Srategic Management

SWOT Analysis - Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats

When conducting strategic planning for any company - online and/or offline - it is useful to complete an analysis that takes into account not only our own business, but our competitor's businesses and the current business environment as well. A SWOT is one such analysis.

Completing a SWOT analysis helps us identify ways to minimize the affect of weaknesses in our business while maximizing our strengths. Ideally, we will match our strengths against market opportunities that result from our competitors’ weaknesses or voids.

Strengths

• Organic listings are a trusted source of information, believed to be unbiased and indexed solely by the automated methods of an objective third-party
• Natural search traffic provides a steady stream of traffic over time
• Costs are frontloaded; once pages are optimized for organic search, low ongoing maintenance fees make it cost-efficient for marketers on a limited budget

Weaknesses

• Organic results can be unfocused in their content and occasionally misconstrued through automation
• There's little control over which terms your pages will be linked with or how well they get ranked
• Relatively low control over your listing copy - automated technology decides what's displayed
• Organic listings have to be optimized well in advance of the intended pay-off and require great insight to production efforts down the road
• Engine requirements can be at odds with site design and architecture; it is often difficult to present information that is both accessible to search spiders and carefully designed to influence consumer behavior
  

Opportunities

• Social media marketing
• New markets in different countries
• Onebox optimization
• customers with potential
• Enhanced Technology capabilities
• Video promotion
• Reputation management
• Ideas and execution

Threats

• No Guaranty of Success
• Continously changing Search Engine Algorithm
• Unscrupulous SEO firms hurting the name of the industry
• PPC Click-Fraud
• Competitors can easily engage in sabotage of their rival's on-line marketing efforts
• If the ROI becomes untenable, SEM will lose favor

Strategic Decisions

In today's economy, the pressure is on for the marketing department to improve upon results with a scaled back budget If you are not already using ROI measurements to guide your marketing investments, now is the time to do so—but make sure you avoid these common errors that can lead to poor decision-making. Many of these errors are made by wellrespected, leading marketing companies and consultants, so check your own internal measurements carefully.

It is sometimes claimed that certain "strategic" business objectives must override the financial analysis that would guide marketing investments toward the greatest profit. Strategic decisions could include customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction, or service quality. However, since businesses exist for the purpose of generating profits, there is typically some financial benefit that is expected to be derived in the future from these strategic decisions. Developing assumptions as to the incremental value of these decisions, or running an ROI analysis to determine the results necessary to justify the strategic decisions, will lead to better, fact-based investments from the marketing budget.