A SWOT analysis for your marketing strategy
One of the first things you learn in business school is how to do a SWOT analysis. It’s a simple strategy for organizing a business’s position in the market in a single document. A SWOT analysis is a great tool to have at your disposal and helps to find ways to improve your business.
In this post, we’ll focus on doing a SWOT analysis for dental practice marketing.
What is a SWOT analysis?
SWOT is an acronym for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. Simply choose a topic, divide a sheet of paper into four sections and lay out your thoughts on how your dental practice is currently doing.
- Strengths: What are you doing well? In what ways does your practice achieve better than average results? What are the primary assets your practice could leverage for greater success?
- Weaknesses: Where does your practice underperform? What are the barriers preventing further success?
- Opportunities: What opportunities are available that your dental practice is not currently taking advantage of?
- Threats: What external influences could affect your dental practice? What potential organizational issues could be a future problem?
A focus on marketing
Whether you’ve owned your own dental practice for one year or 20, you understand the importance of attracting new patients. If you’re having trouble, a SWOT analysis can help you identify assets to lean on, weaknesses to fix, opportunities to pursue and threats to hedge.
Strengths
What makes your dental practice stand out from other dentists in your area? What technology or capability does your office possess that makes your care superior? What marketing channels are currently providing the best results?
Weaknesses
What complaints have you heard from your patients? What organizational inefficiencies may be affecting the patient experience? What marketing channels are currently coming up short? Where do you fall short compared to local competition?
Opportunities
What marketing channels are you underutilizing? Which growth opportunities have you yet to seek out? Which marketing channels do you feel would drive the greatest increase in new patients if better optimized?
Threats
What potential internal problems could you face that would negatively affect new patient growth? How would another dental practice in your area affect growth? What could your competition do that would slow patient growth or cause patient attrition?
A plan of action
Once you’ve painted an accurate picture of where you stand, it’s generally much easier to determine what you need to do next.
