SWOT Analysis
SWOT analysis is looking at your company's internal strenghts and weaknesses and at external opportunities and threats. For most marketers it stops there, almost an academic exercise to be included in some document that will be lost in a folder on their computer.
An well done SWOT should be a fundamental part of both your business plan and your marketing plan. It will bring many things to light that will help you plan your business and marketing strategy. It can help with:
- Competitive Analysis
- Positioning
- Price setting
- Customer segmentation
- Product roadmap
Strengths
- What do your top customer, partners, sales staff say are your top strengths?
- What are you currently doing right?
- What do you think is your number one strength?
- What is the thing you admire most about your best member of staff?
Weaknesses
- What is the main excuse your staff uses for lost sales?
- What is the biggest cause of customer complaints?
- What is the one thing you have been meaning to fix but keep putting off?
- What do your competitors say that they do better than you?
Opportunities
- What do your existing customer buy from others that they could buy from you?
- What could you be adding into every sale that doesn’t currently happen?
- What has changed in recent buying patterns among your new customers?
- What can you do to make better use of on-line technologies to promote your company?
- Are you currently seen as industry experts?
Threats
- What are your top competitors doing better than you?
- What are your top competitors adding to their product/service offerings that could take business from you?
- What new technologies could damage your business if you don’t respond to them?
- Are your key members of staff more in control of your customers than you are?
- What is the worst thing that could happen to affect your business?
The SWOT is usually presented in a block, we have added things to help focus you on where changes will flow from the SWOT.
Once you get this far the real work starts:
- You need to capitalise on your strengths
- You need to mitigate your weaknesses and plan to eliminate them in the future
- You need a plan to evaluate and capitalise on the opportunities you identified
- You should look for opportunity in each threat and plan to meet those threats
If you are in the home counties we can provide consultancy and training services to help you get ahead of the competition.