The number of new businesses created each year is growing, yet despite business owners’ dreams and ambitions, the startup failure rate is 21.5% in the first year and increases to 50% in the fifth year. Based on a poll of former business owners, one of the main reasons for the lack of success is “bad marketing.”
Startups usually have a business plan that includes a marketing section, so it’s tempting to skip over a marketing plan, but here’s why this is a mistake. Business plans cover the entire business, the overall strategy, how various business components are interconnected, and elements such as financial projections, operations, and sales. A marketing plan focuses solely on a marketing roadmap that defines the go-to-market strategy with detailed tactics that support business goals.
Below we review the components of a startup marketing plan designed to position your marketing efforts, and your startup, for success. But first, here’s the scenario we’ll occasionally use in this guide for concept illustration.
Entrepreneurs in a growing urban area decide to start a local pet care service. They know the pet care industry is growing substantially and that there’s a sizable market opportunity in their defined service area. Based on the research they analyzed, they’ll target a market niche to differentiate from the competition. They plan to primarily focus on inbound marketing to create brand awareness, generate leads, and garner customers. If the business is successful, its growth strategy is to create a franchise business for other MSAs (metropolitan service areas).
Step #1: Outline your strategy
No one can afford to be without a strategy in any market, whether it’s emerging or developed. Start creating your marketing strategy by defining broad marketing assumptions and goals. Next, fine-tune them into tighter, more refined marketing objectives and efforts. Use general observations as well as data derived from in-depth market research reports and surveys from a variety of sources.
Keep in mind that as a startup, you’re not only launching a product or service but also your company’s brand. Since you’re starting from scratch with a target audience that knows nothing about your brand or what it represents, many of your initial marketing activities will focus on creating brand awareness and brand credibility. Brand awareness is the extent to which your brand is recognized by potential customers and associated with your product or service. Brand credibility is when potential customers believe your company can consistently deliver on its promises.
In addition to strategy and tactics, your marketing plan should identify key performance indicators (KPIs), such as marketing return on investment (MROI), customer acquisition cost, and conversion rate, to name a few. Equally important, the framework should include measurement capability, so if something’s not working, you can quickly react and make appropriate changes. We’ll cover this in more detail later.
Define your brand messaging and voice
Your business plan defines what your brand represents and offers, how you want it to be perceived, and what it promises to your audience. Your marketing plan should consistently communicate the business plan’s brand image and messages while conveying product or service offerings and their advantages over the competition. The voice, content, and images you use on your website, in ads, and in other marketing assets should be cohesive, unified, and synched with your brand.
Using the pet care startup example, the brand promises boutique-quality service and a personalized experience for both pets and their owners at a competitive rate. The brand messaging and positioning should convey and reinforce these elements, setting the service apart from national “big box” providers, discount providers, and local providers trying to mirror “big box” services in a smaller marketplace. The brand voice conveys high quality, reliability, and a personal touch, and the business understands its targeted audience’s needs better than anyone. Potential customers should be convinced the company provides the service level and overall pet care experience they desire and deserve. In the audience’s mind, the brand should be relatable—one that understands them and is like them.
Set marketing goals
You have no way of knowing whether your marketing efforts are worthwhile without goals. SMART marketing goals provide a framework for defining goals and measuring marketing activities. SMART is defined as being Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Timely. Examples of areas where you could develop SMART goals for startups include, but are not limited to, content marketing, SEO (search engine optimization), customer acquisition, online PPC (pay-per-click) ads, social media marketing, and content marketing.
Before you begin establishing SMART goals, define your target audience and marketing budget.
Define your target audience
Knowing your audience and the typical buyer persona enables you to craft relatable messages directly targeted to them. With startups, there’s no current customer base to glean information from, so you’ll start by identifying your target audience. Since the TAM (total available market), SAM (serviceable available market), and SOM (serviceable obtainable market) data should be included in the business plan, the marketing plan will delve deeper into the SOM and define a typical buyer persona. This is especially essential to your online marketing strategy.
Back to our example, the boutique-quality pet care service would define their buyer persona as a millennial, educated, urban professional with disposable income who has pampered pets and who travels for business and leisure. With this knowledge, the pet care business can craft content and marketing messages designed to resonate with their buyer persona.
Determine your budget
It’s essential to create a marketing budget that outlines the cost of all marketing activities and tactics, giving you a clear financial picture of what it will cost to achieve your marketing goals and business objectives. You’ll want to select the activities and assets that are likely to provide the best marketing ROI. Today’s marketers keep close track of ROI, using it and KPIs to illustrate their contribution to the company’s success.
Step #2: Determine your promotional tactics
As a startup, you need to create promotions and marketing assets focused on generating brand awareness. Brand awareness sets you apart from the competition and should entice potential customers to learn more about your brand and become a customer.
Below are a few examples of promotional tactics you can use to generate awareness and make your business stand out. While determining promotional tactics, highlight the methods you’ll use to collect and analyze digital advertising data, including any marketing automation tools you intend to use. This way, you can make data-driven decisions and adjust a campaign to improve results if needed.
Create a compelling website and invest in SEO
Your website is your storefront, your calling card, and your image all rolled up into one. According to web credibility research at Stanford University, customers judge a company’s credibility by its website design. Spend enough time and resources on planning and then create an eye-catching website that’s easy to navigate, resonates with your target audience, and effectively and concisely conveys your product or service offerings.
