The top 10 strategic analysis tools for businesses

Whether your business is a well-oiled machine or you're still working through some bumps in your processes, there comes a point when you should bring your team to the table to identify what’s working, where there might be gaps, and how you can stay competitive in your market. 

Regular strategic business analysis is important to keep a business functioning at any stage of life, whether it’s a small mom-and-pop or a Fortune 500. The reality is no matter how well you’ve set your business up to run, there are some factors that are out of your control — market dynamics, personnel churn, and the competitive landscape require your business to be adaptive. 

Whether you’re a consultant running strategic analysis for a client or an internal department trying to optimize your performance, having the best strategic analysis tools in your toolkit can help your team get the best out of your strategic planning sessions and have confidence in your strategy going forward. 

Strategic analysis tools can help with analysis of any aspect of your business, including:

• Environmental analysis.
• Industry analysis.
• Competitive analysis.
• Internal analysis.
• Customer analysis.
• Financial analysis.
• Strategic positioning.

What are tools for strategic analysis?

Strategic analysis tools are methods used by businesses or business consultants to evaluate performance, appraise potential challenges or changes, and provide a clear strategy going forward. Essentially, strategic analysis tools are meant to break down quantitative or qualitative business data and transform it into strategic, actionable insight. Simple enough, right?
The steps in strategic analysis are typically as follows:

• Define the scope. Which aspect(s) of the business are you analyzing? Refer to the list in the previous section. 
• Gather data. Assemble any relevant market research, financial reports, or customer feedback.
• Analyze the data. Use appropriate strategic analysis software to crunch the numbers and break down important data. 
• Identify opportunities and threats. Work together to determine where you can improve.
• Assess strengths and weaknesses. What works well for your business? What doesn’t?
• Develop strategic insights. What’s the gist of your findings? 
• Formulate strategies. Put together a strategic roadmap to address your identified threats and opportunities. 
• Implement and check in. Translate your roadmap into an actionable plan and rally your team.

There may be methods of strategic analysis that are more helpful at some steps than others. Don’t limit yourself‌ — ‌if you find a tool isn’t helpful, try something else!

The 10 best tools for strategic business analysis

What you’ve been waiting for‌ — ‌the best strategic analysis tools and techniques to help you put together a solid action plan. These types of strategic analysis tools are highly collaborative. That’s why Mural is a great place to implement them! We’ll include a strategic analysis example for each tool. 

We'll cover:

• How each tool works, its benefits, and use cases
• Mural's templates and features that help teams save time, enhance productivity, and improve collaboration
• Tips on how to effectively use these tools
• Mural's blog posts related to this topic
• Visual examples of the tools Mural has templates for

1. SWOT analysis

A SWOT analysis, which stands for Strengths, Opportunities, Weaknesses, and Threats, is a great internal strategic analysis tool to assess any aspect of your business. It’s a common analysis tool‌ — ‌about 80% of businesses use SWOT analysis. It can help your team think through where your business thrives, where it could be better, and mitigate risks from potential threats. 

Mural’s SWOT analysis template is divided into quadrants where team members can collaboratively or asynchronously add sticky notes to each category. Your team can even vote on the top contenders or solutions in each quadrant.

2. PEST or PESTLE analysis

Don’t swat away a PEST! “PEST” or “PESTLE” stands for Political, Economic, Sociocultural, Technological, plus Legal and Environmental if you want to go the extra mile. This is an external strategic analysis tool meant to evaluate factors outside your business that may impact how your business runs. Like the SWOT analysis, your team can collaboratively add problems or opportunities in each category to help your business thrive in a macro environment.

3. Value chain analysis

A value chain analysis focuses on the most efficient and cost-effective ways to produce more value for the customer while eliminating resource drain. The value chain is typically broken down into “primary activities,” the operations and logistics, and “secondary activities,” which include infrastructure, human resources, R&D, and procurement.

Mural’s value chain analysis template is already broken up into these nine categories, so you and your team can easily start adding and ranking ideas to streamline processes, stay competitive, and retain customers.

