Back to school, back to realityyyyyy

Oh would you look at that, there’s a slight crisp in the air, the kids are back in school, “hectic” has replaced “relaxing” in your daily lexicon and summer is…

GONE
GOne
Gone
gone
* screams into the void *

And your marketing is still plan free and flapping in the breeze.

With Q3 days away from coming to a sudden end (like summer, sigh).

So without further ado, here’s how to see where you’re actually at with your marketing
And plan out how to get your marketing sorted before 2026 rolls around (it’s coming people).

1. Do your customer research (again)

Have you spoken to customers in the last..9 months?
If not, then here’s what you do:

If you don’t have customers (or not enough to know who you want to talk to)

Start with 1:many convos, looking for people talking generally about the problems you want to solve and list their:

• Industry/use case

• Urgency/willingness to pay

• Pain & solution words and phrases

Reddit is GREAT for this → I use GummySearch, but i’m also working on a product to make Reddit research and trendspotting a lot easier.

If you have customers (you want to talk to your best fit ones and work your way out from there)

Email them with a Cal link and a version of this message:

“hi! I want to get to know you better so i can build the best possible product for you.
Do you have 15min this week or next to talk about how i can help you?”

Once you know who to talk to…

• Go to the channels people are chatting in

• Helpfully reply to questions that you can answer

• DM people who look like they need help

• Ask if you could chat because you want to help them

• If they say yes, drop a call link!

Channels to try:

• LinkedIn

• Reddit

• Facebook

• Private Slack communities

• WhatsApp groups

• Telegram groups

• Discords

• Meetup groups very custom to your target audience

If you have lots of customer support transcripts and you know who your best-fit customers are

Then jump straight down to the labeling part, you have what you need to build your Marketing Plan already!

2. Label your interviews

If you have nothing setup, do this in a spreadsheet (Sheets, Airtable, Notion).
If you have a CRM, create a view in there and do this (Bento, SendinBlue, Clay, Ortto).

Based on that you can see what you need to make decisions

Here’s how to evaluate what you’re looking for based on why you were doing the research to begin with.

• Creating a new product → who needs, what features, to solve which problems, for which use cases?

• Finding if you have PMF → are you selling a product with the features people want to the people who need it the most at a price point that makes sense to them? what needs to change (features, audience, price) to make that a reality?

• Discovering what marketing channels will actually work → where are the places that people are asking questions? are you there? with content that answer their questions?

Usually the data will show itself pretty clearly with those filters because you’re looking at a small (below 500 people) data set.

Start taking notes of marketing ideas you have or spots where the dots connect.
We’ll come back to this.

If you don’t want to DIY this, we can do it for you in 4-6 weeks for a flat price. Book a call here.

3. Evaluate (the rest of) your marketing foundations

There are 5 marketing foundations that you need to have (and it’s best to set them up in this order!)

1. Customer interviews + research (see above)

2. Messaging + Visual Branding (the days of “a blue app” are over - you need to “be the glitch”)

3. Working Website (that can be found by Google and convert!)

4. CRM + Analytics setup (Customer Relationship Management)

5. Email Workflows (there are 5 basics that you need)

Picture them like this:

Use this spreadsheet so you can be honest with yourself about where things stand!

Start by taking an inventory of what’s there, and what’s not.
Red pens aloft now!
It’s time to do a self-grading exercise

Tab 1: Answer those questions in the spreadsheet.
Tab 2: will autocalculate where your weakest marketing spots are (and there are links on how to fix them each!)

Before you do anything else, you need to get those foundations knocked out.

It works best to do them in order, but now you know where your weak links really are (bet analytics and emails were not at the top of your to-do list, yet look at that!)

4. Build a marketing plan that makes sense for your business

Aight, now that you know you’re not going to clothesline yourself once you hit the gas on marketing, it’s time to build an actual marketing plan.

Most marketing plans guides are trash. They’re top-down fluffery that has no connection to what customers actually want.

None of that nonsense here.

Marketing plans are for everything after foundations.

Re-look at your Customer Interviews View

Sit down.
Block out an hour, go through that view (in your spreadsheet or your CRM.
Re-read through it all at once.

List out in your marketing plan by distribution channel (header) and then the content topic and type below.

From your list of possible content x distribution channel options, narrow down to:

• 3 for now (in the next 3-6 months)

• 3 for later (in the next 7-12 months)

You can prioritize based on ROI and your level of experience with the channel.
(Aka, if you have zero experience recording video, maybe don’t make YouTube the number one choice)

If you’re feeling really spicy, you can layer in some competitor research to boot. 🌶️

Curious how this all looks in practice?

This is the Marketing Plan template we built for clients.

It has sections for

• embedding your customer interview views

• your messaging/brand personality

• and your messaging matrix broken out by buyer

So everything is neatly in one place for your marketing! Roadmaps!

So, uh, how long is this gonna take? 😬 

• 4-6 weeks for customer research

• 1-4 wks each for foundation fixes

• then you can start on your content + distribution

• and after that you can do marketing experiments (pricing, new channels, oh my!)

There’s checks notes 16 weeks until Christmas 🎄 (falalalala la la la laaaaaa)

Which means there’s no better time than the present to get a marketing plan in order that will snap you out of analysis paralysis

You can DIY it.

But if all this waves hands sounds daunting?
We could do your customer research and build your marketing plan for you in 6 weeks or less.
Book a call here to talk about it.
Tell your friends.

Here are some stats of what you can expect when it’s done:

We’ll see you and your inbox next week. ⚡

Sophia 💜👩🏽‍💻 & Aelia ⚡️🧕 

Powered by Finally getting my hold from the library (God of the Woods ⭐⭐⭐⭐) that i’ve been in line for for 18 months 😅 & family wedding shenanigans