Keep in mind the importance of SEO when developing your website. Integrate it into your plans. Although it may take a few months to begin seeing results, SEO is one of today’s most effective marketing strategies. Quality SEO strategies target the correct audience and help build brand awareness, recognition, and trust. It offers 24/7/365 promotion, delivers quality traffic and viewers to your website who can be converted into buyers, and, done correctly, it’s cost-effective. If you don’t have the time or resources to develop an SEO strategy, consider hiring top SEO freelancers from Upwork.
Launch PPC (pay-per-click) ads
Since earning website visits via organic SEO takes a few months to gain momentum, use PPC ads to get found on searches right away. You pay a fee each time one of your ads is clicked, and you can manage your PPC budget by setting an average daily budget (which establishes a monthly maximum), setting your location and ad schedule, and more. Platforms such as Google Ads make it easy to get started, assisting with keyword themes and search phrases. Google Ads also provides performance data, such as impression details.
Create an email marketing campaign
Email marketing remains one of the most cost-effective and successful ways to reach customers, and marketing automation tools make them easier than ever to administer and manage. One of the significant advantages of using email marketing is its ability to move potential customers through the marketing funnel from awareness and engagement to a purchase decision, retention, and advocacy.
Your first step is to build an email marketing list. Using the pet care business example, the owners use PPC ads to drive targeted traffic to the website. From there, website visitors are invited to input contact information to schedule a service appointment. The business also collects email addresses by offering free, downloadable e-booklets. As opt-in email addresses are gathered, they use the data for email marketing campaigns, such as infographics comparing their service to a top competitor during the consideration stage and promoting referrals with a loyalty program.
Launch social media campaigns
Ads and activity on social media platforms such as Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Facebook play a crucial role in creating brand awareness. Consider integrating both organic and paid social media marketing into your strategy. Organic social media is content—posts, photos, videos, memes, blogs, ebooks, charts, et cetera—that users and businesses share on their feeds. Paid social media is when you pay a social media platform to promote your content to targeted demographics.
Another way to create brand awareness via social media is through influencer marketing, leveraging endorsements, recommendations, and mentions from individuals considered experts by your target audience.
Before launching social media campaigns, keep in mind you’ll need to maintain an active presence and post with enough frequency to bring new traffic to your website.
Invest in content marketing
High-quality, consistent content marketing relevant to your audience is another effective way to create brand awareness, develop your brand presence, enhance SEO efforts, and ultimately, drive sales. When designing your content marketing road map, evaluate multiple methods, such as blogs, podcasts, infographics, e-books, videos, and social media posts.
Leverage offline promotion
Offline promotion includes outbound marketing such as print ads, direct mail, banner ads, popup locations, press opportunities, public relations, TV commercials, radio spots, events and trade shows, and even joint ventures. So, which is best for your startup, inbound or outbound marketing, or both? It depends on your audience and your marketing objectives. Consider your ideal buyers and how they shop for your product or service. Analyze your competitors’ marketing tactics. The size of your marketing budget is also vital because outbound marketing is usually more costly than inbound, which may lower your marketing ROI.
Using our pet care startup scenario, the marketers decide to focus on inbound marketing based on the buyer persona—tech-savvy, busy, educated, affluent, and with varied interests outside of being a pet owner. Yet, they mix in some outbound marketing, such as attending an annual pet show in their MSA.
Step #3: Measure the success of your startup marketing plan
Even if you have substantial marketing funds, you’ll need to measure each of your initiatives’ success to know which ones deliver the best results and MROI.
Measure your results
If you don’t measure results, you won’t know if you were successful. Marketing KPIs can include marketing ROI and ROAS (return on ad spend), customer acquisition cost, conversion rate, social media engagement (number of shares, comments, mentions, tags, and so on), leads from event attendance, and more. Review each marketing effort and determine if you were successful based on your measurements.
Run tests
Tests help you determine the likelihood of success using a specific marketing tactic. Based on test results, you can determine what works best before spending too much time and effort on a particular campaign. Even if you meet your KPI goals, always test, measure, learn and discover ways to increase performance.
Tests can range from A/B testing and trying out different Google Ads to see which one delivers the most click-throughs to testing outbound marketing concepts. For example, let’s say the pet care startup is happy with its inbound marketing results and wants to test an outbound marketing concept. The idea is to liaison with luxury, high-rise apartment property managers to include customized, printed promotional material in their new tenant packages. Instead of creating custom assets for every luxury high-rise in the target area, they start with three or four to test proof of concept.
Learn from successes and failures
It feels good to celebrate your successes, but take a moment to learn from them, too. What went right? Why did it work? What was OK but could have been better?
Although the mantra “failure is not an option” sounds excellent, the reality is that failure is always a possibility. Instead of fretting over it or rationalizing, tackle failure head-on and learn from mistakes made. Determine what went wrong and why. Is the approach you used unsalvageable, or can you tweak it and make it successful? It’s vital to use these takeaways when developing your next campaign.
Get started
Now you know why creating a startup marketing plan is essential, what it includes, and why. But creating a marketing plan with a fully fleshed-out strategy and tactics requires special skills and time. If you don’t have the available staff or staff with the appropriate expertise to create a marketing plan for your startup, consider staff augmentation to meet your needs. Upwork enables you to hire top independent professionals with the confidence of using the world’s work marketplace.
