Author: Bridget Willard

Have you ever seen an image on social media that made you turn your head sideways? Or maybe a billboard or even a written post. There are whole accounts on Instagram dedicated to Photoshop fails and the like. 

Sometimes a bit of tongue-in-cheek humor is appreciated by your audience. And sometimes good intentions get separated from the intended message. It could be your body language, word choice, or accessibility. (I can’t even get going on the PDF flyers I see on IG that no one over 40 can read.)

So this is why you need a professional to not just “manage” your social media. You need a social media marketer. You need a bit of pushback to make your ideas better. They should think about all of the possible outcomes.

This is why a good marketer always does some version of a SWOT analysis.

They don’t just post and hope things work out.

SWOT Analysis Basics

SWOT stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. An experienced marketer just automatically thinks of these with each new idea they encounter. But you can definitely make a chart, especially if you’re presenting to an internal team or an external client. 

“A SWOT analysis can help you to challenge risky assumptions, uncover dangerous blindspots, and reveal important new insights.” Mindtools 

Many large agencies use focus groups as the research arm of a SWOT analysis. Politicians use opposition research. You have to really understand your audience. How they think and their values will determine their perception of your campaign. 

Strengths

Before you post a photo on Instagram, think about what it says about your brand. What’s good about that social post? How does it make people feel about your brand? Does it have easy-to-read text, great captions, and a call to action? Do the colors evoke the feelings you’re hoping it would?

Weaknesses

What will people say about your brand if you do that? If you wear that? If you post an image of a QR code on a mobile ad? They’ll think you don’t know what you’re doing. You can’t scan a QR code on an image on your phone with your phone. Make sense?

Opportunities

How does this social post give you more opportunities? Does it make people think? Does it give them a tool? Does it encourage them? Do they want to see more of what you have to offer?

Threats

How could this image damage you? Do you think people will make negative comments? Will your competition use this against you? Will your hashtag come across wrong? Are there double entendres that you didn’t intend? Will women be offended? Men? Non-binary folks? 

Example: Swot Analysis of Black Friday Deal by a WordPress Plugin

Strengths

A well-executed marketing plan around Black Friday/Cyber Monday including email marketing, social media, and PPC can bring in a bunch of new business and attention to a new WordPress plugin.

Weakness

Having a sale on Black Friday for a software company doesn’t make sense. Black Friday is for retail stores to shore up their finances before the end of the year. If you want to have an online sale after Thanksgiving, keep it at Cyber Monday.

Opportunity

The reason why so many WordPress plugins jump in on Black Friday is to get in front of people’s eyes. It does give you visibility and keeps your plugin top-of-mind.

Threat

A major threat of Black Friday deals is price integrity. Not only are you devaluing your plugin, but you’re training your customers to wait for predicted sales. Furthermore, if you have an annual license, all of your renewals will come back up at the same time next year. Essentially, you’d have to reverse engineer the cost you really want and charge that on Black Friday if you want a sustainable business. 

Bertha.ai decided to skip Black Friday sales for this reason. I also talk about this in my book, “How to Market Your Plugin.”

Get Marketing That Works

If your marketer just says “yes” to your idea they aren’t doing their job.

Sometimes it seems offputting or even rude but it’s always better to let you know before you proceed. That way you can execute a well-thought-out campaign that achieves your business goals.

I’m always open for a quick sales call or you can just book a paid consult.

“She’ll tell you what she thinks is best regardless if it is what you think you want to hear, she’ll challenge you to think broadly about your vision and goals with social, and she’ll curate storytelling into each component of your content strategy.” Michelle Keefer, MA MBA 

So many people want to wait for a full SEO audit before they fix internal links or update articles. I get it. It feels like that may be the most efficient way to tackle the beast.

But it’s like waiting to vacuum until professional cleaners do a move-out clean in your apartment. And this analogy is top-of-mind because I’m looking in the mirror here. I would love to get a deep clean done and reset my apartment.

But it’s still going to get dusty. I still need to wash my bedding. I still need to mop the floor. I still need to sweep and vacuum.

So, you want to wait for an SEO audit. Okay.

Most SEOs charge a fee for that audit (like my friend Warren Laine-Naida does) but the fee doesn’t include doing the work.

So, when is the work going to get done? How outdated will that article be?

And, by the way, also talking to myself here — don’t forget to look at Google Search Console to see your top ranking keywords. This will give you ideas on HOW to adjust those internal audits.

Because if you give the SEO consultant the wrong coordinates (content and business goal) that SEO ship will sail you in the wrong direction.

Watch Video

Notable Timestamps:

00:56 You still have to fix things that you’re linking to.

02:29 People who do SEO audits don’t do the work.

05:00 Your homepage shouldn’t attract every customer.

Full Transcript

(00:01):
Hey everybody. Sometimes you’re just cleaning and you’re doing stuff. You come up with a good idea.

(00:06):
And I was thinking about how as we’re cleaning vacuuming, we come across something and we’re like, Ooh, I need to dust this. Do you ignore it and wait for years? This is how people do SEO audits or, um, redoing their whole site. Like they come up with this idea that they have to have some person, some shiny salesperson come and tell ’em that they have a complete overhaul. That would be like, I’m not gonna vacuum anymore until the cleaning company comes in my apartment and does a move-out clean. And then I’ll have a fresh start. So everything I do from then will work out. That makes no sense. You still have to clean your apartment. You still have to vacuum. You still have to dust. You still have to do laundry.

(00:56):
And that’s the same way with SEO. You still have to fix things that you’re linking to.

(01:03):
Now, Pew Research came out with some findings that 40, 43% of all, um, links are broken on government sites and whatnot. And we link internally and we link out. So there’s checking for broken links on external sites, which is something I definitely need to do. I mean, I’m saying this as a reminder to myself, too. And then there’s internal.

(01:33):
And even though the link works, you may need to update some of that content. For example, the video I did the other day about Twitter still being super relevant in 2025, I linked to the text of my book ’cause you can get this Definitive Guide to Twitter Marketing book as a blog post. And I did some updates to that real quick.

(01:58):
But it’s, it’s the internet, it’s not print. So it’s very easy for us if you, if you have access to your own website, very easy to re redo that content. Um, I’m sure there’s articles that are published on bridgetwillard.com that I need to go through. And if I did a whole SEO audit and paid somebody five to two to $5,000, like 500 to $5,000 to do that SEO audit, I would still have to do the work.

(02:29):
People who do SEO audits don’t do the work. They just find out where the work needs to be done. It’s like a home inspector. They come in, they tell you all the things that are wrong and they give you a list to go get it done. So when you hire somebody like that, they’re not doing the SEO work for you. They’re just telling you where the SEO of work needs to be done.

(02:54):
Oh, Bob, this toilet needs to be fixed. Oh, there this room is isn’t level. It’s like that. It’s a list of tasks that somebody else needs to do. And that audit itself almost always comes up with a list of things that need to be done. Now, they also may for hire, like I said, I was in construction, so we would do building surveys and we would do ’em for a really good price in order to get the work that comes from the building survey. It’s a loss leader.

(03:29):
So instead, when you’re writing your content, um, for your website and you do notice that you’re linking to, um, an internal page, either a page or a post that you wrote, go ahead and make a note. Send yourself an email. Make it a to-do list on a kanban board, whatever it takes for you to spend five, 10 minutes on that one article to make sure that it’s, um, you know, done correctly or up to date with.

(04:08):
Um, it might not be wrong, wrong, but it still might say things that you don’t necessarily agree with. Um, so that’s a good time to update those.

(04:18):
Also, you may think, oh, I don’t really wanna do work with these kind of people anymore. So this language doesn’t make sense. Because sometimes when we’re writing pages, we’re experimenting with language to get that kind of traffic or to meet that person’s needs. Then you might wanna word it a different way.

(04:38):
For example, my homepage, um, is all about being a marketing manager’s best friend. Like, I got you. You need four articles more a month. You can’t do it. You have the budget to outsource. I’m your girl. Oh, you’re supposed to do Twitter and LinkedIn. You can’t focus on both. I’ll do one of ’em for you, no problem.

(05:00):
But then again, I also do a lot of white-labeled work for WordPress, uh, freelancers and agencies of one who do, who build the website, but maybe they’re not writing the page content. I don’t have a landing page for that. This is a good opportunity to have one.

(05:21):
And sometimes we forget that not everybody is our customer. And that’s why when you come across it, that’s a good time for you to go ahead and fix it. I was just vacuuming. I saw a big pile of paper as I moved from my table to under my tv. It’s all dusted. Do I just leave it all dusty? No. I am gonna go get the pledge and clean it up. Maybe the pile of paper comes in my office, but I do need to file those . But you see what I’m saying?

(05:56):
You don’t wait for. You can. You can wait until it’s a total mess. But then you have this giant overwhelming task. Instead of doing it as you come across it yourself on your site as you’re thinking of thanks to post on X Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, um, to share on a story link and Instagram, to pull content from to make those social posts. And you see something maybe you don’t agree with, or there’s a link to a vendor you don’t work with anymore, that’s a good time to just get in there and get it done.

(06:33):
What you’re working on today, let me know in the comments. Bye everybody.