5 steps to create your digital marketing - and get going fast!

Get going now on building traction.

When you think of a marketing plan probably the first thing that comes into your mind is a complex, fancy process made of brainstorms sessions, multi tabs excel files, complicated launch calendars and social media content planning across multiple platforms and media channels. Plus a fancy dashboard to track all sorts of digital marketing KPIs and metrics.

This is all relevant, true (and necessary) if you are a well established organisation with a marketing team with assigned responsibilities. But let’s face it, if you are a startup and you’re reading this, it’s likely that you don’t have a marketing team (yet!) and you’re not at that stage (although we are here to give you all the tools to get you there with our foundation programmes!).

“1) keep it simple 2) done is better than perfect.”

5 steps to a "light touch" digital marketing plan

The 2 key mantras we want you to bear in mind when it comes to marketing for your startup are: 1) keep it simple 2) done is better than perfect. It’s all about imperfect actions that allow you to make progress for your business at this stage.

What does that mean in practice? In our foundation programme we teach our startups how to build a “light touch” digital marketing plan. This involves 5 areas:

1. The first thing you want to do is to build a strong opt in page. This is very much underestimated but it’s absolutely vital in building your own distribution list (one of your most important marketing and business assets). We are moving our potential customers from a distracted and noisy environment (search engines and social medias) to a focused environment (our opt in page) that we control. The recommendation here is to get their email address by giving something extremely valuable in return (people love checklists, challenges, free high value content)

2. You then choose one (yes just one at this stage please!) social media platform where you can post high value content at least 2-3 times per week redirecting potential customers to your opt in page. Here as well the focus is on content which is perceived as very valuable to your audience (addressing one pain point, providing solutions, “how to” content etc). And if you are not sure of which platform is best for your new venture, ask yourself “where does my potential customer live? Where do they spend time online” (a strong marketing plan, whether it’s this simple version or the most complex one will require you to do lots of ground work on who is your customer, what they are struggling with, why they don’t have what they desire and where you can find them. This is a key component of our foundation programme and something we have to be very clear about very early in the process of setting up our new venture)

3. With a solid opt in page you now have people in your database who expressed interest in your content and solutions (yay!). What do we do now? Nurture them and send them one email per week focused on high value content (see the pattern on high value content?) or if you want to keep it very simple redirecting them to your latest social media post (along the lines of “hey, we just wanted to let you know that we just posted something you might like on Instagram: how to……. )

4. At least once per month your weekly email and posts are going to offer something to your audience: a new product, a new service, a bundle, something that grabs their attention, provides a solution to your customer’s problem and (very recommended) give them a bonus which has a high perceived value (for example, if your startup offers lunch boxes delivered to the customer door you could offer them a 30 mins consultation with a nutritionist to tailor their meal plan to their needs. You get the idea)

5. Lastly, someone said what gets measured gets done. This is relevant and valid for any marketing plan. At this stage you don’t need to focus on any complex metric but you might want to keep track of at least the following:

   1. How much your email list is growing

   2. How much your social media channel is growing (in terms of engagement and number of followers)

   3. Sales (especially when you start to make offers)

   4. What’s the value of your customer and how much does it cost you to acquire a customer (LTV and COCA are key metrics that potential investors are interested in and we deep dive into these in our foundation programme)

Getting ahead

That’s it. This is all you need at this stage when it comes to building a marketing plan. This will put you ahead of probably 90% of new ventures that fail in their marketing effort because they don’t focus on these core components or overthink it and make it too complex too soon. You’ll get to the fancy marketing plan, but right now this is all you need to start getting traction.

Speaking of traction, our foundation programme gives you all the tools to start getting traction for your startups quickly. We put a lot of emphasis on traction as traction makes your business more appealing to investors. Get in touch if you want to find out more on how we can help you to get traction.