How to do The 4-Step SWOT Analysis – Discover Opportunities Avoid Threats

Building-Blocks-SWOT-Analysis

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Do you want more business opportunities? Care to spot the threats to your businesses before they hurt? Want to discover the gaps in the market?

Then a SWOT analysis is for you.

[This post is one part of The Digital Marketing Funnel series of posts to help you understand the Digital Marketing process]

A SWOT Business assessment is for real people doing real business in Digital Marketing and social media.

Don’t worry, I am Urban Renström, there is always science and research involved in everything I talk about, teach, and demonstrate.

The SWOT analysis is one of the basic business building blocks to see where in the market you fit. The secret formula of fast, cheap, or good helps you understand the business angles you are trying to foster.

The SWOT Business Analysis

SWOT Analysis of a Company
The SWOT Analysis of a Company

Are you still with me? Good…let’s crack on.

A SWOT analysis is a tool. The SWOT identifies the good, the bad and the ugly inside your business and outside, external forces pressuring your business.

Excel at the boring stuff and the hard stuff becomes easy

The largest business opportunity is building trust with people, generating content (content marketing), growing an email list, and convincing people to buy from you.

SWOT is an acronym and stands for Strength, Weakness, Opportunity, and Threat. It is one of many basic business-building assessment tools. The benefit of its use is as an internal and external business check.

  • An inside check on the strengths and weaknesses of your organization.
  • An outside ‘threat assessor’ and opportunity ($) checker.

Why Should you do a SWOT Analysis of a Company?

Swot analysis of a company builds on what you do well, and your strengths. It assesses your weaknesses in order to minimize risks. And use the sway to grasp an advantage in the market. And lastly, become aware of the threats to your business.

But why do all this? To reduce risks to your business and use your strengths to take opportunities

Use Resources Effectively & Efficiently

Yes, effective and efficient use of your resources – be they time or money. So get more bang for your buck and avoid wasting money.

Why perform a SWOT analysis of a company?

Simply – use your precious resources (money) to get the most revenue and profit.

Every organization, public, private, or not-for-profit, possesses finite resources – human and capital.

Therefore, matching your strengths to the opportunities uses human resources and capital most effectively and efficiently. Saving you money.

Defining and naming weaknesses demystifies and qualifies them.

Does that sound like common sense? Yeah, it does and surprisingly many do not use these tools.

Improve Operations

Finding weakness is not the blame game.

Understanding weaknesses help helps avoid your weakest link and lets you plan for improvement.

Customer service, reducing development time, training, and conversion rates are examples.

A SWOT assessment will prevent strategic blunders. Like copying a product or bringing an inferior product to market.

Discover New Opportunities

Revenue growth in business requires seeking new opportunities. The SWOT analysis helps identify some of these emerging opportunities.

Identifying your capabilities and weaknesses allows you to map them into opportunities.

Both identifying and mapping help you innovate and develop new products/services.

Dealing with Risks (Threats)

What are the risks to your business? Cash flow, changing buying habits, existing or new competitors, technology?

A threat in business is another term for risk — something outside your company’s control.

This threat can be ‘simply’ competitive or larger forces such as economic or legislative.

The known risks you can plan for. Unknown risks have to be dealt with as they arise.

Preparedness is important for surviving and thriving.

The SWOT Analysis

Redux – The SWOT business assessment is an internal and external check of your business.

Strengths and Weaknesses – are internal to your business

Opportunities and Threats – are External to your businesses

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