What’s a SWOT – and how does it help me to build and grow my medical business?
SWOT is an acronym for Strengths Weaknesses Opportunities Threats – and is a basic business tool that can be applied to any business.
It looks at all elements of your business from top to bottom. From a marketing perspective it is used to help us formulate a relevant strategic marketing plan that’s based on you and the unique elements of your business.
A SWOT looks at the good, the bad and the ugly elements of a business.
A marketing SWOT takes into account each of your target markets and will include identifying elements that will affect your ability to market to them including:
- Experience
- Cash flow
- Brand power
- Unique elements of your medical business
- Marketing to date
- Staff
- Location
- Service mix
- Specialisation
- Access
- Competition
- Saturation
- Price
- Messaging
- Industry changes
- Legislation
- Resources – internal and external
A SWOT has the greatest opportunity of achieving results when it includes contribution from different elements of your internal business and impartial direction that drives the SWOT. It’s often hard to conduct an effective SWOT without an external facilitator as you and your staff are too close to the business.
SWOT’s are one of the most powerful business tools we can have. It makes us take time out from the day to day running of our business and look at it through the eyes of our customer as well as giving us the chance to identify previously untapped opportunities.
Take the time out to do a SWOT – it will be worthwhile.
How can CJU help? We work with all our clients as part of our strategy development to conduct a SWOT analysis of their business, call us today to find out more.
