How to create a SWOT analysis and use it for strategic planning (with templates, examples and free builder)

The SWOT framework is here to help you understand your business better, compared to your competitive landscape.

It's not a magic formula, but you can consider it as a helpful tool.

For what?

It lays down in a single matrix the key elements you need to consider when shaping your marketing or product strategy. It's a useful thing to keep in mind when you're working on strategic topics, as it helps put ideas and opportunities in perspective. Specifically, it gives you the context you need to consider, what you should double down on, and what you should avoid.

It can help in decision making and guide you on where you should focus on to plan your next steps.

It's not magic, but it's a simple and effective process you need to do every once in a while.

Note: we've created a way to create your SWOT online for free, it's here with a few templates you can download for free today!

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Helpful note: Without downloading anything, you can also use our free online builder to create your SWOT here.

What's a SWOT?

It stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. SWOT.

It's pretty simple:

You start by listing what your business does well. These are your strengths.

Next, you look at areas where you can improve. These are your weaknesses.

Then, you identify chances to grow or expand. These are opportunities.

Finally, you consider things that could harm your business. These are threats.

Nothing more than this - but you should consider these 4 questions as key questions that you should ask yourself often, so you can inform your future strategic decisions.  It was invented in the 1960s by business consultants to help companies understand their strategic positions in any competitive landscape. Productivity started to raise at that time, thanks to technology, and many businesses were under the impression they would crash.

It reminds me of the AI trends right now -- and AI can definitely be both a threat and an opportunities for most businesses nowadays!

Well, let's back to the SWOT: it sounds easy, right?

By doing this every once in a while, you can quickly identify key factors that affect your business, and focus on the most  important issues. By getting your strengths, you can focus on them to leverage and power up your marketing. By honestly listing weaknesses, you can measure and address them later.

You can't fix something you haven't identified, right?

Opportunities can guide you toward growth areas, while threats alert you to potential problems, usually external factors you should consider.

However, there are downsides. It's sometimes too simple, of course, as it might not capture all the details of your situation. It's like this on purpose, but you should keep in mind that this is a simplification process.

Also, it doesn't give you solutions right away. That would be wonderful, but it's not the case: it's a starting point for decision-making.

Last thing: it works if you're honest, of course. Don't avoid listing weaknesses, and don't overestimate your strengths -- otherwise, this framework is not useful. There's a way to avoid this: involve your team to get different perspectives.

How you create your own SWOT Matrix and use it?

Let's break down the process, as we can also provide templates in Figma, Notion and Google Spreadsheets for you to use.

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Start by drawing a grid with four boxes.

Name each box : Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats.

Some notes:

• Focus on what's relevant. It would be the things that can have a significant impact on your business.
• Strengths and Weaknesses are internal factors you can control, while Opportunities and Threats are external factors you need to respond to.

Let's begin with strengths : list what your business does well. Think about skills, value proposition, engagement with your audience, agility, financial power, etc. Any advantage you have in your market!

Then, weaknesses: : all areas where you consider you should improve within your competitive landscape, or things that are slowing you down in your mission. Limited resources, lacking skills, etc.

Let's continue on opportunities. Basically, these are external factors that could be useful for you. Think about market trends, customer needs, or new technologies you could leverage.

And now, identify threats. Again, these are external challenges that could harm your business, like competition, regulatory changes, interest rates, etc. For me, when I'm doing this, I'm usually listing the things that are keeping me up at night.

First of all, once you've done this: congratulations! Make sure you're honest with yourself -- and that's a huge step. Being able to identify and list items in these 4 areas by itself can make you aware of things you didn't know before.

Now comes the analysis.

The main two things you should do are:

• See how you can use your strengths to take advantage of opportunities.
• Think about how to fix weaknesses, and protect yourself from these threats.

The main purpose here is to connect strengths to:

• Opportunities: how can you leverage your strengths to focus, leverage your position and take advantage of the opportunities you have identified?
• Threats: how can you use your strengths to avoid these external threats to harm your company?

Then, you should connect weaknesses to:

• Opportunities: which are the main weaknesses you need to fix in order to make sure you can seize the biggest opportunities?
• Threats: which are the weaknesses that put you at risk, in the light of the threats that you have identified?

List these connections on the side as well, this is where things are starting to get interesting.

Each connection you've made can be turned into an action plan. For each one of these connections, you should be able to setup a goal and assign a timeline, to make sure you can strategically address them, both getting to the right opportunities and avoiding the threats.

Best practices when using a SWOT

I've done this hundreds of times - here are some recommendations:

• Involve your team: the more ideas, the better. It also helps you get a more honest overview.
• On top of involving your team, think about gathering several perspectives: for example, you could ask your sales and your tech team. They won't see the same Strenghts/Weaknesses/Opportunities or Threats... but this will help you identify common patterns and find the most significant ones.
• Focus on the most important items. We're looking at things that can drastically change your company.
• Strategic thinking is the goal here: the SWOT is a mean to get the right context, so you can work on the most important directions for your company.
• Your strategies should be actionable: if you can't set a goal, then forget about it. Make sure you can measure success, in a way or another. What's not measured doesn't exist :)

By doing this, you can turn your SWOT analysis as a real starting point to work on your growth.

