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Day: January 11, 2023

How to Create a Strategic Marketing Plan (+Template)

Posted on by Colin Steele

It’s never too early for marketing, and a strategic marketing plan can help jumpstart your efforts.
The benefits of marketing don’t always show themselves immediately, which is why some early-stage companies push it off to the side. But the long-term benefits are significant, so the sooner you start marketing, the sooner it will pay off.
“Startups have limited resources, and founders have limited time,” says Christina Logsdon, head of marketing at equity management startup Shoobx. “But even if you spend just 10 minutes a day putting your message and unique point of view out there, it’ll start to make a difference.”
If you want to make the most of your efforts, you need to have a strategic marketing plan. Forty percent of marketers don’t formally document their strategy, but those who do are five times more likely to have success, according to CoSchedule.
You can also get a free strategic marketing plan template to help keep you on track.

What Is a Marketing Plan?

A marketing plan is a living document that describes what a business will do to build its brand, promote its products and services and ultimately generate sales. Among other things, it details the company’s messaging, target markets and personas and marketing channels.
Effective messaging differentiates your company from its competitors and communicates your offering’s unique value proposition. When you create a marketing plan, you’re ensuring consistent, on-brand messaging that aligns with the overall goals of the business.

How to Create a Marketing Plan

To create a marketing plan, include these components:

  1. messaging hierarchy
  2. thought leadership
  3. content development
  4. content distribution

Your first startup marketing plan should focus on messaging — what you want to say, who you want to say it to and how you want to say it. With drumbeat marketing, you develop a unique point of view and share it through multiple owned and earned channels — blogs, social media, press releases, etc. — until it becomes associated with your brand in your market.
All of these components and more are laid out in our strategic marketing plan template.

1. Messaging Hierarchy

Your messaging hierarchy defines exactly what your company wants to say and lays out how you plan to say it in a clear manner that is scalable and differentiated. Your hierarchy should include your:

messaging hierarchy diagram

2. Thought Leadership

Thought leadership is where the differentiated part of your messaging hierarchy comes into play. Using what you’ve developed so far, come up with two or three unique, compelling and provocative points of view (POVs) for your company to own.
At York IE, for example, two of our core POVs are:
The traditional venture capital model is broken.
and
The institutions built to help startups are failing them.
Thought leadership isn’t about getting your executives’ bylines in trade publications or having them invited on podcasts. It’s about having a unique point of view that:

  • opens your audience’s eyes to a better way of doing something; and
  • implicitly positions your company or product as the best way to help them do it.

3. Content Development

Once you know what to say, it’s time to start saying it — over and over again, until your POVs start to be associated with your company in your market.
How can you come up with different ways to say the same thing? Here are some ideas:
Audit your existing content: Do you have existing blog posts that you could update with your new perspectives and republish?
SEO research: Create content that your audience is searching for and inject your POV into it.
Filter your POV through different lenses: Each of your personas has different needs and perspectives. The same with prospects and customers in different verticals. Create tailored content that reinforces your POV in the most effective way for each audience segment.
Develop a consistent but realistic content plan. Publishing one blog post a month is better than publishing three your first week, when there’s a lot of enthusiasm, and then not doing anything for months because you’re burnt out or you’ve moved on to other priorities.

4. Content Distribution

Once you’ve nailed your messaging and point of view and started creating content to reinforce it, you need to make sure people hear it. A disciplined, focused content distribution strategy can help you do effective, consistent marketing — even with limited resources.
How?
Consider the 80/20 rule: Spend 20% of your time creating content and the other 80% of your time distributing it.
For example, you can turn an ebook into multiple blog posts. Then you can turn each of those blogs into multiple LinkedIn posts. And each of those LinkedIn posts can become Twitter threads.
Or you can cut your one-hour webinars or 30-minute podcasts into several YouTube videos, with each spawning a few short clips for social media.
It’s easy to hit Publish and move on to the next project. Build content distribution into your strategic marketing plan so it doesn’t become an afterthought.

Strategic Marketing Plan Template

The best time to start marketing is now.
Dive in with our free template.

DOWNLOAD

Why You Need a Strategic Marketing Plan

You need a strategic marketing plan to help with:

  • message testing and audience validation
  • audience building
  • demand generation
  • lead generation and sales alignment

The drumbeat marketing approach, which emphasizes strong messaging and consistency, can help you achieve these benefits more quickly.

Message Testing and Audience Validation

Engaging the audience provides founders with a good testing ground and feedback loop.

You can easily get feedback from your audience and amplify their positive responses. Test out your message, see if and how it resonates, and then double down on what works.

Having quotes from partners, community members and clients is also a great way to build confidence in your business. These testimonials may come from comments on your social media posts, responses to surveys, interview responses and other sources.

