What are the basic steps to strategic planning?

Set long-term goals. Where do you want your company to be in five years? These should include objectives such as product line up, growth, sales and revenue goals, profit targets, and staffing plans, as well as more extensive goals and objectives.
Conduct a market survey and competitive analysis - As you will need to know what you’re up against and so you can plan your marketing and competitive strategy. Understand your target market’s dynamics, including demographics and the characteristics of your target audience (how, when and where do they buy your product or service). Competitive analysis is also vitally important, gather information on product, promotion, pricing and placement (distribution).
Assess where your company is now. Lay out exactly where your company stands on current revenues and gross and net profits. You will need to know where you are starting from to decide where you’re going and how to get there.
Do a SWOT analysis--Strength, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. This causes you to honestly evaluate your firm’s strengths and weaknesses, and based on the market data you’ve gathered forces you to evaluate opportunities and threats.
Compare where you are now and where you want to be in five years. Is there a large gap between the two? Decide what steps would need be taken to enable you to bridge this gap given what you’ve evaluated in your SWOT analysis. If the gap is too large, consider reviewing and resetting your strategic goals.
Commit your strategic plan to paper, monthly for the first year, then quarterly for the second year and finally annually in the last three years. Meet regularly to review how you’re company is doing vs. goals. Share the plan not only with the management team, but with all your employees, and so everybody is working towards the plan - assign tasks at all levels.
Be flexible. Markets are constantly in a state of flux, with new competition emerging, prices shifting, currencies changing and global factors potentially affecting revenues and profits. A strategic plan should be reviewed every six months so updates can be made to reflect your current position as new information becomes available.