Marketing Your Startup

by Simona Covel

  Once you have a sense of the current landscape, spend a day in the life of a customer’s order. Watch as the order moves through the pipeline, whatever your business may be. Track the milestones along the way, noting if the customer is receiving all the communication they should, if everything about the interaction is clear and easy to follow, and where the experience breaks down. Get as close to mirroring a customer experience as you can in order to experience the true hiccups in the process.

  CUSTOMER SURVEYS

  To figure out what customers want and if they’re happy, there’s a lot to be said for simply asking them. In order to serve your customers better, you have to know them better, says Laurel Mintz, founder and CEO of marketing agency Elevate My Brand.

  Generally, you’ll find that customers love giving their opinion and value being heard. Giving customers a place to talk about what’s working and what isn’t makes them feel empowered. For you, gathering the right information through surveys and questionnaires can help you analyze your sales process, restructure your business model, create more effective product design, and shape more effective marketing campaigns.

  Email is an easy way to start. You can try soliciting feedback through your website, or you can send out an online survey. When a customer responds to an email form, stay in touch. Reassure them that they’ll get a speedy response, suggests Mintz. Showing customers that you care about their experiences will help build relationships that give them a reason to stay. The same goes for surveys that you send out. If you can, send a personalized thank you and be clear about how much you appreciate their participation and what the feedback will be used for. You can also solicit quick one-question polls in social media, if that’s appropriate for your customer base.

  Depending on your industry, feedback software may be an option. A program may be able to send a survey out after every appointment or after each order is placed. “We can immediately see who our promoters are and who had a less-than-perfect experience, which gives us an opportunity to reach out before we might lose that person as a customer,” she notes.

  Once you’ve aggregated your customers’ responses, use them. The information will help you create marketing campaigns that resonate and are effective, make decisions about future product positioning, and make any necessary changes to the ordering and fulfillment process.

  Gathering buyer data is a useful exercise, but to really get to know your customers, you have to go deeper. Facilitating deeper, open-ended conversations may help you move forward if you’re in a pivotal time for your business—whether you’re facing new competition, launching a new product line, or opening a new location.

  You may not be able to count on customers to come to you with constant feedback. But creating a forum for communication gives clients an opportunity to openly discuss both problems and successes on an ongoing basis, so you don’t have to wait for an annual survey to find out what kinds of issues or concerns your customers face. “Recently, we launched a private Facebook group for our customers,” notes Syed Balkhi, co-founder of conversion rate optimization software company OptinMonster. “The conversations we are having help us get to know customers on a personal level. The Facebook group is helping form a community where bloggers can help each other out, and they can also ask us questions in a more relaxed and casual way.”

  Or, take it in person. Host a lunch at your office for your best clients, or create a networking session.

  How Much Does It Cost?

  How much should you devote to existing customers? One guideline is to invest 10 percent of your marketing budget to talking to everyone in your marketing universe, whether or not they fit your ideal customer profile, suggests Peter Economy, author of several leadership and management books. Use another 30 percent of your budget to persuade people who do fit your customer profile—your prospects—that they should become your customers. Devote the remaining 60 percent of your marketing budget to your current customers. This is where you will produce the greatest profit for the least cost per sale.

  CRM SOFTWARE

  There’s no substitute for talking to your customers. That’s how you’ll get the deepest, most actionable insights. But when it comes to day-to-day customer interaction, customer relationship management (CRM) software can ease the burden.

  An effective CRM application provides an organized, comprehensive view of a company’s customers and prospects, and employees’ interactions with them. CRM software is hardly new, but prices have dropped dramatically in recent years, and usability has greatly improved. The key is to get everyone on the same system, and get them to use it. Nothing gets in the way of achieving a total view of the customer like having different departments use different products, or having some employees capture a lot of data while others never touch the system.

  One way some companies solve those problems is to modify their incentive programs to reward employees not only for selling or otherwise serving customers, but also for gathering information about them. CRM software will capture extremely detailed information about customer behavior and preferences that can inform targeted marketing, product development, and sales activities.

  CRM software can help you:

  • Realize which customers produce the most profit. By analyzing buying behaviors and other customer data, your business can gain a better understanding of who are your best customers. You can differentiate between the customers who provide the highest profit margins and those who simply bring you the most revenue. You could use that information to provide a better type or tier of customer service for better customers.

  • Analyze buying patterns. More understanding of customer buying patterns can help you spot potential high-value customers so that you can make the most of your sales opportunities with those customers.

  • Maximize per-customer profits. Data gleaned from CRM can help you lower the cost of selling to certain customers and help you increase profits from those customer interactions.

