Before you get into the nitty-gritty of building ad copy or tweaking your email templates, you need to determine your startup’s overall marketing strategy. When you go to a funding round and a potential investor asks for your marketing strategy, if they aren’t seeing that you know your target audience and have a solid strategy to onboard high-quality users to lead to positive ROI, you aren’t likely to move forward in that funding round. Here’s our quick template for building your marketing strategy.
The “Aha!” Moment
To really drive home your business’s concept, you need to illustrate the problem you’re solving. This should be the beginning of your marketing plan. Ensure you cover the current market, what holes exist there that create the problem, how people are currently combating the problem, and how that creates your Unique Selling Proposition.
Who Is Your Customer?
Once you’ve profiled the market you’re operating in, you’ll need to profile the members of the public who buy products and services like yours within that market. You’ll first need to cover the broader demographics you’re aiming at, using statistical, population-based metrics like age, gender, occupation, marital status, geographical location, and/or income bracket. Then you can narrow down and build a number of psychographic personas to cover your ideal customer’s wants, needs, and concerns.
The 7 P’s
These are the core of your plan, and what you’ll need to spend the most time developing. In your plan, these can just be outlines of what you hope to achieve, but having working evidence is ideal. They are:
- Product — A working product which solves the customer’s problem.
- Price — A competitive monetization strategy that fits customer’s expectations.
- Place — Where you’ll begin your rollout and how that testing ground will inform your evaluations.
- Promotion — The channels you’ll use to communicate with your audience.
- People — The people behind the product and what they bring to your community.
- Process — How you’ll deliver your product, as well as take feedback and iterate the design.
- Physical Evidence — Especially if your product is digital, detail how you’ll gather real evidence of your impact on your audience.