Expert Advice: How to Create a Successful Marketing Plan for Your Startup

No matter how amazing your tech offering is, if you don't have the means to get it in front of your target audience, it won't ever create the impact you hope it will. Tech experts can often flounder when it comes to creating a marketing plan simply because this is the first time they've had to handle this side of running a business. But by taking expert advice and working with experienced marketing professionals, founders may discover that startup marketing is simpler than they thought.

Understand the Goals of a Marketing Plan

Startup marketing is about sales, right? Well, yes, at its most basic, your marketing plan is the foundation of your efforts to gain commitment from other businesses to use your app or platform. But a marketing plan is more complex than just a sales strategy. Investopedia states that marketing plans should always cover "The Four Ps": product, price, place, and promotion. You also need to consider how your marketing strategy will incorporate:

• Your company's values and vision

• Your brand message

• Your short- and long-term goals

• Your target demographics and customer base research

If you don't have a brand messaging framework, check out our course which helps startups recognize the standout elements that can help build a powerful brand.

As well as increasing the volume of leads and boosting your brand, your marketing plan should position your product as outstanding within its field so that you attract potential investors. If you only attract excited customers but never attract investors, growth will be slow and become increasingly difficult. Talk to a marketing specialist about adjusting your marketing plan to include the goal of drawing in investors you want to be associated with your product or service.

Research Your Ideal Customer Profile

The ideal customer profile or ICP is the person or business that will get the most value from your tech offering. Your digital product will help them increase their bottom line, increase organizational efficiencies, or save them time or effort in some other way. By researching who this is and what their pain points are, you can start honing your startup marketing strategy and creating an effective marketing plan early on.

When you have no clients at all, you should gather data on what businesses suffer from the problems your product addresses. Find out what they're currently using to try and deal with these issues, and make a clear case for how your solution is better.

Researching and creating an ICP means your marketing plan is focused and far more effective than trying to market to everyone all at once, which is exhausting, expensive, and rarely fruitful.

Create a Content Plan

Marketing is as much about compelling content as it is about face-to-face discussions or telephone conversations. You can't be everywhere all at once, which is why you need to create an engaging online presence using blogs, social media, and your all-important but often overlooked business website.

Set a content schedule that's frequent enough to keep visitors engaged and position you as an industry expert, but make sure that schedule is sustainable. There's no point committing to blogging every day if you simply don't have the time to do this – or the material to create great content.

When creating your startup marketing plan, consider how you will make your content SEO (search engine optimization) friendly. Research shows that 70% of all online experiences start with a query on a search engine, so if you don't understand SEO, you need to engage the services of someone who does to ensure your content gets read.

Final Word

To summarize our steps, as a startup founder you need to understand the goals of your marketing plan; you need to research your target audience and ideal customer profile, and you need to create content across multiple platforms that's optimized to reach the right readers. If you need more support with your startup marketing efforts, consider engaging a Fractional CMO. Partner with a marketing expert who can oversee your efforts and work with your existing marketing staff to create plans and strategies for continuous, consistent growth. Book a 15-minute introductory call with the team here at Arch Collective to find out more.

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