SWOT Analysis for Your Marketing Campaigns

How do you measure the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns? Do you track ROI? A/B test ads to improve performance? Maybe you use a fancy Google Data Studio dashboard to generate slick reports.

There’s still a good chance you are wasting money, and that’s because most businesses measure the impact of marketing after the fact. While knowing the cost per click of your search or social ads is essential, understanding the overall impact of your marketing campaigns can provide deeper insights into your business.

This is where SWOT analysis comes in handy. SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) analysis for marketing campaigns allows you to see the big picture and face challenges head-on.

What Is a SWOT Analysis?

A SWOT analysis is a framework for analyzing and identifying key challenges affecting your business by considering your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.

The goal of SWOT analysis is not just to track metrics or see which ads perform better but rather to get a high-level view of the impact of your marketing so you can improve it.

The framework of what a SWOT analysis is.

What Are the Benefits of SWOT Analysis in Marketing?

If you’ve run a Google Ad campaign or boosted a Facebook post, you already understand how to track the impact of your campaigns. A SWOT analysis looks beyond the standard metrics like ROI, CPC, and CAC to uncover the most crucial factors impacting your marketing—whether that is customer satisfaction, competitors squeezing you out of the market, or failure to promote your assets effectively.

That data can be powerful, especially if it’s available when you need it the most. According to Airtable, 46 percent of marketers say lack of timely data holds their team back. A SWOT analysis can help.

A few other benefits of SWOT for marketing include:

  • a better understanding of which marketing channels to focus on
  • helps you address weaknesses in your ads or marketing assets
  • makes it easier to see threats to your campaigns before they impact your bottom line
  • enables you to leverage the assets and strengths you already have
  • improves long-term goal setting for your marketing

The average business spends around 12 percent of its overall budget on marketing—a SWOT analysis ensures your budget is put to good use.

What Are the Drawbacks of SWOT in Marketing?

As much as I like SWOT analysis in marketing, it has some limitations. For starters, if you aren’t honest about your true shortcomings, a SWOT analysis won’t provide useful insights. This type of analysis requires self-reflection and honesty to be useful.

It can also be difficult to analyze very complex factors that could be either a weakness or a strength. For example, running ads on TikTok might have the highest cost and drive higher quality leads, which could be both a strength and a potential weakness.

A few other limitations to keep in mind:

  • SWOT analyses can be time-intensive. Make sure you have the personnel and the time to invest before getting started.
  • You might generate too many ideas on how to improve your marketing and get overwhelmed.
  • It can generate a lot of data but doesn’t tell you how to use that data.

Understanding the limitations of a SWOT analysis can help marketers and business owners better prepare and improve their chances of success. Now that you know its limitations, how do you perform a SWOT analysis?

How to Perform a SWOT Analysis for Marketing Campaigns

The first step in performing a SWOT analysis for marketing is determining the scope. Do you want to look at your marketing as a whole or a specific part of your overall marketing strategy? For example, you might want to focus only on your content strategy, SEO, or a specific ad campaign. Defining the parameters of your analysis helps keep you focused.

Keep in mind, there’s no one right way to perform a SWOT analysis, and that’s because every business has a different marketing strategy and faces different threats.

This guide can help you get started, but feel free to skip questions that don’t make sense for your business and add questions that provide a more thorough view of your marketing campaigns.

1. Analyze Your Marketing Strengths

What do you do well? If you’re looking at a specific campaign, think about what elements of the campaign are really working. For example, does your landing page convert at a higher rate, or are ads with people more likely to earn clicks?

Start by asking these questions and documenting the answers. Adjust the questions as needed to focus on a campaign or your entire marketing strategy.

  1. What does your company (or your campaign) do better than others in your industry?
  2. What do your customers love most about your company/product/services?
  3. What positive attributes do customers associate with your brand?
  4. What is your unique selling proposition? Is it effective?
  5. What resources do you have that competitors don’t? This includes people, financial resources, and expertise.
  6. What campaigns are most successful? Consider not just conversions but also lifetime value and cost per acquisition.

Remember, your answers and the questions you ask might vary depending on whether you are analyzing a specific campaign or your marketing strategy as a whole.

How to Find Strength Data

Don’t answer the questions above off the top of your head. Instead, use data to inform your answers. Depending on your business, that might include the following steps:

  • Perform a customer satisfaction survey, like a net promoter score, to understand how customers view your business.
An image of a 1 to 10 rating system asking how likely you are to recommend a company to a friend.
An example a net promoter score, which is a useful tool when finding strength data.
  • Pull campaign data from separate tools into one dashboard, like Power BI or Google Data Studio to better understand the most effective campaigns.
  • Poll your employees to better understand your resources and how your team views your company.

2. Look for Your Marketing Weaknesses

This is often the most challenging part of a SWOT analysis. That’s because you have to be honest with yourself, and it can be hard to admit where campaigns have fallen short.

Start by asking questions. Again, feel free to adjust the wording to fit your campaign or overall strategy.

  1. What do your customers most dislike about your company or offering?
  2. What complaints are often mentioned in negative reviews?
  3. Why do customers churn?
  4. If you sell products, why don’t customers come back?
  5. What could your campaigns do more effectively?
  6. What are the biggest challenges in your current marketing funnel?
  7. Where in your funnel do you lose the most customers?
  8. Where do your competitors win? (This could be specific strategies or platforms they are doing well with.)
  9. What resources are you lacking?

Nearly 40 percent of marketers report having no documented marketing strategy at all, and that can hold you back. Looking at your weaknesses is the first step toward creating or improving your marketing strategy.

Where to Get Weakness Data

As you look for strengths (through customer and employee surveys, for example), also keep an eye out for weaknesses. Other places to locate weaknesses might include:

  • Customer reviews on sites like Google, Yelp, etc.
  • In support tickets. If you constantly get complaints about the same topic, that may need to be addressed.
  • In a competitive analysis.
  • Exit interview data, for customers or employees.
  • Analyze your exit pages in Google Analytics. Why are customers leaving those pages?
  • Assess time-on-page. Do customers spend less time on crucial pages in your marketing funnel?

3. Find Opportunities

This is my favorite part of SWOT—looking for areas to grow and build on your past successes. Where can you make changes and see the biggest impact? This step will help you figure it out. Begin by asking these questions:

  1. How can you improve your marketing funnel or UX?
  2. What kind of marketing messaging resonates with your customers? Can you leverage that on more platforms?
  3. Who are your most vocal brand advocates? How can you use them more effectively?
  4. Are your budget, tools, and human resources being utilized to their full potential?
  5. Which marketing channels exceeded expectations, and why?

Where to Find Opportunities Data

By now, you should’ve come across a few opportunities already. While reading customer reviews, looking at support tickets, and digging into GA data, you’ve likely already noted a few areas where you could improve.

Take a step back and try to look at the data with an open mind. What areas, platforms, or strategies are most likely to drive the best results? Make a list. You can also look at:

Sometimes the best way to see new opportunities is to introduce a fresh perspective. If you’d like help considering your options, reach out to my team. We’re happy to offer our thoughts and help you build an effective strategy.

4. Locate Threats

Over the years, I’ve noticed one thing the most successful brands have in common: the ability to see threats coming and adjust before they become a major issue.

For example, many websites were devastated when Google rolled out its Panda update, which targeted thin and spammy content. Those who saw it coming had already made changes and weren’t nearly as impacted. That should be your goal—to see threats on the horizon and take action.

Here are a few questions to consider:

  1. Economic trends: What economic trends can or might impact your industry? For example, rising costs, increases in gas prices, a move to remote work, and so forth.
  2. Marketing trends: How are marketing trends changing? For example, Google is getting rid of third-party cookies—how will that impact your marketing campaigns?
  3. Technology trends: What technological changes are coming? Automation is gaining popularity, but could that go wrong?
  4. Relationships: What relationships do you rely on, such as brand ambassadors, vendors, manufacturers, and contractors? How would your business recover if those relationships ended? Can you work to mitigate the impact now?
  5. Intuition: What is everyone else doing that just feels wrong to you for some reason? Try to get to the bottom of why it feels off to you and whether that may become a threat in the future.
  6. Audience: Think about your target audience—are they aging out of your market? Is the market shrinking or shifting?

Where to Find Threat Data

The reports and surveys you’ve already done may have highlighted threats. Look back over those results and look for threats you might not have noticed. Other places to look for threats include:

  • Technology blogs or publications.
  • Competitive analysis reports. What changes are your competitors making and why?
  • Newsletters and blogs of industry experts. What are they worried about?
  • Have a brainstorming session with your team. Write down all of the possible threats you can come up with, no matter how unlikely. You can review it later to determine whether action needs to be taken.

Frequently Asked Questions About SWOT for Marketing

How can a SWOT analysis help my marketing ROI?

It provides a high-level view of your marketing campaigns so you can better prepare for the shifting marketing landscape.

What does SWOT stand for?

Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.

How often should I perform a SWOT for marketing?

Ideally, you should perform a SWOT analysis every 6 to 12 months or whenever you notice changes in your campaign ROI.

Can I use SWOT for marketing at my small business?

Yes, SWOT can be used to analyze the effectiveness of marketing for any sized business. It’s particularly helpful for small businesses to find ways to stand out from their competitors.

Conclusion: SWOT Helps Marketers Make Smarter Decisions

Once you’ve performed your SWOT analysis for marketing, it’s time to put that information to work.

How can you improve your current strengths? What steps can you take to reduce the impact of your weaknesses? What changes can you make to take advantage of the marketing opportunities you uncovered? Finally, how can you prepare for the threats you face?

Whether you use SWOT to analyze your overall marketing strategy or focus on specific campaigns like your content marketing, this approach provides the information you need to launch more effective marketing campaigns.

Have you performed a SWOT analysis before? What is holding you back?

How to Do SWOT Analysis For PPC

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) marketing can be one of the quickest and most effective ways to drive customers to your site.

But it can be hard to make money through PPC ads. It’s all too easy to make common mistakes that can wreck your campaign.

Luckily for you, I’ve got plenty of tips that can help.

And there’s one strategy I’ve borrowed from my business analyst friends, which I’m going to share with you today.

It’s called a SWOT analysis.

A SWOT analysis can help you see a different side to your PPC campaign and improve its performance in the process.

This article will help you carry out your own analysis and take your PPC campaigns to another level.

What is a SWOT Analysis?

A SWOT analysis is a corporate evaluation technique that can be used to assess anything from an entire company right down to a single PPC campaign.

So, what does SWOT stand for?

It stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats.

Strengths and weaknesses are internal factors, things you control. Opportunities and threats are external factors. These are happening in the market right now, whether you like it or not. You may not be able to change them, but you can react to them.

Typically, SWOT analysis is used at an operational level to help business leaders assess a company’s current position in the market and highlight areas for future growth.

It can also be used to assess your PPC campaigns. A SWOT analysis can show you how well your campaign is performing, what’s holding you back, and how you can improve.  

Why Your Company Should Do SWOT Analysis for PPC Campaigns

A SWOT analysis should be considered essential if you don’t want your PPC campaigns to fail.

Too often, when brands try to optimize their PPC advertising, they look at their campaigns in isolation. They only analyze their own keywords, bids, and landing pages. But your PPC campaigns don’t exist in a vacuum.

You are competing with hundreds of other brands for the same cherished three or four spots.

A SWOT analysis will help you to understand external factors that may impact your PPC campaigns. Things like competitors, the economy, and the state of your industry can all affect the performance of your ads and the likelihood that someone will buy when they click them.

You’ll also identify new opportunities for your campaign. That could be doubling down on what you do well, or it could be fixing one of your weaknesses. When you lay out what’s working and what’s not, it’s much easier to put together a plan that involves more than just raising your bids.

Ultimately, it will help you to look at your PPC campaigns in a different way. Despite the wealth of advice out there on optimizing PPC campaigns, it’s easy to get stuck in a routine of researching keywords, testing new ad copy, and creating new landing pages.

There’s much more you can be doing to improve your campaigns, and a SWOT analysis will help you take your PPC campaigns to the next level.

How to Do a SWOT Analysis of Your PPC

All you need to do is sit down and brainstorm each of your campaign’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. They are typically displayed in a 2×2 grid.

PPC SWOT Analysis Chart

But you can just make a list below each header if that’s easier.

It can help to have a goal in mind when starting your SWOT analysis.

By focusing on your PPC campaigns, you have already narrowed your focus, but can you get an even clearer picture of what you want to achieve?

Maybe you want to figure out why your PPC campaign isn’t driving as many sales as your Facebook ads, for instance. Or find ways to maximize what is already a profitable channel.

It’s best to do a SWOT analysis with more than one person. The more views and opinions you can capture, the more complete a picture you’ll be able to develop. You can brainstorm together or complete the analysis individually, coming together at the end to share your thoughts.

Finally, try to keep things as even as possible when brainstorming. If you have 10 strengths, find 10 weaknesses. Find a threat for every opportunity. You get the picture.

SWOT Analysis S: Strengths

Start by making a list of all the strengths of your PPC campaign. Strengths are all the internal positive factors about your PPC efforts.

For instance, maybe you have an excellent ROI or a high Quality Score. Covering hundreds of relevant keywords could also be a strength, as could your CTR or bounce rate.

Think about the advantages you hold over the competition, too. That could be the PPC agency you partner with, for instance. It could even be the quality of your products or the strength of your brand. There’s no reason to limit your strengths to things that are specific to your PPC campaign.

Don’t be modest, here! Now’s the time to boast if ever there was one.

PPC SWOT Analysis Strengths

SWOT Analysis W: Weaknesses

Next, examine your PPC campaign’s weaknesses. These are things you are in control of that are stopping you from increasing your ROI and generating more revenue. They could also be things your campaign currently lacks, like A/B testing.

But they could also be broader weaknesses like a small budget or a lack of PPC experts.