Audience Building

There’s a huge potential community for your company out there, from your friends and family to former and current coworkers, clients, prospects, analysts and investors. And we live in an interconnected world that’s surprisingly small. Regularly communicating and interacting with these individuals will help you build community engagement.

Demand Generation

Whether it’s sourcing where your ideal customers hang out, or upselling your products to them, demand generation drives interest and awareness in your company.

A strategic marketing plan can help you focus and scale these efforts, from developing your personas to creating content for them and building conversion paths to generate leads. Which brings us to…

Lead Generation and Sales Alignment

You can’t ignore sales. After all, selling your product is the ultimate goal.

“Everyone talks about the importance of sales and marketing alignment, but few actually achieve it,” says Amanda Bohne, a chief marketing officer in the software industry. “Especially at a startup, even if you have alignment one quarter, maintaining that alignment can be easier said than done when everything is moving at warp speed.”

A marketing plan can help create alignment with sales and ensure you’re delivering qualified leads through an effective and scalable process.

How to Execute on Your Marketing Plan

Once you’ve created a marketing plan, establish a monthly cadence of activities to bring it to life.

Content Development

Create a content calendar. Plan out what you’re going to produce, who’s going to produce it and how you’re going to distribute it. Your calendar should include all the content you plan to create, from thought leadership and search-friendly blog posts to social media posts, news announcements and more.

From here, you can rely on other internal teams, as well as external third parties, to validate your messaging.

Sales Enablement and Demand Generation

One of the first things on your calendar should be cornerstone content — an ebook, white paper or other longform piece focused on the number-one thing your company wants to be known for. Not only can you use this for demand generation and lead generation, but it also makes for strong sales collateral.

Public Relations

Press releases are another type of content you can use to deliver and reinforce your POVs to your audience. What news do you have coming up that would lend itself to an announcement?

Press releases don’t have to be reserved for major news; you can write them for product and feature launches, new hires, new funding, customer and partner wins and even company growth and momentum.

You can also pitch the media, not only on your announcements but also on your thought leadership. Find outlets that will publish your content or interview your executives for news and trend stories.

Analyst and Influencer Relations

Similarly, you can conduct outreach to third-party firms and start building the relationships that may lead to your company getting exposed to their audiences. Identify relevant analyst and influencer targets and lean on your marketing plan to pitch them on why they and their clients need to know about you.

What Is a Strategic Marketing Plan Template?

A strategic marketing plan template is a tool you can use to develop strategies and tactics that will help you achieve your business goals in accordance with established best practices. It helps you focus on your core objectives as you create your marketing plan.

If you don’t want to create a marketing plan from scratch, don’t let that stop you from building your brand. Click here to download the strategic marketing plan template from our Fuel platform and start consistently getting your message out there.

5 Reasons Why You Need a Marketing Plan

Posted on by Colin Steele

At various points in my career, I’ve found myself asking, “Why do I need a marketing plan?”

After all, I’ve been working in content and marketing for a while. I have a pretty good grasp of what I’m doing. I can just wing it, right?

Wrong!

As you tackle more projects and grow your team, the importance of a marketing plan becomes more and more apparent. I’ll explain why in this article. But first, let’s take a step back.

What Is a Marketing Plan?

A marketing plan is a document that explains how a business will promote its brand, products and services to drive sales. It includes information about the company’s messaging, target audience and marketing channels.

By creating a marketing plan, businesses can ensure that they’re messaging consistently and in a way that’s aligned with their overall goals.

Why Is a Marketing Plan Important?

A marketing plan is important because it can help you test and validate your message, better manage your resources and maintain a clear, consistent voice. It also serves as a way for you to grow your audience and align your efforts with overall business goals.

Marketing Plan Template

The best time to start marketing is now.
Dive in with our free template.

DOWNLOAD

1. Message Testing and Validation

A marketing plan forces you to focus. What are you going to say, and who are you going to say it to?

If, after a certain amount of time spent delivering your message to your target audience, you aren’t seeing the desired results, you’ll know it’s time for a new approach. And you have two options:

  • Try the same message with a new audience; or
  • Try a new message with the same audience.

Without a marketing plan, your options wouldn’t be so cut and dried. You’d probably be putting out a lot of different messages to a lot of different audiences, and it would be really hard to identify the root cause of your problem.

But when you have a plan guiding you, it’s a lot easier to iterate on your message and test your audience until you find the right fit. Which leads to the next point…

2. Efficient Resource Management

Marketing teams at startups are small and don’t have a lot of resources. There should always be room to experiment, but at the same time, they can’t afford to keep throwing things at the proverbial wall and hoping something sticks.

Having a plan helps ensure you’re identifying marketing activities that work and doubling down on them to drive your business forward.

3. Clarity and Consistency

A key component of your marketing plan should be a messaging hierarchy, which forces founders and their executive teams to get their company story out of their heads and commit it to writing.

