Startup marketing plan template: How to create one

Creating a thorough marketing plan is an essential part of any new business’s ground considerations. If you’re looking for guidance on how to create a marketing plan to accelerate the process or even if you’re just looking for a trustworthy and free marketing plan template, Slidebean’s always here to help. Enhance your startup’s marketing strategies with our key facts and resources to create the perfect marketing plan. 

Point in creating a marketing plan

First, think of this project as creating a go-to document that’ll “put the pedal to the metal” in one of the most critical stages for your startup. Let this marketing template organize you and your team’s efforts. Setting that goal might help give you solid business growth ideas, for example. 

It doesn’t matter how you think of it, creating a marketing plan should at least force you to have:

• A clear outline of your target audience.
• Research on your competition.
• KPIs and metrics for your goals.
• Guidelines for tracking and reporting.
• A written executive summary.
• A defined marketing strategy.
  

The exercise alone will give you tons of valuable and much-needed material for your startup.

How to create a marketing plan template

There are key elements to consider in regards to any marketing plan. Amongst all those, we’ll focus on the following top five facts on how to create a marketing plan template. However, having a company profile is a good step ahead.

Fact #1: Consider your current marketing position

Start with a well-written executive summary. Focus on making the following very clear:

• your business goals,
• your successes and big milestones reached so far (especially in regards to marketing),

your plans are for the company in the future,

• the metrics that will rule your progress (don’t go into specifics, yet),
• relevant facts about your brand and/or service offer.
  

Make this very concise. Use a couple of paragraphs for it, at most. 

Fact #2: Define the target market and customer needs

You need market research for a thorough and clear understanding of your targeted users. The better you can define your ideal consumer, their ambitions, problems, and the solution you provide to their day-to-day lives, the better. 

Create a full guide, one that speaks of your users’ demographics, habits, and characteristics. Include your targeted users’ aspirations, their identity, personalities, and behavior as much as their frustrations and dreams. Make readers feel like they know the person you’re servicing. 

The clearer you define this, the better knowledge you’ll have on the users you’re targeting. This makes your marketing plan template a lot more powerful. So put a face and a name to them, even. Give us their age, income levels, their hobbies...you name it!

Also, make differences where they’re valid. If you’re tailoring your product to diverse users, separate them. If you don’t know as much as we expect you would, then start off with the general traits you suspect are a perfect match to your business offer. Then work on drawing a finer line as you go on. 

Fact #3: Stress your marketing and advertising goals

And here, you need to be as specific as possible. This is “the meat” of what investors or audience would like to see as part of a marketing plan template presentation. 

Make sure your goals target a large audience. Speak of your conversions and use actual figures to describe what your success has been this far. You’re looking to define what has worked and what you hope will do so even better moving forward in terms of your marketing goals. 

Rely on concise metrics for specific goals. This means staying away from conceptual and vague references such as “getting more followers.” Instead, speak more about reaching precise percentages of increase in traffic, for instance. Clarify which means will be used for that in particular. Outline any precise efforts. 

You can speak of “3% customer acquisition increase by April of this year through 5 weekly targeted ads on Facebook,” for example. Whatever you do, don’t just say “get more customers.”

Fact #4: Define your KPIs

Very much tied to above, key performance indicators (or KPIs), whether high or low ones are critical to a company’s growth. Unfortunately, a lot of startups have a hard time creating effective strategies to tackle these. Yet, KPIs should actually help line up multiple strategies to give a measurable and analytical base. They help achieve essential objectives. 

The idea is to improve how a company makes different important decisions. So figures such as net profits, debt-to-equity, gross margins, and more should help keep an eye on cost and revenue, for example. You could also speak of web traffic, inbound or outbound marketing ROI, increase in sales month on month, amount of logins or sign-ups, operating cash flow as much as annual failure rates, etc. 

Remember, though, you need to stay real with these. Set these at realistic goals no matter what so you can actually drive your general performance and success measures in actionable terms. 

Fact #5: Create timelines for task completions 

Put dates to all of it. 

Part of successfully learning how to create a marketing plan template is knowing how to tie it all into actionable steps that are measured on the basis of a certain frequency. 

Set by month, quarter, and/or year, break down your strategies in whatever form of a timeline you like best. But create a reference road map for all your company efforts. 

Whether you like flow charts, mind maps, simple timelines, or any other visual arrangement, make sure you consider time in your marketing plan. Add these to your template.

How to write a marketing plan?

We’ve previously worked on highlighting the essentials to a marketing plan template. In the article, we define:

• how to work out the description and definition of company goals.
• how to use the strategies for objectives.
• descriptions of the target market.
• definition of online marketing strategies.
• competition and potential partnerships.
  

Follow up on it if you’d like to learn more. Whether you call on our design services or use a standalone template, you can rest assured that we've got very reliable pitch deck material right here at Slidebean.

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