You can probably generate many probing questions to identify specific marketing deficiencies, issues, problems, shortcomings, vulnerabilities or whatever synonym you choose for the word weaknesses.

Most service professionals are fair adept at using probing questions to discover the root cause of their clients’ situation.

This same skill-set can be repurposed to play an important role in identifying weaknesses in your marketing.

Gaps In Resources

Having identified what’s not working, from a planning perspective the next logical question is:

What is necessary to achieve goals … but is not readily available?

Business necessities include various kinds of people, tangible items such as money, office equipment and supplies as well as intangible factors such as
information, know-how, relationships, personal brand, professional credibility
and so forth.

Ideally, the process of identifying strengths will also uncover gaps in available resources.

These are those resources that are necessary to achieve your goals but are not readily available?

In effect, these unfilled gaps are weaknesses to be addressed.

Fears

Along with the happiness and joy of starting and running our own businesses there is a whole lot of fear.

These fears could include lack of money, support, connections or other resources.

Or the fears could be too many competitors, too much to learn or too much of something else.

Even the bravest among us experiences fear from time to time.

However, the thing to recognize is that whatever fear may mess with our heads from time to time, we can learn to address these fears in such a way that they don’t
threaten our success.

Limiting Beliefs

A limiting belief is a state of mind, conviction, or belief that you think to be true that limits you in some way.

This limiting belief could be about you, your interactions with other people, or with the world and how it works.

Limiting beliefs can have a number of negative effects on you.

As we began to experience more life, we were introduced to an unending list of
rules about what we should say, how we should be, and what we should do.

These “should”s creating limiting beliefs that invariably prevent us from realizing
our full potential.

As is the case with fears, we can learn to address and even better, eliminate these beliefs that limit our success.

Bad habits

According to JackCanfield, Success Coach and co-creator of the Chicken Soup books, 90% of our behaviour is habitual.

In other words,
90% of the hundreds of our daily actions both big and small, we undertake by
habit.

The good news is that habits free up our minds while our bodies operate on automatic pilot.

The bad news is some habits are counter-productive, and as such represent weaknesses as opposed to strengths.

When we do what we have always done, invariably we get the results we have always gotten.

A SWOT analysis offers an ideal opportunity to identify those negative habits, aka weaknesses, that breed negative consequences.

To grab a FREE SWOT analysis tool, click here.