By Caroline Forsey

As your business grows, you face more obstacles, challenges, opportunities, and projects in general. It’s a good and natural part of scaling an organization, but how do you determine your priorities? Which initiatives should you execute on first, and which challenges should you address right away?

Enter the SWOT analysis, a framework that can help you develop a roadmap for moving forward with your business, maximizing opportunities and minimizing roadblocks along the way.

While it may seems simple on the surface, a SWOT analysis allows you to make unbiased evaluations on:

• Your business or brand
• Market positioning
• A new project or initiative
• A specific campaign or channel

Practically anything that requires strategic planning, internal or external, can have the SWOT framework applied to it, helping you avoid unnecessary errors down the road from lack of insight.

Importance of SWOT Analysis

You’ve noticed by now that SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threads. The framework seems simple enough that you’d be tempted to forego doing using it at all, relying instead on your intuition to take these things into account.

But you shouldn’t. Doing a SWOT analysis is important because:

• It gives you the chance to worry and to dream. Adding the SWOT analysis as an important step in your strategic process, you’re giving yourself the space to dream, evaluate, and worry before taking action. Your insights in this regard then turn into assets as you create the roadmap for your project or initiative.
• It forces you to define your variables. Instead of diving head first into the planning and execution, you’re taking inventory of all your assets and roadblocks. These can help you create a more specific and effective roadmap.
• It allows you to think more critically and account for mitigating factors. As you identify weaknesses and threats, you’re better enabled to account for them in your roadmap, improving your chances for success.
• It helps you keep a written account. As your organization grows and changes, you’ll be able to strike things off your old SWOTs and add new things as the industry changes. It can be illuminating to look back to where you started as you look ahead at what’s to come.

Here, we’ll tackle how to best do a SWOT analysis, provide you with a SWOT analysis template, and conduct SWOT analyses on major brands Apple and Starbucks. When you’re done reading, you’ll have all the inspiration and tactical advice you need to tackle a SWOT analysis for yourself.

How Do You Write a Good SWOT Analysis?

There are several steps you’ll want to take when evaluating your business and conducting a strategic SWOT analysis.

1. Download HubSpot’s SWOT Analysis Template.

There’s no need to start from scratch for your analysis. Here, I’ve created a sample using a free, editable template — feel free to use the model yourself, or create your own as it suits your …read more

Source:: HubSpot Blog

Author: Aaron