Why Do a SWOT Analysis?

By doing a SWOT analysis, you should be able to identify where you have opportunities and risks. Once you have completed your SWOT analysis, you can then use that information to create an actionable plan. The actionable plan should be based upon the strengths and weaknesses you’ve identified from your current efforts, take advantage of opportunities in the market and also account for potential threats to your strategy.

“Knowing this will give you a good idea of how you should start to analyze your strategies.” 

How to do a SWOT Analysis?

You can simply draw four boxes on a piece of paper, similar to the illustration below.

Then, you’ll want to fill in each section accordingly:

Strengths

Here you will list 3-4 major internal strategic strengths of your current efforts. You need to identify what has been working well for you so far. (Even if you haven’t started yet, you can still complete this step.) In that case, for example, one of your strengths could be that you have expertise in a particular topic that your target audience is extremely interested in.

If you have started , however, some of your strengths could include a well-defined blogging strategy and established customer base.

Weaknesses

Here you will list 3-4 major internal strategic weaknesses of your current efforts. Again, if you haven’t started yet, you can still complete this step. For example, your weakness could be a lack of a dedicated resource for product development or lack of experience in raising money.

If you have started, some examples of potential weaknesses would be an inability to attract strong salespeople or lack of capital needed to market your product or service.

Opportunities

Here you will list 3-4 major external opportunities that exist for anyone working within your market. Some examples of opportunities might include that paid social distribution as it isn’t as competitive as adwords campaigns or generating leads from long-form ‘how-to’ content.

Threats

Here you will list 3-4 major external threats that exist for anyone working within your market. Some potential threats include a product or service that is easily replicated by your competitors, like industry white papers for example, or your competitors might have more resources to develop a better resource centre, increasing their possibility to rank higher than you.

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