Startup Marketing Plan Template: How to Create One

Creating a thorough marketing plan is an essential part of the basic considerations for any new business. If you’re looking for tips on how to create a marketing plan to speed up the process or even if you’re just looking for a reliable and free marketing plan template, Slidebean is always here to help. Enhance your startup’s marketing strategies with our key facts and resources to create the perfect marketing plan.

Point in creating a marketing plan

First, think of this project as creating a must-have document that will “put the pedal to the metal” in one of the most critical steps for your startup. Let this marketing template organize your efforts and those of your team. Setting this goal could give you solid business growth ideas, for example.

No matter how you think about it, creating a marketing plan should at least require you to have:

• A clear overview of your target audience.
• Research your competition.
• KPIs and metrics for your goals.
• Guidelines for monitoring and reporting.
• A written summary.
• A defined marketing strategy.

Exercise alone will give you tons of valuable and much-needed material for your startup.

How to Create a Marketing Plan Template

There are key things to consider when it comes to any marketing plan. Out of all these, we will focus on the following five key facts on how to create a marketing plan template. However, having a company profile is a good step forward.

Fact #1: Consider your current marketing position

Start with a well-written summary. Focus on the following very clear:

• your business goals,
• your successes and major milestones achieved so far (especially in regards to marketing),

your projects concern the future of the company,

• the metrics that will govern your progress (don’t go into details yet),
• relevant facts about your brand and/or service offering.

Be very concise. Use a few paragraphs for this, at most.

Fact #2: Define the target market and customer needs

You need market research for a deep and clear understanding of your targeted users. The better you can define your ideal consumer, their ambitions, their problems and the solution you bring to their daily life, the better.

Create a comprehensive guide, which talks about the demographics, habits and characteristics of your users. Include the aspirations of your targeted users, their identity, personalities and behaviors as well as their frustrations and dreams. Make readers feel like they know the person you serve.

The more clearly you define this, the more knowledge you will have about the users you are targeting. It makes your marketing plan template much more powerful. So even give them a face and a name. Give us their age, income level, hobbies… you name it!

Also, make differences where valid. If you are adapting your product to various users, separate them. If you don’t know as much as expected, start with the general characteristics that you think are a perfect match for your business offering. Then work on drawing a finer line as you go.

Fact #3: Focus on your marketing and advertising goals

And here you need to be as specific as possible. It’s the “meat” of what investors or the public would like to see as part of a marketing plan template presentation.

Make sure your goals target a broad audience. Talk about your conversions and use real numbers to describe your success so far. You’re looking to define what worked and what you hope to do to move forward even better in terms of marketing goals.

Rely on concise metrics for specific goals. This means staying away from vague, conceptual references such as “getting more followers”. Instead, talk more about hitting specific percentages of increased traffic, eg. Specify what means will be used for this in particular. Describe any specific effort.

You can talk about a “3% increase in customer acquisition by April this year from 5 weekly targeted ads on Facebook,” for example. Whatever you do, don’t just say “get more customers”.

Fact #4: Define your KPIs

Very much related to the above, Key Performance Indicators (or KPIs), whether high or low, are essential to the growth of a business. Unfortunately, many startups struggle to create effective strategies to deal with this. Yet KPIs should actually help align multiple strategies to provide a measurable and analytical foundation. They make it possible to achieve essential objectives.

The idea is to improve the way a company makes different important decisions. So numbers like net profit, debt ratio, gross margins, etc. should help keep tabs on costs and revenue, for example. You can also talk about web traffic, inbound or outbound marketing ROI, increase in sales month over month, number of logins or signups, operating cash flow as much as annual failure rates, etc.

Remember, though, that you need to be realistic with these. Set them at realistic goals, no matter what, so you can really drive your overall performance and success metrics in concrete terms.

Fact #5: Create timelines for task completion

Put dates to all of this.

Part of learning success in creating a marketing plan template is knowing how to tie it all down to actionable milestones that are measured based on a certain frequency.

Define by month, quarter and/or year, break down your strategies into the calendar form you prefer. But create a baseline roadmap for all of your business endeavors.

Whether you like flowcharts, mind maps, simple timelines, or any other visual arrangement, be sure to factor time into your marketing plan. Add them to your template.

How to write a marketing plan?

We have already worked on highlighting the essential elements of a marketing plan template. In the article, we define:

• how to elaborate the description and the definition of the company’s objectives.
• how to use strategies for goals.
• target market descriptions.
• definition of online marketing strategies.
• competition and potential partnerships.

Follow it if you want to know more. Whether you hire our design services or use a standalone template, you can rest assured that we have highly reliable pitch deck hardware right here at Slidebean.

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