Whether you’re just starting your marketing efforts in your own business, a new job, re-strategizing a marketing plan, a SWOT analysis is a great tool to help you visualize and strategize.
Why would a SWOT analysis matter for your marketing? This analysis is a straightforward model that analyzes the company’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats to create the foundation of a marketing strategy. It is important to address the weaknesses and make improvements so that they are no longer weaknesses.
WHAT IS A SWOT ANALYSIS?
SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats, and so a SWOT Analysis is a tool for assessing these four aspects of your business.
You can use SWOT Analysis to make the most of what you’ve got, to your organization’s best advantage. By using a SWOT analysis, you can reduce the chances of failure, by comprehending what you’re lacking, and helping in eliminate negatives you may see in the business for marketing (for these purposes.)
The SWOT analysis will allow you to craft a strategy by really focusing on the pros by outlining and visualizing it. It’s best done with every department in the company as the more feedback from company team members you get to do this, the better it will be, unless it’s just you.
SWOT is made of two parts: the strengths and weaknesses refer to the internals of a company while the opportunities and threats are external to the company and exist in the environment.
The two external factors, opportunities and threats, are not in the company’s control. The environment, composed of social, economic, legal, regulatory, national and even international events, has to be continuously scanned to track these.
CONDUCTING A SWOT ANALYSIS
Conducting a SWOT analysis
- Decide on the objective of your SWOT analysis.
- Research your business, industry and market.
- List your business’s strengths.
- List your business’s weaknesses.
- List potential opportunities for your business.
- List potential threats to your business.
- Establish priorities from the SWOT.
IMPLEMENTING SWOT IN YOUR MARKETING
This seems obvious, right? It’s marketing 101. What are your strengths? What are your VALUE PROPOSITIONS? While it may seem obvious, and some of this may come natural in your marketing strategy, nevertheless, it’s important to do this outline and it will give you a clear visualization not just for you but for everyone in the team to come up with marketing initiatives.
The SWOT analysis should go all the way from the owner / ceo to the copy writer doing copy and viewed by all. This will allow you to be get your team on the same page and laser focus on strenghts.
How you can make the SWOT analysis really effective for your marketing efforts is by also using your weaknesses to your advantage. What do I mean? The weaknesses in your SWOT may conclude that you may not be doing something as good as you can / should, and maybe communicating that to customers may play well. That’s just one example.
Your strengths should be constantly outline in your marketing through different copy and messaging. Do NOT get away from your strengths in your marketing as this is what will turn consumers into customers. More often than not, you can see some companies trying to get creative with their marketing, and while it’s great to test, it’s vital you stick to core strengths that help you build and grow your business.
ANALYZE THE ANALYSIS
- Strengths–Opportunities. Use your internal strengths to take advantage of opportunities.
- Strengths-Threats. Use your strengths to minimize threats.
- Weaknesses-Opportunities. Improve weaknesses by taking advantage of opportunities.
- Weaknesses-Threats. Work to eliminate weaknesses to avoid threats.
