Marketing plan for business start-up

The marketing plan for the startup company concentrates on the affordable and effective marketing strategies for the new company with the limited budget for marketing. In this thesis, the shoe company named Jalkani is selected as the case study for the marketing plan. In the age of Internet, the marketing becomes more complex with the combination of the traditional advertising (paid advertisements in newspapers, billboard, or television) and the model digital marketing. The costs for each mechanism also vary, depending on the using purpose and the company’s size. Based on the pre-defined market size and products features of the company, the thesis will firstly analyse the business situation of the company, which is the most important factor for the later marketing plan. In Jalkani, the business characteristics are analysed in three aspects: customer’s behaviour, environmental influences (via PEST analysis), and the business insider (via SWOT analysis). This thesis is not the first business research for Jalkani. The co/founders of the business conducted a project last year to analyse the market demand and design the supply chain for the business. Based on some information of the previous study, this thesis will give the practical marketing plan for the products to launch in Finland. In the next stage, the study will provide the method to determine budget and the segmentation process. Those two steps are considered the preparation stage before the actual marketing plan. For Jalkani, because the company is the new entrance in the Finnish market, there is no history record for the company to estimate the budget and determine the exact profitable customer groups. Therefore, we use the affordable budgeting strategy to design the budget for the company, while the customers are defined based on the survey. By using the forecast sales of the business in the first six months after launching (forecasted in the last study), the ideal budget for marketing in the start-up period should be kept under 4000 EUR. Finally, the action plan will gather all the mentioned information to figure out the best marketing plan for Jalkani, with the objective “cheap and effective”. Each marketing method will be described clearly with its advantages and disadvantages. In order to help the case company to reconsider the suggestions, the estimated costs of the marketing methods are also given