How to Write a Marketing Plan

Every marketing plan has to fit the needs and situation. Even so, there are standard components you just can’t do without. A marketing plan should always have a situation analysis, marketing strategy, sales forecast, and expense budget.

Situation Analysis: Normally this will include a market analysis, a SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats), and a [...]

The SWOT analysis is a valuable step in your situational analysis. Assessing your firm’s strengths, weaknesses, market opportunities, and threats through a SWOT analysis is a very simple process that can offer powerful insight into the potential and critical issues affecting a venture.
The SWOT analysis begins by conducting an inventory of internal strengths and weaknesses [...]

The competitive analysis process presents an opportunity to describe your major competitors in terms of the factors that most influence revenues. This may include your competitor’s:

organization size
market share
comparative product quality
growth
available capital and resources
image
marketing strategy
target markets
and any attributes you consider important.

Industry associations, industry publications, media coverage, information from the financial community, and their own marketing materials [...]

Relatively few marketing plans are blessed with budgets for professional market research. When you can’t pass the problem to professionals, then you have to make some intelligent estimates. Get comfortable with the idea of making good educated guesses. Many people think there is something magic about this, some technique they don’t know that the experts [...]