All, Early Stage Startups, Marketing Strategy

Magnetude Blog Series: A First Time Founder's Guide to Building a Marketing Plan (Step I)

Welcome to Magnetude Mondays, where every Monday morning for the next eight weeks, we’ll share with you how to create a realistic and executable marketing plan for your early stage venture. Step one is all about defining your business objectives.

Step I: Establish Your Business Objectives

While you likely already know your venture’s business goals (to get as many profitable customers as possible, of course!), being explicit about what you want to focus on this coming quarter will help you channel your efforts and resources accordingly. You should summarize in a few bullet points the activities most important to your current and near-term success using the questions below to help work through the priorities.

Key Questions to ask yourself when defining your objectives:

  • What are the most critical elements to our success and viability for the next 3-6 months?
  • How many new clients do we need to bring on board before our next major milestone? How long do we expect that to take given our sales cycle?
  • If we only had 5 hours per week to build our business, how would we spend that time?
  • What are the hurdles our sales leaders will face in moving prospects through the sales cycle?
  • What should our customer acquisition process look like?

Once documented, remove any objectives that are not related to marketing or business development. With the handful of objectives you’re left with (ideally no more than three or four), brainstorm ideas on how you could accomplish each. Jot these down, and save them for later. Don’t worry if you don’t have many to start—subsequent posts in the Magnetude Monday series will review specific marketing tactics to consider.

Need an example to help get you started? Here’s an example of marketing-oriented business objectives, loosely based on an enterprise IT software startup. The venture had recently completed their beta tests with roughly a dozen trials, they had just brought on their first paying customer and were getting ready to officially launch into the market.

Example 1

Visit us next Monday when we talk about “Planning Your Budget & Resource Allocation” and follow us on Twitter to stay up to date with the release of our latest blog posts.

​If you are a step ahead and already have a pressing marketing need, please reach out and contact us.