TOWS Matrix Template
The TOWS Matrix template is a variation of the SWOT analysis that helps you analyze your company’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats so you can generate strategic options to move your business forward. The TOWS analysis is a powerful strategic tool to help you:
- Identify core values and opportunities that your organization excels at, and where you can improve.
- Define your whole organization’s strategic roadmap, or break it down to identify strategies for each department or team.
- Use it to analyze a process – marketing campaign. fundraising efforts, development workflow, etc.
Xtensio is your team space for beautiful living documents.
Create, manage and share business collateral, easily.
Join the 63,602 changemakers.
Xtensio is your team space for beautiful living documents.
Create, manage and share business collateral, easily.
Join the 63,602 changemakers.
The TOWS Matrix template is a variation of the SWOT analysis that helps you analyze your company’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats so you can generate strategic options to move your business forward. The TOWS analysis is a powerful strategic tool to help you:
- Identify core values and opportunities that your organization excels at, and where you can improve.
- Define your whole organization’s strategic roadmap, or break it down to identify strategies for each department or team.
- Use it to analyze a process – marketing campaign. fundraising efforts, development workflow, etc.
Paperless documents
How to create an impactful TOWS Matrix with Xtensio
- Click and start editing, no account or credit card required.
Follow along with the instructional template copy. Add charts, graphs, images and videos to customize your TOWS analysis. Drag & drop. Resize. It’s the easiest editor ever.
- Customize everything in the TOWS analysis template to match your brand.
Define your style guide; Add your (or your client’s) brand fonts. You can even grab colors directly from a website to quickly and easily brand your TOWS Matrix.
- Work on key details of your TOWS analysis together on the cloud.
Add colleagues (or clients) to collaborate on the online TOWS -(Threats, Opportunities, Weaknesses and Strengths) Matrix template. Changes automatically save and sync across all devices, in real-time.
- Share a link. Present a slideshow. Embed. Download a PDF/PNG.
The TOWS analysis template seamlessly adapts to your workflow. No more jumping from tool-to-tool to create different types of deliverables.
- Reuse and repurpose.
Save your own custom online TOWS analysis template. Or copy and merge into other documents.
What is a TOWS Matrix?
The TOWS Matrix is a variation of the SWOT Analysis designed to uncover your company’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. Taking the traditional SWOT Analysis a step further, the TOWS analysis specifically looks at the relationships between the different factors and categories to help you develop strategic solutions for your organization.
Both startups and large enterprises use the TOWS analysis approach as a primary strategic planning tool to match internal and external factors. This can assist your business in understanding how to drive growth, minimize damage, overcome weaknesses, and capitalize on your team’s strengths. This tool can be used for a variety of reasons, including:
- Identify core values and opportunities that your organization excels at, and where you can improve.
- Define your whole organization’s strategic roadmap, or break it down to identify strategies for each department or team.
- Use it to analyze a process – marketing campaign. fundraising efforts, development workflow, etc.
With Xtensio, you can easily generate a TOWS analysis tailored to fit your specific requirements. You can work hand-in-hand with your team on a live doc, leave feedback, or share a link to maintain visibility across your organization.
How do you turn a SWOT analysis into a TOWS analysis?
While a SWOT analysis is an effective tool for uncovering your organization’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, the TOWS analysis helps you create actionable strategies from those findings.
The TOWS analysis allows you to connect the relationships between each quadrant of the matrix:
- Strengths to Opportunities: Emphasize your internal strengths to create more opportunities.
- Strengths to Threats: Take advantage of your strengths to foresee and resolve possible threats.
- Weaknesses to Opportunities: Overcome weaknesses and turn them into opportunities.
- Weaknesses to Threats: Determine the areas you need to improve and eliminate threats.
You can construct a list of solutions for your team to implement by analyzing these relationships. Long-term plans should be broken down into steps with a clear timeframe or milestones so that you may make smarter judgments as you go.
By turning SWOT to TOWS analysis, you can generate more comprehensive insights for your organization. Remember, you can also use this tool in more granular aspects of your business like analyzing a marketing campaign, improving customer service or streamlining production flows.
What strategic options can the TOWS Matrix help me develop?
There are four strategic alternatives that can be developed from the TOWS analysis. Depending on your objectives and other environmental factors within the organization, use the strategies that best fit your situation.
- SO Situation or Maxi-Maxi Strategy: This strategy has the greatest potential for success because it focuses on using your organization’s internal strengths to maximize external opportunities. For example, if you have a cost advantage over competitors you could combine that with an opportunity to expand into another market.
