Business SWOT Analysis

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Have you wondered if you were missing out on ways to improve your business performance? How do you measure the success, and weakness, of your business? If you want to stay competitive then it’s important that you are consistently looking for ways how to evaluate your business performance. We worked with some digital marketing experts to put together a guide for how to use a SWOT analysis to quickly evaluate your business performance.

While each business is unique, there are some fundamental concepts and strategies that you can compare to your current business activities. By evaluating your business performance consistently you can stay aware of your strengths and opportunities, and identify your weaknesses and threats in time to address them efficiently. Capitalizing on your strong areas and reducing your vulnerabilities will improve your overall business performance. Keep reading to learn more about expert strategies on how to evaluate your business performance.

Why Use a SWOT Analysis to Evaluate Your Business Performance?

SWOT Analysis for Business Performance
Outline of a SWOT Analysis

There is a multitude of ways to evaluate your business performance and you can get as granular as you’d like. But for this blog, we’re going to stay more macro and focus on an overall view of your business. To evaluate the condition of your business one of the most commonly used strategies is to perform a SWOT analysis. A SWOT analysis stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. By identifying these core indicators you can determine where your business needs to improve and where it’s performing well.

In each of these areas, you can choose to identify Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), that help you determine the overall performance of your business. These are something your business can monitor on a regular basis once they’ve been identified.

Business Performance Strengths

These are the areas where your business is currently performing well. Your business strengths are the characteristics that give you an advantage over your competitors.

What are some areas you should be focusing on? There are quite a few areas that are important no matter what kind of industry your business is in. We’ve identified a few general characteristics to evaluate the overall performance of your business.

Your Website

Even a store that only sells products in a brick-and-mortar store needs some sort of website to maintain an online presence. Your website is your public brochure that explains what your business is and why customers should choose you. A fast website that is easier to navigate than competitors is a definite strength. Optimizing your website is something that needs to be done yearly!

A KPI for your website performance could be New Users each month, Sessions, or Average Session Duration. Keeping track of these through Google Analytics helps monitor your website performance.

Your SEO

If you have keywords specific to your products or industry that are ranking well on Google this is a major strength for your business. By getting a high-ranking spot you are increasing the visibility of your business’s website which means more traffic, i.e. potential customers.

A KPI for your SEO would be the ranking of your main keywords and phrases. Taking the time to identify them for your business and implement them across your website content is critical.

Your Marketing Performance

Your marketing performance can be a key indicator of your business performance. Even the most well-known brands in the world spend millions of dollars on marketing every year. It’s something your business needs to invest in if it wants to find success. If your business has a strong marketing strategy or key marketing technology to support your marketing efforts it’s a major plus.

A good KPI for measuring the strength of your marketing is the number of forms submitted each month on your website, or the number of promos redeemed from a recent marketing campaign. Clicks on your email marketing is another good KPI to watch.

Weaknesses in Business Performance

Unfortunately, every business is going to have some weaknesses, but it’s better to be aware of them. This way you can address them ahead of time and keep them from overly affecting your business performance. Identifying the characteristics of your business that make it disadvantageous to competitors will help you improve your business.

Your weaknesses could be some of the strength characteristics we mentioned above, and if so, you might want to find some expert digital marketing help.

Weak or nonexistent Content

One of the factors that can really hurt modern business is a lack of meaningful content on your website. Blogging and other informative resources have become essential for a business. They are your opportunity to educate your target audience, share ideas, and connect with a larger audience. Lack of valuable content will hurt your business performance. Learn more about the 5 Reasons Why Blogging is a Profitable Marketing Strategy for Your Business.

A KPI to measure for the success of your content is the number of clicks on your articles each month.

Lack of Social Media Presence

Web Design Tips
Try posting tips or info specific to your industry on Socials

While social media can be complicated to master, it’s an important part of the business strategy that your business shouldn’t ignore. Each social media platform provides a unique opportunity to connect with a distinct audience. While you don’t need to have a presence on every single platform, identify the ones that your target audience is using and make sure you have a presence there.

If you aren’t active on social media, you’re weakening the potential performance of your business. All your business needs to do is meet the Social Media essentials. Display your accurate contact and business information so users can find your store or website, post relative content once a week, and engage with your users. Posting relevant content can be made a lot easier if you’re posting quality blog content. Recycle pieces of that content for your weekly posts. By posting weekly you show your business is real and responsive, and it creates valuable backlinks to your website.

An important KPI for your social media could be the number of followers or engagement on your posts.

