You Ask, I Answer: Getting Started With Data-Driven SWOT Analysis?

In today's episode, Talesha asks, how do you chip away at the progression of creating a data-driven SWOT analysis on a small team that doesn't already possess all the key skills? So this is very much a marketing data science question. In regards to uh SWOT analysis using data, uh, there's a bunch of different challenges here, but the place to start is to identify what data uh you do have and whether it's of any use to uh your company and competitors. For example, you could gather up publicly available, for example, social media data, like number of retweets or something. But while that is good to have that and be able to get it for competitors, the question is, is that a relevant metric?

Probably not. Whereas uh a relevant metric could be things like branded organic search. How many people per month are searching for uh your brand's uh products and services by name? How many people are doing that by for a competitor? You know, Starbucks coffee versus Dunkin' Donuts coffee.

Once you've identified the data that you can get, you then have to run an analysis to look at is that data useful for SWOT analysis? Remember that SWOT analysis is basically strengths and weaknesses, those are the things that you're good at that uh you have control over, and opportunities and threats, which are uh in many cases when you're dealing doing competitive SWOT analysis as opposed to environmental, the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors. And so you do need to get that apples to apples data. What data can you get? And there's a whole bunch of data that for obvious reasons you cannot get a hold of.

So the question is uh what data can you can you get a hold of and can you benchmark it against uh a competitor? Search is useful, social media can be useful depending on how important it is and how relevant it is. Advertising data, um especially pay-per-click ads, display ads, social media ads, and there are a number of tools out there um that can get you that information. Uh financial data can be available if it's a publicly traded company, if they're uh you have a collection of publicly traded companies, whatever it is, you need to get the data first and then make that determination, is this data something that um we can get information about. So let's talk through a quick example.

Suppose you're looking at search, search data. You have branded and unbranded organic search, uh, which is essentially people searching for you by name and people searching for your your category. What percentage of the overall volume uh do you earn in branded search for people some searching for your company's name? What percentage of um branded search do competitors get? How much traffic is it, right?

If you get 10 branded searches a month and your competitor gets a million for their products and services, you know that you've got an uphill battle on when it comes to building your brand. Uh if you are just no one's searching for you by name, you don't have mind share. Nobody thinks I should search for trust insights when I need uh analytics help. If nobody remembers the company name, then that's a pretty straightforward way to start your SWOT analysis, right? You have your strengths, whatever they are, and in this example, your your weakness is clearly branded organic search.

Your str your competitors ha threaten you with their strengths, right? They have great branded organic search. What are their competitors your competitors weak on in branded search? Are there certain product lines that are not as robust as they could be? Are there certain um negative searches like you know, Starbucks coffee socks, uh things like that?

And so you can start to put together measurement-based uh searches, then you can go a little further afield, uh go down the demand or up the demand funnel to unbranded search. So if people are searching for coffee shop near me, what are you strong on? What keywords? What are you weak on? What are your competitors strong on?

What are they weak on? And that now you're starting to tease out the actual strategy of what it is that you can do. If your competitors are really strong on coffee shop near me, and you're not, you're weak on it, but they're weak on espresso shop near me. Aha. That is an area, that's an opportunity, and if you can build that into a strength, a position of strength, uh, you can influence the mind share and how much uh you how much search traffic you get hold of.

So this is a really great example of using a SWOT analysis, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats for a specific type of data that is available for you and available for your competitors. Again, the same would be true for social media data. Um you can see, for example, how fast is a competitor's account growing, how fast is your account growing? Can you determine why? What are their engagement rates look like uh based on things like likes, comments, and shares on their posts versus yours?

Um the only c caveat is that you need to have that benchmark of what data points are relevant to you. If social media accounts for you know 1% of the conversions that you have, then doing an exhaustive SWOT analysis may not be worth the time. On the other hand, for example, if organic search is 75% of all your online conversions, you bet your butt you'd better be doing an exhaustive uh search-based SWOT analysis with that data. So the easy way to start there is go into your Google Analytics, look at your assisted conversions, and look at the channels. What channels are driving conversions, and then do you have available data for yourself and your competitors for those channels?

You can get some level of referral traffic, for example. Um you'll get a lot of that through SEO tools. You can get some level of search data, actually, a lot of search data. You can get some level of social data. Really tough to get email data other than things like you know, domains being blacklisted and stuff, but for the most part, email data is very difficult to get a hold of.

Um probably not get do a whole lot with direct traffic in general. Um you can get some advertising data. So use your Google Analytics data to tell you what's important to you on a channel basis because the channels that are converting for you may not be what converting for custom for your competitors, but if they're converting for you, then those are areas that you definitely want to win in and take share away from your competitors as well. So that's how it would start chipping away at this progression. You're not gonna nail it straight out of the gate, but you can at least start getting the basic data together using Google Analytics to calibrate which data to look at.

And then once you've pulled in that data, just start doing your best with even just basics, like which number is bigger, right? You don't necessarily need to jump into hardcore statistical analysis right away. If you're just trying to get a lay of the land. It's a fascinating question because most people don't use data this way. Most people just look at their own data or look at a competitor's data, but don't ever put it in that SWOT framework that is very helpful for understanding how the different data points compare and contrast with each other.

So it's a really good question. If you have follow up questions, leave them in the comments box below. Subscribe to the YouTube channel and the newsletter. We'll talk to you soon. Take care.

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