How to Create a Marketing Plan

What steps are involved in creating a highly effective marketing plan for a start-up business?

As a startup, 90% of your success will rest on the shoulders of your marketing. This applies even if you’re not doing big paid marketing or display campaigns. The number of users you can attract, the price you can charge for your product, and the funds you can raise are all results of marketing.

1) Know where you want to go

To craft a marketing plan that works, you need to know what it should do for you. What is the ultimate goal in terms of users, reach, profit, and output for your business?

Knowing this will help you craft each part of your plan and ensure that these components will get you there. It’s not just the volume you want, but whether the brand and reach you create will have the wings to reach that altitude.

Knowing these big goals will also make it easier to back up calculations. How much marketing will it take to achieve your biggest goals? You probably don’t have the budget to make it happen on day one. So break it down into milestones and identify the marketing needed to get you to each marker on the journey. One of the first will be hitting that crucial break-even point and paying your founding team enough to be able to afford to stay in business and enjoy it.

In fact, once you know where you want to go, you’ll need to capture the direction inside your pitch deck. There will be an entire slide dedicated to this in your pitch deck, which is what potential investors expect. For a winning deck, take a look at the pitch deck template created by Silicon Valley legend Peter Thiel (see here) which I recently covered. Thiel was Facebook’s first angel investor with a check for $500,000 that turned into over $1 billion in cash. Additionally, I also provided commentary on a pitch deck from an Uber competitor that raised over $400 million (see here).

2) Market research

Research and data are everything. Listen to your instincts. Then save that and follow the data and facts. You are going to want to include key stats from this research in your pitch deck when fundraising.

Some of the most basic data will include your startup’s market size and total addressable market (TAM).

The creation of marketing personas and users is an important and valuable part of this. Both if you are a B2C and B2B company. Knowing exactly who your best customers are will help you identify and better target your marketing from the start. You’ll waste a lot less and convert a lot more by using targeted campaigns and the right message.

The more you know about your client, the better. What do they do for a living? What keeps them up at night? What motivates them to get up in the morning? How much do they earn? Where do they shop? What is their favorite color? What time are they online? Where do they meet?

Then make sure you’ve done a thorough competitive analysis. Who are your competitors ? How much do they charge? How is their customer service? What are they doing well? Where do they drop the ball and give you room to do better?

It sounds basic, but it’s scary how many budding entrepreneurs try to start businesses without really knowing if they’re just recreating the wheel.

Equipped with all this knowledge, you will be able to craft an effective positioning statement, USP, and brand. Creating a style guide and specs for your marketing and branding to keep everything consistent can be part of that. It can certainly help keep a unified image. Don’t let that slow you down, because things are bound to change as you test, grow, and fundraise from new investors.

3) Identify your marketing channels

After identifying your best potential customers and the right branding, entrepreneurs will be able to better select the most suitable marketing and advertising channels.

There is no one right answer. What’s best will be a little different for every startup. This may include social media, television, outdoor advertising, print ads, email, pop-up shops or storefronts, apps, affiliate platforms, live events or outbound calls.

Just make sure you have a well-balanced marketing mix, leave room for trial and error and testing, and give yourself plenty of time for these channels to pay off and reach critical mass.

4) Budgeting

It is clear that all this requires budgeting. Even if you’re not running Google PPC ads, Facebook ads, or other large paid campaigns, marketing requires a budget. Even if it’s about creating great content for a winning pitch deck and pitching it.

You can never afford to stop marketing. When you stop marketing, you stop having a business. If Apple and Nike are still doing it with all their billions and market position, then you better believe it.

Investors should also know this information. It shows that you know what you are doing. They normally would rather invest to help you grow in this way than pay salaries or just keep you afloat because your overhead is wearing you down.

5) Team

Who will create all this marketing, respond to incoming leads, and follow up?

You may be a sales genius and enjoy selling and creating promotional pieces. However, no matter how good you are, there are many channels and factors to master in this one area of ​​business. It’s hard to be a true master above all these trends and best practices, and run the business well and fundraise well. Your time can be better spent on other higher level tasks. Even in the beginning, your time will be better spent closing valuable leads than on marketing material.

Know who you need and be sure to hire them and have them created for your needs months in advance. Not at the last minute. Otherwise, you’ll pay more and have warranties that aren’t as good or as effective as they could be.

6) Formatting

You should have a stand-alone marketing campaign that you regularly check and your team works on. All the basics will also be incorporated into your abstract and presentation pitch.

Being specific is fine, but don’t go too crazy creating volumes of marketing plan documents at first. All of this will change over time. You must manage to raise funds and gain new users.

Summary

Marketing is the blood of any startup. Even if you have a very technical physical product that you are developing for the B2B market.

While the outcome of the above can be a very simple and concise plan and set of facts and stats for your deck, all of these factors are important for an impactful marketing plan that works and achieves your startup’s main goals.

You can also listen in the DealMakers Podcast for free insights into the life of startups, how to successfully fundraise and survive the process, and how to make smarter decisions about executing your marketing efforts.