There are also cool ways to use SWOT to find more ideas to help your company and succeed:

• Revere the analysis. Consider how your strengths could become weaknesses, and vice versa. These are hidden risks you could consider.
• Apply the SWOT to your competitors. Analyse their own strengths and weaknesses: this way, you'll find gaps in your market. Gaps you can fill, that can be opportunities. For example, if a competitor has a lame customer service, you know you can turn this into an opportunity.
• Same thing, when applying SWOT to your competitors: consider what would be their perfect or their major threats, given their strengths and weaknesses. This can help you prioritise opportunities: if a competitor is uniquely positioned to do something better than you, you should keep this in mind.
• Again, when applying this to your competitors: you can turn this into a competitive landscape matrix, so you can rank and classify your competitors. What makes you unique, which ones have the same strengths, weaknesses, etc.
• You can use SWOT for specific projects, not just your business! Before launching a new product, changing your pricing, etc. It's a cool way to mitigate risks and potentially find new ideas as well.

It might be hard to find these data for your competitors. That's what we're doing at Panoramata: automated competitive analysis for you!

SWOT Matrix alternatives

There are several tools and frameworks you could use, on top of the SWOT matrix.

Let me insist at "on top": these are super helpful tools as well, but you still want to do the SWOT process, as it doesn't have to take you hours, and it's an unique tool to help decision making.

One option is the PEST analysis, which stands for Political, Economic, Social, and Technological factors. This framework focuses on external factors. This is mainly for big and large companies, or operating in a regulated market.

I like to use also Porter's Five Forces.

It's much more market driven:

• Threats of new entrants: do you have a moat? Is your business protected enough in some way, or could someone do exactly the same thing tomorrow?
• Your market power: are you unique enough to setup your own pricing? Or do customers compare your offers vs. competitors all the time, and you need to take this into account?

SWOT Examples & Insights

Let's get a bit more practical: I'll give you more insights and examples, based on your industry.

SWOT for E-commerce

Here are some things you should think about, from real examples:

• Strength: Strong suppliers relationships
• Weakness: Slow delivery due to logistics
• Weakness: Limited customer service because (lack of resources)
• Opportunity: Trending CBD market
• Opportunity: Organic market is growing
• Threat: Inflation
• Threat: New entrants in the market every week

Main insight here: by having strong suppliers relationships, you can differentiate yourself more easily in the market by launching new products at better conditions, and mitigate the threat of the new entrants. Focus was put on the supplier relationships, and get recommendations from them to find a new logistic supplier (which we did).

SWOT for Saas

Again:

• Strength: Unique feature
• Strength: Unique founder skills and market knowledge
• Weakness: Small customer base -> small vitality in the product
• Opportunity: Rising demand (in the lead gen market)
• Threat: AI potentially disrupting the market

Main insights: we ended up identifying 3 new use cases we could develop with AI, instead of fearing it.

SWOT for B2B Services

Same thing here:

• Strength: Strong client relationships
• Strength: Niche expertise
• Weakness: 2 clients represented 60% of the business
• Weakness: Clients were looking for more services we could offer, just beyond the addressed niche
• Opportunity: Expanding beyond the niche
• Opportunity: Growing demand in nearby markets
• Threat: Recession
• Threat: Clients handling services in-house

Main insight was, obviously, expanding our offerings :)

I hope these examples were useful!

Mistakes you should avoid

Here are some pitfalls and mistakes you should avoid when performing a SWOT analysis:

• Don't be vague. Be super specific with examples.
• Be honest, again!
• Don't overlook external factors, market trends or competitor actions.
• Don't do this alone, and then present the results to your team. Get them involved.
• Consider it done and never revisit it -- make sure to update it, maybe each quarter or whenever there's an important change in your business.

How can you create action plans from your SWOT?

We've seen earlier in this post that, of course, the goal of the SWOT is to turn these insights into action plans to you can grow your business, while mitigating risks.

How do you do this?

The simplest process is:

• Match your strengths to your opportunities. Ask yourself: How can you use what you're doing well to seize these opportunities? You have strong customer service? Raise prices and offer tailored services. Think about gaps in the market you can fill. Your SWOT analysis shows you where these gaps are.
• Minimise weaknesses to avoid threats as much as possible. AI might disrupt your market? Make sure you can learn more about the technology, and find ways to make it work for you.
• While doing this, you should absolutely prioritise the most important factors and the biggest impact.
• Set goals. Measure them. For example, "upgrade 10% of our clients to the tailored services offer"
• Set a timeline: it should have a start date and an end date.
• Allocate resources and responsibilities if you have a team. Set time aside.

For example, for each action plan:

• Set clear goals: decide what you want to achieve. Your goals should be specific and measurable.
• Develop action steps: this is the how, you should outline the steps needed to reach your goals.
  • Improve your website's user experience.
  • Launch targeted marketing campaigns.
  • Offer promotions to new customers, etc.
• Assign resources:
  • Budget for marketing,
  • Team members to manage campaigns,
  • 2 hours per week, etc.
• Measure effectiveness: you need to measure results.
  • Track key metrics: identify what indicators show progress.
    • Number of online sales,
    • Website traffic,
    • Conversion rates, etc.
  • Compare to goals: make sure you're meeting your targets.
  • Adjust as Needed: of course, if you're not on track, modify your strategies.
• Measure against SWOT: make sure you reference your analysis
  • Strengths and Weaknesses: are you leveraging your strengths? Have you reduced weaknesses? Have you fixed the weaknesses you've identified before, that might prevent you to grow?
  • Opportunities and Threats: are you on track to take these new opportunities? Are there new threats?
• Be creative: explore unconventional strategies, based on the strengths you've identified,
• Be ready to adapt: if there's something that affects your analysis, don't be afraid to redo it.
• Benchmark against competitors: compare your progress vs. your competitors in the markeT.

SWOT Templates Online, on Figma, Notion and Spreadsheet/Excel

You can download our template here:

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At the same time, we developed a tool so you can create your SWOT online:

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Hope this helps!

At Panoramata, we're here to help you track your competitors automatically. We won't automatically create your SWOT, but you can focus on your own business, and we'll monitor the competition for you!