4. Gap analysis

As they say, “Mind the gap.” That’s exactly what this strategic analysis framework aims to do. Gap analysis, put simply, looks at the gap between where your business is currently and where you want it to be. From there, your team can come up with strategies to “bridge” the gap. This method, also called a “needs assessment,” can be combined with other strategic analysis tools like SWOT to index on strengths, identify opportunities and rank solutions. Giving yourself something to aspire to is effective — 85% of respondents in a survey reported that gap analysis helped them make more informed strategic decisions. 

5. VRIO analysis

The VRIO framework is a strategic analysis tool that helps you assess where your business stands in the competitive landscape and identify opportunities to get a leg up on competitors, focusing on resources. VRIO is comprised of four categories:

1. Value. What resources do you have that can decrease cost, increase profitability, or both?
2. Rarity. How rare are your resources? Can other companies procure the same resources?
3. Imitability. How easily can competitors copy your products, services, or processes?
4. Organization. Do you have organized systems in place to use your resources efficiently?

6. Competitive analysis

Sometimes, peeking over the fence can give you valuable insight into how to clean up your own yard. Competitive analysis, like VRIO analysis, looks at your business in comparison to competitors in your industry. Competitive analysis consists of identifying your competitors, evaluating their strategies, strengths, and weaknesses, and determining how your business can get an edge over competitors to gain more market share. Competitive analysis is best when done frequently — 50% of businesses conduct a competitive analysis every quarter. 

Mural’s competitive analysis template allows you to compare competitors side-by-side and collaboratively identify their strengths and weaknesses, offering valuable insight into what you might want to emulate (or not). You can combine competitive analysis with a SWOT analysis for more in depth insight.

7. Audience analysis

An audience analysis is empathy in action. In this analysis, your goal is to identify with your audience — who they are, what they need, and what their motivations, preferences, and goals are. Using this analysis, plus any customer feedback and demographic info you’ve collected, you can create an accurate customer persona, identify opportunities to better serve your customers, or even expand your market to include a wider audience. 

Mural’s audience analysis for e-learning template is a strategic analysis template that focuses specifically on audience learning preferences, but you can easily swap that out for anything else you want to understand about your audience.

8. OKR planning

While some strategic analysis tools focus on past performance, OKR planning focuses on the future. OKRs are a pretty par-for-the-course methodology in business, but they can also be a great strategic planning analysis tool. OKR stands for “Objectives and Key Results.” OKRs encourage businesses to set challenging goals and establish which metrics will determine success. They’re also a great tool to track progress, align teams, and encourage your team to contribute. 

Mural’s OKR planning template was designed by Mural’s own senior leadership team and is broken up into steps to encourage teams to reflect and ease into an action plan. Mural’s “Private Mode” feature allows participants to add content privately, so teams can set internal goals without other teams weighing in. 

9. Stakeholder analysis

Stakeholder analysis evaluates an aspect of the business based on the needs and goals of individual stakeholders. For example, when focusing on the procurement aspect of the business, legal may need to be kept informed, but not actively engaged. This allows teams to analyze the influence of individual stakeholders and see where they align, diverge, or contradict. 

Mural’s stakeholder expectations matrix template evaluates stakeholders based on influence, availability, and interest so you can make sure the right people are involved while preventing too many cooks in the kitchen. 

10. Scenario planning

Scenario planning maps your user’s journey through your product experience and indicates any sticky points, bottlenecks, redundancies, or inefficiencies in the user journey. This one requires a little creativity and a lot of empathy. You’ll have to come up with different scenarios, and then map out how the user will proceed through that scenario step by step. Once you’ve identified the strengths and weaknesses of your user journey in many different situations, you’ll be able to come up with a strategy to make the product experience as efficient and enjoyable as possible. 

Mural’s scenario map template will help your team identify what the user is doing, thinking, and feeling during each step of the journey. Diverse perspectives are key here‌ — ‌Mural’s features allow everyone to contribute. 

Bring all these tools together with Mural’s strategic analysis software

Mural allows you to build strategic analysis tools from scratch, or take advantage of the templates we already have available. Good strategic analysis requires collaboration, which is what Mural is made for! Make visual collaboration seamless (and fun!) at your next strategic planning workshop with Mural.