A startup marketing plan has plans and strategies that promote the products and services of startups. Despite having no fixed template for a startup marketing plan, one can know that your plan needs to have a checklist of all those things that will help set your startup to be known in the market. A startup marketing plan allows startups to get to know the prospective customers, clients, channels of marketing, and the forms of marketing they can adopt to reach out to them. The business growth and development are based on a strong startup marketing plan and remember everything is based on the timing factor.
For example, if you have launched an educational startup that caters to students who are studying for their board exams then it needs to be introduced to the students 3-to 4 months before their main exams. You can introduce such a startup to the students and their parents during the holiday season or after their exams as they won’t be effective. Students may have already joined different tuitions and classes for preparing well for their board exams, so the timing matters a lot for successful marketing efforts.
What is Innovation in Business?
A startup marketing plan involves knowing the startup’s customers and competitors, giving detailed information about the startup’s business and products/services, evaluating the usefulness of the marketing strategy adopted by the startup, finding out which strategy suits the best for the business and also implementing them in a timely manner.
Here is an example of a startup marketing plan’s identification of customers.
For an educational website that caters to graduate students, here is the layout.
Age group: 17 to 20
Gender: Male and Female
Interest: Business Management, Accounting, Finance, Human Resource Management
Lives: India and specifically Mumbai
Education: Passouts of Class 12 / HSC
Goals: To get Bachelor’s degree, a job, information about Master’s courses
Buying potential: Rs. 10,000 or less per year
In short, a startup marketing plan should involve all the information about how the startup can sell out its business to its customers. The company can keep a tab on the emerging trends such as checking out social media pages, news channels, news columns, etc. to know what is hot right now! For example, if the graduate students are looking for the recently released movie that has roared at the box office, then selling out free tickets for the winners of a contest on your startup company’s website can also keep them hooked.
The marketing efforts also can come in the form of a solution to a problem that can be innovative in nature. For example, if coronavirus lockdown has kept students at home for the last two years, then you can come up with some travel tickets to the cheapest destinations that they can go to after they complete their exams. This will make them talk about how your educational website is trying to act like an understanding friend to them in times of need.
You need to study your competitors’ marketing efforts as well in order to successfully launch your business in the market and also make it sustainable.
