5 steps to building your marketing plan

Hi everyone! Hope you’ve been keeping busy over the summer developing your products and thinking about how you’ll penetrate the market 💪🏼

I wanted to take today to talk about building your marketing plans! It’s great to see that many founders do understand the value and importance of marketing, so I’d like to help you get the ball rolling on actually putting your plan together.

This blog should provide a strong place to start for you! So here we go:

1. Do some research

The two most important points here are a SWOT analysis and a competitor analysis. Have a look into your market space and industry - who else is there? Who else is doing what you are trying to do? Who is also targeting your potential customers? Try to really understand what makes them successful. Explore all their digital presence - websites, social media, subscribe for their emails and download their apps. Take note of the things they do that you like, and the things that you don’t.

From there, have a think of how you compete and stand out - complete your SWOT analysis. What are your strengths and weaknesses, compared to your competitors? What opportunities and threats did you see in the market?

Do all of the above, and move on to step 2!

2. Define your target audience

So, so many founders think their product is for ‘everyone’, and that ‘anyone’ can find it useful. Even if that’s the case, this doesn’t really help your launch strategy - targeting EVERYONE would simply be way too expensive!

Now that you have explored the market and your competitors, think about which part of the audience would want to use your product, specifically. How will your differentiators appeal to a specific group of people? Who are the very first people that your app will help?

3. Set your goals

If you don’t know where you’re going, then you are already there. You need to set goals!

Your target can’t just be “tons of users” or “loads of money”. You need to set realistic and specific goals within certain time frames. That’s where “SMART” goals come in - specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-bound.

So before you get into the next steps of setting out your marketing plan, think about what you want to achieve. Some examples that I think are relevant to many of you:

• Get my first 500 downloads within 2 months of launch

• Build a list of 1000 emails before launch

• Gain 10% monthly growth on social media

4. Outline your channels

Now that you know who you are targeting and what you want to achieve, you are ready to start listing your tactics of making that happen.

Think about what channels your audience uses, and how you can use them. For example, is your audience on Facebook, or do they hang out more on Instagram? If you are selling a business tool, can you find your potential users on LinkedIn? Or are they younger, hanging out on TikTok? Or maybe it’s not about social media entirely, and you can reach them through partner sites, or email, or video… Keep thinking!

Once you pick your channels, you can think about how to use them - your tactics. Whether it’s regular posting, organic growth, or using ads, list it all out. Think about how regularly you want to do this. It should start looking like something like this:

• Post on Instagram every day

• Post on Facebook weekly with polls and announcements

• Run Google ads

• Run LinkedIn ads

5. Set a budget

There’s one thing left to add to the above list - your spend.

Before you can throw your glove into the ring and start using your marketing channels, you need to know what you can spend.

For example, in the above list we have Google and LinkedIn ads. How much do you think you can afford to spend in the month leading up to launch and in the following months?

One useful tool is that most advertising platforms will do a brief calculation to show you what your money will get you. So as your setting up your ads, you can put different numbers in the budget spot, and see what the forecasted results will be.

Whatever your budget is, I do recommend to spend it SLOWLY. If you want to spend £800 on ads in a month, for example, don’t set it as £800 a month, but £200 a week. In the first week maybe try doing just £100-150, so you can see what’s working and put the bulk of your money towards that.

And that’s it! You have now completed the first steps to starting your marketing. I encourage you all to start thinking about the above steps, especially the first two. It will really help you (and your marketing team if you hire one!) hit the ground running when it’s time to launch.

As always, please reach out if you want to discuss any above further, or if you would like to see how I can help with your marketing!