SWOT
Mia Hamm, one of the biggest legends in soccer history. She is a two time Olympic gold medalist and played forward for the US Women’s National Team for seventeen years……seventeen!
From an early age, Mia Hamm was training to achieve these goals. She had to have a plan to reach Olympian status, it was not an option not to.
When you play a sport, your coach analyzes you as a player. What are each player’s strengths and weaknesses? What can this player do better? What should this player not do? What opportunities are realistic for this player? In sports, selling your ability is just as key as it is for any company or brand.
Before any game, the other team’s players are watched, evaluated and a game plan is put in place. You always have to study the competition. In sports, you have to closely evaluate the team you are competing against. You have to know their strengths and weakness so that you can best match your team with theirs.
After you and your competitors are assessed and the game plan is put into action, you can show off your ability for the scouts.
Much like the coach does for his players, employees must do this for their brands. Just as a game plan is put into action for sports, it is also employed for brands. This is known as a SWOT analysis.
A brand MUST find and know their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats — SWOT.
There are many benefits to a SWOT analysis and mindtools.com claims, “You can use SWOT Analysis to make the most of what you’ve got, to your organization’s best advantage. And you can reduce the chances of failure, by understanding what you’re lacking, and eliminating hazards that would otherwise catch you unaware…Better still, you can start to craft a strategy that distinguishes you from your competitors, and so compete successfully in your market”. The overall benefit of a SWOT analysis is crucial because it helps to break down all the parts of a plan that a brand needs to be able to analyze their potential for success.
The first part of a SWOT analysis is to study your success. This is an important step because here a brand can look at their current standing and see the capability of where they can be. Success is an internal factor that smallbusiness.com says, “Evaluating the company’s strengths helps it determine how to allocate these resources in a manner that will result in the highest possible potential for revenue growth and profitability. The management team examines where the company can compete most effectively. The company often discovers it has competitive strengths that have not been fully utilized in the past”.
If a company did not evaluate their strengths then they would not know what is and is not working; what to keep doing and what to stop doing. Like smallbusiness.com said, often companies don’t even know their exact strengths and with analysis, they might come across a surprising area that they now can play into more.
The second internal factor is weakness. When thinking of weaknesses, a company must ask what does our brand lack? Weaknesses can be improved upon and worked on overtime. Take Mia Hamm for example, she has to identify her weaknesses to take her skills to the next level. It is imperative to know your brand’s weaknesses so they can be modified and improved.
There are big advantages of a SWOT analysis including concentrating on the most important factors of a business. The SWOT analysis is getting to know and understand a brand better. It gets to the brunt of the hurdle a company may be facing. As business.com says, the advantages of a SWOT analysis include, “it has little or no cost — anyone who understands your business can perform a SWOT analysis. You can also use a SWOT analysis when you don’t have much time to address a complex situation”. Not only does it help you identify the key problems your company may face, but also the real strengths and at no cost.
Other benefits include understanding your business better, addressing weaknesses, identifying threats, taking advantage of opportunities, and designing a plan after the assessment. These benefits come from examining the two internal factors: strengths and weaknesses.
It is also necessary for a company to know their audience. When you know your audience, then producing content becomes more focused. Knowing your audience means knowing their gender, age, other demographics, and specific data and statistics on exactly what people who follow you like. Armed with this information, your brand can produce the best and most popular content for your page. Having this data also allows for a brand to target the best influencers who can help promote the brand’s products or services most organically.
The best way to find and target the right audience is by reading through comments, looking through insights, and seeing what posts and topics spark your follower’s attention. This way, a brand can learn more about their strengths and who their primary audience is to capitalize on this information. Sprout social says identifying this third element, opportunities, will help to “point you toward what’s next, ultimately helping your social presence from growing stale”.
When targeting the right audience, the third element of the SWOT analysis can be reached; opportunities. Opportunities arise when a brand breaks down their strengths and sees what is working for their company and pushes advantages. The more you know about your brand… the more your brand can excel.
For example, Tik Tok has a majority of younger audiences on their platform; primarily high schoolers and twenty-somethings. So, when the platform runs ads or incorporates new features, this is the age they target. Tik Tok would most likely stray away from running an ad about the best areas to live for families but rather run an ad about the top five trending items to take to college in 2020.
Finally, knowing your audience helps not only to identify what to post and when but also to better identify threats. Companies see which posts and topics are not popular or even had backlash; it is critical to know what your audience does not enjoy as well. It is also valuable to know what your competition is excelling in so you can plan a competitive strategy to challenge or even surpass the competition. This is a necessary question to ask within a business.
Besides competitors, threats can include changes to app design or algorithms, the current state of your market and products, as well as the economy. Again, identifying threats within a business can help to maximize your success by knowing what is not working. For example, a company could be facing a threat because their competitor has a large following and voice on Instagram while their brand is very inconsistent on the platform. This threat is important to address so that the brand can now develop a better strategy to become active on Instagram since they know this platform has potential clients.
A SWOT analysis can be very helpful in taking an honest look at a brand or business. This will not only help you learn about your business or brand but also to better understand it as well. SWOT analysis allows compacting and subsequent simplification of such by dividing into four smaller categories. This analysis is one of the quickest and most available ways for a company to evaluate its current standing and then re-evaluate for future progress.
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