How to Create a Marketing Plan (by an ex-Google PMM)

hey guys I'm currently in Taiwan right now so I don't really have a YouTube setup but hopefully you can bear with this in this video I'll be showing you how you can create a marketing plan from scratch a marketing plan is a plan to Market your company and your services to your customers at scale it's a little different from my go-to market plan and that it's more strategic and it covers a longer time frame between 3 months and 6 months a goto Market plan on the other hand is more focused on marketing a specific product

or asset a marketing plan should focus on doing two things one it should give your stakeholders a high level overview of how you want to do marketing and secondly it should help you prioritize what are the most important marketing levers that you can pull to drive the most impact the marketing plan should cover one who your customers are what the customer Journey looks like two your marketing strategy this includes your existing marketing channels your marketing approach your assumptions and the main levers that you want to pull and finally execution which includes priorities for that quarter

your kpis and the resources that you need to deliver on the plan so for today's exercise I'll be using a startup accelerator based in Southeast Asia as my example their goal is to get as many startup Founders to apply to the startup accelerator as possible so they can increase the likelihood of finding a startup founder that would generate a positive Roi for their investors you can think of them as y combinator but they're based in Southeast Asia so without further Ado I'll go ahead and open up Google Docs and walk you through how I would

create a marketing plan for the startup accelerator we have Google Docs open let's build our marketing plan we call this startup incubator marketing plan and then we'll call this startup accelerator accelerate X the first thing that we're going to do is list out the timeline and Target goal so the timeline here will be 3 months and then the target goal would be 1,000 applications the target audience would be the next thing that we want to list out the target audience here are aspiring Founders I think there are three types of aspiring Founders one is entrepreneur

college students the second is early to midc Career professional to be more specific we'll call them early to midcareer corporate professionals and then finally we have fun employed and GAP your professionals these are the three buckets of aspiring Founders let's go ahead and list out their pain points desires and interest so for entrepreneur college students they really don't like structure so they might not even like school or the idea of working on 9 to5 corporate job afterwards they want to build and create create stuff and they are interested in startups so that is the first

group the second group are early to make career professionals they're tired of the 9 to-5 grind they want to build something and be their own boss so a little different from college students what they're looking for is to be independent and work on their own business they're interested in working on site projects then transitioning for time they might still value the financial stability of the job and but they're interested in working on side projects and then potentially turning those side projects into full-time businesses and finally the fun employed and GAP year professionals these are people

who are already dabbling in projects they need support and resources to get to the next level and they might be interested in funding these could be people who are taking break in between work or people who got laid off from work and they're just working on their own thing their main pain point is finance they want to be able to raise money and pursue what is it that they want to do next let's go ahead and list out the customer Journey from the founders P perspective this is important because as a product marketer you need

to put yourself in the shoes of the customer and understand the full journey and where your solution might play a role so the first thing is the not happy with their current situation and because of that they want to be their own boss and build something from there they might say Okay I want to do some research and the way that they're going to learn more is by watching on YouTube videos and reading articles and after doing research and self-education they're now inspired after they get inspired they want to find a problem space and build

a prototype from there they might find that there's a mismatch in what they're trying to build and their skill set for for example they might be more business focused and they want to find a technical co-founder so in this case they might be thinking I need to find someone to work on the Prototype with they might check out some entrepreneur events to network and find their co-founder once they found their team they will want to work on this full-time because they feel like they have the confidence of knowing what problem to solve and what the

team skills they currently have to be able to solve that and I'm going to apply to a startup accelerator and get funding this is the customer Journey from inception to decision first they have the pain point of not being happy with their current situation whether that's in school corporate 9 to5 or just not being able to earn income the second is their escape or solution which is I want to be my own boss and build something and then the next stage after that is is research and education a lot of this is finding out if

the startup route is for them and then if they feel like it is for them then we reach inspiration and action so this is when they're invested and going down this path we have team formation and networking so this is the part where they start getting serious about building a team and trying to find people to work with finally they have decision which is I'm going to go ahead and start a startup this is where accelerate X comes in which is providing the startup with resources and guidance once we've understood the target audience and customer

Journey we want to list out our existing marketing channels let's say that accelerate X has a YouTube channel and now we have 1,000 subscribers and then let's say we have a prominent Venture Capital Partner and he has a LinkedIn page with 12,000 followers and we also have our company LinkedIn with uh 7,000 followers and then finally we have an email list of 6,000 subscribers for each of these we can take a guess at who are these subscribers or followers so for YouTube I think these are people who are interested in entrepreneurship for VC they're interested

Ed in um Partners POV which is point of view and they are interested in networking with the Venture Capital list and then we have the company LinkedIn these people who follow us are interested in jobs and opportunities and finally we have our email list which I think is the most impactful these are people who are are very interested in entrepreneurship from here we'll list out what are my marketing approach I have three principles so the first principle is optimize what's worked well in the past so if it's not broken don't fix it the second thing

is stop what hasn't worked well and then the third thing is test new potential channels next we'll list out marketing assumptions so these are just assumptions that we can make based on our existing channels one assumption I'm going to make is that content and emails are the main drivers for applications I think people are interested in educational content and give us their emails when they feel like they get value from us and then it is through the emails that we're able to convert them into applications the second assumption I'm going to make is that we

haven't experimented much with influencers and Community collapse the third assumption is that people apply last minute people want to be the most ready when they apply they want to make sure they have everything in their application and hence they try to delay and um apply at the deadline now that we have the marketing approach assumptions and channels we can connect the dots let's go ahead and list out our marketing levers the levers are marketing channels that we want to leverage to drive applications I think the big ones are going to be content and email the

