How To Create A Powerful Digital Marketing Plan For Startups

Last updated on July 10th, 2025 at 12:25 am

So you have a great product. But guess what?

As Gabriel Weinberg, the founder and CEO of DuckDuckGo put it in his book “Traction”:

“Almost every failed startup has a product. What failed startups don’t have are enough customers.”

Having a great product isn’t enough. You also need an effective marketing strategy.

So how can you create a digital marketing plan for your startup?

That’s what we are going to discuss today.

What is Agile Marketing?

You might be familiar with the “Lean Startup” methodology:

“A core component of Lean Startup methodology is the build-measure-learn feedback loop.

The first step is figuring out the problem that needs to be solved and then developing a minimum viable product (MVP) to begin the process of learning as quickly as possible.

Once the MVP is established, a startup can work on tuning the engine.”

Agile marketing is this same methodology applied to marketing:

Here are the three ways in which agile marketing differs from traditional marketing:

• Focus on frequent releases
• Deliberate experimentation
• Unrelenting commitment to audience satisfaction

Traditional marketing takes what is known as the “Big Bang” approach – developing a marketing campaign in isolation, then launching it and hoping that it works.

Meanwhile, agile marketing takes a “Lean” approach that is much more iterative.

Say, you create paid advertising campaigns for Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn then set a small daily budget for each and run them.

Then you evaluate the results and invest more resources into the campaign that worked best, if it continues working you then scale it over time.

This is a much better approach from the risk management perspective:

Instead of putting all your eggs in one basket you make small bets, evaluate the results, and then adjust accordingly.

We recommend agile marketing to all businesses but it’s especially important to bootstrapped startups that have extremely limited resources.

If you are funding your startup solely from your savings, then you can’t afford to make huge bets on unproven marketing strategies!

Do Things That Don’t Scale!

There’s a startup concept called “premature optimization”.

It refers to entrepreneurs wasting time, energy, and money on optimizing something that doesn’t need to be optimized at that point in time.

This distracts them from what really matters: gaining traction.

The most common example of premature optimization is a premature focus on scalability.

If you are just starting out, you don’t need scalability, as there’s nothing to scale yet. What you should focus on is acquiring customers!

Paul Graham, the founder of the prestigious startup incubator Y-Combinator, wrote an essay on this back in 2013 called “Do Things That Don’t Scale”. It has since become a classic in the startup community.

In that essay, he argues that the belief that startups either take off or they don’t is false.

“Actually startups take off because the founders make them take off. There may be a handful that just grew by themselves, but usually, it takes some sort of push to get them going.

A good metaphor would be the cranks that car engines had before they got electric starters. Once the engine was going, it would keep going, but there was a separate and laborious process to get it going.”

Graham believes that to get a startup going, you need to be willing to do things that don’t scale such as taking heroic measures to acquire users (among other things).

So before you start developing a scalable marketing strategy, look for ways to acquire customers that will enable you to get the ball rolling ASAP, even if they won’t scale as your startup grows.

How to Find Potential Customers?

Graham says that if you build something to solve a problem that you have, then finding potential customers should be straightforward.

When you belong to your target audience, you probably already know where people like you hang out.

It’s more complicated when you aren’t your own ideal customer.

Here’s what Graham advises in that case:

“Otherwise you’ll have to make a more deliberate effort to locate the most promising vein of users.

The usual way to do that is to get some initial set of users by doing a comparatively untargeted launch, and then to observe which kind seems most enthusiastic, and seek out more like them.

 For example, Ben Silbermann noticed that a lot of the earliest Pinterest users were interested in design, so he went to a conference of design bloggers to recruit users, and that worked well.”

This is where agile marketing is likely to come in handy:

Experiment with targeting different market segments to see which segment responds the best, then double down on promoting your product to that segment.

Extremely Effective Marketing Strategies That Don’t Scale

Here are two marketing strategies that we recommend for getting your startup off the ground:

Strategy #1: Cold Outreach

Cold outreach is all about reaching out to potential customers directly.

There are three key cold outreach methods:

• Cold email
• Cold social media messages
• Cold calling

Arguably, cold email is the best place to start when it comes to cold outreach, though of course, it all depends on your target audience.

It can help you grow your startup FAST.

For Example:

Justin McGill, the founder of LeadFuze search engine for leads, grew his company to $30,000 in monthly recurring revenue in just one year with cold email outreach.

