How to design a marketing plan that helps you make an impact
Marketing is the promise we make to the world. The promise of making a change for the better.
Who are you?
Why should I care? In this busy world with short attention spans, we need to quickly and clearly communicate who we are and what we do.
Crafting a single sentence that does that will help us improve our messaging in all our marketing efforts. We're going to craft that sentence as the first step in designing our marketing plan.
What are you?
Are you an app? A platform? A community? A book? A drink? That simple, don’t be clever with it. Cleverness can lead to confusion and as Donald Miller says, “If you confuse you lose.”
What do you do?
What problem does your offering solve for your customer?
The main problem exercise
A simple exercise you can do to define the main problem you solve is to jot down all the problems your offering solves. Then read through them and choose the most important one, or the reason why you created this offering.
Mapping
Now that you’ve defined the main problem, it’s time to map out how it’s done. Don’t go into detail, keep it as simple as possible (3-5 steps)
Now look back at your map and answer the question that most applies to you:
- What is the step that makes you different from other offerings out there?
- What’s the most important step people take to solve the problem with your solution?
We'll dig deeper into the core of the problem and see how that helps us position us in front of our customers in an upcoming post.
Putting everything together
Now that we’ve got our pieces of the puzzle, it’s time to put them together.
Here’s a plug and play formula to create your defining sentence.
[Brand name] is a/an [what you are] that helps you [problem you solve] with [unique or most important step]
You can play around with the wording until it feels right for what you do. Keep in mind to avoid cleverness as it usually confuses people.
This is simple but crucial. Startups tend to overcomplicate what they are.
A super clear and simple sentence that anyone can understand will let you get the word out there. This will help people who are already looking for something like you. It’s part one of the foundation we need to build our marketing plan.
Next up we’ll define who you’re for, your ideal customer.