PEST Analysis Tool
Understand the Business Environment
Understand macro economic factors that affect your business and develop innovative strategies with your team to overcome challenges.
- PEST analysis frameworks and templates to get you started
- Easy-to-use visual canvas for brainstorming and planning sessions
- Real-time collaboration to engage seamlessly with stakeholders
Over 10 Million people and 1000s of teams already use Creately
Identify External Factors at a Glance
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Whiteboard to analyze industry trends, competitor strategies, and consumer behaviors.
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Frameworks and templates to conduct competitor analysis, strategic planning, and more.
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Ideate with brainstorming tools like mind maps, SWOT diagrams, and sticky notes.
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Highlight individual external factors with configurable color themes.
Connect Information and Strategize Effortlessly
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Bring in data from multiple sources into one workspace for investigation and analysis.
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Create presentations, reports, and dashboards for stakeholders with built-in tools.
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Embed docs with in-app previews and import images and vectors for more context.
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Add docs, attachments, links, and more via the notes panel to capture the big picture.
Collaborate and Plan Together
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Work with teammates on a shared canvas with real-time cursors for all participants.
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Have discussions on the same canvas with @mention comments and comment threads.
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Manage, share, edit and review plans and strategies with access levels and roles.
Create a Comprehensive Execution Plan
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Visually rank external factors based on influence and impact with prioritization grids.
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Import and export data across different platforms through multiple app integrations.
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Visualize a core model from multiple perspectives with multi-perspective modeling.
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Export diagrams in JPEG, PNG, PDF and SVG formats or enable link sharing to embed on any site.
What is a PEST Analysis?
PEST analysis is a framework used to analyze the impact of macro economic factors on a particular business. PEST stands for political, economic, social and technological. Using this tool, an organization can assess external factors that influence its operations, and create strategies to become more competitive and relevant in the market.
Why is a PEST Analysis Important for a Team in Strategic Planning?
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A PEST analysis helps teams to identify opportunities and threats. By looking and analyzing the political, economic, social and technological factors that affect the industry, teams can pinpoint emerging trends and changes.
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By studying the external environment, teams can plan for future opportunities or threats better by adjusting the business strategies.
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Teams can gain a better understanding of the market that the business is operating in. They can figure out consumer and market trends, changes in the market to respond appropriately.
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Teams can take necessary steps to manage risks by identifying potential threats to the business. This may include developing contingency plans or making certain investments.
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A PEST analysis can help teams to make better and informed decisions about strategic investments, expansions, and other business initiatives.
How to Conduct a PEST Analysis with Your Team?
- Define the scope of the analysis
As the first step, together with your team, decide what specific areas of the organization you want to evaluate with the PEST analysis. It is best to have team members joining from various departments to bring in multiple perspectives.
Use Creatley’s integrated conferencing facilities with Microsoft Teams, whiteboard and free hand drawing capabilities to carry out dynamic discussions and decide the way forward.
- Research and gather information
Divide the work among the team. Ask team members to gather relevant data relating to potential factors under the main categories in PEST - political, environmental, social and technological. Ensure that these factors impact the organization.
Share a workspace or folder with the team so that they can include all the gathered information in one central location. Use an already available PEST template or create one from scratch to start.
The team can collect data by conducting surveys and research or by importing data from an internal CRM system or sales funnel. Link relevant documents to the workspace on Creately to easily compile all relevant data.
- Identify key issues
Together with the team, review the information gathered and identify key issues that will likely have an impact on the organization.
Use color themes and shapes with context to easily highlight and differentiate each individual factor of the analysis for an in-depth breakdown of the chosen factors.
- Evaluate the impact of each issue
Assess the potential impact of each issue and prioritize based on their level of importance.
Collaborate with the team to conduct brainstorming sessions within the shared workspace to complete the analysis with inputs from multiple teams. Use dot voting and prioritization grids to evaluate the impact.
- Finalize the analysis
Finalize the analysis and easily share the workspace with the relevant stakeholders by importing/exporting, embedding into emails or integrating into various platforms. Ask other departments and teams to weigh in on the analysis.
Use in-line commenting, @mentions and sticky notes to provide feedback and have discussions and follow ups on the same canvas.
- Develop an action plan
Moving forward, based on the finalized analysis, the team should next work on putting together and strategizing an action plan to address the most significant issues and to mitigate their impact on the organization.
Conduct Your PEST Analysis with These Editable Templates
FAQs About the PEST Analysis Tool in Creately
A PEST analysis is ideal if you want to understand the big picture of your business. It provides a macro-level understanding of how your business is impacted due to political, environmental, social, and technological factors. By looking into these factors, you can better plan and manage projects/organizations, arrange your marketing and look into development aspects. It would be best if you did a PEST analysis,
- If you are starting a new business
- If your business is changing or is having a significant issue
- If you want to evaluate the market/project with changing external conditions
- If you want to re-think your business strategy and how it fits
- If you are a researcher and require an analysis to see external influences
- Collaborate with your team and, if possible, experts to identify risks and get different perspectives.
- Use SWOT analysis, Porter’s five forces, competitor analysis, and other useful tools to enrich your planning.
- Don’t jump to conclusions by looking at past and present scenarios. Use a rating system to identify what most impacts your business/project.
- Use quantitative data whenever possible.
- Don’t get bogged down with over- and micro-analyzing. Select factors that are high-level.
You can use Creately’s whiteboard capabilities and other powerful collaboration tools to get everyone on the same page. It is always ideal to have a lively discussion to quickly narrow down essential factors. Use dot vote to identify and prioritize.
PESTLE, sometimes written as PESTEL, stands for political, economic, social, technological, legal, and environmental (or ecological) factors. All these are critical macro-environmental factors, and PESTLE is used as a strategic tool to understand their impact on a business/project.
The PEST and PESTLE are both used as economic analysis tools. The only difference between the two is the additional two factors assessed by PESTEL, i.e., legal and environmental.
Resources and Guides to Effectively Plan and Strategize
Streamline Your Workflows by Integrating with the Tools You Love
Creately integrates with the tools your teams use every day and supports your team’s workflow seamlessly.
Why is Creately a Better PEST Analysis Tool
Creately is the intelligent visual platform enabling visual collaboration, knowledge management and project execution.
100+ proprietary features deliver a flexible, no-code visual platform, expertly-tuned for ease of use.
Infinite Visual Canvas
Visually create and organize any structure you imagine. Drag drop shapes or datasets, embed external content.
Real-Time Collaboration
Work remote or hybrid with realtime cursor tracking, synced previews and proper in-context comments and tasks.
Custom Databases
Create custom databases for any kind of information from tasks, HR personnel records to matters for law firms.
Data Driven Docs
Create docs and notes to go deeper from the high-level visual views. 2 way link to other docs, shapes or data with @mentions.
Professional Diagramming
50+ types of standard diagrams with 1000+ specially designed shapes and connectors enable blazing fast diagramming.
Project & Task Management
Use built-in agile project management tooling or integrate with your favourite project management tool to keep work flowing.
Enterprise Scalability
From SSO, SCIM to well defined employee onboarding, offboarding workflows Creately can scale to support diverse enterprise needs.
Powerful Visual Modelling
Visuals that are backed by databases, update once, reflect in multiple views type of workflows.
Enterprise-Grade Security and Compliance
We ensure the privacy and information security of both clients and users through enhanced data security measures compliant with industry security standards. Creately is GDPR compliant and dedicated to keeping your data private, secure, and safe.
Just Plug and Play
An easy-to-use interface with a minimal learning curve. Simply Sign-In using your work email to automatically add team members to the enterprise plan.
No installation required.
