ESYB2 044 - The Marketing Plan of Your Business Plan
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[00:00:00] Now let's discuss the marketing plan section of your business plan. It's one of the most important sections because it has to do with your business growth, which is the lifeline of your business. And if your marketing plan is weak or non existent, it typically leads to either rejection by investors because they see you're not ready or failure of your actual business, because there's not going to be a business growth.

And most first time entrepreneurs, when they start out. They have a marketing strategy that reads something like this. Social media promotion on Instagram, Facebook, they're gonna promote through their website, business cards and flyers. Well, that is not a marketing plan. That is just something that everybody sort of repeats almost identically.

Because marketing should be specific to the nuances of your business and strategies that are chosen must be specifically the most effective ones for your situation. So you have to identify what's more important for you, branding, traffic, sales, building an audience. I know you'll say, of [00:01:00] course all of them, but usually there's one that's more important than others.

For small businesses, usually sales is the most important because that's how you keep the lights on, that's how you keep your business running, and then everything else falls into place. So you have to identify what you're after, and then find how to accomplish that. So let's look at an example. Of my business plan and see how I handle that.

Here is the marketing plan for my mobile apps. It starts with a UVP, unique value proposition, which is essentially your differentiation and how used to going to stand out in my case, it's lofty. I said, it's the most helpful apps for entrepreneurs with software and personalized help. And how am I going to promote it?

There's a lot of ways you can promote your business and entrepreneurs actually typically get lost in the volume of strategies. Should they do Twitter? Should they do Facebook? Should they do Instagram? But usually what happens is there is a few most effective strategies that you must identify. In the case of mobile apps, most apps are discovered [00:02:00] through app store search.

So I list that first and then some apps get publicity like my apps got publicity. And some apps go viral from people who are using it, sharing the app. That's what happened in my case. And then, a few mediocre strategies that didn't work too well, but I listed them anyway, were promotion from my website, Google search, because sometimes people search Google and the apps come up, but most of the time apps come up when people search app stores.

And I promote it on my YouTube channel. Now, for the reach of my YouTube channel, which has millions of views, I didn't get proportionally that many downloads. So this turned out to be not the best marketing channel. And of course you can run ads for most apps. Ads are not a good idea because you end up spending more money than you end up earning.

So I put that there just as an option, but it's not a big option. Most effective strategies for me were these three. App store search, publicity, virality from user sharing. But also what was really important is Long term user engagement of the app that has to do [00:03:00] with the app quality and my customer support that I provided for most businesses that's fantastic if that can be present because actually with customer support you sometimes even upsell more.

And then I added typical social media platforms as the last channel. In my case, they were not effective. Then I started getting into branding for most people. They really love their branding. They're like, my name is so and so and such and such. I picked my name and I thought about it for three months or whatever, but the.

Name hardly matters often, and sometimes it's something random that nobody understands. But, what really makes your branding is the quality of your product when people use it. If it's not good, they associate your product with not good. But if it's good, then they associate it with being good. So actually, it's the quality of your product that directs your branding.

And of course, sometimes when you rank in App Store Search number one, that gives you immediately credibility. That gives [00:04:00] you a slight boost in your branding. And also having actually a lot of users using the app. That's also branding. Like, who cares if you have a logo that nobody is seeing or using?

Whereas even if you have a confusing name, like half the brands out there, they have a confusing name, but they're getting a lot of users. Well, that name is becoming a name. I mean, Google, there's no reason that Google should be a brand. Amazon, there's no reason that Amazon should be a brand really. They just.

We're good products that got a lot of usage and then they became brands. So sometimes you make the brand that's more practical way to think about it. And of course, publicity, if you get on any kind of news or podcasts or blogs, people mention you, people talk about you, that actually builds up your brand as well.

And in my case, I was able to boost the brand of my apps with my personal brand. And sometimes they reinforce each other. The founder's personal brand might help the company's brand and vice versa. And for sales, I don't have direct sales, so I have an A here. Usually sales would come [00:05:00] from direct outreach by your company to potential clients or potential clients searching, maybe Google, maybe something else for.

Some kind of product or service that you might sell in this case. I don't have that. So it's any, but those are typically the sales channel. And this is essentially the most important parts of your marketing plan. You can make growth projections, things like that. But when you're just starting out, I mean, these will be very random, but the most important thing is that you accurately and correctly choose.

The most important marketing strategy is because if you pursue wrong ones, your business is not going to do well. But if you pursue the right ones and you pursue them correctly, then your business will do well. So really that's, what's important.

