The Ultimate Guide to using a SWOT analysis to sharpen your brand strategy

the-ultimate-guide-to-using-a-swot-analysis-to-sharpen-your-brand-strategy

There is a saying in the management world – which goes like “ While starting a business it is better to measure once and cut twice”.

When you set out to build your brand strategy – it’s always best to be number 1 in a new market – than number 2 or number 3 in an already crowded market.

In such a case, a SWOT analysis of your business idea – would give you a great insight into whether or not – your market needs your product or not.

A SWOT analysis of your brand strategy would give you an idea about the strengths ( S ) , weaknesses ( W ) , Opportunities ( O ) and threats ( T ) of your brands ability to dominate the market.

Let’s use Heena as an example to conduct a SWOT analysis to sharpen your brand strategy to achieve maximum market penetration in minimum time;

1 – Evaluate The Strength of your idea

Heena started a company selling sweat free yoga pants. She’s been running online ads on Adwords, Facebook, and Instagram with diminishing returns. Heena now needs to do a little pondering on why is it that an idea that seemed so promising is now on it’s the way to the business graveyard.

So Heena bucks up and starts doing some quick research.

She does a quick google search under keywords related to her brand to see what her competitors Unique Selling Propositions are. While on their websites – she finds that most of them are making pretty similar claims about the sweat-free yoga pants product. She realizes that her greatest strength is the fact that all her competitors are faceless e-commerce websites – whereas her ad copy features her story giving her product a bit more human appeal.

Another differentiator she can find is – she is just selling one type of sweat-free yoga pants whereas her competitors are selling close to 50 pants.

2 – Swallow your pride and Admit your weakness

So Heena now asks herself what her weaknesses are.

Her major weakness is that her USP is pretty similar to her competitor’s tagline. After looking at her analytics she also finds that she has incredibly high bounce rates on her landing page.

3 – Look For Opportunities In The Long Tail

Heena now decides that the market she is targeting is too crowded. So she heads over to Google’s Keyword Planner and discovers that about 10k people are looking for Plus Sized Yoga pants each month.

Excited she does a quick google search and finds that her competitors are selling just sweat free yoga pants whereas if she can position herself as “ Plus Sized Sweat Free Yoga Pants Lady” she can blow away her competitors through a simple change of her central selling idea.

So using this new opportunity she now needs to determine where her threats lay.

4 – Search for threats that can effectively shut you down

So Heena now has a new market to target. Plus sized women who do yoga and need Sweat free Yoga Pants.

Heena now redoes her website copy, adds new pictures and is ready to begin advertising – but she only has a 200$ as a marketing budget.

From experience, Heena knows that Adwords is expensive and with a small marketing budget she needs a low-risk way to test this new idea.

So she hits up Instagram and finds a few yoga institutes in her area who are ready to give her a shoutout for 25 dollars.

So Heena knows now that she has the budget to buy 4 Instagram shoutouts in total.

She then would build a quick landing page and design a creature that the influencer would post on their page. Heena then finds that for a budget of 25$ she got about 5 orders of her 15 dollar yoga pants and with a 20% markup on the wholesale price – she breaks even.

While doing a SWOT analysis of your brand – the best mindset you could have is to look for an untapped category like Heena and then go and hyper-niche down into that category – so that you can be first in the market instead if second or third.

Often the only change you would need to make is in your USP and then you need to back that up with the work that comes from trying different strategies that take you closer towards your business goals.

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