Look for a Business Marketing Professional to Help with your SWOT Analysis

Hire a business marketing professional to help perform a SWOT analysis on your business. This analysis can help your business move forward. Whilst your current business team can do it, hiring a business marketing professional to help conduct your SWOT analysis is beneficial. An impartial party reviewing your business to determine your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT) can provide a clear, unbiased view of your current performance as well as future prospects. Self-Study Bring in your supervisors, directors or other top people to get a vision of the big picture first. Get their perspective as well as those of key customers and even major vendors. Brainstorm key issues that your business and the marketplace face. Encourage everyone to make comments and suggestions without worrying about any judgment. Observations may include strengths and potential growth opportunities as well as weaknesses and failures. Evaluate all the significant issues that crop up during the brainstorming session and outline potential action plans to address them. Your hired business marketing professional is in the best position to help with the plan of action as they will best know the marketplace and know how to capitalise on strengths and opportunities and minimise weaknesses and failures. Strengths and Weaknesses Strengths are often the easiest to identify and may include a strong financial position, excellent personnel and management, a solid marketing plan and cost-effective production. Weaknesses are often the considered the elephant in the room. You know you have them but don’t want to acknowledge them. However, with the right SWOT analysis, you can tackle those weaknesses and turn them into strengths and opportunities. Weaknesses may appear as insufficient liquid cash to use for expansion of a new product line or poor management and personnel. The products may be outdated or customer service and after-sales service may be ineffective. Poor production schedules and outdated equipment could be contributing factors. Opportunities and Threats Threats are often easy to spot and must be prepared for. It could be in the form of a key employee that leaves for the competition – with full knowledge of your business practices. Price increases from vendors, rate hikes in rent, legislative changes, market recessions and more contribute to potential threats too. Identified opportunities can mean a boost of business for you. Perhaps it is the failure of a competitor’s product line or the addition of a new sales distribution outlet. A new customer base and innovative technologies that lower production costs are additional opportunities. Every business – large and small – should perform a SWOT analysis on occasion to maintain their competitive edge. Once the analysis is performed, a clear plan of action can be put into play. With the help of a business marketing professional who is knowledgeable about the marketplace, your business can take advantage of those opportunities and minimize its weaknesses to avoid failure.