Startup Marketing Hack: A Five-Step Guide to Developing a Viable Marketing Plan
A company’s success doesn’t solely depend on the greatness of its leader’s vision; it is rather defined by the way the team intends to turn this vision into reality.
This is why the path to success starts with a well-developed marketing plan, which should precisely outline company goals and steps necessary to achieve them. As a pillar of all your future marketing efforts, a marketing plan should not be yet another boring formal document. It needs to be something like a bible according to which you’ll be planning the most important business processes.
The essences of a powerful marketing plan
Like most other forms of strategic planning, a marketing plan should be focused on “envisioning a desired future, and translating this vision into broadly defined goals or objectives and a sequence of steps to achieve them,” as suggested by Schmidt, Enock and Laycock.
In practice, this means that a marketing plan should outline the goals as specifically as possible and include the exact measures, resources and tasks needed to reach them. Therefore, rather than just outlining a set of general benefits your company can have, the marketing plan should have a form of a carefully analyzed program for completing some specific tasks.
Of course, there are many theories on how to come up with a perfect marketing plan, but we’ll try to break all this down to five most critical steps you need to take in order to get some tangible results.
1. Analyze: current situation, market trends and business opportunities
Analysis is a key to understanding market opportunities and using them to your own advantage. This means that everything that relates to your business should get a shape of a formal analysis rather than a set of assumptions some leaders are tempted to make.
One of the best ways to do so is to use the highly popular SWOT analysis, whose purpose is to pinpoint the critical opportunities for expansion. Based on this, you can get a clearer picture of where your company stands and how it can distinguish from everybody else in the industry.
2. Research: target segments and competition
A detailed understanding of your target audience’s needs and desires is probably the most valuable resource you can use to conquer the market. Once you’re sure about their demographics, lifestyles and behavioral specificities, you’ll be able to adjust your product or service offering to their exact needs.
Moreover, this serves as a constant source of inspiration for further product innovation, which is an aspect necessary to keep your product in demand. Similarly, research on competitors helps you identify market gaps and create a unique value proposition that would help you stand out from the crowd.
3. Define: purpose, goals, pricing and budget
Based on the knowledge you gathered through the analysis of the critical segments, you can now define unique features of your product. This is where the vision should get the final shape and start acting as the guiding force behind your company.
However, bear in mind that random statements about mission, vision and values, just won’t do as a company purpose, as cleverly noted on Harvard Business Review. Instead, what you should do is “find a way to express the organization’s impact on the lives of customers, clients, students, patients” and make them feel it. This way, your company is more likely to see some great results of its marketing efforts and eventually become the reflection of your early vision.
4. Plan: buyer’s journey and conversion optimization
Without a properly planned buyer’s journey, you might end up constantly catering to the audience that doesn’t convert at all. This is why planning a buyer’s journey is probably one of the most important and most complex steps in the development of a marketing plan.
The complexity of a modern buyer’s journey mainly stems from the fact that this concept is no longer as straightforward as it used to be. Some great points about this are made in this comprehensive guide to creating a marketing plan by Upwork’s Hiring Hub (whose image we borrowed for this article), which suggests that “progression has become less of a funnel and more of a map, with self-sufficient customers jumping on and off the path as needed.”
Indeed, rather than creating a linear plan according to which your prospects are expected to convert, now you need to create a map that takes all the possible distribution channels and touch points into consideration. Only with this in place, your company can actually start converting and gathering a community of loyal customers and brand evangelists.
5. Distribute: online and offline opportunities
In this globalized world, there are many ways to expand your business. From strategic partnerships to acquisitions, startups can identify a variety of opportunities for the execution of their plan.
However, one of the universal strategies today is developing a digital presence, which knows no boundaries between industries or company types. With billions of active internet users and 78% of those aged 15 or above saying they’re ready to shop or explore product/service offers online, this is an opportunity no one wants to miss.
Therefore, you need to ensure you have invested sufficient time and money into planning your digital presence and seizing every single opportunity to improve it. Once you get the right domain name and ensure your website is built with a consumer’s experience in mind, you can start creating compelling content and attracting global audiences. The “digital-first” policy was adopted for different national projects across the world and there’s no reason it won’t work for you too.
Conclusions
Without a proper marketing plan, even the greatest products can remain unknown to the public. Suffice to say, a product no one knows about is a product that doesn’t exist. Therefore, a marketing strategy is the essence of a company’s expansion and needs to be planned carefully in order to bring results. After all, you don’t want to end up like just another startup that tried and failed – you want to shine and build a recognizable brand, which is where these five steps should help.
