How to Create a Winning Marketing Plan for your Start-up?

If you’re planning to step into a start-up business, there’s a 90% chance you don’t have a defined marketing plan. Studies say that nearly 10% of start-ups fail to meet the market demands in the first year, and about 70% face a breakdown within five years of development. Start-ups face a lot of uncertainty during the initial period. While some become successful in sieving through the hurdles, most of them experience a drastic decline in their growth. Do you know why is this so? That’s because most of the start-ups lack a strategically defined marketing plan.

Marketing is the most crucial aspect of a business that determines its fate in the competitive market. While the term is mostly used to denote how a business connects with its target customers to raise awareness or make a sale, it is actually far more comprehensive than it appears. Marketing encompasses anything and everything that a business needs to thrive upon. It is the most dynamic and innovative approach that requires constant updation according to the latest trends. If you lack proper research, a strategic business prototype, or a well-structured customer relationship management, you’re most likely to sink in no time. A winning marketing strategy to support short-term as well as down the lane goals of a start-up business involves four critical steps :

1. Performing an explicit Market Research

2. Developing a curated Business Model

3. Executing comprehensive Marketing campaigns

4. Maintaining extensive Customer Management

Why should you perform a thorough Market Research?

You cannot just think of a business idea and jump into it. However unique your idea seems to be, you need to know whether the idea will actually generate revenue. Market research is the most important part of your business plan to decide what you’ll sell, why you’ll sell, to whom you’ll sell, and how you’ll sell that.

Validate your business idea

Every business stands upon a problem that it aims to solve through its products or services. Before planning on how you’ll solve a problem, you must be crisp clear about what problem you will target. Now that’s a difficult concept. Every problem of your target customer will not generate revenue. Though there will be several pain points to target, people might not be enthusiastic to invest money on an issue which can be solved otherwise. 

For example, you’ll find very few subscribers to a plagiarism checker, while millions of travelers use app cab services even if they’re overpriced. Thus, exploring the value of the pain point is crucial to decide whether to target your business against it.

Set your Target Customers

Targeting a niche is always a better strategy over serving the generic mass. If you take the example of Wow! Momo, they have delivered innovative and experimental Tibetan delicacies to the young generation, mostly students and working professionals. Being one of the most successful start-ups of recent times, their products are specifically targeted to the millennials who are into exploring varied cuisines in a quick bite. This way, understanding the customers’ demands and satisfying their requirements becomes easier.

Segmenting and choosing your target market wisely helps you settle into a profitable, sustainable and scalable business.

Analyze Market Trends

Identifying the preferences, demands, pains, and tastes of your target customers will provide you an insight of your performance area, and what strategies will and won’t work. Analyzing how your customers and competitors are behaving, which products are selling high, and which marketing strategies aren’t leveraging the expected outcome will help you innovate on your business model.

This is also the basis of a solid marketing plan and staying ahead of your competitors. Analyzing market trends doesn't just help with sales, but other aspects such as product development and market penetration.

Perform PESTLE Analysis

PESTLE stands for Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Legal, and Environmental analysis that helps you to evaluate your business prospects, risks, and opportunities in a particular geographic area. Before you indulge in your start-up, you must be acquainted with the government regulations, demographics and culture, economic trends, environmental policies, and technological advancements of that particular zone that will directly influence your productivity and success.

Analyze your Product-Market Fit

Selling your product in a market that has no demand for it makes no sense. Product-Market Fit is the analysis of how much requirement does your target market have to make your product sell. For example, Google brought AdSense which enabled their advertisers to display their ads in relevant web pages, even beyond the SERP. This increased the click-through rates of their customers and the revenue of Google experienced a hike in no time.

A proper product-market analysis sets up the stage for immediate growth and future market dominance.

Test and iterate your Prototype

Market research is an elaborate and complex process, requiring years to complete. Even after your business idea is validated, you need to fine-tune a potential offering by conducting surveys, interacting with your potential customers about their opinions, and iterate and reiterate your idea by constantly innovating on it. 

Develop a curated Business Model

When you’re confident about your market research, your next step is to create a strategic and well-structured working model for your business. A good business model will involve your target market and audience, define market positioning and pricing, determine product value proposition, and explain your mode of revenue generation.

Step 1: Define Target Market and Target Audience

Your primary focus while outlining the business model is to determine who your target audience is. If you’ve done your research thoroughly, you must have already decided upon where you want to sell your product, and to whom you want to target your marketing campaigns. Customizing your campaigns according to the preferences and buying habits of your consumers will result in effective conversion of leads.

Step 2: Define Market Positioning and Pricing

There might be millions of companies offering similar business to the same niche you’re targeting. Product positioning will allow you to determine where your products stand out from your competitors. Your unique selling proposition will determine the price you’ll keep to make your products sell. For example, if you’re focusing on quality more than quantity, your price may be higher. On the contrary, if your USP is affordability and you target the mass, you would probably like to compromise your product’s quality.

Step 3: Determine Value Proposition

Why will customers choose your product? That defines how much you’ll make in business. Your brand should promise value to your customers when they buy your product. There are defined ways of communicating your value proposition to your target consumers. Apple iPhone proposes “Your Experience is the Product” as they provide elite smartphone experience with premium features.

Step 4: Decide on your Revenue Model

Whether you’re selling a product or a service, you need to determine a channel through which you’ll earn your revenue. You may promote direct selling, online purchasing, or subscription to your digital product. You may also provide free services to enhance your organic ranking and utilize customer engagement to earn revenue from advertisers.

Execute comprehensive Marketing campaigns

Here comes the rate-limiting factor of your sale. If you don’t carry out exhaustive marketing campaigns to your niche customers, your entire efforts of building up your business goes in vain. Though the marketing strategies will vary according to your target niche, there are a bunch of marketing channels that you can leverage to connect to your customers. Most B2C or B2B businesses opt for omnichannel marketing to ensure an all-round buying experience for their customers. Whether you’re concentrating on digital marketing or traditional marketing methods, your customers should enjoy both online and brick-and-mortar retailing to finalize their decisions.

Website

A well-designed website gives an online identity to your brand. It’s your personal space where you can define your business values, educate your customers about your products, create blogs, build your opt-in form to collect the visitors’ emails, offer lead magnet, and sell your products.

Social Media Marketing

Social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc. provide an easy way to connect to millions of users and get clicked. They enable you to share your thoughts to like-minded people, observe how your competitors are marketing their products, and promote your brand with compelling posts with clear calls to action. You can seamlessly carry out your Social Media Marketing with automated tools like Sprout Social, Loomly, Audiense, and many more.

Content Marketing

You can keep your audience constantly engaged by creating and sharing high quality relevant blogs, articles, videos, podcasts, and infographics to stay at the top-of-their-minds when they consider buying what you sell.

SEO

The content you put forward to engage your customers must be search engine optimized to increase your organic ranking on a search engine results page. Using relevant keywords that have high search volume (you can use free keywords research tools like WordStream and SEMRush to identify which keywords relevant to your brand rank high), adding title tags, meta description, outbound and backlinks will help drive traffic to your page.

Google Adwords and PPC

Pay-per-click marketing is basically advertising your products on Google’s SERP. You can create your ad using Adwords and bid for a space at the top of the result page whenever a user searches for the relevant keyword. Google will show your advert based on its quality and bidding amount, and get paid by you whenever a user clicks on it. PPC ads are an easy and time-saving way of marketing your product and getting click-throughs.

Advertising

Traditional advertisements are still very important marketing methods to reach a mass of customers. Advertising your brand through banners, hoardings, newspaper, radio or television will engage thousands of viewers at the same time.

Offline Marketing

You can even utilize the emotions of your customers to enhance your brand relevance by sending personalized postcards, pamphlets, business cards, and brochures to educate them. Offline marketing can be effectively done by networking with consumers at events or seminars, or engaging with potential customers in telephonic calls.

Marketing Automation

Using software to automate the monotonous marketing process, making email marketing, social media posting, and running ad campaigns flawless will enable you to streamline the sales funnel. You can organize your customer inputs, monitor their behavior by analytics, get suggestions on your marketing strategy by Artificial Intelligence, convert leads into sales, and provide customers with end-to-end support, all in one platform.

Don’t forget to Track your Customer Experience

Your job doesn’t end upon selling your product. When a customer buys your product, he expects after sale support, regular monitoring of his complaints, and satisfying him with your customer-centric services. Your customer management journey starts here. You can retain your present customers, promote upselling and cross-selling of your products, as well as ensure word-of-mouth marketing to develop your business further.

Feedback Management

Connect with your customers by calls, emails, or CRM to earn their valuable feedback and reviews of your product. If the feedback is positive, you can leverage their satisfaction for further promotion. However, if their feedback is negative, consider what they’re suggesting on its modification and innovation.

After Sales Support

You will enhance your customer loyalty and retention by taking care of their complaints and difficulties with your product. Measuring your customer loyalty with metrics like Customer Loyalty Index, Engagement Score, or Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) can help you in solving their problems, fixing issues, and improving customer experience.

Upselling and Cross-selling

You can leverage your customer satisfaction by marketing your higher-end products and persuading them to make a purchase. Cross-selling complementary products can also end up in sale if they find them beneficial to add to their experience.

Innovation and Product Enhancement

Customer feedback is the best market research strategy to work on improving your products, innovating on features, and intensifying on value proposition. Keeping room for modifications is always the key to growth and development.

Conclusion

Investing substantial time and efforts on strategizing your marketing plan will definitely give you a higher ROI. If you are looking for someone to curate the entire process flawlessly, we at Ekakshar are always by your side. Reach us to get a 360-degree experience on designing your customized marketing plan, and develop your dream start-up with utmost certainty.