Startup 101: Marketing Plans for your Bootstrapped Startup

To boost the visibility of your startup, establishing a strong digital marketing presence through strategic decisions and promotions is critical.

In setting a strong, practical marketing plan, there are 3 clear steps to formulate the same.

A. Sketch your strategy

• Define end-goals

Planning the journey before having a clear destination in mind can be quite confusing and aimless.

In the same way, before rushing towards blind execution, you have to define your marketing goals, including your budget. This will determine the marketing strategies that would truly benefit your startup.

Do you want more customers? Or do you envision increased brand awareness of your startup? Each goal will result in a unique marketing plan.

The goal of new customer acquisition would orient marketing strategies to engage more people in signing up for your product and becoming active/paying users.

Brand awareness might involve your marketing strategies to revolve around getting people to recognize your brand and the central message it carries.

With a clear goal in sight, it will be easier for you to gauge the execution of your marketing plan.

• Defining a target audience

Your marketing plan must intend to reach the people you think to be best for your business. This will help you structure your marketing to your specific audience and their needs.

You can start with identifying the basic demographics(age, gender, and location) of your target customers, how your offering is unique to them and why you would be chosen by them over your competitors.

B. Reach your audience

These channels are essential to any startup marketing plan:

• Create a website

Websites function as dynamic marketing tools to help you interact with your audience and improve your business. When you decide if you want a fully-fledged website or a singular attractive landing page, the site would assuredly give a unique, branded feel to your customers.

• Leverage Social Media

In today’s times, social media is an undeniable part of your startup marketing plan. Using social media networks such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and even more formal networks such as Linkedin gives you the opportunity to increase traffic and exposure for your business.

Social media can gain you unique customer insights, quite easily. Through various metrics such as ad performance, or even the impressions created on social media, you would know what engages your audience.

This can help you finetune your marketing plan through changing your content, attract new followers, and maintain your existing ones through engagement

• Create relationships

Aside from what you tell your customers, testimonials are another way customers gain exposure and trust with your startup’s brand. In today’s digital era, this means collaborating with influencers and referral groups.

A starting point to build a relationship with critical influencers from your industry domain. Send them cold-mails and enlighten them on your unique value offering, and even offer them free products or services.

Influencers are critical. They serve as a legitimate voice, one that elevates your previously unknown startup to a credible business to potential customers.

For bootstrapped startups, referrals are another way to create rewarding relationships. Let your customers do the marketing for you. Word of mouth can be a quite powerful (and free!) marketing force.

In the presence of tight marketing budgets, your startup’s customer referral program can gain your startup brand recognition and new customers. However, be sure to incentivize your current customers for their contribution either through discounted prices or exclusive benefits.

• Content and Email Marketing

Content marketing is a cost-effective measure to leverage content creation and sharing to attract your target audience. Ranging from blog posts, videos, posts, to even podcasts and infographics, these differ from your promotional content.

While the latter content has a selling motive, content marketing has an engagement motive. By identifying and providing the information valuable to your audience- content marketing will give you the power to improve your traffic and brand awareness.

Email marketing is an essential strategy for attracting customers to your startup for little or no cost. Once you have a prospect or customer’s email address, you can send him or her emails to promote your startup.

• Offline marketing

While digital marketing would naturally be the major focus for many startups, there is also some understated value to offline marketing. Always create physical business cards and brochures to network at physical events.

The main advantage of offline marketing is that it aims to go where your customers are. When you are just starting out, networking is key to getting your startup off the ground.

Offline events and interactions, such as entrepreneurship festivals and trade shows can serve as interesting opportunities for you to interact with the entire startup ecosystem.

C. Measure and Learn

• Measure your results

A bootstrapped startup, by definition, finds itself with limited funds and resources available. So it’s important that your marketing budget consumed leads to tangible, measurable results

Start with setting and tracking your marketing KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) to track how your marketing efforts have fared. If your business goal is brand awareness, then your KPIs can be site traffic and social media engagement. If your business goal is new customer acquisitions, then your KPIs should focus on measuring your sales and conversion rates.

As you see your startup marketing plan unfurl, every campaign will give you new insights about your audience. These insights, if taken seriously, can be turned into actionable learnings to serve your customers better.

Once you assess how your marketing plan fared on your established KPIs, you can realize how your marketing plan has resonated with your audience, the demographics these customers hail from, and their brand interactions.

With all of this data, you can improve your strategy based on who is in your audience and what’s working for them. Let your audience drive what you do, and you’ll hit those marketing KPIs in no time.

Conclusion

The startup journey is an exciting one, given the freedom you have in paving your own path to success. When it comes to formulating your marketing plan, creating a successful one need not be a complex expensive process. The best marketing ideas are usually simple, intuitive, and well researched- and most importantly, building your startup’s brand is a perpetual process, and your marketing plan should be equally agile.