Marketing SWOT Analysis

The traditional marketing SWOT analysis as taught in marketing courses can be overly academic and not very practical for the small business owner.

This article will discuss a way to make your marketing SWOT analysis easier to develop and put into action.

The acronym SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. By understanding how to differentiate yourself from your competitors, you'll be in a position to make your products and services more desirable.

To start, let's look at the traditional MBA definition of a SWOT analysis. Here it is:

"A marketing SWOT analysis is a subjective assessment of data which is organized by the SWOT format into a logical order that helps understanding, presentation, discussion and decision-making."

Yuck! Who wants to embark on creating a marketing SWOT analysis after reading that?

For the small business owner, it is critical that a SWOT analysis be easy to develop, execute and monitor for effectiveness.

Developing Your Marketing SWOT Analysis

It's impossible to provide a SWOT template that will work for every business. However, all you need is a spreadsheet program like EXCEL to get started.

Take a look at the example sheet I've provided below. It's unlikely that every area I've listed applies to your business. Simply use the example to come up with your own headings and listings that align to your particular business and target market.

Marketing SWOT Analysis Sheet

Taking the time to perform a SWOT analysis like this is time well spent. Most people are so focused on running their business, they never take the time to truly understand their competition. Knowing a bit about your competition will allow you to define potential business opportunities.

Researching Your Competitors

To make your marketing SWOT analysis simple and efficient to research, I recommend the following.

Pick only your top three competitors
Be short and concise in your spreadsheet
Take the time to define which attributes are important to monitor and research for your target market
Use the SEO Toolbar to research your competitor's web stats

The last point requires a little more explanation. In order to easily compare your business website to that of a competitor, I recommend the SEO Toolbar.

Once installed, this free toolbar will allow you to monitor the stats of any website you visit. Click the above link for more information about this great research tool and how to install it.

Using Your Marketing SWOT Analysis

Once you have researched and filled out your SWOT analysis sheet, the next step is to write down and prioritize three areas of improvement.

Why just three? Because limiting your work to just three important areas will help ensure you follow through with the implementation. It's better to focus on a smaller number of critical improvements than to attempt to fix a dozen issues, leaving your focus and attention scattered.

Unless you happen to drive thousands of visitors a day to your website and are able to convert them to a sale, you'll most likely have some improvements to make to your business website.

Plan on picking one and maybe two of your improvements on improving your website with respect to your competitors. Perhaps you need to work on improving your META tags or building more quality inbound links.

Use the SEO Toolbar to monitor your web stats as well as those of your competitors. As you drive more quality links and add more compelling content, you'll be able to actually see your improvement month by month.

By the way, the SEO Toolbar can also let you see the keywords your competitors are using and how those keywords are ranking for them in the major search engines. This is a great way to assess your competitor's site and see which words they are targeting.

Assessing offline marketing is much more difficult as you actually need to obtain your competitor's brochures and catalogs. If you find it difficult to get on your competitor's mailing list, have your Uncle Joe sign up and pass you the materials when he receives them. And remember, just because your competitor is doing it, doesn't mean it's necessarily a good idea or that it's profitable.

Ultimately, you want to approach your analysis with the goals of your customer in mind. The primary objective is not to match everything your competitor is doing, but to really deeply understand the wants and needs of your customer - and to deliver on those wants in a manner more compelling than your competition.

Final Thoughts on Your SWOT Analysis

The traditional SWOT analysis tends to be a bit too analytical and impractical for the small business owner. By focusing on Strengths and Weaknesses, you'll naturally uncover Opportunities and Threats.

By concentrating on real-world marketing tactics, limiting your analysis to just three competitors and focusing on just three areas of improvement, a SWOT analysis can be an effective tool in improving your market position and further helping your customer's achieve their goals.

A final piece of advice. A marketing SWOT analysis is meant to improve your customer's experience with your company, not to ensure your 'stats' are better than those of your competitors.

Ultimately, the person to most benefit from your SWOT analysis must be your customer!