What Is a SWOT Analysis?

A SWOT analysis involves looking at your business's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. Doing this can be helpful in various situations, such as when you want to get a better sense of your business or when you're considering making changes. All you need to do a SWOT analysis is a piece of paper and a pen, plus a 2X2 grid template to help organize your thoughts. They are things like industry changes and new technology. The last quadrant of your analysis is threats. These are things that could damage your business, like a recession or bad publicity A SWOT analysis done every few months or every half-year will give you information that can be useful in the short term. Brainstorming with others can help you notice things you might have missed and develop ideas that aren't fully formed. As you brainstorm, record your ideas in the correct quadrant. The strength quadrant of your analysis will include things your business is doing well. The weaknesses quadrant will include areas where your business or team needs improvement. Opportunities are things that you can't control, as they are external to your business. They are things like industry changes and new technology. The last quadrant of your analysis is threats. These are things that could damage your business, like a recession or bad publicity. A SWOT analysis is a common part of a strategy review or competitive analysis in marketing. It can help you understand where your marketing strategy is strong or weak, and how you can out-market your competitors. The threats section of your analysis should include potential issues or challenges you could face as a business. There are many tools you can use to sharpen your analysis and derive useful data-driven insights. Semrush's Trends tools can help uncover useful insights about the competition that can complement any SWOT Analysis. Tools that track web traffic trends can be helpful for understanding your ecommerce brand's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT). For example, if you see that your brand's direct traffic is on par with or even slightly higher than your competitors', this could be a strength. If you notice a large downswing in social media traffic across the market from May through August, this could present an opportunity or a threat. The "buy/reserve/confirmation.html" page on Ford's website received 53,000 unique page views between May and August. This number does not necessarily reflect the number of cars sold, but it can give a general sense of how effective Ford's sales funnel is. We can compare this number to our own to see where we are doing better or worse, and what opportunities or threats exist. The Market Summary section of the Overview report is a good place to start understanding your market and comparing changes over time. Chevrolet may find some significant changes that could help with their SWOT analysis. The Audience Insights report in Traffic Analytics allows you to discover data about different aspects of your audience, including their households, income, education levels, and employment statuses. By taking a closer look at the Parental Leave section, for example, you can see which car brands are preferred by this segment of the audience. Chevy and Hyundai are the least popular among this group, while Toyota and Kia are preferred. This information can help Chevy to realize that they are missing out on a major opportunity to corner this segment by not highlighting the safety and space features of their vehicles in their marketing.

(source: https://www.semrush.com/blog/swot-analysis-examples)