next one would be influencer and Community collaps the last one would be the application structure when it comes to content video is very powerful because it's the most engaging format and especially short form video as well as long form interview Style videos the first one I can think of is create videos that educate and entertain one is we can do Street interviews and another one will be starter stories we can have Street interviews with Founders and investors so these will be fun walking side by side with Founders and investors on what makes a startup successful

with startup stories I think it could be fun and relatable startup stories which resonate with a specific founder Persona so for example a CS Dropout with $100 and bank to $100,000 and monthly recurring Revenue Street interviews these will be short form vertical videos and starter stories which are more long form videos the main element is that we not only educating but also entertaining through St interviews it'll be more engaging when you have two people walk side by side and then you have the interview going on and then with the starter stories this is a great

way to be more specific and um talking about your Founders that resonates with one of the three groups that we outlined here the next thing is to create email drip campaigns that specifically either remove blockers or encourage buyers to action what do I mean by removing blockers is because I think when startup Founders apply they have some impostor syndrome so we want to address those concerns and then secondly encourage bias to action we want to empower them to apply so that they apply versus not even applying because they're scared so there's two ways to do

this first we can think about doing startup Ms so this could be an email series on the most common misconceptions about startups that's preventing people from applying so one myth could be that you absolutely need a co-founder to apply to a startup accelerator we can share examples of successful solo founder or solo Founders who found co-founders later on that could be a myth hey I need a co-founder if I don't have one I shouldn't apply but what we can do is say hey there are people who started startups alone did a great job or maybe

people who started startups alone initially and then they found a co-founder later on and this should not be preventing you from applying to our startup accelerator that is one example the next email drip campaign could be startup Challenge and this could be a 7-Day challenge for the email subscribers to build a prototype validate the idea and then the call to action will be to share their findings and apply to accelerate X we can position this as like a pre-application boot camp before you even apply to Startup accelerator we invite you to do this Challenge and

see if this is something that you would want to do for time and as part of this we can also include a Founder quiz to help them better understand what kind of Founders they are and what kind of problems they should be trying to solve for this would also help them save time going after bad ideas this is what I think could be the most impactful on the email and content side street interviews starter stories videos and then startup Ms and challenge email drip campaigns for in influencer and Community collabs there's two things we can

do here we can partner with lifestyle or career influencers the other is collaborate with University and business type communities the reason I said lifestyle is because there's more reach and career is more specific we can invite the influencer to share how they built their business and our platform could be YouTube or LinkedIn I think many of the same Concepts would apply to startups because influencers also have to think about growth marketing monetization next we can think about Partnerships once we've invited them we can ask the influencers to plug accelerate X in their videos because we've

built a relationship right the key part here is we want to build a relationship first by inviting them on our platform and then we make the ask which is we want to ask to plug acceler X in their videos we can even have them share referral links with their followers we would pay them based on every app referral we can also have our venture capitalist offered to go on their channel to provide content value to Their audience this would give us more exposure that's how I would approach collapse with influencers next is how can we

collaborate with University and business Tech communities we can do community plugs we can do this by creating a brand ambassador program where ambassadors learn than share with their communities we can offer a small fixed monthly amount or a number of mentions on social plus a referral bonus for each app we can find the people who hold positions of leadership offer them the opportunity to learn about acceler X and become a brand ambassador we can pay them uh a monthly amount to mention us on their social and we can pay them for every single application referral

the final thing is virtual events so we can say co-host Zoom Workshop events with the above organizations we can also do one super day event with speakers in the morning and networking in the afternoon actually why don't we just say live event virtual event we can co-host an educational Workshop event and rely on the organizations to bring traffic and then we will provide the content value that is pretty much it for collaborations the next step is application structure people apply last minute and this is the case with colleges as well many people apply last minute

because they feel like they're not ready yet so what we can do here is we can encourage early applications we have a an early app deadline and a regular deadline and then we can message the early app deadline as a preliminary deadline where if people don't get in they get moved to the regular deadline this way people don't feel like they're sacrificing their potential by applying to the early deadline instead we can just say the early deadline is an additional pass that you get if you want to see how you stack up in terms of

your application strength this way we encourage people to take action apply earlier and if they don't get in they can get feedback on how they can improve their application to hopefully get in during the regular deadline um we can also better anticipate how many apps what going to get versus waiting until last minute now I have a pretty fairly complete initial marketing plan which highlights the plan of action for the next 3 months to achieve the most important marketing kpi which is 1,000 applications in three months we have our target audience we have the three

different personas we mapped out the customer Journey from inception to decision we know what our existing marketing channels are we have a clear marketing strategy we have marketing assumptions with marketing levers there's content and email influencer and community collabs and application structure we have quite a few things that we would want to do like Street interviews starter stories email drip campaigns influencer collabs community collabs and application structure these are all marketing levers that we can pull to drive applications The Next Step would be to map these levers back to the customer Journey so this way

we can see where the levers fall in context of the customer Journey from there we can prioritize what we think are the most impactful projects that we want to accomplish for that quarter because obviously it'll be hard to do all of these in three months so we want to prioritize the most impactful ones and finally we would list out the metrics deliverables and the marketing support needed and if you want to see the full marketing plan check it out on pmm school.com uh where I share more in-depth tutorials on how you can do product marketing

and the workplace so there you have it that's how you can create a marketing plan from scratch if you want to see the full marketing plan check out the product marketing school at pmm school.com and if you found value from this video please make sure to give it a like and let me know in the comments Below on what other types of content you want to see till next time see you [Music]