How to do a SWOT analysis
5 December 2022
A content strategy is extremely important if you want your content to deliver the desired outcome. A SWOT analysis is a key part of the strategy. This blog explains what a SWOT analysis is and how to create one, so you get the best out of your content plan.
What is a SWOT analysis?
A SWOT analysis enables you to analyse the past, the present, and the future, both internally – looking inwardly at your own firm – and externally – looking at everything else around you.
In a nutshell, a SWOT analysis allows you to determine what you should and shouldn’t be doing when it comes to creating your content plan. It stands for:
- Strengths
- Weaknesses
- Opportunities
- Threats
How do you do a SWOT analysis?
Preparing a SWOT analysis is more straightforward than you think. However, it does take time as you need to gather the right data and do plenty of research. You need to go through the 4 sections individually, but each one may inform you what else can be included in the others.
Completing Strengths in the SWOT analysis
When completing ‘Strengths’ you need to look inwardly at your own firm and work out what your strengths are. Your USPs are your strengths, but you should also look back at the content you’ve previously created. By doing this, you’ll work out what content performed best, and what you should consider doing again. Examples include:
- Take a look at Google Analytics and look at your top-performing content. What was it about this content that made it perform so well?
- Take a look at where Google ranked your content and those that ranked well. Was there anything specific about this content that made it rank well?
- Take a look at any PPC landing pages or display ads that resulted in more leads. What was it about those ads that made them successful?
- Take a look at your social media analytics. Which style of posts worked best? Was there a specific day of the week or time of day that led to increased engagement or generated leads?
- Take a look at the analytics on your email marketing platform. What type of content generated the highest open rates and click-through rates (CTRs)? Was there a trend in better performance on a specific day of the week or time of day?
The research you undertake to determine your strengths can be eye-opening. It can often prevent you from reinventing the wheel as you’ll know what you should continue to do.
Completing Weaknesses in the SWOT analysis
You’ll find that once you’ve completed the research into ‘Strengths’, most of the work for ‘Weaknesses’ will already be done. This is because this section is looking inwardly at your own firm to discover what your weaknesses are. Look at what didn’t work well and what you wish would have been done better or differently. Examples include:
- Take a look at Google Analytics and look at your poorest-performing content. Why did that content not perform well?
- Take a look at where Google ranked your content. What type of content didn’t rank at all or ranked really poorly?
- Take a look at your PPC landing pages and display ads that didn’t generate any leads or very few leads. Was there anything specific that caused them to fail?
- Take a look at your social media analytics and which posts didn’t work well. What style of posts didn’t work? Was there a specific day of the week or time of day that didn’t generate engagement or leads?
- Take a look at the analytics on your email marketing platform. What type of content generated the lowest amount of open rates and CTRs? Was there a trend in poor performance on a specific day of the week or time of day?
- Take a look at the content you produced and your overall delivery. Did it have your customer personas in mind?
The research you undertake to determine your weaknesses will help prevent you from creating and distributing content in the future which simply doesn’t work.
Completing Opportunities in the SWOT analysis
When completing ‘Opportunities’, it’s time to look outwardly instead of inwardly at your own firm. This means you should look at your competitors, market, social and economic trends or events, highly searched topics, and industry changes. Examples of what you should consider include:
- Take a look at your competitors. Is there anything they’re doing well that you’ve not tried? Is there anything they’re not doing, leaving a gap in the market? Most of this information you’ll already have if you’ve carried out your competitor analysis as part of your content strategy.
- Take a look at any current market trends. Is there anything relevant that you can include in your content plan?
- Take a look at the highly searched topics. Are there any that you can include in your keywords or any social media hashtags?
- Take a look at industry changes. Is there any you can create content about that demonstrates your firm is an expert in this area?
Completing Threats in the SWOT analysis
As with ‘Opportunities’, ‘Threats’ also looks outwardly at your competitors, market, social and economic trends or events, searches, and industry changes. Examples of what you should consider include:
- Take a look at your competitors. Are your competitors monopolising a specific product or service which may prevent your content from meeting your content objectives? Again, you should have this information if you’ve completed your competitor analysis as part of your content strategy.
- Take a look at events. Are there any events that may result in your content being misconstrued as ‘in poor taste’ or ‘insensitive’?
- Take a look at industry changes. Are there any industry changes that may prevent you from delivering content that has worked well in the past?
- Take a look at the current economic and social climate. Currently, the cost of living crisis and environmental issues may be huge threats to some firms. If you’ve completed your customer analysis as part of your content strategy, you may already have this information and understand the threats posed.
By understanding the threats posed, you’ll be able to consider what content to avoid and how you can navigate your content plan around them.
Finalising your SWOT analysis
Once you’ve carried out your research, add bullet points of what you’ve learned from your SWOT analysis.
When complete, you’ll be able to easily identify what you should continue doing, what you should stop doing, what you should try doing, and what you should avoid.
This will help you significantly when you’re forming your content plan and help you achieve your SMART goals.
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All content in this article was correct at the time of publication.