- WO Situation or Mini-Maxi Strategy: In this situation, you can consider how market opportunities can be used to compensate for your organization’s deficiencies. If you own a design firm that specializes in branding but your team lacks the development abilities to make your work stand out, you may be able to outsource to a more specialized team.
- ST Situation or Maxi-Mini Strategy: Here, you’ll look at your company’s strengths to understand how you can avoid real and potential threats in the market. If you have a cost advantage but there’s a possible threat of lost profit margins due to external factors like seasonal trends or market fluctuations, you may want to develop strategies to leverage your product or service’s affordability to prevent slumps.
- WT Situation or Mini-Mini Strategy: In this defensive strategy, you’ll look at both your internal weaknesses and external threats to find ways to minimize both. This may mean you need to develop strategic partnerships or possibly rethink your business idea altogether.
More templates related to TOWS matrix
See how Xtensio can help your business
Product Management
Build and launch products and services successfully.
Sales
Engage buyers more and close sales faster.
Used by the world’s top businesses.
63,602 users and counting.
Jerome Katz
Professor of Entrepreneurship @
Jake Peters
CEO @
Robin Bramman
Founder and Chief Brand Mixologist @
Olakunle Oladehin
Executive Director @
Aaron Friedland
Executive Director @
Anna Yunker
Content Strategist @
Robin Eyre
Owner @
Adam Sher
CEO @
Stephen Paterson
Chief Product Officer @
Frequently asked questions
Xtensio is the quickest and easiest way for teams to create, share and manage all of their business documents together. Create pitches, sales sheets, reports, case studies, agendas and more. Add images, videos, tables, buttons and other interactive modules. Drag and drop, resize, change backgrounds, colors. Share a link. Present a digital slideshow. Export a PDF/PNG.
A folio is a live webpage, a full-screen digital slideshow presentation and an exportable PDF/PNG document all-in-one. Folios are responsive, collaborative and completely customizable.
Start from an instructional template, editable example or a blank folio to build all your business documents and presentations with the ease of a web builder. Add team members and guests to work together in real-time on the cloud. Changes instantly sync to the live version of the folio so both internal and external stakeholders are always up-to-date. Folios are the next generation of flexible documents and presentations.
Unlike other presentation or document creators, Xtensio works like a web builder so you can easily drag and drop interactive content, customize the layout, and change colors, fonts, backgrounds to get professional-looking business content out the door quickly, without needing a designer.
You can collaborate with team members and guests to work together in real-time on the cloud. And the flexibility to share folios as live web links, digital slideshow presentations or exportable PDF/PNGs means you don’t have to jump between tools when creating different deliverables. Check out this page to see how Xtensio outpaces the competition.
Yes. All Xtensio plans include 128 bit SSL encryption and backups to ensure your data is secure. Here’s more on the range of sharing options on Xtensio, from completely private to public.
Yes, You can start customizing your TOWS analysis template right away! You will never be asked to provide credit card information to try out the editor.
By upgrading to our premium plans, you’ll have a private, branded workspace with your own URL where you, your team members and guests can create and collaborate on multiple presentations and documents.
You’ll be able to lock branding across your deliverables with the team style guide, streamline the creation process with custom templates, unlock exports, add password protection and customize individual shared links, and view folio stats to stay updated on all of your projects. Here’s more about our premium plans.
The goal of this exercise is to generate strategic options for maximizing your internal and external environment for optimal growth by helping you analyze your company’s opportunities, threats, strengths and weaknesses.
In the TOWS analysis that you create, you should include any and all information about your company’s strengths and weaknesses and external threats and opportunities that your company can take advantage of to generate effective strategies for growth.
The living documents such as a TOWS analysis allows you to instantly sync your entire team throughout the process. The document can easily be updated as your product or service evolves, and as your team optimizes the strategic process.
You can add collaborators to work in real-time. And you can share the customizable link to keep internal and external colleagues up-to-date as the project progresses.
Yes! With our premium plans, you can invite as many people as you’d like to collaborate on your TOWS analysis, ensuring your whole team is aligned. Here’s more on real-time collaboration.
When you’re ready to share your TOWS analysis with your management team and investors, choose between presenting it as a full-screen digital slideshow, sending it as a responsive web link or exporting it as a PDF or PNG. All of your share options are located at the top right of your edit screen. Learn more about the different ways to share your folios in this tutorial video.
We do! There are a number of different templates, examples and resources to guide you through defining and implementing your business strategy. Check out our Strategy toolbox to find more tools and resources.
