How the SWOT Analysis can help you analyse your company’s strategy?
We live in a world that is changing very fast and very much. Your business strategies from last year may still be good for this year, but how can you tell? Firstly, you can always analyse your company’s strategies whether it is the beginning, middle or end of the new year. However, the beginning of the new year is a cyclical step where we tend to re-evaluate ourselves and our performance, and since companies are made of people, we have transferred this tradition to our corporate structures. Although it was developed in the 1960s, SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) analysis is still one of the best ways to analyse a company. The business analysis consists of examining the four axes of strategy at two levels: internal and external.
Strengths:
In other words, these are the good qualities of your company or brand. Maybe you don’t have too much competition in the market (external) or you have a great team (internal) or low brand costs (internal) with high benefits (external). It is very important that you know your strengths in order to use them and grow them. Knowing your strengths will help you also identify opportunities that are a good fit for your business.
Weaknesses:
To measure weaknesses, you need to define an optimal level of functioning of your business and then identify internal and external factors that prevent your business from reaching that level. Again, we are talking about internal and external factors. Internal weaknesses can be high staff turnover or poor communication between your teams, while external weaknesses can be a poor brand image or a more competitive market.
Opportunities:
Do you remember the weaknesses? Well, sometimes they turn out to be opportunities. For example, if your business isn’t on social media platforms, this presents an opportunity to penetrate a niche and attract new potential customers. Perhaps your competitors have left gaps that you can exploit. Or there are new legal regulations that can be to your company’s advantage !Opportunities can also be internal, e.g. new financial or human resources.
Threats:
are events that can happen mainly because of your weaknesses or because of changes that you cannot control. These can also be internal or external. The way to reduce your threats is to heal the weaknesses of your organisation. By doing this, you have already built a barrier against a large number of threats.
The SWOT structure/analysis is designed to help you understand and analyse your business. It can be adapted to any business as every business has its own peculiarities.
Vapanana the Marketing Academy and Agency.
