Business Planning is the core of a business. Not only it has to be detail and factual, it should cover the most relevant competitive information. Among a Business Plan, there are several key categories involved, one of the important category is a Marketing Plan. It is a document outline the most critical component of the Marketing Strategy and its Goal and Target to meet the requirement of the Business Plan.

As brief outline of the key characteristic of a Marketing Plan as follows:_

1) Marketing Objective
Each of the key categories in the Business Plan must include an objective. For Marketing Plan, it refers to the purpose a and responsibility of a Marketing Department. There are many variables to the market situation, Hence it is vital to crystallize the objective of the Marketing. An example of a Marketing Objective are Market Share and Sales Turnover.

2) Marketing Strategy
In most organizations, a Strategic Planning is conducted in an annual basis depending on the competitiveness of the business. After developed several strategic options, it is crucial to screen through them and pick the most appropriate strategy for the business. The output from this selection process is a Marketing Strategy.

3) Business Analysis
This is the essential input into Marketing Strategy Process. Among the analysis include PEST Analysis; Michael Porter’s 5-forces of competition and the SWOT.

4) Review of Marketing Performance
This is the part that capture the outcome of the key characteristics in the Marketing Plan Template. It is used to monitor the progress of each of them to ascertain they are on track.
How Important is the SWOT Analysis?

Although analysis using SWOT is one of the three analytical components in a Business Analysis, it form the heart of all the analysis. The SWOT Analysis Template collate all the information about the PEST Analysis namely information on Politics, Economics, Social and Technological and feed into either the Opportunities or Threats in the SWOT factors. Similarly, it is done for the information from 5-forces of Competition. Then the Internal factors are collected from within the business operation.

Once all the internal and external information are collected into the appropriate quadrant of the SWOT, then only it is fruitful to perform the SWOT Analysis accordingly.

The importance of SWOT Analysis in a Marketing Plan is its alignment to the business environment which has a direct impact to the future of the business hence its future profitability.

Please navigate the sidebars for more detail of various activities in the SWOT Analysis.