Every startup needs a great marketing plan to help it get off the ground. When you launch a new business, you need to find effective ways of promoting it, while also keeping your budget low.

If you’re starting with an unknown brand, getting your message out there can be tough. Instead of just jumping into your marketing without giving it much thought, plan everything intelligently so you have a strategy to inform all of your decisions.

There are many steps you can take to create the ultimate startup marketing plan, discovering ways to promote your brand.

Consider Your Marketing Budget

Before you can create a marketing plan for your startup, it’s important to consider how much you can spend.

As a startup business, you’re likely to be on a tighter budget than many other businesses, but that doesn’t mean that you have to limit yourself too much.

Deciding how much you’re willing and able to spend can be difficult, but there are a few things you might do to come up with a figure and allocate your budget in the right way.

You should consider your budget both long-term and short-term so you know what you’ll be spending in a year and what you’ll be spending monthly too.

Set Achievable Goals

It’s crucial to have goals if you want to create an effective marketing plan. You need to know what you’re aiming to do and be able to justify all of your actions.

There should be a goal you’re aiming for, which you can also break down into smaller goals and objectives. You need to think about your overall business goals and then decide how your marketing goals will align with them.

For example, how will you increase traffic to your website, and how will you then convert your website visitors into leads or sales?

Define Your Target Market

It’s always important to know just who your marketing is for. If you don’t know your audience, you won’t be able to choose the best marketing channels and methods or create advertisements that are tailored for your desired customers.

You need to consider a range of different factors, from the basic demographics of your target audience to more in-depth issues such as their interests, what sort of media they consume and the best ways to reach them.

You can find plenty of existing research that can help you and conduct your own research too to discover who your customers are.

Develop Your Brand

A well-defined brand helps you to deliver a consistent message. Once you know your target audience, you can make sure you have a brand that speaks to them.

To make sure you can deliver a consistent message across different marketing channels and over time, while also possibly adapting your tone for various platforms and media, it’s a good idea to develop a brand style guide.

You can define your brand tone of voice and set out rules for how you want to present your brand in different ways. Your materials might include everything from words you like to use to which logo or font to use in different situations.

Analyze Competition

Every business needs to know their competition so they can differentiate themselves. You should know what your competitors are getting right and where they might not be doing do well so you can develop a strategy to beat them.

Your startup is unlikely to be a unique business, but there are still things you can offer that other brands might not. When you analyze your competition, you can use the SWOT strategy to look at their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.

Using a SWOT chart, you can compare your competitors to your brand.

Get the Right People Onboard

A strong marketing team can make a big difference in how successful your startup can pull off its marketing strategy. Bringing the right team together will help your startup to flourish under the guidance of people with the right expertise.

As a growing business, creating your own marketing department might not be possible just yet.

Perhaps one or two members of staff might be full-time marketers, but it’s also possible to add marketing expertise to your startup through outsourcing. Using a marketing agency can be the most affordable way to expand your team and talent.

Consider Your Marketing Channels

There are many ways you can reach your intended audience, both online and offline. Digital marketing is often the most affordable way for startups to promote themselves, but it’s important not to rule out more traditional marketing methods too.

When thinking about marketing channels, you need to consider the best and most cost-effective places to find your audience. Are they more likely to be searching for you online or would they look you up if they saw an advert in a magazine?

Digital marketing alone has various channels for you to consider, from social media to PPC advertising and your own website.

Develop a Strong Web Presence

Every business in the modern age needs to have a web presence to promote their brand. Your customers will search for the products or services you provide or even looking for you specifically.

If you don’t make your brand available online, you could miss out on a lot of business.

To get started, you will need a website and an SEO strategy to promote your brand. There are many ways to improve SEO for your website, whether your business is entirely online or you want to improve local SEO to find customers in your region.

Make Good Use of Social Media

Social media is one of the best marketing channels that startups can make use of. It provides plenty of opportunities for affordable marketing, whether you are using it as a free, organic tool or making use of the various paid advertising options that are available.

It can be a great tool to use, but you need to make sure you use it in the right way. It’s important not to simply try and use every social network available. Startups need to identify the best channels for them to use based on what their target audience is using and what is suitable for their brand.

Create a Content Marketing Strategy

Content marketing is another key area to cover when developing a marketing plan for the digital world. Valuable content can help to improve SEO, give your brand interesting things to post on social media and offer something valuable to your customers in a range of ways.

Content includes various materials such as website content and blog posts, videos, infographics and more. These things can be created on a budget and promoted through different channels, such as social media. Good content helps with inbound marketing and can bring in people at different stages of their customer journey.

Growing an Email List

Creating an email list should be part of your startup’s marketing plan too. It can take a long time to build a substantial list, but there are several techniques you might use to do it.

You should make it easy to sign up on your website and make an attractive proposition too.

Offering people an incentive to sign up can boost your number of sign-ups whether you offer some interesting content to download, give people who sign up a discount or just promise them special offers or valuable content in your emails.

Having landing pages that are optimized for conversions can help you collect leads and email sign-ups too.

Network in Your Industry

Building a network of influencers in your industry will help you to spread the word about your brand. If you have powerful voices who can speak up for you, you have a better chance of getting people to pay attention to your startup.

Along with connecting to business people and professionals in your industry, it’s worth considering the power of social media influencers who are more like your typical customer.

They can also help to promote your products in the same way that industry experts can but to a different audience.

Work Out How to Test and Measure Campaigns

When you set goals for your marketing campaign, you also need to know how you will measure them. You need to know whether you’re heading in the right direction and meeting the goals you have created.

You need to decide how you will test your marketing campaigns and what metrics you will measure to determine your level of success. There are lots of tools you can use and data you can collect to measure everything from email open rates to advertisement clicks.

The results you get can inform your actions and help you change your campaigns to make them more successful.

With a good startup marketing plan, you can grow your startup’s image and reputation.