What marketing budget should I set to promote my tech startup?

When you start your tech business, it can be a struggle to determine how much should they spend on your marketing campaign.  Whether you developed an app, software or a revolutionary high-tech product, you need to find out how to promote your concept as well as your brand and what budget you should allocate.

So how much should you invest in marketing?

1. What are the most essential marketing and prospecting activities?

Blogging: Sharing valuable information to your prospects is crucial to building up your credibility. We recommend you post once a week. Indeed, constant posting will make you interesting in your prospects as well as Google, from an SEO point of view.

SEO or Search Engine Optimisation: Nowadays it is easier and easier to be SEO friendly thanks to the internet. We recommend you train yourself and make sure you have a good enough online presence.

Social media: Your online presence pass through social media. Don’t waste your time publishing content on every social media platform. Only use the ones your targets are on. If your target audience is 50+ aged sports lovers, Instagram won’t work for example, because only 20% of your target audience use this media.

Attend & speak at events: Your online presence is important, and so is your physical presence. There are many tech events and this is your opportunity to increase your brand awareness.

Prospect: Prospecting is challenging but essential. But it can lead to some great partnerships, new clients, and a better visibility.

Build a quality website: this is the best way to show your professionalism, credibility and to explain your offer. As a tech startup, your target audience expects a good user experience and a nice design.

Promoting Materials: Every business needs brochures, visit cards, and any type of promoting materials to make an impact on your prospects’ mind.

This list is not exhaustive. You could also build your customer database, conduct marketing research, create a video presentation and more.

2. How much time should I spend on my marketing activities? 

The first thing is to have a marketing plan. You need to know what you want to achieve, how you want to achieve your business goals and then define budget and timeline. A deadline must be allocated to each task each week.

Due to the number of marketing tasks to do, we recommend you spend approximately 20% of your time on marketing activities. It means that if you work 45 hours a week, you should spend 9 hours on your marketing campaign.

3. How much money should you spend on your marketing campaign? 

Now you know how much time and what to do to promote your business, the last question is how much money you should spend.

Setting a budget would allow you to advertise to reach more prospects, or to host events in which you can develop your professional network and increase your brand awareness. Having a budget would also help you to create with an agency a bespoke and attractive website.

A website that isn’t professionally designed would lead to a high bounce rate (the number of visitors leaving without taking the time to navigate on your website). Additionally, a tech website is expected to be especially well designed.

As a tech startup, your budget must be sufficient to achieve your business goals. If you want to be internationally known, you will have to spend more to exceed local reach.

Never lose sight of your ROI. You must be able to measure the effectiveness of your campaigns.

The cost of an event should bring you new clients and contracts. If not, make sure it has a positive impact on the attendees that may recommend you. At the end of the day, if your event didn’t convert into new contracts, you still built up some of your brand awareness and credibility and thus strengthened your brand.

The amount must be personalised to your needs and targets, but we usually recommend tech startup spend around 20% of their revenues on marketing, whereas established company usually spend 10 to 15%.

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