Here’s the QVC formula that he used in his cold emails:

• Question – “Most people try to lead in with some sort of introduction and this just tips off the prospect that they don’t know you. Instead, try to lead in with a question that pertains to your business.”
• Value Proposition – “This is where everyone gets it wrong. Instead of going on and on about how great your service is and ALL that you offer, try to get the core message out and highlight what makes you unique.”
• Call-to-Action (CTA) – “Don’t end the email weakly, with a “Look forward to hearing from you” type closing. Instead, ask directly if they can speak in the next few days OR give them some sort of closing question that begs an answer in order to elicit some sort of response.”

Here’s a sample cold email:

Justin also advises giving the recipient a way to opt-out of the follow-up emails:

It’s important to understand that following up is a crucial component of any cold email campaign.

Don’t just send one email and leave it at that. You need to follow up… And then keep following up!

That being said, Justin believes that you shouldn’t just “check-in”, you want to provide additional value in each subsequent email.

Here’s a follow-up strategy that LeadFuze has seen a lot of success with:

1. QVC Email
2. Case Study
3. Value Add (recent blog post link, relevant news article, another case study, etc)
4. Break-up Email (letting them know you won’t be following up anymore)

How many emails should you send?

“It is ultimately up to you. As long as you can bring some sort of value to each email, there isn’t any reason why you should stop. Especially if you feel your solution will truly help them. You have an obligation at that point!”

Keep in mind that nowadays pretty much everyone is overwhelmed by the number of emails that they get.

So you might need to email people several times to get their attention. Don’t take it personally!

Strategy #2: Live Webinars

Another marketing strategy that doesn’t scale but can help you grow your startup FAST is doing live webinars.

In fact, our co-founder Russell Brunson believes that the best business model in the world is to:

1. Create a webinar selling your service or your product
2. Do that webinar live every single week for a year

This was the primary strategy that he used to gain traction with ClickFunnels.

During that first year after the launch, his aim was to do 5-7 webinars a week. Sometimes he’d end up doing 2-3 webinars in one day!

But you don’t need to go all out like that to get results – one live webinar per week for 52 weeks should be enough to get your startup off the ground!

There are two ways to get people to attend your webinars when you don’t have an audience of your own:

1. Affiliate marketing – Find people whose audiences overlap with your target audience, reach out to them and work out a deal where they will promote your webinar in exchange for a cut from each sale.
2. Webinar funnel – Create a webinar funnel, then drive traffic to it with paid ads.

Eventually, you can automate this with a pre-recorded webinar, but we recommend doing it live at least once a week, every week for a year.

How to Create a Scalable Marketing Strategy

You will eventually hit a growth ceiling with the “do things that don’t scale” approach, at which point you will need to develop a scalable marketing strategy.

Here’s how:

Step #1: Clearly Define Your Dream Customers

You should already know who your dream customers are.

But we recommend writing it down for the sake of clarity.

This definition should include demographic traits such as:

• Age
• Sex
• Location
• Nationality
• Education level
• Occupation
• Income level
• Political affiliation

Etc.

The more precise your definition of your dream customer, the easier it will be to target the right people in your marketing campaigns.

Step #2: Conduct Extensive Customer Research

Once you have defined your dream customers, you should conduct extensive customer research to better understand their psychology.

You can learn more about them by:

• Subscribing to subreddits
• Registering on online forums
• Consuming content such as blog posts, YouTube videos, and podcasts
• Following social media influencers
• Analyzing customer feedback

And, of course, talking to your dream customers one on one!

Here are the four key questions that you want to answer:

1. What does your dream customer want?
2. What is your dream customer struggling with?
3. How will you serve your dream customer?
4. What will you sell your dream customers that they want to purchase?

We recommend writing down the answers as that will provide clarity that should help you make better business decisions.

Note that the first three questions are deceptively simple.

You might need to dig deep to answer them correctly. What is really driving your dream customers?

Typically, the real answers are not the obvious ones that come to mind immediately, as the underlying motivations are often different from the explicitly expressed goals.

Question #4 is the least relevant because at this stage you should already have a validated product.

Step #3: Build a Value Ladder Sales Funnel

We believe that the most effective way to sell anything online is the Value Ladder sales funnel.

It was created by our co-founder Russell Brunson who then used it to take ClickFunnels from zero to $10M+ in annual revenue in just one year (it’s at $100M+ now!).

This sales funnel has four stages:

• Bait – You offer the potential customer your lead magnet in exchange for their email address.
• Frontend – You offer the potential customer your least expensive and least valuable product or service.
• Middle – You offer the customer a more expensive and valuable product or service.
• Backend – You offer the customer your most expensive and most valuable product or service.

Ideally, you also offer a continuity program of some sort, meaning, a subscription product that generates recurring revenue.

We also recommend adding downsells, upsells, and cross sells to these core offers in order to maximize your revenue.

