SWOT Analysis and TOWS analysis is a valuable step in the analysis of your situation. Assess your company's strengths, weaknesses, market opportunities, and threats through a SWOT analysis and TOWS analysis is a very simple process that can offer powerful insights into the potential issues and critically affect a business. The SWOT analysis and TOWS analysis begins by conducting an inventory of internal strengths and weaknesses in your organization. You will then see the external opportunities and threats that could affect the organization, based on your market and the overall environment. Do not worry about elaborating on this topic at this stage; bullet points may be the best way to get started. Capture you believe are relevant factors in each of four regions. You will want to review what has been noted here as you work through your marketing plan. The main purpose of the SWOT analysis is to identify and assign each significant factor, positive and negative, with one of four categories, so you can view your business objectively. SWOT or TOWS analysis will be a useful tool in developing and confirming your marketing objectives and strategies.
Some experts suggest that you consider more elaborate external opportunities and threats before the strengths and weaknesses. Marketing Plan Pro will allow you to complete your SWOT analysis and TOWS Analysis in whatever order works best for you. In either situation, you will want to review these four areas in detail.
Strength
Illustrates the power of positive attributes, tangible and intangible, internal to your organization. They are in your control. What do you do well? What resources do you have? What are the advantages you have over your competitors?
You may want to evaluate your strengths on a regional basis, such as marketing, finance, manufacturing, and organizational structure. Strengths including the positive attributes of the people involved in the business, including their knowledge, background, education, letters, contacts, reputation, or skills that they bring. Strength also includes intangible assets such as available capital, equipment, credit, customer established, existing distribution channels, copyrighted materials, patents, and information processing systems, and other valuable resource in business.
Strength capture the positive aspects internal to your business that adds value or offer you a competitive advantage. This is your chance to remind yourself of the existing value in your business.
Weakness
Note weaknesses in your business. Weakness is a factor within your control that reduce your ability to obtain or maintain competitive advantage. Areas you might improve?
Weaknesses might include lack of expertise, limited resources, lack of access to skills or technology, inferior service, or poor location of your business. These are factors that are under your control, but for various reasons, which need improvement to effectively accomplish your marketing goals.
Weaknesses capture the negative aspects internal to your business which reduces the value you offer, or a place you at a competitive loss. This is the area that you need to improve in order to compete with the best of your competitors. The more accurately you identify your weaknesses, the more valuable the SWOT or TOWS will be for your assessment.
Opportunities
Assess opportunities interesting external factor is the reason for your business there and prosper. It is external to your business. Are there opportunities in your market, or in the environment, than you expect to benefit?
These opportunities reflect the potential you can realize through implementing your marketing strategy. Opportunities may be the result of market growth, lifestyle changes, the settlement of problems associated with the current situation, positive market perceptions about your business, or the ability to offer greater value that will create demand for your services. If the relevant time period where, in the vicinity of opportunity. Is this an ongoing opportunity, or whether the window of opportunity? How critical is your time?
Opportunities outside of your business. If you have identified "opportunities" that internal to the organization and within your control, you will want to classify them as strengths.
Threat
What factors are potential threats to your business? Threats include factors beyond your control that can put your marketing strategy, or the business itself, at risk. It also external - you have no control over them, but you can get the benefits of having an emergency plan to deal with them if they should occur.
The threat is the challenge created by an unfavorable trend or development that can lead to worsening of income or profit. Competition - existing or potentially - always a threat. Other threats may include intolerable price increases by suppliers, government regulation, economic downturns, destroy or scope of press and media, consumer behavior change to reduce your sales, or the introduction of a "leap-frog" technologies that can make your product, equipment or services obsolete . What situations might threaten your marketing efforts? Get your worst fears on the table. Part of this list may be speculative, and still add value to your SWOT analysis.
This may be valuable to classify your threats according to "their seriousness" and "probability of occurrence."
The better you to identify potential threats, the more likely you can position themselves to proactively plan and respond to them. You will look back on these threats when you consider your contingency plans.
Implication
Internal strengths and weaknesses, compared with external opportunities and threats, can provide additional insight into the condition and potential business. How can you use power to take better advantage of opportunities ahead and minimize the threat of danger that may be introduced if they become reality? How can weaknesses be minimized or eliminated? The actual value of the SWOT analysis in bringing this information together, to assess the most promising opportunities, and issues most important.
An example
AMT is a computer store in the middle market in the United States. Lately, business has steadily declined through, mainly due to increasing competition from larger stores office products with national brand names. Here is a SWOT analysis is included in marketing plans.
Strength
- Knowledge. Our competitors are retailers, pushing boxes. We know systems, networks, connectivity, programming, all the Value Added Reseller (vars), and data management.
- Relationship selling. We know our customers, one by one. Our direct sales force maintains close contact.
- History. We've been in town forever. We have the loyalty of customers and vendors. We are a local.
Weakness
- Cost. Chain stores have better economics. their per-unit sales costs low enough. They do not offer what we offer in terms of selling knowledge, but the cost per square foot and per dollar of sales is much lower.
- Price and volume. Major stores pushing boxes can sell less. component of their costs are less and they benefit from volume buying with the main vendors.
- Brand power. Take one look at them full-page ads, in color, in the Sunday paper. We can not match that. We do not have national name that flows into national advertising.
Opportunities
- Local area network. LAN become commonplace in small business, and even in my home office. Business today assume LANs are part of normal office work. This is an opportunity for us because LANs are much more knowledge and service intensive than the standard PC off-the-shelf.
- Internet. The increasing opportunities of the Internet offer us another field strength compared to the box-on-the-shelf major chain stores. Our customers want to help more with the Internet and we are in a better position to give it to them.
- Training. Large stores do not provide training, but as systems become more complicated with LAN and Internet usage, training more in demand. This is particularly true of our main target market.
- Service. As our target market needs more service, our competitors are less likely than ever to provide it. their business model does not include service, just selling boxes.
Threat
- Computer as a tool. Volume of purchases and sales of computers as products in boxes, should not need support, training, connectivity services, etc. As people think of computers in these terms, they think they need our service orientation less.
- Greater price-oriented stores. When they lower the price of a big ad in the newspaper, our customers think we do not give good value.
Utilizing the SWOT analysis or TOWS analysis can bring insights into time well invested.
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