By clearly articulating this core set of values company-wide, you’re creating a strong storytelling foundation. You’re ensuring that everyone is saying the same thing and speaking in the same language. And that makes it so much easier for customers to understand what you do and why they should buy from you.

4. Audience Growth

Audience growth is a natural byproduct of consistently distributing a proven message to a well-defined market — an approach we call drumbeat marketing. By creating helpful, unique content that’s optimized for search, you can drive more organic traffic to your website. By delivering your message in new ways over and over again on social media, you can attract more followers.

Your marketing plan can also lay out more explicit strategies and tactics for growing your audience, such as paid social media and other forms of advertising, link building, guest posting and more.

5. Business Alignment

As a marketer it’s easy to get caught up in the latest trends, tools and platforms. And again, while it’s important to keep up with what’s going on in the industry, you only have so many hours in the day. The core of your work should be dedicated to activities that align with your company’s overall goals.

A marketing plan articulates those goals and marketing’s role in achieving them. If you’re focused on increasing organic traffic, but none of that traffic is converting into leads, and lead generation is one of your company’s main goals, that’s a problem.

Create Your Marketing Plan

A marketing plan can help you test and validate your message, efficiently manage resources, develop a consistent voice, grow your audience and achieve alignment with broader business goals.

Now that you understand the importance of a marketing plan, it’s time to create your own. Get started with our free template.

The Complete Guide to Repurposing Content

Posted on by Colin Steele

Repurposing content is a great way to maximize the value you get out of the ebooks, blog posts, webinars and podcasts you create.

Creating a marketing plan lays the foundation for your growth, but consistently producing content and telling your story is how you actually build your brand. By repurposing, you can do this more efficiently and effectively than if you were creating every piece of content individually.

What is Content Repurposing?

Content repurposing, also known as content recycling or content reusing, is a marketing strategy that emphasizes presenting existing content in new formats and distributing it through multiple channels. Repurposing content enables creators to maximize the value of their work and reach new audiences.

In this guide, we’ll cover the benefits of repurposing content, how to do it and which content types are the best candidates. We’ll also share some real-world examples. But first, here’s a story that illustrates the power of repurposing:

In 2021, my first year at York IE, we published more than 150 blog posts. It takes a lot of work to come up with that many content ideas and make them a reality. Our strategy was basically, “identify keywords that align with our core messaging and try to rank for as many of them as possible.” We were creating every post in a vacuum — in addition to handling the one-off posts that other employees were creating, writing press releases, etc. It just wasn’t sustainable.

When you produce so much content, it’s hard to give any one piece all the attention it deserves — from creation and optimization to promotion and distribution — because you have to move on to the next piece.

The next year, we approached things differently. We focused on creating two types of pillar content: monthly webinars and templates. Then we took those and repurposed them into additional content (blog posts, native LinkedIn posts, YouTube and social videos, etc.).

We ended up publishing 35 fewer blog posts for the year — about a 25% decrease. But our annual traffic actually increased by 45%, and our organic traffic more than doubled.

Benefits of Repurposing Content

The benefits of repurposing content include:

  • greater credibility;
  • broader appeal;
  • efficient, organized content creation; and
  • better ROI.

Greater Credibility

It’s so hard to keep your messaging aligned when you’re creating a bunch of standalone pieces of content. But if you take long-form content, such as a video presentation or podcast, and you slice and dice it into smaller pieces, such as blog posts and Twitter threads, they will all have consistent messaging because they all flow from the same source.

When you deliver a consistent point of view to your audience in new ways over and over again, you begin to become known for that point of view in your market — the ultimate goal of our drumbeat marketing philosophy.

Broader Appeal

I’m a big social media person. I don’t read a lot of newsletters, but I love scrolling through LinkedIn looking for new ideas and advice. Lots of people love newsletters, though. Some prefer blogs. Others immerse themselves in podcasts and videos.

If you only publish blog posts, you’re limiting your audience to people who like to read blogs. By repurposing content, you can make your messaging more accessible to a larger audience.

Efficient, Organized Content Creation

Content marketing involves a lot of moving pieces. No matter how organized you are, there are things out of your control. Writers miss deadlines. Subject matter expert interviews fall through. Approval emails go unanswered.

And the more individual pieces of content you plan, the more these issues compound, throwing your calendar into disarray.

When you plan one large piece of content with repurposing in mind from the start, you can eliminate a lot of these problems. There’s more upfront work that goes into producing an hourlong webinar or a 5,000-word ebook, but once the event is over or the ebook is published, you have everything you need to start creating more content.

For example, last year we turned one webinar into two YouTube videos, two social video clips, two blog posts and six LinkedIn posts. It was July, and I was scheduling complete, approved, high-quality content to be published in November.

