The first three steps to building a modern marketing plan

Every day I talk to startup teams who want to grow their business through marketing, but many don’t have sufficient marketing strategies. I get responses that include:

• We have a business plan with a few paragraphs on marketing.

• We focused on product, legal, financial and financing audits.

• Yes, we are going to do some Facebook and SEO.

• We’ll create one once we figure out what works for us.

• Hiring a group like yours to do their job was the idea.

If you start to grab a theme here, it’s no surprise that many of our potential clients don’t. want to invest funds in developing a well-researched marketing model, even if it is an algorithmic roadmap to their revenue goals. Many startups prefer to spend on marketing tactics in hopes of upfront performance.

Unfortunately, the science of marketing is not black and white. There are inherent and unpredictable elements to any launch that require authentic human responses. And the mere fact of investing time or monetary resources does not justify or guarantee anything. If Facebook or Google start offering pay-for-performance campaigns during initial launches for brands, we’d happily provide them, but that’s just not in the cards.

Having a marketing strategy is important. I could refer to one of many historical quotes here: “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail” or “Planning is everything”.

How to Create Your Own Marketing Strategy: The Eight Point Plan

To create your own marketing strategy, here are some steps my team and I use in our eight-point plan:

1. Industry Overview

Perform real-time research on your industry to get a clear idea of ​​the marketing landscape your target audience is facing. Recent industry trends, changes in the supply chain and upcoming legislation can all have an immense impact. Without doing your due diligence to get that real-time data, you’re shooting in the dark.

There are a variety of great free and paid tools to use here. Statista’s free information is often undervalued. IBIS is usually at the enterprise level. And don’t underestimate the value of a thorough Google search to find critical information, market size/growth, and general direction.

It is important to understand your position in the market to uncover opportunities and learn from the results of others.

2. Competitor audits

It’s not just a list of your direct/indirect competitors, but an in-depth study of how these brands get their digital market share. Discover:

• What social and blogging platforms do they use? How often do they post? What content gets the most engagement? What tags are used? Who comments? Do they run unique promotions?

• What influencers are talking about it? What do the messages look like?

• Which publishers and writers cover them? What do they say?

• What does their site analytics look like (e.g. visitor volume, time spent, bounce rate, traffic sources, audience geography)?

• Do they advertise? What channels? What keywords? What do their ads look like? How much are they spending? How aggressive is their retargeting?

• What keywords are they ranking for?

• Can you find case studies that share performance and acquisition data?

Ideally, you want to walk away from this research with an accurate understanding of how these brands do it. I’d like to quote Tony Robbins here saying, “Success leaves clues. We like to think we’re standing on the competitors’ shoulders here and leveraging their market testing.

This can be the most valuable section of the whole plan and set the framework for all the remaining parts.

3. Target audience

In a past life, I worked as a supplier for many big agencies, contracting for top 100 to 500 brands. I’ve seen high audience personality decks, and unless I see that level of detail in a brand’s target audience data, I think there’s still a lot to do.

There’s a reason why the biggest ad tech platforms put so much emphasis on audience modeling and why incumbent brands are still investing increased budgets, year after year, in this due diligence. The better you know your customer, the more action you can inspire.

Imagine knowing a breakdown of your customer groups by:

• Age

• sex

• Geolocation (up to a small radius of local businesses or landmarks)

• Household income level

• Use of income

• Buying behavior

• Preferred point of purchase

• Investment behavior

• weekend activities

• Personal and public influencers

• Online activities

• Frequency of social media interactions

• social interests

• Political support

• Choice of device

Could you learn from this data to bet on predictable patterns? If nothing else, would it help identify digital touchpoints, develop messages to execute on each, and determine tangible goals from those executions?

The analysis of business pages on leading social platforms will blow your mind these days. Web analytics can give you a lot of information. A focus group or survey can be powerful when structured properly. You can be very specific about your questions, but you’ll only get the data you’re looking for, so be sure to cover everything you want in your questions. Here are some ways to research information about your target audience. The data is there, waiting to be extracted.

Sometimes, for different verticals, these segments are easier to find than others. But even describing this information based on assumptions, broken down into multiple audience profiles, can make all the difference in communicating with your team, vendors (great for proposal conversations), and other third parties.

I recommend personifying each of these profiles down to the personality level by creating a fictional but symbolic individual that can be relatable in any planning meeting.

Now that we have scoured the macro industry research, we can dive into the micro competitor data, which will influence the actions the plan is meant to create. A plan is constantly evolving, and the next sections of part two will lay the groundwork for the plan in detail, ultimately culminating in algorithms for each marketing activation.