  The ultimate goal is to use data in more than the usual who-is-buying-what or which-sector is-underperforming way. Instead, use data as a way to understand the full scope of a customer’s problem, which can create opportunities to sell customers a broader, more integrated set of products or services. Or to simply be more confident that you know what their issues are, and you’re as relevant to them as ever.

  How Much Does It Cost?

  Today you can find a CRM solution for as little as a few dollars per month—though that’s pretty barebones. For a more full-featured suite, you may pay $50 per month or more. Salesforce, probably the best-known player in town, offers plans for as little as $25 per user per month for a simple, off-the-shelf solution; $150 for a customizable version.1

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  WRITING A MARKETING PLAN

  Y OU PROBABLY SPENT WEEKS—if not months—on your business plan, to provide a holistic view of the entire organization and how it will operate and grow. It’s a prerequisite just to get a foot in the door with lenders and investors. You may have made a nod toward marketing in that document—and you may have thought that was enough. But while that’s a start, for most growing businesses it makes sense to invest in the development of a separate, more-detailed marketing plan. The plan will be your roadmap to acquiring new customers and deepening relationships with the ones you have. It will serve as a north star, making sure as conditions change and you’re making in-the-moment decisions, those decisions are grounded in a sound strategy.

  The specific objectives of any marketing plan will vary depending on the nature of the business behind it and that business’s goals. But most marketing plans consider a few fundamentals, like market and customer research, branding/positioning, competitive analysis, tactics, budget, and measurement. It’s a lot to cover, but once complete, the document will serve as a comprehensive roadmap for your company.

  For small businesses, it’s best to think of a marketing plan as a way to tell a concise story that covers all the key points of your strategy going forward. So, k
eep it brief: The best plans can be told in 15 pages or fewer. Before you begin, it could be helpful to establish three items:

  1. A completion date. A deadline you set in advance for when you want to complete your first draft of the plan. It’s important to remember that establishing an effective plan will be an iterative process. You can count on your plan changing.

  2. The responsible parties. Establish your team’s roles and responsibility. In other words, make sure you identify who is doing what and when they need it completed.

  3. Your budget. When it comes to putting together a marketing strategy, it’s critical to establish ahead of time how much do you have to spend, as that can have a major impact on the strategies you decide to implement.

  Once you have these items in hand, you’re ready to put your plan together.

  START WITH YOUR OBJECTIVES

  The first step in developing your marketing plan is to establish the marketing objectives that will accomplish your business goals, says Karen Albritton, former CEO and president of Capstrat, a North Carolina marketing agency. “If your business goal is to grow revenue, what marketing objective will accomplish this? Adding more customers? More repeat customers? Higher expenditures?”

  One of the steps you can take to create your objectives is to first create a vision statement, which is basically the long-term mission for your business that is both timeless and immediately inspiring for organization stakeholders. Every business has its own brand, so in setting your vision, you should identify the attributes of your product or service that define the brand and its long-term positioning.

  Another step that can help set objectives is to perform a SWOT analysis, where you identify the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats facing your business. By conducting such an analysis, you should identify the key insights and strategic plans that will drive your business over the next one-to-five years. This includes understanding your five Cs—the consumer, channel, company, competition, and climate—deeply enough that when you finish, you should understand your point of difference in the market and where your opportunities lie, says Deb Roberts, marketing strategy consultant at Synapse Marketing Solutions. This should inform how you set your objectives.

  Once you have your vision and a better sense of the opportunities and threats facing your business, you can begin establishing objectives. You want those objectives to be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, time bound (SMART, get it?). That will help you drive to your tangible goal, such as profitable growth or market share.

  A good plan requires simplicity, and simplicity requires focus. The key is to be realistic and specific, but also set a limited number of marketing goals related to what you think is your target market.

  CONDUCT SOME RESEARCH

  Many businesses fail to conduct the market research and market analysis that could really help them. “It’s either overlooked or perhaps small businesses feel it is a cost they can’t afford,” Albritton says. Marketing plans that don’t incorporate that kind of research, however, will almost certainly waste money. This goes back to what we talked about at the beginning of this book: better understanding who and where you customers are.

  One of your primary goals in conducting research is to set focus areas, says Albritton. “It’s easy to fragment your efforts without discipline,” she says. “So set a clear definition for the type of customers you want.” At this point you should tackle your priority geography or audience segment and begin focusing on the product and service offering you do best.

  Strategies are the how in your plan, Albritton says. This is the point where you begin to address questions such as:

  How will you position your business against other business?

