Conversion

Doing a SWOT Analysis for Your Internet Marketing Plan

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by Web Marketing Today. Practical Ecommerce acquired Web Marketing Today in 2012. In 2016, we merged the two sites, leaving Practical Ecommerce as the successor.

Restaurants ought to make bigger napkins, since some of the most productive business ideas seem to come to mind over a meal. The SWOT analysis technique lends itself to napkin planning and snapshot insights. To conduct a SWOT analysis, draw a vertical line in the center of your napkin (or whiteboard or flipchart), intersected by a horizontal line. Now you have four quadrants where you’ll sketch your company’s situation.

 

Strengths Weaknesses
Opportunities Threats

Though a great deal of research may lie behind what’s in each box, keep it simple and incisive. Collecting these facts and ideas together in one place energizes you to see the big picture. Use it as a brainstorming tool. A strategy formation tool. Note that the first pair of categories — strengths and weaknesses — refer to your company’s INTERNAL nature, while the second pair of categories refer to EXTERNAL opportunities and threats.

Strengths

In the first box list all the strengths your company possesses. Don’t be modest. Spell them out. If you do this with others, you might begin by brainstorming words that characterize your company and writing them down as fast as people say them. Then use those ideas to construct a profile of your company’s strengths.

Weaknesses

In the second box list weaknesses, areas your business lacks or doesn’t have the personnel to cover well. Be honest. It’s better to face the bad news now rather than construct an unrealistic marketing plan that is doomed to failure.

Opportunities

The third box is for opportunities. When you look at the market (and we’re looking particularly at the Internet market in this series), what do you see? What AREN’T your competitors doing that customers need? Look for gaps. Of course, this is related to a competitive analysis; none of these elements of a marketing plan stand alone; they’re all interrelated. Gaps may not last long. What you see as an opportunity today may not exist in three months. A SWOT analysis is only a snapshot in time, not a permanent document.

Threats

The final box is to list threats to your business. What trends do you see that could wipe you out or make your service or product obsolete? What are your competitors doing to push themselves ahead? What new dot-com start-up is trying to move into the market?

Here’s an example of how a SWOT Analysis might look for a fictional animal greeting card site, CrawlyCards.com, specializing in pictures of ground-clinging creatures such as slugs, snails, and puppydog tails.

Strengths

  • Unique idea, no one else is even close
  • Strong artistic team includes some of the finest slug and insect illustrators in the country
  • Excellent animation abilities
  • Source of inspirational card inscriptions for all occasions
  • Experienced and innovative company officers.
Weaknesses

  • Small opt-in customer list, most site users seek to remain anonymous
  • Few advertisers interested in this strangely targeted market
  • Perl script that runs the site is slow and needs to be rewritten in a compiled language
  • Lack of interest from venture capitalists.
  • Single stream of revenue is advertising, and that is slim pickin’s.
Opportunities

  • No real competitors in our precise space.
  • Much traffic from students at UC Santa Cruz (Banana Slug is their mascot) sending cards to each other. Possible joint venture with alumni association and the Official Pacific Northwest Slug Page http://www.tammyslug.com
  • Seek advertising from French restaurants and their suppliers.
  • Possible books sales such as: Slugs and Snails (Minipets), Field Guide to the Slug, and Creepy Crawly Cuisine: The Gourmet Guide to Edible Insects.
  • Possible sales of Turbo Snails to browse algae in fishtanks
  • Partnership with CyberSlug Adoption Center
  • E-commerce venture selling scarab jewelry
  • Possible advertisers among pet supply and fish supply stores, bug jewelry manufacturers
  • Possible affiliate program with snail bait companies
  • Possible cross promotion with Conchologists of America
Threats

  • Chemical companies are producing more effective snail bait that may destroy gastropod populations in our lifetime.
  • Large card sites such as Blue Mountain (http://www.bluemountain.com) might want to take over the slug and mollusk traffic and edge us out.

Obviously this company has some real problems — no effective revenue model — but at least they’re looking at alternatives. This is what a SWOT analysis can do for you, and may be the germ of an idea that will revolutionize the snail and slug card business as we know it.

(To those of you from a different culture, this example is a joke. Please don’t take it seriously, just an example of Yankee poor taste. It helps lighten up an otherwise dull subject.)

Dr. Ralph F. Wilson
Dr. Ralph F. Wilson
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