The reason why this sales funnel works so well is that it allows you to:

1. Start the relationship with that person by offering free value
2. Nurture that relationship by continuing to provide free value via email
3. Build trust by delivering progressively more paid value at each stage

Here’s how Russell explains it:

You should create a Value Ladder sales funnel for your startup.

Don’t worry, you don’t need to build the whole thing in one go, you can start with the lead magnet + a frontend offer (your product).

 A free 14-day trial can work well as a lead magnet for SaaS startups.

Also, just because you have a software company, doesn’t mean that you can’t sell other types of products as well (books, eBooks, online courses, etc.).

Finally, we recommend ditching your traditional website and replacing it with your lead magnet landing page. Why?

Because traditional websites are confusing mazes of links that encourage aimless clicking around.

Meanwhile, by definition, sales funnels are designed to guide the potential customer towards the sale, one step at a time.

According to our data, on average, sales funnels generate 6x more sales than traditional websites!

Of course, we understand that ditching your website might seem drastic, so all we ask is that you conduct an experiment:

1. Send 50% of your traffic to your website and the other 50% to your lead magnet landing page.
2. See which one performs better.
3. Keep the winner.

We already know what the results are going to be 😉

By the way:

ClickFunnels generates over $100M in annual revenue and our homepage is a landing page. We practice what we preach because it works!

SaaS Sales Funnel Example: Our “DotCom Secrets” Funnel

We also advise creating more sales funnels over time.

Say, Russell wrote three bestselling books:

• “DotCom Secrets”
• “Traffic Secrets”
• “Expert Secrets”

We use these books as “FREE + Shipping” lead magnets.

What that means is that you can get a physical copy for free if you cover the shipping costs.

Here’s what our “DotCom Secrets” Value Ladder sales funnel looks like:

As you can see, we sell our software as a frontend product, but then we also have several more expensive offers.

Step #4: Start Driving Traffic With Paid Ads

Once your Value Ladder sales funnel is all set up, it’s time to start driving traffic to it. But how can you do that?

We believe that the best way is paid advertising.

Paid traffic is:

• Predictable
• Scalable
• Easy to measure

Experiment with various platforms, determine which one works best, and figure out how to make your ad campaign profitable. Then start scaling it. Do it gradually, though!

Also, use paid traffic to optimize your sales funnel for conversions – it can help you 2x, 5x, or even 10x your profits!

We have noticed that bootstrapped software entrepreneurs are often hesitant to use paid ads.

But as Laura Roeder, the founder of MeetEdgar, explained in her interview on the Indie Hackers podcast:

So what you can do from day one is pay Google and Facebook and they will put you in front of who you want to be in front of.

You don’t have to do anything clever, it doesn’t take any time. Give Facebook a dollar and they will follow your instructions (for the most part). So that’s what we did. Right from the launch, we were spending $40,000/month on Facebook ads.

(…)

“I think people are scared of spending the money, but I would rather spend more on ads in the beginning. (…) 

Because later, you can actually have the search traffic, which to me, is the best kind of traffic.”

Also, Jakob Greenfield recently published a great article on the subject of paid advertising in the context of bootstrapping:

“Why the indie maker playbook is dead (or how I learned to spend money on ads)”

Step #5: Build Traffic-Generating Assets

Paid advertising is great but you don’t want to be completely reliant on it forever.

That’s why we recommend investing in building traffic-generating assets such as:

• A social media following
• A YouTube channel
• A niche blog

Realistically, it will probably take 12-24 months until you start seeing serious results, especially if you have never done it before.

However, the single most important thing here is consistency, as the most common mistake people make when it comes to building these assets is giving up too soon.

We recommend an approach called “The Law of 100” where you set a specific goal such as:

• Publishing a social media update every day for 100 days
• Publishing 100 YouTube videos
• Publishing 100 blog articles

…etc.

This will help you stay focused on the process and not give up when you feel like nothing is happening despite all your hard work.

In all likelihood, by the time you reach your goal, you will have gotten at least some results, which will motivate you to keep going. Simply set another “100” goal!

Of course, it’s not just consistency that matters, content quality is also extremely important. But you can improve over time. Just don’t give up!

Want Russell to Show You How to Build Your First Sales Funnel?

Let’s keep it real:

Building a sales funnel from scratch can seem like a daunting task.

That’s why we created our 5 Day Challenge where Russell walks you through it step-by-step.

You will learn how to:

• Generate unlimited leads
• Create your first lead magnet
• Build your first sales funnel
• Create a simple 6-email follow-up sequence
• And launch your funnel

…in just five days!

So don’t hesitate.

Join our 5 Day Challenge today. It’s completely free!