SWOT Analysis Template

About the SWOT Analysis template

The SWOT Analysis template helps you can map out the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of your business, project, or product launch. This strategic tool is perfect for exploring more aspects of your business and to better inform decisions when it comes to strategies, action plans, and your project's next steps.

Keep reading to know more about the SWOT Analysis template.

What is a SWOT analysis?

When developing a business strategy, it can be hard to figure out what to focus on. A SWOT analysis template helps you hone in on key factors. SWOT is an acronym for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. A SWOT analysis is a valuable strategic tool that can help you examine both internal and external factors.

Strengths and weaknesses are internal factors specific to your business. These may include talent or your employees, intellectual property, marketing strategy, or location, depending on what’s relevant. Opportunities and threats, by contrast, are external factors that cannot be controlled, like market fluctuations, competition, prices of raw materials, and consumer trends.

When to perform a SWOT analysis

Performing a SWOT Analysis is crucial to ensure that you and your team are aware of all the factors that may affect your business or organization. The conclusions of a SWOT help inform both higher-level strategy and business decisions. Your team can perform a SWOT Analysis in a variety of situations, such as when you want to explore a new business and product opportunities, decide on the best way to launch a product, determine what you can change in an existing business, release the potential of your business or use your strengths to develop opportunities.

 It is recommended that you perform a SWOT analysis regularly. This will differ according to your business needs but in general, a SWOT analysis should be done bi-annually or whenever a significant decision needs to be made. For example, before deciding to pursue a new product venture or business avenue, a SWOT will help you better understand the potential opportunities and challenges you’ll face based on your current positioning against competitors. 

What are the components of a SWOT Analysis?

The SWOT Analysis has four components that allow you to develop a well-considered business strategy. There are internal factors (strengths and weaknesses) and external factors (opportunities and threats) that will need to be analyzed as part of the SWOT Analysis. We’ll take a look at each of these components in more detail.

Strengths

The strengths of your business or organization are internal factors that you do well and that separates you from the competition. Strengths are within your control and enable you to create and sustain success. Your strengths may include your unique product offering, specific expertise, an innovative company culture, or popular brand image.

Weaknesses 

By contrast, the weaknesses of your business or organization will leave you more vulnerable to threats and perhaps prevent you from exploiting opportunities. Like strengths, weaknesses are also internal factors. These are within your control to an extent, so you can improve them with the right approach and resources.

Opportunities

Opportunities are external factors, which means they’re uncontrollable and unchangeable. They may present themselves through a beneficial change in regulations, the availability of new technologies to help you scale or reduce costs, competitors going out of business, or perhaps market trends that work to your advantage. Opportunities can allow your business or organization to become more profitable, and you should grasp them when they arise.

Threats

Threats are also external factors that are uncontrollable. These could include anything that can negatively impact your business. For example, macro-environmental factors such as changes in government policy, deregulation of markets, and the availability of new tech may be either an opportunity or a threat, depending on how it impacts you. It’s essential to forecast potential threats in order to have a contingency plan in place. If any of these threats materialize, you’ll then be able to mitigate the potential impact of these.

How to use a blank SWOT Analysis template 

The blank SWOT Analysis template will consist of four blocks of content, built in a simple two-by-two grid, each containing one key analysis area. To organize your work visually, you can color code the blocks, so you and your team can quickly identify them.

Suppose you want to deepen your SWOT template. In that case, you can also have additional blocks containing more details about the strategies you want to develop to tackle the weaknesses or keep your team’s strengths.

Create your own SWOT Analysis template

SWOT analysis is easy, using Miro’s simple template. When conducting a SWOT analysis, your team will look at ways to develop strengths (S), minimize weaknesses (W), discover opportunities (O), prevent threats (T), and track potential dangers.

Miro is the perfect canvas to create and share your SWOT analysis with your team. Get started by selecting this SWOT Analysis template. Then, follow these steps:

1. List your organization’s Strengths: what do users like best about your product or process? What do you do better than competitors? What unique advantages does your organization have?

2. Find your company’s Weaknesses: what problems or complaints do you hear most from customers? What do you see as your biggest current obstacles? What advantages do your competitors have that your company does not yet have?

3. Next, list Opportunities you can potentially pursue: how can you improve your customer service? What messaging resonates most with your users? Are there resources or tools you could further leverage to your advantage?

4. Threats can be wide-ranging: specific or emerging competitors, high staff turnover, or market volatility, for instance.

Pro-tip: color code sticky notes for each SWOT quadrant and use the voting feature to identify the top three strengths of your organization.

What are the benefits of using a SWOT Analysis?

There is a range of benefits to using a SWOT Analysis tool, both in its use as a tool and informing strategy. Some of these benefits include:

• Helps to better understand your business or organization - Performing a SWOT analysis requires you to assess your internal strengths and weaknesses. In doing so, you and your team must fully understand all aspects of the business or organization and by asking the right questions, you’ll become better informed.

• It is cost-effective - A SWOT analysis can be performed inexpensively by your team. It does not necessarily require external consultants.

• Deterrence of threats - By identifying potential threats, you will then be able to prepare for these various scenarios by developing risk mitigation strategies. This may be the difference between success and failure.

• Develop business goals and strategies - A thought-out SWOT Analysis will help you and your team to identify opportunities to pursue and weaknesses to address. Ultimately, you’ll be able to identify strategies that will move the needle and better ensure future success.

Despite the various benefits of a SWOT, there are a number of limitations. There is a risk of having too much information, which may mean that not everything is useful. You and your team will need to decide which present the best opportunities to inform your future strategy. 

You might identify problems, but the SWOT Analysis is not intended to solve these. To this end, you will need to determine what is most urgent to prioritize. Regardless, the SWOT Analysis remains a helpful tool and a good first step in developing any strategy.

What are some examples of SWOT analysis? 

Professionals across many industries can use the SWOT matrix template, and you can even use it for yourself. Some career coaches use the SWOT analysis to identify their client’s career strengths and weaknesses and clarify future steps and opportunities.

Marketers will use the SWOT analysis to evaluate campaigns, marketing channels, competitors’ ads, and market share. That way, they can quickly identify opportunities and most significant threats to their advertisement plan. Discover additional swot analysis templates to help you innovate faster.