Better ROI

Repurposing content is more efficient. It ensures every piece gets the promotion it deserves, because distribution is baked into the process. If you can create less content and get more traffic, why wouldn’t you?

Which Content Should I Repurpose?

You can repurpose any type of content. Break up large pieces and turn them into a series of smaller posts. Or take a bunch of smaller pieces and turn them into a big, premium product.

Here are some of my favorite types of content to repurpose:

Large Written Pieces

Ebooks, white papers and other longform content are great candidates for repurposing. A 5,000 word ebook can easily become five or 10 blog posts. And longform content is usually organized into distinct sections or chapters, which means it’s easy to decide how to break it up.

From there, add the necessary context to each section so it can stand on its own, include links between the new pieces, and you’re good to go.

Longform Multimedia

Webinars and podcasts can yield multiple smaller pieces of multimedia and written content. The key is to plan for repurposing in advance so you’re not poring over transcripts, trying to figure out how to reuse what was said.

Internal Communications

Look inside your company’s own walls. Internal communications and other business documents can be a great jumping-off point (or at least serve as inspiration) for external marketing content.

In the past, we’ve turned a due diligence questionnaire response into a blog post and turned part of an investor update into a LinkedIn post. We’ve even taken transcripts of team strategy calls and used them to create thought leadership content.

It goes without saying that you can’t just take these documents, cut and paste them into your content management system and publish them. They often contain confidential or sensitive material that you can’t share with the world, and they probably need additional context for external audiences.

But they usually contain broader insights that you can share with your audience. Take advantage of this opportunity.

Old, Successful Content

Do you have a tweet or LinkedIn post that performed well this month? It will probably perform well next month, too.

You don’t want to say the exact same thing in the exact same format, but small tweaks and changes in presentation can keep your content feeling fresh while hammering home the same overall point.

And don’t worry that you’ll turn off your audience by repeating yourself. Repetition is the only way to break through the noise and become known for something.

How to Repurpose Content

Here are some of the best ways to repurpose content:

  1. Turn ebooks and white papers into multiple blog posts.
  2. Use blog sections as LinkedIn posts and Twitter threads.
  3. Break webinars and podcasts up into YouTube videos.
  4. Cut YouTube sound bites into social videos.
  5. Write blogs based on audio transcripts.
  6. Create social graphics from charts.
  7. Package up related blogs as guides.

There are numerous ways you can do it, depending on the type of content. For an example, here’s how we go about repurposing content from our webinars, and how you can turn your webinars into a content engine too:

1. Plan in Advance

Come up with questions that align with your content goals (targeting specific keyword phrases, building thought leadership, etc.).

2. Turn One Large Video into Multiple Smaller Videos

Cut the videos of each answer and put them on YouTube. Use the question as the title if it’s something people ask or search for a lot.

3. Turn the Videos into Blog Posts

Clean up and optimize the transcripts of each answer and publish them on your blog. Embed the related YouTube video in each post.

4. Create Social Assets

Cut the best sound bites into 30- to 60-second social video clips. Put the best quotes on graphics with the speaker’s headshot.

5. Turn the Blogs into Social Posts

Break each blog post up into smaller LinkedIn posts or Twitter threads. Publish them alongside the social videos and graphics. Link back to the blog.

Content Repurposing Examples

York IE CTO Mike Veilleux gave a webinar last year on the path to product market fit. Following the steps above, we created two YouTube videos:

What Is Minimum Viable Product (MVP) and Audience (MVA)?

How to Position Your Startup’s Product

We then turned each video into a blog post:

And we created multiple LinkedIn posts, such as this one:

York IE LinkedIn post on product positioning repurposed from a blog post

Always Be Repurposing

Repurposing content doesn’t have to be a huge process.

It’s not always about planning an e-book or a podcast or a webinar and how you’re going to break that down into blog posts and then how you’re going to break those blog posts into LinkedIn posts and Twitter threads.

Don’t get me wrong: That’s very valuable. But it takes a lot of work.

Sometimes, though, content repurposing is as simple as identifying content created for one purpose and using it for another.

For example, last year Matt Shapiro, York IE director of investments, interviewed all the founders in our most recent investment cohort over Zoom. His initial idea was to include the videos in the update packet that we share with our investors.

But we could see the videos had more value, for a wider audience. So we posted them on YouTube:

And then we realized that the founders’ answers to the question “Why did you choose to work with York IE?” provided some amazing social proof. So we clipped those, added titles and captions and rolled them out on social media:

What makes or breaks a startup? It’s the people!

That’s why we’re so excited to invest in @pieropoli and the entire Evorra team. pic.twitter.com/uJEig6WlvU

— York IE (@yorkgrowth) August 17, 2022

Always keep your eyes peeled for new ways to use existing content. Once you know how to repurpose content, you’ll see opportunities everywhere.