How to write a marketing plan: Marketing plan steps

You have your startup. You have a great product. Your team is excellent. You've chosen the right technologies, and now it's just a matter of customers or investors coming in on their own, right? Not quite.

Relax, what you need is to establish your marketing department, and I'm going to help you think about it from scratch, in a VERY summarized way. Consider that each of these points is a very intense development, and here you'll only see a summary.

Objectives, Mission and Vision

First, clearly establish the objectives of your company. Mission and vision are crucial to project it in the medium and long term. Interview various stakeholders in the startup, conduct a SWOT analysis, ask some employees how they see the SWOT, understand the market where you decided to commercialize your product, define your buyer persona, compare your product with the competition through benchmarking, as well as the brand personalities in the industry and others.

💡 Recommended Thought: What is the top global brand that inspires your product? In what other brands, not necessarily in the same industry as your product, could you find direction? What are the characteristics of those brands that you believe your brand could adapt?

So, you've done your internal and external analysis of the company. It's time to start making some decisions. Is the image of your company optimal? Do you think you could adjust something to make it more impactful, memorable, and more aligned with business goals? Does it differentiate from other companies?

Positioning

Now, think about positioning: that is, what place you would like to occupy in the minds of consumers. In other words, how do you want them to perceive your brand/product/service?

What will be the strategy to position yourself in the market? Wesley G. Bush, in his book "Product-led growth: how to build a product that sells itself," provides an interesting MOAT framework that can help you choose the go-to-market strategy.

• ‍Market Strategy‍
• Ocean Conditions‍
• Audience‍
• Time-to-Value

Market Strategy

Is your go-to-market strategy dominant, disruptive, or differentiated?

‍

Ocean Conditions

Are you in a red or blue-ocean business?

Audience

Do you have a top-down or bottom-up marketing strategy?

Top-Down vs Bottom-Up Strategy:

Top-Down

‍Targets key decision-makers and executives, usually involving large product rollouts throughout an entire business.

When using a top-down selling strategy, your sales team targets key decision-makers and executives. Typically, these deals include large product rollouts throughout an entire business.

One reason the top-down sales strategy exists is that businesses want uniformity. Decision makers like to keep their businesses organized and allocate resources efficiently. It doesn’t make sense to use a different CRM for each local sales team when you can use one for everyone.

With a top-down selling strategy, you’ll typically make the sale to the decision-makers at the top of the organization. But the real selling has just begun. Now, you have to convince internal teams to use your software.

Bottom-Up

A product that can be adopted in minutes. Unlike the top-down selling strategy, where it may take months or years to close a sale

Typically, businesses deploy a free-trial or freemium model to make a bottom-up selling strategy work. A big reason to choose a product-led model is that if people can’t see the value in using your product quickly, few will upgrade.

Time-to-Value

How fast can you showcase value?

Measuring Time to Value (TTV) is essential, as it gauges how swiftly new customers can derive benefits from your product or service. In the competitive landscape, users anticipate prompt value realization after their purchase. TTV often goes unnoticed, especially in the realm of Software as a Service (SaaS), yet its significance cannot be overstated. Failing to promptly deliver value might lead to customer attrition, with users opting for competitors who can meet their expectations more efficiently.

Here, it's crucial to start understanding the personality and voice of your brand. What channels will it communicate through, and how will its voice be integrated?

📌 Example: When binbash, a DevOps & Cloud consulting company, decided to undergo a rebranding, we identified the key buyers of these services, also known as buyer personas, as CTOs and VPs of Engineering with a strong affinity for building infrastructures. Recognizing these individuals as 'builders,' and considering our primary target audience was early-stage startups, we crafted a fitting tagline: 'For whatever you want to build.' Having precisely defined our target audience—early-stage startups—it was time to effectively convey our Time to Value (TTV) message. We achieved this by highlighting the strengths of Leverage, a product capable of accelerating infrastructure building up to 10 times faster. We coupled this with the overarching theme of 'for whatever you want to build,' emphasizing that regardless of the industry for which you need infrastructure, our solution would expedite your processes, optimize costs, and enhance sustainability. In essence, we aimed for a well-architected solution.

Now, it's time to start showcasing your product or service. This involves channeling it. The website, a landing page to generate traffic, where we will make the necessary SEO adjustments, a waitlist to generate subscribers whom we will later target with various marketing techniques, and the creation of social media focused on attracting consumers. Yes, just like the sales department, marketing has its own funnel.

And obviously, to develop that funnel, there are various strategies to consider, depending on the stage you are in.

But how do you know if your actions are successful or not? That's why it's essential to measure them through pre-defined KPIs.

In this summarized overview, we've seen:

1. Company Objectives Definition
2. Vision
3. Mission
4. External Analysis
5. Market
6. Competition
7. Product/Service
8. Pricing
9. Brand
10. Internal Analysis
11. SWOT
12. Branding
13. Pricing
14. Image
15. Positioning
16. Go-to-Market Strategies
17. MOAT Analysis
18. Conceptualization
19. Channels

Depending on the need and speed at which you need to scale, this mini-guide can help you quickly understand the main considerations if your startup needs to build a marketing department from scratch. Clearly, one person alone cannot handle this, but after having your CMO or Head of Marketing, you can start thinking about, depending on the decisions you make, the positions you need to fill for your marketing department to become a reality.