My "must-complete" marketing checklist for startups just launching (Free template)

Hi all! I want to say thanks for all the upvotes, comments and conversations on my last post. The support was really cool to see as a long-time lurker, few-time poster 🙌

Here is the post on how I do marketing on a $0 budget.

That said, I have decided to write a follow up article expanding on the topic I know best — marketing for startups.

To introduce myself again, I’m a B2B SaaS marketer with experience at 3 startups including 2 acquisitions. And this is my checklist for any startups looking to kick off their marketing.

❗️Here is a Google Spreadsheet I created to help you easily track what needs done. Please make a copy!

Start with a general plan (this won’t be too complicated, I promise) ☑️

This is going to be 2 parts, both the high-level vision and practical application.

The high-level is going to be thinking about who your customers are (the audience), how they will use your product (the use cases) and why they should choose you (the value proposition).

My advice: Keep in mind you are still a startup. You don’t have the luxury of time to map out your values and mission in a corporate-style slide deck.
Keep it simple: who are your customers, where can you reach them, how many visits do you need, how many sign ups, etc.

The practical application is going to be a simple spreadsheet to check off the list of “must-complete” items before launching. I’ll dive into these a bit more below with some tips. But in sum, these are the things I think need done before you officially “kick-off”.

Get everything set up 📈

For a marketer, this never is very fun. For a startup founder, it’s really not very fun.

But it must be done.

Setting up certain tracking, analytics and accounts is a necessity for almost all marketing efforts. It’s important at the beginning, but even more important later down the line.

Things you need to do:

• Google WorkSpace (or other alternative): If you haven’t done so yet, set up your Google Workspace for your company email, Google drive for docs and sheets, etc.
• Google Analytics: You’ll want to start tracking any data points (both to your app and marketing website) right away.
• Google Search Console: More on this below in the website section.
• Reporting framework: This doesn’t need to be too in-depth, just something to help structure your marketing efforts moving forward. I recommend Sheets for Marketers for free templates.

You’ll notice this is very Google-focused. Despite each of our individual feelings, a lot of marketing tools are centered around Google Search and are necessary to have. I personally enjoy the Google tools, especially since most are free and have found it’s easier to have everything in one platform.

Create branding and marketing materials ✍️

Again, like most things above, this doesn’t need to be extensive. But you do need to have these materials on-hand and in one place so you can quickly use them in any given scenario — for example, adding your “about” text to a G2 company profile or having images for your website.

You don’t want to have to re-create this every single time.

Here’s what I would recommend:

Boilerplate copy

• A tagline
• A short intro (2-3 sentences)
• A short summary (under 500 words)
• A long summary (around 1200 words)
• A list of features
• A list of 2-3 uses cases + benefits

This should be more than enough to get you going, so you can easily copy & paste when creating marketing materials.

My advice: as a copywriter would be to use your high-level analysis from above and write it out as you would explain to someone in person.
For example: “We help people with customer support”....and this is important because…”Good customer support means you keep customers happy and reduce churn”....
Then you go from there: Don’t get stuck trying to write the perfect copy, you’ll spend way too much time and over complicate it. Keep it simple and just get it on paper.
There's AI tools: You can always make edits later, maybe with the help of ChatGPT or Bard to refine things. Please drop any other content AI tools in the comments.

Logo

To be transparent, I don’t have tons of experience in these. There’s plenty of AI tools I’ve seen so that’s probably a good option. Please let me know in the comments!

I would recommend when you create your logo, be sure to have several different file types (.png, .svg, .jpg, .webp) and file sizes created (TinyWow is a good tool for this).

Product images/screenshots

There’s almost no situation where images or videos don’t help your marketing. These will be used almost everywhere.

When you’re just getting started, it’s likely you don’t have the budget for a huge brand guide to be created. But from my experience, you don’t need to.

Screenshots are perfectly fine for SaaS. Or the stylized images of screenshots.

See my previous blog for free tools for branding

You can of course use free stock images, but this really isn’t the style anymore. See why/a great meme here.

Website 💻

A good-quality website is an ESSENTIAL.

Not just a website. You need a website that is clean, secure and conveys trust. This is so, so important as a startup.

Think about your own experience picking software. If the website sucks, then it’s likely the product sucks too (or you at least think it does).

You don’t need to have a massive website. In most cases, just a homepage is fine. Be sure to include information like:

• General message (see copy notes above)
• Product/How it works/Features
• CTA for how to get started (sign up, contact us, etc.)
• Pricing
• Contact options (chatbox, email, form)

You’ll likely need to invest some time and money in this marketing effort. There’s free tools to help, but it’s not something you want to cut corners with. At any part in the marketing funnel, your website will be involved.

SEO

SEO is a long-term game, not necessarily a kickoff item. However, when you set up your website, there’s key decisions that will impact your SEO down the line such as your site structure, bread crumbs, URL slugs, etc.

Here’s a great post with SEO advice for early stage startups

I would also recommend taking the time to learn how Google Search works with their free courses. This will be important down the line when you hire SEO/SEA/Paid ad agencies — it can be pretty confusing so you’ll want to have a foundation to be able to know what you’re hiring them for.

Here’s the courses from Google.

Online profiles & marketplaces 📢

Online profiles help boost your visibility and presences.

Again, think about your own process for finding a new software. Maybe you see an idea or a referral….you check out the website…and then you Google the product to see more. This is how all of gauge a certain level of trust and if something is “legit”

The top sites for this include:

• Google My Business profile
• G2
• Gartner (Capterra, Software Advice, Get App)
• BetaList
• Product Hunt
• EU Startups

Most of these are free(ish). You can get the basic profile, but for any hard ROI in terms of marketing, you need to pay to play for a solid ROI.

However I would still suggest making a profile here for a few reasons:

• It's still another channel where you can show your product, pricing and screenshots
• Gives your website an extra spot in search rankings = some trust and authority
• Gartner (company of software advice) provides a program where they give your customers $5 or $10 amazon giftcards in exchange for a review = great way to get reviews. This is completely free for you.
• G2 has great collateral for product reviews called badges, a lot of SaaS websites feature these on the homepage and pricing page = great social proof for any of your marketing content.

As I mentioned above, you’ll want to have your copy/branding/images ready to ensure these profiles look professional and appealing.

Wrapping up

Thanks for reading and I hope this helps! Please let me know in the comments any other “must-complete” marketing items.

Here’s the spreadsheet again.