SWOT Analysis – What is a SWOT analysis?
As its name indicates, it is the analysis of a company’s weaknesses, threats, strengths and opportunities. This study will serve to have a most realistic current vision of a specific company, project or sector. It is also commonly known by its acronym in English as SWOT analysis.
Once this information is obtained, we have all the cards on the table to be able to make the best decisions and measures in the medium and long term.
Parts of a SWOT analysis
Although it is true that this analysis gives us precise information about all areas of a company, we have to understand this analysis as an accumulation of references about two very different parts.
Internal analisis
Here a study is made of the current situation of the company without taking into account factors from outside it. It is about knowing and understanding the strengths and weaknesses of a company or the element analyzed.
External analysis
In this process, external factors are studied. Those that are more directly related to the market or sector. Therefore, we must focus on the existing opportunities and threats.
Types of SWOT analysis
As we said at the beginning, this matrix is still oriented to the study of a company or an entrepreneurial project. We can see that over time they have been used for very diverse objectives and therefore different typologies of SWOT have been created.
Currently you can see different types of SWOT:
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SWOT analysis for a company: the most traditional.
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SWOT analysis for personal brand: aimed at exploiting everything that we do not reflect to the world.
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SWOT analysis for digital marketing: it involves studying all these issues but placing more emphasis on the factors of the digital world.
The latter is one of the most used today, since with the arrival of the digital world and 2.0, many companies must orient that traditional SWOT to the new era where competition is global and actions have a greater impact.
SWOT Analysis Examples for Digital Marketing
According to what has already been mentioned above, it is important to understand, not only what a SWOT matrix is, but also how it is made and how it could be oriented to different sectors.
In this case, we will talk about how to do a SWOT analysis focused on a newsletter campaign.
As each company has a particular situation and the objectives of an email marketing action are completely different, it is interesting to have a prior study of the current situation.
To carry out this analysis we will begin by drawing the four quadrants with each of the elements of the internal and external analysis.
The first thing would be to analyze our company or our project. That is, we start with the internal analysis.
Here we have already seen the two key elements: Weaknesses and strengths.
As an example of the strengths of a company that is dedicated to web design and development, we can say that a strength would be its after-sales customer service or the delivery times of projects entrusted to them.
An example of a weakness could be poor positioning in search engine SERPs or a deficiency in time management.
The idea would be to write down in each of the corresponding quadrants everything that reflects a weakness or strength, being as realistic as possible.
After finishing the internal analysis, we will move on to the external part of the company. Filling in, to do so, everything related to opportunities and threats
An example of opportunities could be a relationship or collaboration with an editor that will allow not only the development of the website, but also the content part.
And as for threats, it could be the wide range of products and services that the competition offers compared to our company.
After having all these fields filled in, we will be able to see where we are powerful and how we could stand out more from the competition.
To do this, we must enhance those strengths and solve those weaknesses through various actions to be able to reduce those threats and take advantage of the opportunities in an optimal way.
Example of a solution to the example of weaknesses (time management) could be optimized and solved with the automation of many processes with email marketing
For all these reasons, the SWOT analysis is a multifunctional element that can not only help companies that already have a journey and a life cycle started, but can also help numerous newly created companies to have a starting point or an initial market study based on available resources and the level of current competition.