Creating an effective marketing strategy is essential for all startups. It's the foundation of how you'll create and nurture client relationships, plus it highlights how you'll increase your ROI and boost your bottom line. Your plan states what you'll do, how you're going to do it, for how long, and how much money you'll invest into those efforts. Following these five steps helps you formulate an effective marketing plan that will drive effective campaigns that result in business growth.

1. Set Your Goals

When setting goals, consider using the SMART method: Every goal should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and timed in some way. In other words, state what you want to achieve, how you'll decide if you've achieved it, assess if it's possible to achieve it, check if it's in line with your existing company goals and visions, and say when you'll achieve it by.

For example, you might want to increase the number of leads generated by your blog. You'll need to assess the impact of your blog as it is right now and state what percentage you want to improve that by. Check if you have the budget for more content creation or even funds you could invest in an SEO specialist. Confer with your co-founders or executives to check this goal matches the overall business strategy, and say when you want to achieve this increase in leads by. Voila, you set a realistic, achievable marketing goal. Your marketing plan should be packed with specific goals like this, which may all feed into larger goals, such as improving capital efficiency and attracting investors.

2. Research, Research, Research

Your startup marketing strategy should be based on facts and figures from careful research. This includes market analysis to ensure there is a need for your digital solution. It should also include an assessment of potential client pain points and exactly how your offering addresses those — ideally with meaningful statistics to back that up. Beta testers and in-house users of the app or platform can provide data on the usefulness of your product in the early days of your business prior to having multiple client testimonials.

3. Define Your Target Audience

Once you know there's a genuine need for your product and that product produces great results, you need to carefully define who will get the most value from it. This means creating an ideal customer profile (ICP) and ensuring that the majority, if not all your marketing efforts take a laser focus on targeting these types of customers. This avoids wasting your marketing budget on sectors that won't gain any real-life benefit from your product.

4. Choose Your Channels

Diversifying is great and can be really beneficial if your target audience uses multiple platforms to reach its own clients and customers. However, if you're targeting a fairly narrow niche within your industry that primarily connects with peers and clients via LinkedIn, for example, then spending a ton of your startup marketing budget on sponsored Facebook posts is a waste of money. Use your earlier research to determine which channels will provide the most impact.

5. Set Your Marketing Budget

While for many founders, this may be the dullest part of marketing, it's also the most essential to avoid scaling your marketing efforts faster than your business can grow. This is where a Fractional CMO can help early-stage startups that perhaps don't have a marketing expert in their C-suite. A Fractional CMO is a part-time executive who gives expert advice on which areas would benefit from additional investment and where savings could be made to maximize the effectiveness of your startup marketing strategy. Onboarding experts on a temporary basis is often a lot more cost-effective than committing to a permanent hire.

Final Word

Your startup marketing strategy will be as unique as your company, but by following these key points, you take the first step towards ensuring you have all the foundational elements for long-term, sustainable growth. Book a 15-minute introductory call with the team here at Arch Collective and tell us about your tech startup. Our experienced marketers have worked with multiple post-series A companies across a range of industries and can provide the expertise you need to take your business to the next level.

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