One of the first things investors and peers will ask you when you tell them you're launching a business is if you have a marketing plan. Whether you love it or hate it, the reality is that marketing matters. Marketing can be a real challenge for entrepreneurs because having the ability to develop a product doesn't necessarily make a person qualified to sell that product to the public successfully. Mastering the art of converting leads into sales is something that takes patience, research and a willingness to act boldly. Here are some simple steps that will help you craft an infallible marketing plan for your startup:
Know Who You're Dealing With
How can you tailor a marketing plan to attract an audience you've never met? The good news is that there is so much information at your fingertips that can help you meet the audience you're trying to court. It is essential to use market research to get inside the mind of the average customer you're trying to attract. Knowing your audience is essential for using the type of language they speak or appealing to the values they have. For instance, a cybersecurity startup needs to be able to speak to the practical, fact-based minds of IT security officers. Familiarity with customers can be achieved through researching customer behaviors and creating customer profiles. You can then mine your own data to see if marketing efforts are successful at engaging customers and converting leads into sales. Of course, your need to get to know who you're dealing with isn't confined to your customer base. It is also important to get to know your competitors. Do you know the other brands in your niche well enough to anticipate their moves and beat them at their own game? It is so important to devote time to learning the motives, values, behaviors and goals of your direct competitors if you want to be able to carry your own percentage of the market.
Brand Development and Web Presence
The world needs to know who you are and where it can find you. The best way to make your brand visible is to make your brand digital. One of the first things you need to do when launching a business is create a cohesive brand identify that extends to all aspects of who you are and what you do. This identity needs to be reinforced through images and words. Good visual design and smart wording are everything when it comes to getting noticed and being remembered in today's crowded marketplace. You can't be relevant without making sure your identify extends to cover your entire digital presence.
Pick the Right Digital Marketing Ingredients
You need to give your brand a personality right from the start when you enter the arena of social media. Is your brand's personality friendly and inquisitive? You might want to use casual, mildly humorous copy that people find approachable. Is your brand authoritative in the subject it deals with? Be sure to offer plenty of helpful and factual tidbits of information. Taking time to find your brand's voice can pay off when creating a website and social media pages.
Gain Knowledge About Paid Marketing
A marketing plan can easily take on a life of its own. The truth is that you can't handle your company's marketing on a part-time basis and expect it to be successful. There comes a time when you have to delegate marketing responsibilities to people who know what they're doing. In fact, paid marketing is one of the smartest investments you can make when launching a business. Far too many companies learn this fact the hard way by not investing enough into marketing early on in the launch process. It is extremely important to come up with a strategy that includes paid marketing long before your brand even launches. One of the most important aspects of a successful marketing plan is drumming up interest and enthusiasm leading up to a brand's launch. It is difficult to make up for lost time if you don't start thinking about marketing until your company has already been around for a while.
Generate, Engage and Convert
Where do all of the marketing efforts you release into the world land once they are out there? The trouble with many marketing strategies is that they never actually provide that information. It is so important to have a strategy that allows you to measure the success of each marketing move by gauging engagement and conversion rates. Of course, it all starts with generating visual and written marketing content that people are interested in taking a second look at. Effective marketing content should grab audiences and cause people to want to act and respond. There are several methods to use that can help you measure how each lead-generating step performs when it comes to converting engagement into action.
Are you reaching the marketing stage of launching a business? You need to learn these steps for creating a foolproof marketing plan for your startup company.
