It’s freeing to roam unmapped terrain guided by instincts, but an outdoor brand that fails to use SWOT—an analysis of Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats—puts itself at a disadvantage. Before trekking into new territory, outdoors enthusiasts often assess their ‘SWOT’ to maximize their adventure.
If you’re anything like us, standing still isn’t an option. Neither is going halfway and turning back. But that doesn’t mean we run unbridled campaigns. It means we prepare a roadmap for the journey using a SWOT analysis. Why not apply this forethought to your brand’s marketing strategies and push your campaigns to new heights?
Read on as we explore the SWOT analysis process to help your brand:
When and How To Use SWOT in Marketing
Strategic marketing for outdoor companies is built on awareness. You can’t hunt down leads and overtake competitors if you don’t know where you stand. New outdoor brands and established companies must devise analysis-based marketing strategies to earn tactical advantages over the competition, and SWOT is a must for any marketer’s rucksack.
A SWOT analysis provides perspective when you are:
- Exploring new product lines or services
- Considering a rebrand to better align with your company’s goals
- Deciding where to focus marketing efforts and resources for outdoor companies
Consider SWOT a team sport. Lifestyle brand owners, stakeholders, and staff should be involved in this analysis to help draft an accurate plan.
To start a SWOT analysis, you’ll need to understand how competitive your outdoor brand is and where there’s room for improvement. Crunching the numbers of your market share will give you a general idea of how your brand competes in the outdoor industry, but your dominance also depends on ancillary factors, like the product quality, your reputation, and the community you’ve built.
You’ll need to look inward to understand where you’re losing ground to competitors. Trust us, the homework is worth the payout. Ready to get started? Follow this SWOT roadmap to evaluate your outdoor company’s status and inform your brand strategy:
Assess Your Strengths
You may not get an easier jump-off point than listing your outdoor brand’s strengths. These are internal factors—things you do well, how you set yourselves apart, your product highlights, and your team’s resources. Assessing strengths is an essential step for any company, but new outdoor brands looking for marketing opportunities should start with their strengths.
Here are a few areas to consider where or how you excel:
- Selling Points – Consider the durability and performance of your products, plus proprietary tech or material advantages that set your brand apart.
- Brand Recognition – Research (surveys, social observations, digging through forums) how your target audience regards your brand and whether you’re a household name beyond your niche. Do you have a solid online presence and the followers to prove it?
- Your Team – This includes their skills and knowledge but it goes beyond boring résumés; identify crewmembers who are outdoor enthusiasts bringing value to a wilderness brand, offering expertise that forges customer relationships and trust.
- Leadership – Consider your dominance in the outdoor space, your influence on a niche sport, and count all areas where you’re a front-runner, like innovation and product diversity.
Leveraging Strengths in Marketing Plans for Outdoor Brands
Too many brands expect their product features to sell themselves, but marketing that’s ‘good enough’ won’t crush your competitors. You have strengths—ingenious products, high-quality performance gear, or an adventure-forward point of view—and any of these can create compelling marketing content for outdoor brands. Use high-impact videos and photography to turn heads and highlight what differentiates you from the pack. Your followers are more likely to share and engage with captivating content, compounding the payout you get from social interactions and pushing your brand further to the front.
Define Company Weaknesses
The biggest weakness for an outdoor brand is ignoring its shortcomings. Finding room for improvement can be insightful for any outdoor company, and being honest with yourself will safeguard your brand strategy against future pitfalls. Here are a few areas in which we frequently see room for growth in an outdoor brand:
- Low Online Visibility – If marketing campaigns for your outdoor company aren’t reaching the right audience, your visibility will suffer and you’ll lose leads to competitors.
- Limited Resources – Content creation, social media management, and customer analysis require staff, tools, and resources that many niche lifestyle brands lack.
- Seasonality – Outdoor brands often experience seasonal demand and traffic fluctuations.
- Dependence on Retailers – Companies with websites that are difficult to navigate or shop rely on retailers and third parties, and lose control over the customer experience.
Alleviating a Lifestyle Brand’s Marketing Weaknesses
The good news is, there are plenty of ways to punch up a brand’s marketing, and small outdoor companies and niche gear brands can accomplish these with and without help.
- Consider how influencer marketing or collaborations can increase your performance brand’s visibility, market reach, and recognition.
- Execute search engine optimization (SEO) to surpass competitors in the search engine results.
- Refuse to use seasonality as a crutch and instead master seasonal content creation to thrive year-round.
- Leverage powerful tools, like paid search marketing to maximize your ROI with niche audiences
- Invest in an e-commerce site to reduce your reliance on retailers and create a shopping experience that reflects your brand.
Identify New Brand Opportunities
Exploiting strengths and improving areas of weakness are areas in which an outdoor brand should consistently look to generate opportunities, but companies should also explore new technology trends and changing consumer preferences to find uncharted places to expand their marketing. Use these ideas to spark areas to identify in your brand’s SWOT analysis:
- Preferences and changing habits – Trends like nomadism and an increased focus on health and wellness can grow the demand for your products among individuals adopting new lifestyles and hobbies.
- Technology Trends – New social platforms and app capabilities create additional marketing methods for brands that want to stay relevant.
- Unutilized Media – Consider what media coverage and press can do to increase marketing opportunities, especially for a new outdoor brand.
Seizing Marketing Opportunities for Outdoor Brands
Consider this permission to embrace your inner vulture and scavenge any opportunity your competitor leaves for the taking. Use these ideas to get started:
- Watch social media and brand influencers for emerging trends in your space to keep updated on consumers’ habits and preferences.
- Stay aware of competitors’ challenges, like supply chain issues or service gaps, and market areas where you are poised to take the lead offerings to outdoors enthusiasts who are too excited to wait for their regular brand.
- Use a digital marketing agency to help you with social media marketing and community management, keeping your resources free to innovate.
- Lean on technology to beat lackluster customer service by using chatbots or other AI-assisted website tools; you’ll increase customer satisfaction without burning out your resources.
- Public relations and media outreach is an art form that opens many doors for brands; consider teaming with a PR agency to add octane to your efforts.
Catalog Threats
Threats are external factors that may harm your business’ success and stunt your growth. Though you can’t often control these influences, you can use a powerful marketing strategy to mitigate their impact. Evaluate your operations for these threats and others during your SWOT analysis:
- Industry Challenges – Changes to industry regulations and production-related dilemmas can stifle a growing brand looking to expand.
- Production Challenges – Competitors innovating new materials and technology for outdoor gear can impact the perception of established brands.
- Economic Influences – Downturns in financial stability can influence consumer spending on hobbies and sports.
- Environmental Influences – Natural disasters, droughts, and other factors can influence wildlife, sports, and outdoor hobbies.
Addressing Threats Outdoor Brands Face
Staying solutions-focused when facing outside threats can help you transform negative situations into positive gains. Pay attention to industry regulations and legislation that can change your operations, and discuss marketing messaging early to help guide customers through any uncertainty. When economic instability affects consumer spending, outdoor companies should increase their marketing efforts, focusing on quality and high performance to show the value customers receive. Keep conservation in the conversation using marketing strategies focused on sustainability. Not only will this help the environment you love, but it will attract customers who appreciate your advocacy.
Lifestyle brands and performance gear makers understand the industry’s challenges, but the steps to gaining a competitive advantage aren’t always clear. If you need help evaluating your business’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, contact our team today. We may work as marketers, but we live for the outdoors and understand what makes companies like yours and customers like us tick.