How to Build a SWOT Analysis that Works for You

To develop a strategic marketing approach, it helps to know where your strengths and weaknesses lie and how your opportunities compare to the threats you’ll face. This is the purpose of the SWOT analysis… it allows you to assess your internal and external factors so you can refine and improve your marketing of the managed services you offer.

Let’s explore what goes into a SWOT analysis and how to use it to your advantage, beginning with a breakdown of its most basic parts.

What Goes into a SWOT Analysis?

The four components of a SWOT analysis are as follows:

• Strengths - what internal factors give your business an advantage?
• Weaknesses - what internal factors put your business at a disadvantage?
• Opportunities - what external factors could give your business an advantage?
• Threats - what external factors could put your business at a disadvantage?

By identifying these factors, you can shift your operations more accurately to balance them out—or even make changes to resolve them—to make your business more marketable. After all, the more positives and fewer negatives your business presents, the more reliable it will appear to prospects and clients.

Let’s dive into the four components of a SWOT analysis individually to give you a better idea of what each looks like.

Strengths

In short, what is or would be beneficial to include in your greater marketing strategy that you have control of in your business? What do you do best that can be highlighted in your marketing? What wins can you brag about?

These strengths should be quantifiable, giving you facts and figures to lean on as you identify routes that would encourage your success. Maybe you have a 28% higher retention rate after running a webinar if you send a postcard before the event than otherwise. Perhaps your team members hold credentials that are hard to find amongst your competition, with an average of 4 per employee compared to a competitor’s 2.

These strengths can easily be translated into your marketing. You just need to identify what will be most impactful to the audience you’re communicating with.

Weaknesses

Of course, it is also essential to identify where your business may be lacking in some way so you are prepared to avoid its impacts. What can you improve via a bit of attention, and what might you want to invest less in at a given time?

There are numerous reasons that your business may underperform in different ways, in terms of its efficiency, its productivity, or its competitiveness… just to name a few. 

This is valuable information to know because it shows you where improvements are needed, which helps you identify your next steps. Alternatively, it may reveal that a certain initiative is not what you want to invest in at the time, so it may be less important to focus on than some of your other efforts. As a result, you can save some of your marketing budget by not investing in your weaker points.

Opportunities

So far, we’ve talked about elements that occur within your business—things that you have some level of control over. However, that’s only half of what you need to be concerned with. Things will also happen outside of your business, some of which will improve your relative competitiveness if you can identify them.

For example, seeking out gaps in the market and a competitor’s offering can help you strategize a targeted approach to your own services and promote them to be as attractive as possible.

Of course, you may also have the opportunity to correct some of the weaknesses you’ve identified, improving your business in that way,

Threats

Of course, not everything will be primrose and daisies. Some things in your environment could ultimately harm your business and its operations. Remember the pandemic that shut down the world for a few years? That was a clear business threat, and there was only so much we could do to mitigate it.

That said, there are some steps to take that can help you identify threats on a smaller scale. Paying attention to industry changes and where your competitors are doing better can give you insights to help minimize the threats you face… ideally turning a threat into another opportunity.

How to Conduct a SWOT Analysis as Effectively as Possible

If you can collect the highest-quality data in all four aspects of your analysis, you’ll be a much better place to achieve success. Therefore, it pays to closely examine your internal data and processes and the external market and its varying trends to act as flexibly as possible.

This should tell you what opportunities you have to embrace and allow you to prioritize your varied insights into actionable and practical strategies.

A SWOT Analysis Can Help Bring Your Marketing to the Next Level

Knowledge is, as they say, power… and knowledge is precisely what a SWOT analysis offers. By identifying and acting on your business’ present strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, you have a simple means of identifying how to improve your MSP’s marketing practices.

We’re here to help. Reach out to us to learn more about our best practice-fueled MSP marketing services. Contact us at 888-546-4384.