  What target markets are your best prospects to achieve your goals?

  How will you price your offerings to achieve your goals?

  Strategies should also be broad enough to capture several specific tactics, says Roberts, such as “build brand awareness” or “deliver unmatched customer service.”

  “Ultimately, all work done on the business should fall into these strategies,” Roberts says. “If the work doesn’t satisfy the strategies, then it shouldn’t be done.”

  OUTLINE YOUR TACTICS

  Tactics are the what in your plan, says Albritton. Start by thinking about what you should do first to achieve the best results. That may be as simple as putting together a very good presentation. Start small and build tactics one by one. For each tactic you develop, note how it fits your areas of focus, your strategies, and your objectives.

  An example of a tactic could be, according to Roberts, to reduce days from order to delivery as a way to accomplish a strategy of “delivering unmatched customer service.” If your strategy is to build brand awareness, tactics might include out-of-home advertising or an influencer campaign. The tactics are the vehicles that will be used to communicate the brand messaging to the target audience. This is the meat of your plan—what you’ll use to build an implementation calendar.

  You should also develop a forecast for each tactic: Identify the volume of sales that you expect to earn from each marketing effort, the cost of goods sold attached to that sales volume, the budget, and any other financial figure that you expect to achieve as a result of putting your plan into motion.

  MEASURE EACH TACTIC

  In solid plans, tactics are thorough, all the way down to details concerning execution and measurements of success, such as launch dates and expected reach, says Roberts. The point is that you need to begin measuring whether the tactics are successful at delivering your objectives. You may even choose to stagger your tactics so that you can evaluate their effectiveness and learn which ones work best for your business.

  Units of measurement can range from web traffic to retail foot traffic to increases in sales volume, Albritton says. Basically, you should strive to measure anything you can track to judge whether a tactic has made a difference.

  Strategies vs. Tactics

  The meat of your plan will include your objectives, your strategy, and your tactics. Putting tactics ahead of strategy is an extremely common mistake—not just at startups, but at all kinds of businesses. You may have a gut feeling that Facebook marketing—the tactic—is where you want to put most of your energy, but you can’t be sure until you justify that decision with a strategy. The strategy has to come first—it’s the “why” that leads to each tactic.

  Here’s an example:

  Strategy

  Become a leading industry expert in the area of software for schools, ultimately using that credibility to cement relationships with district leadership and drive sales.

  Tactics

  • Influencer marketing campaign distributing software to top education bloggers

  • Content marketing including establishing a weekly blog on issues in education and contributing guest posts to high-profile education blogs

  • Booth at top education trade shows

  DEVELOP THE PLAN AND STICK TO IT

  Your plan is only as good as its implementation, so also create a plan for precisely how you are going to execute on it, Albritton advises. Where appropriate, look to partner with other organizations to help with implementation. You may be able to find interns from nearby universities, for example. “These days, even high school students have amazing talents in technology and design,” she says.

  If your plan includes advertising or events, sometimes the vendors will help with implementation. Depending on your area of business, you may also consider bartering services with other businesses. If you don’t currently have the resources available to take action, find someone who does.

  IMPLEMENT THE PLAN—BUT STAY FLEXIBLE

  Never forget that the opportunities and risks you established in your SWOT analysis might dictate that the objectives you’ve established in your plan might not happen “as planned,” Roberts says. A whole host of variables could come into play that you never considered in the beginning, such as changes in
consumer demand, channel expansion, customer contracts, competitive responses, and supply costs.

  That’s why the best advice is to rough out a plan and then put it down in detail with action items on a monthly calendar, Albritton says. Set a time to review the calendar each month, assess results, and determine next steps.

  “ Measure or it didn’t happen. CMOs face new marketing channels all the time, while overall budgets are mostly flat. This creates a need to laser focus on the ROI of all marketing activities. Today’s top-performing channel is tomorrow’s thud.”

  JEAN-LUC VANHULST, President, Write2Market

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  SETTING A BUDGET

  THERE’S NO SINGLE BUDGET figure that works for every business. How much you should spend depends on where you are in your growth and on what industry your business operates in. One commonly cited rule of thumb is that the amount you spend on marketing per year should range anywhere from 1 percent to 10 percent of sales—or possibly more, depending on several factors, including:

  • How established is your business? If no one has heard of your business yet, you may need to spend more to gain traction early on. Some experts recommend spending as much as 15 percent of sales early on.

  • What industry are you in? Every industry is different, and some are more reliant on marketing than others. You should have a sense of how much your competitors are spending.