If you’re a technical founder just getting started on your first few “hello world” marketing artifacts—a blog post, a website, and some social posting–the idea of a marketing plan might seem comically premature. But I’m here to argue (as someone generally allergic to plans) that a simple-as-rocks, basic marketing plan will help you produce more consistent, better output and grow your business faster.

In this post I’ll go through why early stage technical founders should have a marketing plan, ways to do it that will actually help your business, and a simple template you can use to get started.

Why you should, actually, have a marketing plan

The basic reason to have a marketing plan is that it will help you hit your goals. If you’re trying to get to 6 onboarded design partners by the end of the year, these wandering souls will not miraculously find their way to your product. Growth has mechanics, and marketing plans explicitly engage with those mechanics. 

Working backwards to figure out how many emails you need to send, how many website visitors you need, and how many blog posts you need to write is going to make it much more likely that you actually get those 6 onboarded design partners. Think of it like an engineering pipeline.

There are some other good reasons to have a marketing plan. One of them is that these plans, when done well, can actually motivate you to create more consistent, better marketing. In most of my work with founders, this manifests itself in getting more stuff–blog posts, events, changelogs, whatever–out. I often say that the biggest marketing problem for most early stage technical founders isn’t bad marketing, it’s not enough marketing. Most technical founders simply do not produce consistently enough to have a meaningful impact (often the case for positioning, messaging, and marketing overall). 

To help assuage this, marketing plans I put together have rudimentary but explicit ideas for how much stuff we’ll need to create to hit numbers:

This way, if you miss your goal for something like website traffic, you can ask “well, did we write any blog posts this month?” If you didn’t, that’s a good place to start for why it was a bad month. Most technical founders I work with have, in some shape or form, a fear of (or allergy to) writing or producing content consistently. This can help you get over it. 

Speaking of producing stuff–marketing plans are a great way to figure out what your hiring needs are going to be for the next 12 months. If you’re past your first few design partners and are trying to scale things up, a plan will make it overtly clear that it’s time to hire your first marketer (and perhaps: what kind). Marketing as a function also makes a disproportionately high use of contractors and agencies–your plan can help you realize it’s time to bring in a ghostwriter, paid ads consultant, or whatever else fits your unique business.

Marketing plans are also useful because your board will love them. At the early stages, they most likely won’t care about the specific numbers, or whether you hit them exactly or not. But they will be psyched that you have set concrete goals and are working backwards towards what you need to do to get there.

There are more reasons but…hopefully you get the picture.

A good early stage marketing plan: simple, inputs and outputs

Many founders don’t do marketing plans because they think they need to be these convoluted, hyper-specific concoctions. But they do not. 

Here is the template I work from when creating marketing plans with the companies I work with. It has only 3 outputs:

1. Website visitors: where your marketing will be driving people.
2. Signups / Demos: whichever fits the way you’re going to market. 
3. Customers: aligned with your sales plan. The whole point of this thing.

That’s it. You are an early stage startup and your business is simple, so your marketing plan should be too. These are the 3 things that matter, and can help individually diagnose your funnel. Consider a few examples:

• You are not getting any website traffic: probably because you’re not producing enough stuff. And if you are, it’s probably because it’s not very good.
• You have a lot of demos, but very few customers: either you’re inaccurately marketing your product, or you’re doing a bad job of closing customers (which is also a marketing problem).
• You have a lot of website visitors, but very few signups: you either have a bad website, or you’re driving the wrong type of traffic to it (people who aren’t interested in your product). 

These numbers are also tightly integrated with sales, as all early marketing should be. The whole point of marketing is to get customers, so your plan should end with a customer number. 

The second side of what I think makes a good marketing plan is inputs. Marketing plans that are just about your top line numbers will not motivate or help you accomplish your goals. Everyone’s inputs are different, but these are some of the ones I’ll usually include:

If you need 1,500 site visitors this month to get to 5 demos and 1 customer, how many blog posts do you need to write to drive that traffic? Should you run an event? Maybe get that changelog off the backburner? Having an inputs section in your plan helps motivate these excellent questions. Like I said earlier, the number 1 reason that technical founders don’t hit their marketing goals is that they did not do enough of the things needed to hit them.

If you follow these ideas, you’ll avoid your marketing plan being some tedious bureaucratic artifact.

Instead, it will actually help you grow. And you can make a copy of my marketing plan template here.