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Are you feeling at a loss for where your company stands in your market?
Whether you have an established business and see growth opportunities or want to evaluate the potential of a new product or services, a SWOT analysis can provide you with insightful information. Knowing the strengths and weaknesses of your business can help you identify what you can improve and how to increase growth, this is why performing a SWOT analysis can be helpful. SWOT stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats both internally and externally. This analysis allows for a complete overview and what needs modifications for your business or product/service addition. You can lay out all future opportunities and threats that could help bring ideas to light that you were not aware of before doing the analysis.
A SWOT analysis allows you to clearly lay out all aspects of the business and assess what can be done and will create a way to prioritize issues or opportunities to expand the business. Doing this analysis initially on your own allows your ideas and vision to be presented without other perspectives. After doing so, perform the analysis with your team to listen to the different viewpoints of the various aspects of the analysis. A SWOT analysis will assess any potential threats your company is facing that you may not have considered before doing the analysis. Getting ahead of any opportunities or threats your company has will allow for a timely growth and no surprises when issues occur.
Laying out strengths can allow you to see what has helped with current success as well as what can be done to continue growing. It is always great insight to scoll through company reviews, emails, and old notes. If you are testing the potential of an addition to current offerings, evaluating how the new offering will do in the current market is key for its success. Weaknesses let you evaluate all the ideas as to what is currently lacking in the business or what can be a downside to adding a new aspect to the company. Finding various opportunities allows you to set goals for the company with a clear vision for the overall growth. Knowing the potential opportunities gives you a good understanding to any shifts that need to be made within the company and lets you evaluate how those will be performed and executed.
Threats are very important in seeing what a downfall could be in the future with a product or service. Being aware of any potential threats the company could face creates a way to adjust the company and position yourself in a way to avoid those threats. Being aware of what could negatively affect your company is important for the success of your business. Knowing the types of threats that may arise allows for readjustment. Every negative comment about your company can be a learning experience, or an opportunity for growth. Take this time to place yourself in the customers shoes!
A SWOT analysis can also be done on competitors with public information that can be found. By performing such an analysis, you can identify what your competitor lacks as well as how they excel in areas you may not. You can evaluate your competition and look at how you can improve your own business to work off their weaknesses and threats if they are different from your own. Knowing how you compare to your competitors helps identify what you can do within your own business. How do you do this, you may ask? RESEARCH! Check out your competitors websites, public pages, and reviews? What are people saying about the competition?
Knowing the various aspects that make the SWOT analysis lets you see what aspects of the business you may need help with. Reaching out for help is difficult if you are facing several issues and don’t know where to start. After performing this analysis, you can clearly see what issues you currently have and know what you need guidance with. Getting the help you need can come from someone within your team or outsourcing the help to someone with a different perspective. Having an outside source perform a SWOT analysis will help you to see how you are viewed from someone with no affiliation to the business. Consultants can effectively perform this type of analysis on the company and provide insightful observations. Having an analysis done outside of you and your teams provides an entirely new perspective and can demonstrate how others see the business.
A SWOT analysis can identify the various ways to improve as well as what you are executing correctly and can help expand and grow your business by displaying new opportunities and catch any potential threats so you are always prepared and know how to navigate through various situations.
If you perform a SWOT analysis on your own, you can visit a Business-to-Business Services agency or Consulting firm such as Avexa for a 360 degree review with confidence and understand what direction you would like to see your company head!