Startup Marketing Plan: The Bridge Between The Startup Marketing Strategy And Its Successful Implementation

In this post, I want to share how to craft a booming startup marketing plan to continue with the article about creating a startup marketing strategy for your startup.

If you are a startup founder, you know the importance of a marketing plan for your business. But also remember the first thing you need to craft before composing your tech startup marketing plan is the marketing strategy.

Now, you may wonder how the marketing plan and strategy differ. They aren’t the same thing. Please check how to craft the marketing strategy for your startup before reading this post so you will understand the big picture and main differences from now on.

It is the plan to determine how to achieve our marketing goals. We will make a plan to reach them using our available marketing resources.

I will describe 8 steps to transform your startup marketing strategy into actionable efforts to generate results.

Based on your startup business plan, you have defined specific marketing goals that align with your overall business objectives.

Defining your OKRs was the 8th step of building the marketing strategy for your startup.

Now, you need to translate them into marketing objectives. The main difference between goals and objectives is the long/ short-term vision and the specificity.

Let’s make it simple in this post and work with 2 annual marketing goals examples:

• Goal 1: become the second player in the market by growing our market share to 12%.
• Goal 2: improve the efficiency of sales efforts by reducing our CAC by 10%.

So now we need to translate these goals into concrete marketing objectives to take action to reach them.

A practical framework for this is to set SMART (Specific, Measurable, Actionable/ Attachable, Realistic, Time-based) objectives. This way, we will make sure our marketing plan makes sense.

Goal 1

To hit goal 1, we will push it by defining two objectives and their correspondent KPIs:

• Objective 1: Get a customer retention rate of 70%.
• Objective 2:Increase sales volume by 15%.

Goal 2

To improve efficiency, we will focus on two objectives, including the following KPIs:

• Objective 3: Decrease cost per lead by 20%.
• Objective 4: Increase sales conversion rate by 10%.

This step should also be realistic and aligned with the marketing resources allocated in your startup business plan.

Suppose you’re the founder of an early-stage startup and don’t have access to historical data or reliable benchmarks in your market. In that case, consulting with industry experts or making educated guesses about how to adapt as you start collecting data would be helpful.

The persona developed during market research will guide the entire marketing plan. So, it needs to be part of the marketing plan for everyone to be aligned.

It remains the north star of the marketing plan for a startup business.
Remember that this persona should be accurate, and it should be one of the subjects you contacted during the research phase that represents the ideal customer profile.

You can call this persona by their real name and keep them in mind while making decisions, or you can use a pseudonym to hide their real identity.

Using an existing persona image is extremely helpful when you need to make decisions about your budget allocation.

List your persona’s pain points to remember where to focus your efforts. Prioritize and use them in your content campaigns and messaging.

To go deeper on this, check step 2 of how to craft the marketing strategy for a startup.

It is important to have an updated competitor positioning map and a shared document to monitor their actions.

It’s essential to be aware of and understand your market thoroughly. However, it’s not wise to use this information to create a plan merely replicating what your competitors already do.

Instead, you should use your market knowledge to develop a unique plan that sets you apart from your competitors.

Don’t get obsessed with what your competitors are doing to base your plan on them. This will make it difficult for you to stand out in the market and find your unique positioning.

I highly recommend being obsessed with your clients and continuously seeking ways to delight them.

Use it as a reference and focus on improving what makes your product and service unique to keep sweetening and making things different.

Understanding their strengths and weaknesses in content, messaging, partnerships, and channels used in their marketing acquisition and retention plan is essential to do things differently.

One smart thing you can do when disrupting or entering a new market with mature competitors is to provide your audience with added value that would be impossible for more prominent brands.

For example, if your customer base is still small, you can apply a special offer for all clients and non-clients so that large competitors cannot afford to propose the same thing, as it would not be affordable based on their large customer base.

You can also implement automation tools to personalize the customer journey deeply. Understanding your competitor’s customer journey is vital to see where it lacks value.

If you can effectively provide higher value in certain moments of truth with your client, that will set you apart from them. More giant corporations would struggle to adapt due to legacy systems.

This step is fundamental to pursuing the effectiveness of your marketing efforts.

To work on step 5, you need to base on all the information and decisions taken while building your marketing strategy:

• Your main competitors
• Your USP and value proposition
• The internal circumstances 
• Your strengths and the market opportunities
• And your brand identity

Based on all these points you have already worked on while crafting your marketing strategy, you need to define now your content territories to gain authority by differentiating and building a brand that resonates with your target. 

I will go deeper into content strategy in a future blog post.

It is time to turn the decisions made during strategy development into actionable levers, the messages that will differentiate your proposal from competitors and resonate with your persona.

• How is your solution different from that of your market? 
• How can you say things differently or communicate differently?
• How can you differentiate your problem-solving approach from your 
• competitors?
• What are their interests?
• What do they browse about?
• How can you engage with your clients on a deeper level? 

Focus on three pain points and three benefits and or incentives.

Make a list of messages and clarify them across the marketing funnel. I’m leaving a note here about many theories concerning the end of the marketing funnel. 

I want to advocate for its transformation, not for its disappearance. It is still a beneficial tool in terms of marketing planning. Digital and offline channels can interchange and are not linear along the customer journey and prospect interactions. But this does not mean that the marketing funnel has died. 

Attribution has been a challenge for marketing forever, not only after digital channels became massive. I still remember using different telephone numbers in TV campaign spots to attribute calls to other TV programs, weekdays, and time slots.

