The Power of SWOT Analysis for Content Marketing Strategy

A content marketing strategy will work out for your business only if the planning phase is framed well.

If you head straight to the content creation stage without planning your strategy, there are increased chances that you’ll fail to connect with your target audience.

Whether you are auditing your website’s content or just creating a marketing campaign, you need to create a healthy plan about the story that you intend to share with prospective customers through your content.

If you have been looking for smart content strategy planning tools then SWOT Analysis can come to your rescue. It essentially gives a strategic view of the biggest challenges and best opportunities that you may encounter with content marketing.

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Moreover, you’ll get a clear picture of your business’s performance in the market and about the sales and marketing environment, you’re functioning in. Here is all you need to know about SWOT analysis and its benefits.

Table of Contents:

About SWOT

SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) is one of the most effective analytical tools used for evaluating a strategy. SWOT Analysis is one of the key elements of Strategic planning that impacts the success of the process to a great extent.

The S.W.O.T framework is all about creating a list of internal weaknesses and strengths (relevant to a certain project) of a business and composing lists of the external risks and opportunities existing outside the boundaries that could affect the success of a project.

How is SWOT Analysis used in Content Strategy?

Like any other management tool, executing SWOT analysis for an effective content strategy also requires good pieces of information. It is really important to take some time and be honest when determining the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of your business. It is recommended to include your company’s content people, web designer, and sales or marketing executive when conducting SWOT analysis so that you end up with more complex and richer information.

Once you have all the answers on paper of all four categories use them in a matrix to create a compelling content strategy. With the information gathered through SWOT analysis, you can define the content’s style, word and grammar usage, sentence length as well as articles’ length. This strategy will further enhance your brand awareness while maintaining the authenticity and exclusivity of your business in the market.

Content Strategy SWOT Analysis Example

Here is a SWOT Analysis Template of a Content Marketing firm. Before creating its content marketing strategy the firms conduct a complete a SWOT analysis of its business.

Step (1): Identifying Strengths and Weaknesses

Strengths

Well organized whitepapers that are efficient enough for lead generation

Well defined editorial calendar and blogging strategies

Healthy partner relationships that can generate additional traffic through content promotion

Content distribution through Adwords campaigns optimization

Weaknesses

The company focuses primarily on initial lead generation

Current content marketing efforts aren’t SEO friendly

Current efforts aren’t sufficient to track ROI

Limited experience and knowledge for handling returning leads

Fewer possibilities of outreach performance due to ‘not so healthy’ relationship with the influencers

Step (2): Identifying Opportunities and Threats

Opportunities

Paid social media distribution is less costly in comparison to Adwords, which makes it ideal for content promotion

Conversion rate can be improved through product’s animated video explainers

How to (long form) contents can generate high traffic

Threats

The current content strategy for white papers can be easily replicated by competitors because it is AdWords optimized.

Competitors can better harness the power of SEO to their advantage.

Competitors can potentially promote their content through influencers by maintaining good relationships with them.

After completing SWOT analysis of the current content marketing efforts, the next step is to create an actionable plan using this information. The new content marketing plan will be based on the weaknesses and strengths the firm has identified from the analysis. In addition, it should use the opportunities in the best manner possible while keeping account of the potential threats.

Step (3): Content Marketing SWOT Action Plan

The organization needs to focus on creating more creative and valuable white papers for social promotion. This can be done by maintaining their thought leadership through expert commentary addition. An influencer program can also offer great results.

Improve customer conversion rate and personalisation for the returning leads by leveraging technology.

Test the paid social media distribution for the content that has sorted the organization’s purpose quite effectively and create new SEO friendly content accordingly.

Leverage its partners to increase the content resource.

The company needs to create explainer videos and other competitive assets in order to enhance the performance of its lead nurture programs.

Create ROI reports for the content to ensure to determine the success rate of their content marketing efforts.

The following PowerPoint templates represent the SWOT analysis summary and the action plan defined, ready to be presented to the executives. The PPT template includes several creative layouts and slide designs for presenting the analyzed Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. The professional layout will prove out to be much more effective from marketing and business point of view.

Conclusion

You need to be objective when analyzing the external factors. Focus more on the factors that influence your sales opportunity and target market. Also, consider the external conditions that aren’t within your control, but have a huge impact on your work and business. This entails extensive data analysis of the external factors that can prove out to be helpful in achieving your objectives.

Note that SWOT analysis is just one of the many tools of the strategy toolbox. It is advisable to use SWOT in combination with other analysis models when framing content marketing strategies and making decisions for the elevated success of your organization.

The additional analytic tools that are worth considering include MOST (mission, objective, strategies and tactics), SCRS (strategy, current state, requirements, and solution) and PEST (political, economic, social and technological) analyses. Plus, you need to be smart and informative when planning content marketing strategies of your firm.

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