Forming a marketing plan: first steps for beginners

The owner of a start-up business needs to consider a lot and perform several roles at the same time. He must be a personnel manager, a sales manager, and, of course, a marketer. Subsequent success and prosperity largely depend on the successful implementation of marketing tasks. Don't know where to start? We have prepared a small action plan.

Step one. Define your goals

To develop your own marketing plan, you first need to decide on the ultimate goal of this very plan. In other words, what do you want to achieve: reach a specific audience, capture a certain market share, return investment within a certain time frame.

Understanding the overall goal will help you develop each stage, build small steps and provide realistic budgets . Understanding each step will make it possible to determine the best communication channels.

Step two. Marketing Research

Presumably, you conducted market research before creating a new product or service and now recognize the need for it. It's time to do some more research to understand exactly how to market your product. You need to choose the right audience at the right time.

Spend more effort on creating your ideal buyer persona. Introduce his age, income, gender, education level and any other data that might help. You need to correctly convey information about the benefits your services bring to each client. Try to answer the following questions:

• What worries the client?
• What upsets him?
• What fear does he experience?
• What difficulties does he face?
• What does he want?
• Which channels does he most often receive information - digital or print?

Finally, it is necessary to conduct a comparative analysis and determine who your competitors are, how much they spend, how they conduct market research, what they do better than you.

All this information will help you create a unique value proposition, find your audience and market niche.

Step three. Selecting channels

Do not spread your budget across all channels at the same time. Focus on what's really important to your customers, at least in the beginning. It's never too late to add additional channels.

Let's say your research reveals that your ideal customer is middle-aged and prefers to read print newspapers and magazines to keep up with the news. Or vice versa - young people who prefer the news feed on Facebook. Or perhaps “your” people respond best to interesting printed newsletters?

Step four. Assign roles

You will definitely need help with advertising. It is necessary to hire professionals or outsource it. Think about who will create the design of advertising layouts and write texts - a lot depends on them. Choose a reliable printing house for the production of printed materials - they should look attractive and solid.

Make sure that there is someone to answer advertising requests and make successful sales. You should not skimp on hiring professionals - this will lead to a fiasco of the advertising campaign as a whole.

Step five. Testing

Experiment with different campaigns and evaluate effectiveness. Analyze what leads to the best result and think about how to improve this result. Don't stop modifying and editing your ads. Digital printing allows you to print small runs relatively inexpensively, so you can try new colors, fonts, images and messages. Sometimes, even by replacing a couple of words or one picture, you can increase sales many times over.

So, competent marketing is the most important component of the success of any startup. The more thoughtful the marketing plan, the faster you can achieve your goals, make your business profitable, your brand recognizable, get loyal customers and become “number one” in your niche.