Remember to only include things you have control over in this category. Having a bigger, better-funded competitor is not a relevant weakness of your campaign. Operating in a very competitive market is, on the other hand. You can’t control your competitor, but you can choose not to compete. Or at least not compete directly.

When in doubt, look at your strengths section and think about the opposite.

PPC SWOT Analysis Weaknesses

SWOT Analysis O: Opportunities

Now consider any external positive factors that could improve your PPC campaigns in the future. You could be launching a new advertising campaign, for instance, that would increase the demand for your product.

Maybe a competitor is on the verge of bankruptcy or is pivoting their business model.

Take into account the time frame of these opportunities. A new marketing campaign may only increase demand for a few months, whereas ongoing market growth (like the acceleration of e-commerce) may last for years.

Don’t forget to combine what you’ve done so far by including weaknesses that can be turned into strengths.

PPC SWOT Analysis Opportunities

SWOT Analysis T: Threats

Finally, look at threats to your PPC campaign. These are also external factors that you have little to no control over. And this is where you’d list those bigger, better-funded competitors who are constantly outbidding you.

It’s not just your competitors you need to consider, however. What’s the market like for your current product? Are consumers shopping somewhere other than Google? Could anything change that would impact your success, like one of your employees taking a new job?

It can help to think about your company and your industry at a broader level, too. Does your product risk becoming obsolete, for instance? Or could changes to the market weaken demand for your offering?

PPC SWOT Analysis Threats

Visualizing and Displaying Your SWOT Analysis

There are several different methods to display your SWOT analysis.

As I have shown above, the most common format of a SWOT analysis is a 2×2 chart. This makes it easy to visualize your analysis as a whole, as every section is displayed in relation to each other.

But it’s not the only way you can display your SWOT analysis.

There are plenty of ways to make your analysis more digestible and visually engaging.

Check out this graphic analysis of a Nike SWOT by Business Strategy Hub.

Nike SWOT Analysis

Or this creative McDonalds SWOT graphic by Creately.

McDonalds SWOT Analysis

If design isn’t your forte, Lucidchart has a SWOT analysis generator you can use instead.

Making Your SWOT Analysis Actionable

One problem with a SWOT is that it doesn’t produce actionable results. It only helps you understand where you currently are.

You need to make your analysis actionable.

Start by looking at the relationship between each section. For instance, ask yourself whether you can use your strengths to create new opportunities, or whether you can remove threats by improving your weaknesses.

Let’s start by looking at how you can turn your strengths into new opportunities. Basically, this means doing more of what you are good at. In the example above, we highlighted landing page creation as a strength.

You could turn this into an opportunity by creating more landing pages for your ad groups. Doing so could improve your quality score, decrease your bounce rate, and increase your conversion rate.

Next, identify how you can turn your weaknesses into strengths. Again, in the example above, I listed a lack of a dedicated PPC account manager as a weakness. Assuming you have the budget to hire a new employee, this is a pretty easy one to fix. Alternatively, you could work with a digital marketing consultant.

Now let’s look at opportunities. Is there any way you can capitalize on the opportunities you’ve identified? We listed e-commerce growth and new products as opportunities above. One option is to increase our budget to take advantage of the growth in e-commerce. Another would be to create new ads and landing pages for our new products.

Finally, look at the threats. You probably won’t be able to change any of these directly, but you figure out ways to mitigate the threats. For instance, if you have a larger competitor with a bigger budget, you can maximize your ROI as much as possible or target longer tail keywords.

Examples of SWOT Analysis for PPC Campaigns

Are you ready to start your own SWOT analysis? Hopefully, you can use my examples as a jumping-off point. But just in case you need more guidance, here are a couple of other examples of SWOT analysis for PPC campaigns.

The first is by White Shark Media.

White Shark Media PPC SWOT Analysis

You can see they get very specific listing ad KPIs in both the strengths and weaknesses columns. They also do an excellent job of balancing strengths with weaknesses and opportunities with threats.

The second is by SEMrush and Hanapin Marketing.

SEMRush PPC SWOT Analysis

This is a much broader approach to PPC SWOT analysis, including things like product prices and availability. They also do a nice job of matching up strengths with weaknesses and opportunities with threats.

Conclusion

A SWOT analysis is a great way to get a different perspective on your PPC campaign. Remember, your campaigns don’t exist in a vacuum, and neither should your optimization efforts.

By thinking about your ads in the context of the broader market and economy, you can optimize your campaigns at a level your competitors can only dream of.

Why stop at creating new ad copy and running A/B tests when you can find out ways to capitalize on new consumer sentiment or shifts in the market.

What have you uncovered with your SWOT analysis? Let me know in the comments!

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