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As you begin to put together your new strategic marketing plan, you should take into account the internal and external factors in your marketing environment that will be affecting you in the upcoming year. In my previous post, How Effective is Your Marketing Plan? I asked you the following you the following question:

“Did your plan discuss opportunities, threats, weaknesses and strengths for your company to exploit/solve? (This is often seen as part of a SWOT analysis but could be an 8-factor or 5-factor analysis as well.)”

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Porter’s Five Forces

Many of us are familiar with SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) as our architecture for conducting internal and external reviews. Personally, I prefer to use an 8-factor or 5-factor analysis to better understand the environment in which I’ll be operating for my strategic marketing plan in the upcoming year. Porter’s 5 Forces helps us understand our business’s competitive marketing environment. It’s critical to understand the forces that will prevail in the industry and, therefore, the marketing environment you will be competing in during the upcoming year. This is how you will determine what to market, how to market, and what your competitors will be marketing.

Eight Forces Framework

The Eight Forces Framework gives us another way to examine how external forces affect our business, affecting our direction and success. (I don’t recall where I found this initially or who to attribute it to, but it’s a great framework. If you know the author, please let me know so I can correctly attribute it.) While it usually does not entirely fall upon the Marketing Department to do this level of strategic planning, if it is not being done elsewhere within your company, the Marketing Department should take the time. Examining Your Marketing EnvironmentUnderstanding how the external world may act upon your business will help you better understand how and why to take advantage of it or sidestep it as appropriate. When planning your marketing efforts for the next year, this will be vital information that will give you a leg up in your planning. Perhaps the most essential part of any of these analyses, however, is the paragraph (or five) you write explaining your findings for the marketing environment and what that will mean to your business, strategic marketing plan, products, and community reputation. This work is perhaps your marketing plan’s most essential and foundational component. Everything else in your plan should build upon this framework. So take your time and do it thoroughly and comprehensively, then include it in your marketing plan so that you will remember the assumptions you built your plan on throughout the year and in future years.

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