It is very useful to develop your messages and channels based on the marketing funnel phases—from the top of the funnel awareness phase to the consideration, conversion, loyalty, and advocation stage.

It’s important to remember that you can only approach people familiar with your brand or the problems you solve in the same way as those who have already visited your website, filled out a questionnaire, and left their information to receive your newsletter or a discount. 

You can classify these messages along the marketing funnel into two big groups: demand generation and new user acquisition messages, as well as messages to engage, delight, and nurture your clients to generate advocacy.

Always remember that different audiences require different types of messaging to pursue other objectives.

In conclusion, at the heart of all your marketing campaigns, include 3-5 consistent core messages. Adapt it to the stage of the funnel your prospects and clients are in.

Stick to these messages. Prioritize them and give them an appropriate weight within your communication plan.

We marketers get tired of repeating ourselves, but recurrence is essential for a brand’s consistency, for us to be able to impact our target, and for us to build our brand awareness and positioning. We interact with our brand all day, but for prospects and customers, it’s just a small part of their lives.

Your brand’s unique positioning should be translated into engaging messages and content that sets it apart from the competition. 

This step is about efficiency. To reach your audience efficiently with your marketing investment, you need to select the proper channels at each point of the prospect and customer journey.

You must balance your organic and paid media to reach the broadest possible audience within your persona profile with the minimum marketing investment.

You must also maximize conversion along the final marketing funnel step and purchase until clients become advocates of the brand and product or service, generating referrals. 

We must focus on the persona created while working on the marketing strategy. We need to know our persona well enough to understand where they spend their time, both online and offline, and where we can find and attract them.

• What social networks do they use, and where are they concentrated? 
• What kind of media do they consume, and on which platforms do they buy? 
• What marketplaces are their favorites? 
• What kind of websites do they like to visit?
• What are the apps they are heavy users of?
• What are the best channels for demand generation? And for client engagement?

You must constantly adapt your content to the campaign objectives, the best formats on each channel, and the messaging you want to communicate.

As always, it is better quality than quantity, so making the most of your marketing efforts is not a matter of being everywhere as a brand but dominating the channels you choose.

How do you ensure that you combine content, messages, and channels to adapt best and achieve efficiency and effectiveness? 

Establishing a test-and-learn system to measure KPIs on each channel to choose the best combination is crucial from the beginning.

We will see this more profound in the last step of the plan.

Partnerships are crucial to maximizing impact and results when developing your marketing plan. They are essential to expanding your audience, raising awareness, and creating synergies that benefit everyone.

No matter where your startup is, partnering with the right project or brand can exponentially boost your metrics through joint initiatives.

The partnership should help increase brand awareness, generate leads, and drive sales while also enhancing your market positioning and unique selling proposition (USP) and reinforcing your brand.

Choosing the right partnerships that align with our marketing strategy is essential. Not just any partnership will do.

It is important to share similar purposes and values to maintain consistency. Remember that consistency and coherence in all your actions are necessary for success.

To ensure the success of a plan, the team must learn and adapt while implementing it.

The digital ecosystem changes rapidly, and what may have been a successful tactic yesterday may not work in a few months. Digital channels such as Google ads, SEO, Meta, LinkedIn, and others continually evolve algorithms to meet their objectives.

Therefore, the only way to make your plan work and stay updated is to set up a test-and-learn system as a standard practice. This approach is fundamental to the success of your strategy and involves building a plan for everyday marketing activities.

Analytics and automation are essential to maximizing one’s efforts and should be the pillars of this system. The goal is to set reference values for your business metrics, which you can monitor and continually improve to meet your KPIs.

Additionally, supporting your efforts with the necessary automation tools can ensure the smooth functioning of leads, users, and clients.

Be patient in getting results, but at the same time, don’t be afraid to redirect your efforts and adjust the appropriate levers to grow.

Finally, I’d like to share some important considerations to keep in mind while working on your marketing plan and creating the marketing budget.

I will create a complete post to go deeper into this critical step, but for now, while these are not hard and fast rules, check my advice based on my experience that can help you get the best results.

Of course, everything depends on your startup’s type, stage, business and marketing goals, the balance between organic and paid actions, and general strategy.

To begin, we should divide our resources into two main categories, prospects, and clients, based on two high-level objectives:

1. Demand generation and acquisition of new clients.
2. Engagement and delightfulness to gain loyal clients.

If done correctly, the second point can multiply our acquisition pipeline thanks to advocacy and referrals.

The second significant split between resource allocation should be brand and performance objectives.

Brand objectives are related to growing awareness of your brand and product, while performance objectives relate to KPIs located at a lower funnel level that generate sales.

When building your marketing plan, it’s crucial to differentiate your budget between content and channels. You need to consider dividing your marketing resources between creating content and making it accessible to your audience. Both variables are essential, and the budget division between them is key.

Another important consideration is whether to do everything alone or partner with others in your resources division.

Finally, dividing your allocation between productive and non-productive resources can be extremely helpful regarding the startup marketing budget.

The productive budget is everything you invest in buying the presence within a particular marketing channel. In contrast, the non-productive budget includes everything else regarding content and resource fees to manage and feed the channels.

These divisions help maintain appropriate levels and efficiently use your resources.

For example, unless there’s a strategic reason, spending five times more on video production than distribution doesn’t make sense.

It would not be wise to invest 100k euros monthly on paid channels while paying a performance agency a 60k euro fee for managing the campaigns.