How to Build a Killer Marketing Engine for Your Startup

Develop a marketing plan that incorporates your vision, strategy, OKRs, tactics, and KPIs.

All organizations should strive to deliver compelling solutions that solve customer pain points. However, there’s no point in having great solutions, if no one knows about them.

Lack of product demand is one of the top reasons startups fail. Yet, many startups don’t realize the importance of marketing their products. Almost as bad are companies that do marketing but fly blind without a marketing plan or success metrics.

In my former startup, a SaaS eBook platform for K-12 schools, we did marketing early on but in hindsight, we were terrible at it since we weren’t consistent with our marketing messaging and calendar but worse, we were either not looking at metrics or looking at the wrong ones.

This likely cost us months/years of slower growth and money that could have been put to better use. With Startup Sidekick, we want to try to get this right from the start. I share some insights from both my startups later in this post.

Let’s look at how you can build a killer marketing plan on a budget, by reviewing the following facets of assembling a well-oiled marketing engine in any startup: