How to Build a Foolproof Startup Marketing Plan

What do you want your marketing campaign to achieve? Are you looking to build awareness of your products, or do you want to collect sign-ups for an upcoming beta launch?

There’s no right or wrong answer here, but your goals will be foundational to coming up with a successful marketing strategy. Choose the wrong goals, and your marketing plan will always disappoint you.

Here are a few goals to consider:

• Awareness
• Sales
• Subscriptions
• Lead generation
• Traffic
• Signups
• Cross-sell
• Up-sell
• Free trials
• Customer reviews
• User experience
• Customer lifetime value (CLV)

Choose the KPIs and metrics you’ll use to gauge success. For example, if you want to use marketing to grow product awareness, how will you measure it? Will you launch surveys, or will you measure traffic to your product pages?

Describe your target market. If you’ve already created your buyer personas, great! If not, here’s where to start.

First, think about who you’re creating your product or services for.

What do they want? What problems do they face? How does your solution differ from existing alternatives?

Fill in the following details to the best of your ability:

• Demographics
• Psychographics
• Behaviors
• Interests
• Wants
• Needs
• Problems
• Current solutions
• Preferred channels

As you market your products, you’ll learn more about your audience. You might find they dislike certain vocabulary words, or you may discover their perfect price range.

Update your target audience profiles when you learn this information, and use this data to optimize existing and future campaigns.

Product-market fit is about introducing the right products to the right market (at the right time). Your product should solve a customer’s pain point, and they should want to buy it over any existing alternatives or substitutes.

You don’t want interested customers. You want customers who will put their wallet where their mouth is and buy your solutions.

Do marketing research to refine your products and business model.

Here’s how to find product-market fit:

1. Understand your target customer
2. Find customer pain points
3. Offer a differentiated solution
4. Describe your value proposition
5. Outline your MVP
6. Build your MVP
7. Test your MVP
8. Upgrade and improve
9. Test your MVP again

A marketing strategy without a budget is just a wishlist. You need actual numbers to accompany your plan.

Without it, your plan might as well include getting Elon Musk to promote your product and Amazon to feature it on their homepage.

If you’re like most startups, you probably have a super-slim marketing budget. There’s nothing wrong with that—it just means you need to get creative and thrifty.

For example, organic social media is free, but paid social media marketing is expensive. Posting organic search-focused content on your blog is free, but pay-per-click (PPC) advertising on search pages is not.

You don’t necessarily need to limit your marketing plan to free channels, but you do need to prioritize where you’ll spend your money (and how much money you have to spend).

Here are a few free tools to hopefully help out your bank account as you explore your options:

• Unsplash (stock photos)
• whatsmyserp (keyword research)
• Asana (project management)
• Mailchimp (email marketing)
• Canva (image creation and editing)
• Google Drive (file storage)
• Slack (messaging)
• Buffer (social media management)

All of these startup tools have free plans that’ll scale with your business. Start for free and wait to upgrade until absolutely necessary.

It’s possible to run a do-it-yourself marketing show, but your marketing efforts will perform better with a team.

You have enough hats to wear already, don’t you?

Your team doesn’t need to be expensive. While you might wait to hire full-time employees to manage different marketing channels and programs, you can start today with low-cost independent contractors and freelancers.

You might hire a freelance writer to help with your website’s copywriting, and you could find a graphic designer to design your logo and landing pages.

Yes, their services come at a price, but you can find talented people on sites like Upwork and Fiver.

Every business’s marketing plan will look different, but your startup should at least have these essential assets:

• Website: This is the home of your startup. It’s where potential customers, investors, and lenders will visit to learn more about your business.
• Blog: Your blog is where you share information about your products and solutions for free.
• Social media profiles: Grab social media accounts on popular social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube to secure your handle for the future.
• Email list: Start building your email marketing strategy from day one. Google can change its search algorithms, and Twitter can freeze your account—but nobody can take away your opted-in email list.

Now, it’s time to use your audience research and data to determine your primary channels.

• Where do your customers spend their time, and where can you reach them?
• Do they tend to look for answers to problems on Google, or do they turn to their Reddit community?
• Does your audience like to read from news sites, or do they prefer influencers’ blogs?

Answers to these questions will dictate how you should prioritize your startup marketing program.

Remember, you can’t be everywhere.

Your marketing should be about quality over quantity, and your quality is going to suffer if you try to post on every possible communication channel every day.

Your marketing strategy is never perfect—there’s always room to grow and improve. Send your campaigns out into the world, and then see how they perform. Learn from your failures and victories.

When possible, A/B test your marketing materials. Whether it’s an email subject line or a landing page, test it with your audience to see which variations perform best.

Changing something as simple as the layout of your page or the text in your call-to-action button can have profound impacts on your marketing efforts—and they don’t involve you revisiting the drawing board and starting everything from scratch.

Keep an eye on your success metrics during your campaigns—not just at the end. You might find engagement data that inspires tweaks in your strategy that’ll save you money (and boost performance) when implemented now instead of later.

For example, if you notice that your YouTube ads have a better conversion rate (and lower cost per acquisition) than your LinkedIn ads, consider moving your LinkedIn budget over to YouTube.

Your startup marketing plan isn’t on auto-pilot—you can’t just set it and forget it. There’s room to upgrade and optimize all of your campaigns, from your website blog to your email newsletter subject lines.

Look for ways to improve, and ask your customers for feedback.

You might find that you’re fatiguing them with too many weekly emails, or you may find they want to see more video content on your website.

Make time regularly to review your marketing plan. Your business goals might have changed, or you may have started targeting your audience differently—these business insights should be reflected in your marketing strategy.

Take time once a quarter to sit down and revisit your plan. What’s working? What’s not? What channels do you want to experiment with? What channels could you cut?