Beyond Business as Usual: Building a 2024 Marketing Plan for Real Change

2024 is going to be a challenging year for tech startups.?

Although we’re seeing many PR announcements on funding rounds for so many early-stage start-ups (shout out to all of the amazing startups that raised funds recently! Great to see your success and contribution to the Israeli tech ecosystem, whatever vertical you’re active in. We will win with our merit and grit!). Having said that- your (too frequently one-woman show, Jane of all trades, full stack wonder woman) marketing team will have to settle with (much) less (budgets, resources) and deliver more, each company and their growth goals.

How to NOT create your marketing plan for 2024

Here are the 5 biggest mistakes to make when planning your annual marketing plan. Use this ultimate guide to crash and burn your marketing ship (Orrrrrr- do the complete opposite, and take a look at the tips!).

1. Ignore previous years' metrics. Simply don’t look at last year's results. Instead: If you don’t have metrics for comparison, do some research with industry benchmarks, and even better- with specific vertical metrics of success.?
2. Don’t utilize the feedback from all the liaising departments- sales, product, and CS. Instead: as the active marketing function, as a team, or as an individual, you operate as the support system for anything customer-facing. The insights the sales, customer success, pre-sales engineers, and product- are crucial for marketing success. Utilize the input they provide, and this in turn will help you fine-tune and direct your efforts to the areas that need amendment or rethinking.?
3. Base your marketing plan on external advice- create a full-blown plan that incorporates everything that everyone else expects you to do, and include all the things that anyone around the office offers as a marketing idea (you know what I mean, conversations that usually start with “we should be doing… our competitors are doing, why aren’t we doing…”). Instead- focus. Find 5-6 pillars (or any other number of pillars that fits your current resources) to focus your attention on and test (see point #5).?
4. Overpromise your potential achievements. This will lead to an inflated plan, wasted energy, and a lot of anger and anxiety around underdelivering, which will trickle down to your team members who’ll feel the pressure of underperformance and will start questioning their professionality and leadership. Instead:..... (and this is a general piece of advice!) always advocate efforts and manage expectations. If you’re expectations and projections are dependent or co-dependant on other departments' performance, make sure you express this very explicitly, this could be a planned big product/feature launch. be transparent about forecasting and potential pipeline generation. If the goals set are far from achievable with your current resources, even creativity and guerilla marketing won't help here.
5. Stick rigorously to the plan. Don't move an inch (or millimeter, depending on what side of the pond you are!) from your plans. Instead: Set expectations that the plan is agile and subject to change, based on performance and sales predictions. From a strategic point of view- come prepared with a very high-level plan B. From a more tactical aspect: execute, test, revert, and do some reverse engineering to see where your pitfalls are. Be agile with your marketing plan.

Don't panic. It's (totally!) doable.

In a world that is undergoing a financial recharge, business is anything but usual. Your marketing plan needs to be concise, smart, and very attentive to rapid change. A marketing leader that will focus on the ongoing, yet preserve a listening ear, internally (work together as one with liaising teams) and externally (constantly audit the ecosystem- customers, potential clients, and evangelists), will be able to create a flexible marketing method that delivers short term and create a long term sustainable and scalable operation. Just focus on listening.