Business Performance Opportunities

Opportunities are something that your business should get excited about and identify as soon as possible. Being the first business to take advantage of previously missed opportunities can pay off in dividends. Identify the areas that your competition is currently not taking advantage of or an area that your business can become more efficient.

Consolidate Your Marketing Efforts

It costs a lot to hire a Web Design and Marketing team to implement all of the improvements you collect from your SWOT analysis. It also can be expensive to implement the software and technology that will set your business apart from the competition, or even stay competitive. It may be more economical (and productive) to outsource your marketing and web development efforts to an experienced third-party partner. With their expertise and perfected strategy, you can start seeing immediate results from your marketing efforts. Read more to understand the Advantages and Disadvantages of In House Marketing Vs A Manufacturing Marketing Agency.

With an experienced agency handling your marketing efforts you can choose more general KPIs like monthly orders and website visitors. Your agency partner should provide in-depth reports about their efforts.

Using PPC and Social Media Ads

While many businesses already understand the value of using PPC and Social Media Ads, it doesn’t mean there still isn’t an opportunity there. If you setup a better campaign, or craft a more compelling message (with targeted keywords) your ads can outperform your competitors. You should also consider the latest options in PPC ads like emerging Ad Retargeting campaigns. Leveraging the best PPC ad campaigns can be a huge opportunity to improve your business performance.

Threats to Your Business Performance

When you own a business you understand there is always a variety of threats that could affect your business performance. Some of them you can’t control, like new competitors or shifts in public attitude. However, some of the threats that you identify you can address.

Losing Website Visitors to Bounce

One consistent threat to your website is the amount of competition. The google results are endless, and each one is vying for your target audience’s attention. At any point, your visitors can opt to leave your site, or ‘bounce’, and visit another competitor’s website. This is a constant threat to your business performance.

One of the ways to address this sort of threat is to understand your customer journey. If you can identify the areas on your website that is causing customers to bounce, you can fix them. Using heat mapping software like Crazyegg you can monitor behavior and review reports about your user journey. Installing it can take some time but if you hire an expert, they can do it in no time and even make the changes needed to fix your user journey threats.

Once you’ve received your first heat map reports you can use this as your benchmark for your User Journey KPI.

Failure to Meet ADA Compliance and Privacy Laws

You need to make sure that your business isn’t at risk from lack of ADA compliance or failure to comply with ever-changing Privacy Laws. These each change frequently and can be a constant threat to your business. It can not only cost your business potential customers, but it can result in hefty fines. Many ADA compliance fines range from $75,000 to $150,000, while some privacy violations are $5,000 per user! Luckily you can address both of these potential threats, Accessibe monitors your ADA compliance and Termageddon keeps your privacy policies up to date.

Using Accessibe and Termageddon to monitor your website can provide feedback for your compliance KPIs.

What to do Once You Evaluate Your Business Performance?

Once you’ve completed your SWOT analysis of your business you can start exploring options to address what you’ve found. You could choose to focus on making your strengths even stronger to differentiate yourself further from competitors. Or you can check the available quick solutions to address weaknesses or threats to your business. Either way, you’ve taken the first step to improve your business by performing an in-depth SWOT analysis.

If you want to truly transform your business and see serious improvement to your business performance, it’s time to reach out to the experts in digital marketing and web design. By contacting an agency that specializes in both they can identify the issues with your marketing and website, and implement the changes for both. They’ll create a digital strategy so your marketing and website work hand in hand to improve business performance. An improved website moves more customers into your marketing funnel, allowing you to increase conversions.

Contact Idea Marketing Group, Experts in Digital Marketing and Web Design

Idea Marketing Group is comprised of top Chicago web designers and marketers and has helped hundreds of businesses succeed online since 2009. We understand the tools and solutions that will generate maximum results for your business. Our team works closely with clients to understand their business and design a strategy to optimize results.

By choosing an expert team you can quickly and correctly implement marketing strategies that will have a major impact on your business efforts. Past clients have seen direct results in as little as a few weeks. Choosing a marketing agency partner like Idea is the best choice to make a serious improvement in your marketing strategy. Check out our portfolio of past marketing and web design projects.

Idea Marketing Group Logo, experts in evaluating business performance through a SWOT Analysis

Idea Marketing Group is a marketing agency known for web design and development. Since 2009, they have built hundreds of websites and managed marketing campaigns reaching millions of people for top brands and businesses throughout the nation. Services include branding, strategy, UI/UX design, content marketing, search engine optimization, website support, and digital advertising. Everything a website needs to dominate in search rankings. They are consistently rated as a top web design agency by Clutch.co.