What the Heck is SWOT and How Do I Use it for Marketing my Book? (Part 1)
An intro and look at the 'Strength' component of SWOT.
Companies of all sizes often use the SWOT analysis before designing a marketing campaign. Yet authors seldom use this tool, which can lead to a helter skelter approach to marketing.
SWOT is an acronym for Strength/Weakness/Opportunities/Threats. The analysis helps identify both internal and external factors that you should consider before you put together a marketing plan for your book(s). Typically, Strength and Weaknesses are about internal factors and Opportunities and Threats are about external factors. But if you have a strong resistance to using social media as a marketing tool, and your pre-marketing assessments indicate that the majority of your market is going to be influenced by social media, your aversion to it will definitely be a threat to your success.
It is important to be critically honest with yourself as you look at the SWOT components of you, your book, and your target market. If you don’t, you could spend a lot of time and money on a marketing plan that really isn’t going where it needs to go or doing what you want it to do.
As I write these marketing newsletters, I am assuming that you already have a good product that has been carefully edited, nicely designed, with a professional cover, and a description that is compelling. If you are self-published and haven’t put your book through several rounds of editing with different editors, you did a do-it-yourself cover and don’t have artistic skills, etc., you need to go back to the beginning. Make sure you have a book that can stand side to side on digital and bookstore shelves with bestselling authors and hold its own.
In this four-part newsletter series on SWOT, I’m going to look at the four components of a SWOT analysis, and how you can use each of them to create a marketing plan designed for you, your book, and your marketplace.
When publishing books under either BQB Publishing or WriteLife Publishing, we expected the author to complete a Competitive Analysis for each title. This analysis asked questions that gave us (and the author) an idea of the components that should be a part of their marketing plans.
Yet, we found that very few authors would use these components when creating their plans. Yes, you want to highlight your strengths, but just because something is a weakness doesn’t mean you don’t do anything in that area of marketing. You either work on that weakness to build it up or you hire someone to help you in that area. We also found that authors seldom assess and use the opportunities that exist in their marketplace or in their region. Or they didn’t identify threats to their success, often coming from their own planning or fears.
These are some of the possible SWOT analysis answers from authors and some of the ways components could be used for their benefit. Many of them could apply to many of you, as well.