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Doing a SWOT Analysis for Your Marketing Plan

Restaurants ought to make bigger napkins, since some of the most productive business ideas seem to come to mind over a meal. The SWOT analysistechnique lends itself to napkin planning and snapshot insights. To conduct a SWOT analysis, draw a vertical line in the center of your napkin (or whiteboard or flipchart), intersected by a horizontal line.Now you have four quadrants where you'll sketch your company's situation.

|Strengths |Weaknesses |
|Opportunities |Threats |


Though agreat deal of research may lie behind what's in each box, keep it simple and incisive. Collecting these facts and ideas together in one place energizes you to see the big picture. Use it as abrainstorming tool. A strategy formation tool. Note that the first pair of categories -- strengths and weaknesses -- refer to your company's INTERNAL nature, while the second pair of categories refer toEXTERNAL opportunities and threats.

Strengths

In the first box list all the strengths your company possesses. Don't be modest. Spell them out. If you do this with others, you might begin bybrainstorming words that characterize your company and writing them down as fast as people say them. Then use those ideas to construct a profile of your company's strengths.

Weaknesses

In the second boxlist weaknesses, areas your business lacks or doesn't have the personnel to cover well. Be honest. It's better to face the bad news now rather than construct an unrealistic marketing plan that isdoomed to failure.

Opportunities

The third box is for opportunities. When you look at the market (and we're looking particularly at the Internet market in this series), what do you see? What AREN'Tyour competitors doing that customers need? Look for gaps. Of course, this is related to a competitive analysis; none of these elements of a marketing plan stand alone; they're all interrelated....