Do you plan on starting a new business venture? Or maybe you plan on introducing a novel business strategy? If yes, your business will find it quite helpful to conduct a SWOT analysis. With a thorough analysis of your Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats, you can get a deeper insight into the external/internal factors that can help your business reach its goals. Though a SWOT analysis is quite useful and easy to perform, there are a few things that you should keep in mind while performing a SWOT analysis.
Tag Archives: SWOT analysis
Why Your Business Requires A SWOT Analysis
Posted on August 23, 2014Conducting a SWOT analysis is a great way to think about your business in a whole new way. S.W.O.T is the acronym for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. By taking into consideration the strengths and weaknesses of your business, as well as the threats and opportunities that your company faces in the market is a great way to come up with a strong business strategy.
What is a SWOT analysis?
A SWOT analysis is an ideal framework by which you can quickly identify and analyze the external and internal factors that can have an impact on the future viability of a place, product, person or project.
What does SWOT measure?
Your company’s strengths and weaknesses are internal (For example: patents, location or reputation). You have the power to change these over a period of time, by carrying out some work. On the other hand, opportunities and threats are external (For example: prices, competitors or suppliers). These are out there in the marketplace, happening whether your company likes it or not. You do not have the power to change them.
What are the four elements that a SWOT analysis examines?
- Strengths: Resources and internal attributes that support a successful outcome for your business
- Weaknesses: Resources and internal attributes that work against a successful business outcome
- Opportunities: External factors that your project or company can use to its advantage
- Threats: External factors that could jeopardize your company or project
How to Identify, Find & Evaluate Your Target Market?
Posted on July 19, 2014As a business, trying to satisfy a wide array of different needs at the same time is not an effective strategy. However, by splitting up your customers into different group of similar people can help your business to effectively market your services/products specifically to the customers who will be most profitable to your company.
But how do you identity, find and then evaluate your target market? Here is how you do it…..
Identify your target market
How do you go about identifying your target market? You look for groups with similar characteristics and then identify the different segments among your existing customers. You can segment your consumers by income, age or gender. The location is also a key factor and can help you decide if you are targeting local consumers or international customers. Through segmentation, you can clearly understand what aspects of your business offers appeal to each of the consumer groups and accordingly adapt your product/service to exactly match their requirements.
This may mean modifying your product or making changes to your service, reliability, delivery or any other specific need that is important to a particular market segment. At times, you may also need to adjust the way you market your business offers (Changing your pricing policy or using distribution channels that reach your target audience more effectively). While reaching out to different customer segments, remember to also adapt your promotional media messages accordingly.
Find and evaluate potential customers
When it comes to identifying the right groups of customers that your business should be targeting, knowledge is everything. This is where Market Research can help you. With market research, you can understand the needs, spending habits and tastes of different groups of prospective consumers. This will reveal which customer segments are most likely to buy your products/services and the exact kind of marketing and sales actions that they will respond to.
A SWOT analysis can also help your business evaluate your weaknesses and strengths as a business and identify the threats and opportunities that are looming in your targeted market. This will give you a clear picture if your business is in a position to carry out a strong marketing and sales campaign with your targeted customers. A SWOT analysis can also show you how you measure up against your competitors. Continue reading
