Digging deeper into understanding the in’s and out’s of your brand is a key to it’s success.

As a social media manager and as someone who may be on the more creative side of the company, you may often get left out of truly understanding the in’s and out’s of your business.

However, being able to humanize your brand is absolutely key to it’s success. Consumers rate trust in a brand as their third top reason as to why they should purchase from a particular brand over others. With so much competition and content out there, it only becomes harder to distinguish yourself from the rest.

So here’s where SWOT analysis comes into play.

SWOT stands for strengths, weakness, opportunities and threats and is a technique for assessing these aspects of your business. And as a brand you need to put your best foot forward when it comes to social media.

When it comes to analyzing strengths you want to see what your business does well and what unique resources you have. On the other hand, when it comes to looking at your weaknesses you want to look at how you could improve and look at where you may have fewer resources compared to others. For opportunities, you want to see how you can turn your strengths into opportunities and see what trends you can take advantage of. And lastly, threats requires understanding the harm your weaknesses may be causing and what your competition is doing.

If you’re trying to find a solution to see how you can improve your brand a SWOT analysis must come first. Not doing so is like giving someone a medical diagnosis based on the symptoms someone may be experiencing. Doctors always do some form of a mix of tests or bloodwork in order to rule out any other possibilities (based on my knowledge of watching lots of House, M.D.). So if you’re business wants to take the next step in putting it’s best foot forward it’s going to need a full check-up first.

A SWOT analysis helps provide a guideline as to how you should take a deeper look at your business. Other benefits include capitalizing on opportunities, being prepared for potential threats, helping develop business goals, and helping take advantage of your strengths.

A SWOT analysis is not only important for a business as a whole, but it’s absolutely crucial for social media managers too. This helps ensure that your business and social media strategy align with each other and are achieving the same goals. And when you’re trying to find a way to humanize your brand to distinguish yourself you now have a SWOT analysis you can follow in order to find your voice.

Not only do you need to under the SWOT of your business, you have to know your audience too.

One of the things that I heard over and over again during my undergraduate years as an Advertising/Public Relations major was that by targeting everyone, you reach no one. It does not matter how generic your company is, you must always have a target audience and you have to know how to talk to them.

As a social media manager it’s absolutely crucial to understand that. People are bombarded with advertisements and information on social media, leading them to not even take a look at some of the content they are receiving. But by understanding them, you could be the reason they take a minute to stop and actually look.

According to Forrester Research Inc, online sales in the United States are expected to reach $523 billion in the next five years, up 56% from $335 billion in 2015, and mobile devices are expected to be a key driver in that growth.

Creating a target audience helps ensure social media managers are creating effective long-term strategies and are walking consumers through every part of their journey. Speaking the language of your audience becomes key in this process as well. Your target audience influences what content you post, the voice of your brand, and where you will spend time looking for potential customers.

And it’s absolutely crucial to not be afraid to get very specific about who your audience is. Even if it’s not as many people as you would expect, the more niche your audience the more likely your ads will resonate with them. From this you can expect better customer relationships, reduced competition, increased visibility and requires less resources.

Understanding a brand’s opportunities and threats.

Not only is it absolutely crucial for social media managers to understand their target audience, but they also need to understand a brand’s potential opportunities, threats, and use these to their advantage.

By understanding a brand’s opportunity as a social media manager, you can assess if a specific social campaign is worth the risk. The potential opportunities should be what help guide a social campaign. This also helps a brand’s social media looking relevant and in tune with the audience’s interests as well.

As mentioned before you always want to think about the risks of a social media campaign. Threats that you may want to always consider are changes to algorithms, new marketing campaigns from competitors, and current market conditions. By understanding your threats you may also be able to see opportunities as to areas where you could improve in order to prevent threats. However, many threats can be out of your control and so as a social media manager you want to try to be as realistic as possible.

Overall….

As a social media manager, you certainly have to wear lots of hats when it comes to getting a well-rounded knowledge of your brand. You’ll want to have an overall SWOT analysis that also align with a social media SWOT analysis. While it may seem difficult, SWOT analysis helps provide backed up information as to why you may want to do a certain campaign and also help guide you through as to what you are trying to accomplish and how you are going to do it.