How a marketing SWOT can help you marketing your Squarespace website
SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities & Threats)
Learn how to prioritize your Squarespace marketing efforts with a digital marketing SWOT analysis. Discover how to identify your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats to create effective strategies for SEO, social media, email marketing, and more. Align your business goals with your digital marketing priorities and maximize your online success.
A SWOT is a standard part of any business plan. It allows you to see how your business stands up against the competition and identify your strengths, weaknesses, threats, and business opportunities.
Brick-and-mortar operations can look a lot different than online businesses. While your business is a whole, examining the online landscape will give you a clearer idea of your digital marketing priorities.
Your brick-and-mortar store may have an incredible team, an ideal location with lots of foot traffic, and relatively few competitors nearby.
When it comes to examining your strengths and weaknesses from a digital marketing perspective, you may learn you have more competitors than initially thought, and customer acquisition may be costly.
You might also come across new opportunities to serve a far larger audience than a brick-and-mortar operation or uncover creative ways to engage with your large Instagram following.
When we consider our online marketing goals, the importance of a SWOT becomes even clearer.
Defining business goals - what does your business want to achieve?
Goals are things you are looking to accomplish. Your goals should tangibly benefit your business.
When creating goals, make sure you get to the heart of what you want to achieve. Often people may create fuzzy goals such as, "I want to increase my website traffic" or "I want more social media followers". What you likely want, however, is to increase your revenue by 10% in the next six months. Therefore your goal is not more traffic; instead, your goal is to increase sales - so let's call that out.
Make sure your goals are SMART goals. Let’s look back to the example goal of increasing online revenue by 10% in the next six months.
S: SPECIFIC
What do you want to do? Increase online revenue by 10% in the next 6 months
M: Measurable
What will success look like? A 10% increase in online revenue
A: Attainable
Is this a realistic goal? Yes, based on current sales this is attainable
R: Relevant
Will this help the business? Yes, increasing our online revenue directly relates to and impacts the business
T: Time-bound
What is the time frame? The next 6 months
It may be tempting to say something vague like "I want to get more people interested in my services," but try to tie KPIs (key performance indicators) to your goal. Drill down another layer to something like, "I want to acquire X new quality leads for X service in X time frame."
Let's take a few minutes to get crystal clear on your online business goals.
The online landscape looks different than brick and mortar operations
Your business is a whole, and every touchpoint should have continuity. The digital landscape, however, can be very different than a bricks-and-mortar operation. Often, people move online or are ready to double down on their digital marketing but haven’t done a thorough audit of what is happening online.
For example, the online market may be saturated with goods they are looking to sell. Your in-person store may very successfully sell this product. Perhaps, you are located in an ideal situation and get a lot of foot traffic, and there isn’t a lot of competitors in your area.
Online, you might be competing with dozens (or more) other companies. Consequently, you want to consider the time and effort it will take to get your website higher in search engines and how much it will cost to acquire new customers using online ads. Once you learn the cost of acquiring a new customer, is your margin still strong?
Additionally, while the online landscape may be more competitive, it also might open up many more opportunities. Perhaps your business or service can go worldwide or across North America. So, despite being more competitive, your market could open up substantially.
Let’s take a look at an example of an online SWOT and see examples of weaknesses and strengths that are somewhat unique to the online landscape.
In this example we are looking at a fitness studio, or service based industry that practiced in person a d wants to take advantage of online tools.
SWOT (Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities & threats)
S: Strengths
What are you doing well? What sets you apart?
Large Instagram Following
Large email list and engaged community
People love our classes
There is a demand for our services
W: Weaknesses
What areas could you improve? Do you have inadequate resources?
Don't rank well in Google
Rely too heavily on Instagram to drive traffic
We spend a lot of time managing social, but it isn't getting us a bunch of new clients
O: Opportunties
What are your goals?
Grow our website traffic and increase our new clients
Improve our conversion rate with improved user experience
Improve our website to host a video library, so we don't have to rely on live-stream classes
T: Threats
What are your threats?
This area is getting more saturated
Our competitors are running a lot of Google ads and potentially eating into our market
People have less disposable income at the moment Cost of acquisition for a new subscriber is high
Measuring your online business goals against your SWOT
If you are moving online or starting an online business, a SWOT is a great tool to understand where you should start your marketing efforts. A SWOT allows you to examine where you should allocate efforts for immediate success and where you’ll want to use your resources as you build your business.
For example, if your website doesn’t rank well organically in search engines, but you are looking to fill classes TODAY, putting most of your marketing budget into SEO services may not be the right choice.
Picking the right digital marketing tactics based on your goals and online SWOT
Marketing efforts that focus on the short term and long term can happen simultaneously, but it’s important to know what levers to pull to help you reach your goals.
Knowing SEO can take several months, it may not be our best effort in the immediate.
Instead, it might make sense to capitalize on our extensive email list. Perhaps we should use our email list and offer a referral incentive to tap into that network and gain more immediate customers. We may also want to experiment with Google Search Ads, so our service offering shows up in search results.
That said, we don’t want to rely on paying for traffic in the long term, so we might passively start creating guides and blog content and link-building strategies that will serve us down the road.
