SWOT analysis is a straightforward model that analyzes an organization’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats to create the foundation of a marketing strategy. To do so, it takes into account what an organization can and cannot do as well as any potential favorable or unfavorable conditions related to the company’s products or services.

What is SWOT analysis?

Highly useful for developing and confirming your organizational goals, each of the four categories provides specific insights that can be used to cultivate a successful marketing strategy, including:

• Strengths– Positive attributes internal to your organization and within your control. Strengths often include resources, competitive advantages, the positive aspects of those within your workforce and the aspects related to your business that you do particularly well, focusing on all the internal components that add value or offer you a competitive advantage.
• Weaknesses– Weaknesses summarize the negative internal aspects to your businesses that diminish the overall value your products or services provide. This category can be extremely helpful in providing an organizational assessment, provided you focus on an accurate identification of your company’s weaknesses.
• Opportunities– These factors include the specific opportunities existing within your market that provide a benefit, including market growth, lifestyle changes, resolution of current problems or the basic ability to offer a higher degree of value in relation to your competitors to promote an increase in demand for your products or services.
• Threats– External factors beyond the control of your organization that have the potential to place your marketing strategy, or the entire business, at risk. The primary and ever-present threat is competition. However, other threats can include unsustainable price increases by suppliers, increased government regulation, economic downturns, negative press coverage, shifts in consumer behavior.

Turning SWOT Analysis into a Strategic Plan

You can develop a strategic plan based on the information you’ve learned. For example, once you’ve identified your inherent strengths, you can leverage them to pursue the opportunities best suited to your organization, effectively reducing potential vulnerability related to threats. In the same way, by identifying your organization’s weaknesses with regard to external threats, you can devise a plan that will enable you to eliminate or minimize them while improving defensive strategies related to your offerings.