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

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Talesa 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?”

In regard to a SWOT analysis using data, the place to start is to identify what data you do have, and whether it’s of any use to your company and competitors. For example, you might have lots of information on retweets – but is that a valuable measure? Doing this KPI identification is essential – start with the data you can get apples to apples comparisons about, and then determine if that data is useful.

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In today’s episode to Lisa asks how to 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 SWOT analysis using data, there’s a bunch of different challenges here.

But the place to start is to identify what data you do have, and whether it’s of any use to your company and competitors.

For example, He 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, a relevant metric could be things like branded organic search, how many people per month are searching for your brand’s products and services by name? How many people are doing that by for a competitor of 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 you have control over.

And opportunities and threats, which are, in many cases when you’re doing 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, there’s a whole bunch of data that for obvious reasons you cannot get ahold of.

So the question is, what data can can you get ahold of and can you benchmark it against competitor search is useful social media can be useful, depending on how important it is, and how relevant is advertising data.

Especially Pay Per Click ads, display ads, social media ads.

And there are a number of tools out there that can get you that information.

financial data can be available if it’s a publicly traded company, if 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 we can get information about? So let’s talk to a quick example.

Suppose you’re looking at search search data.

You have branded and unbranded organic search, which is essentially people searching for you by name and people searching for your category.

What percentage of the overall volume do you earn in branded search for people, some Search for your company’s name.

What percentage of branded search? Do competitors get? How much traffic is 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 it when it comes to building your brand.

If you just no one’s searching for you by name, you don’t have mindshare.

Nobody thinks I should search for Trust Insights when I need 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, if your weaknesses clearly brand organic search your your competitors threaten you with their strengths.

Right? They have great brand 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 Negative searches like, you know, Starbucks, coffee socks, things like that.

And so you can start to put together measurement based searches, then you can go a little further afield.

Go down the demand or up the demand funnel, to unbranded search.

So if people are searching for coffee shop near me, what do you strong on what keywords? What do 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 a suppressor shop near me, aha, that is an area of opportunity.

And if you can build that into a strength, a position of strength, you can influence the mindshare and how much 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.

You can see, for example, how fast is a competitors account growing? How fast is your account growing? Can you determine why? What are their engagement rates look like, based on things like likes, comments and shares on their posts versus yours.

The only 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, in organic searches, 75% of all your online conversions, you bet your but you’d better be doing an exhaustive, search based SWOT analysis.

This is what 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, you’ll get a lot that through SEO tools, you can get some level of search data, actually a lot of search data, you can get some level 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 ahold of.

You can probably not get do a whole lot with direct traffic in general.

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 converting for customer competitors.

But if they’re converting for you Then those are areas that you definitely want to win in and take share away from competitors as well.

So that’s how it started chipping away at this progression, you’re not going to 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 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.

This is a really good question.

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 day, 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.

This is a really good question.

If you have follow up questions, leave them in the comments box below.

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