When you want to grow your eCommerce business, it can be hard to come up with a marketing plan. What’s your goal? What are you currently doing, and will it truly help you reach those goals? You aren’t alone, and these concerns are common among online eCommerce business owners.
The good news is that there are simple business and marketing methods that you can use to help you create a marketing plan. One of our favourites here at Springer Marketing is SWOT analysis. In this blog post, we will show you how a SWOT analysis can help you work out how you can achieve success for your eCommerce website.
What Is SWOT Analysis?
SWOT analysis is made up of four components: Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats.
Let us talk about each component in-depth and provide you with a series of questions you can use to help you create your own SWOT analysis for your online business.
Strengths
- What is your business good at?
- What are you good at?
- What’s your advantage against your competitors?
- What resources do you own?
- Why would someone buy from you rather than a competitor?
Weaknesses
- What areas of your business need improvement?
- What does your business lack?
- What are the products that don’t sell?
- Do you lack certain resources?
- Do you have the required marketing and SEO skills in-house?
- Where are your competitors stronger than you?
- What do your competitors do better than you?
Opportunities
- Are there any circumstances that can enable you to grow your business?
- What are the opportunities in your industry?
- Are there any marketing trends you can leverage?
- Can you expand?
- Are there any new products you could sell?
- Are there any new target markets you need to approach?
Threats
- Are there any factors that pose a risk to your business?
- Do you have new competitors aggressively gathering market share?
- Are there factors that are decreasing your revenues or potential profits?
- Is the gap between you and your competitors growing?
- Are any regulations changing
- What are competitors doing?
- Are consumer trends changing?
Your strengths and weaknesses are internal factors that may impact your business, whereas opportunities and threats are external factors that may impact the landscape your company operates in.
So What Now?
To help you recognise how vital a SWOT analysis is to your eCommerce business: lets make up a company and go through it. Lets call the company: John’s Custom T-shirt Co.
John just started selling t-shirt on his online eCommerce website, and the problem is, he does not have a lot of customers. He has use the knowledge he picked up by Googleing SEO to optimise it, his products are organised and he has an online presence. However, as this is a new business, he has a few problems.
John’s business lacks a social media following and his online content is lacking engagement. He does not rank on the first page of Google and he doesn’t get much traffic from search engines. He is currently on page 5 for the commercial keywords that he identified as being relevant for his business.
As you would imagine John has a lot of competitors online, however there are opportunities in the local offline market. In his area, he has 2 competitors that have been going for almost 2 years, yet they too lack an online presence. He’s planning on hiring a content creator, social media specialist and SEO experts to get his business off-the-ground.
Given this data, John’s SWOT could look like this:
Strengths
- Several patterns to print (famous people, characters of comic books, cartoons…)
- Different styles of t-shirts (v-neck,round neck, short & long sleeve)
- Very large range of colours
- Fast delivery (within 3 days)
- We have contract licenses
Weaknesses
- We don’t have a physical shop
- We don’t have our own delivery system, we use couriers
- Young copmany
- Poor SEO positions in Google
- Not much engagement on Social Media
Opportunities
- High-demand market
- Demand Increasing
- Sales of custom t-shirts are increasing online
- Internet is everywhere customers even use their phones to order
- Grow our social media following
- Improve our SEO positions
Threats
- Other online competitors
- Our prices are higher than retailers as ours are custom made
- Established local competition
Through a simple SWOT analysis, John is able to clearly identify what he needs to do in order to achieve eCommerce success.
If you want to improve your website’s marketing why not sign up for our FREE Website Audit or contact us to discuss what we can do for your website.
