Performing a SWOT analysis is crucial for any business. In this episode of Above the Noise, our VP of Marketing Josh Stike walks you through the steps of this essential tool, which can help you develop a plan to set you apart from the competition.

Video Transcription

SWOT is simply an acronym that stands for strengths, weaknessesopportunities, and threats. As you’re going through this exercise draw a 2×2 grid out on a sheet of paper, grab your nearest whiteboard.

Strengths

In the upper left hand corner is where you’re going to put your strengths. These are going to be things that you think you do particularly well. Don’t just limit yourself to business uses like you might be a great salesperson, but that’s kind of obvious for you. If you maybe you’re a great writer, or you speak multiple languages. Think of those things that could really help set you apart from the competition.

If you’re a great writer, you can be writing eBooks and white papers and blogs for your business that other people in your market might not be able to do, and then leverage that for lead generation.

Weaknesses

In the upper right hand corner are going to be your weaknesses. The key here is to be brutally honest with yourself. Nobody else is going to see this sheet of paper. Don’t hide your weaknesses from yourself. You want to make sure that you’re recognizing things that you have the opportunity to improvevupon, or eliminate from your strategy completely.

Opportunities and Threats

On the bottom half of your grid will be your opportunities and threats. These are things that are external to your business. Things you don’t necessarily have any control over. An opportunity might be that there’s a new business starting up in your area and you’re going to have a lot of new people coming to your town. In your threats these are going to be things like changing marketing conditions, etc.

Make sure that you’re doing this part of the analysis more frequently even than you’re doing the strengths and weaknesses, because they tend to be more timely and they’re going to change with time. So you might even think as an example, a threat is social media, right? That’s an upcoming new technology, but one of your weaknesses is that you’re not necessarily tech savvy and one of your strengths is that you’re really great with people and relationships. Take this opportunity strategically to double down on those relationships, connecting with past clients in a personal way and leveraging those for referrals for your business.

Build an action plan.

The next step after you have your SWOT analysis done is to build an action plan. You can do this by combining all the different areas that you have laid out on your SWOT, or you can just really focus on your strengths. So let’s say that you’re a great public speaker. Your action plan for that is going to be to put together a presentation for first-time homebuyers. Then you want to schedule a seminar that people can attend. Then you’ll want to promote that locally in your area where young couples hang out or on social media, and finally you’ll want to collect all of the email addresses and names for people that attend the seminar so that you can follow up with them later as leads for your business.

Take action.

And then the last thing as always is to make sure you’re taking action on your plan. A plan without action isn’t a plan, it’s just a speech. So most importantly like always take action on that.

The takeaway.

If you liked this video, give us a thumbs up make sure you’re commenting in the comment section what are your strengths, what are some of your weaknesses. We want to kick back those ideas. We’re going to have a printable template in the description of this video that you can download, and work through yourself. Most importantly guys, take action on this today!