Many entrepreneurs believe that getting their product or brand in front of as many people as possible will eventually cause them to want it. In reality, getting a lot of people looking at your product without having any intent to purchase creates a huge pool of people who will never buy from you (but will give you vanity metrics).
This guide takes a look at the inefficient way that standard 'build visibility to grow' tactics work, and breaks them down into their components in order to explain how true tech startup brand awareness really builds category memory. It will show you how to build a precise method to connect the buyer's problems with your product's solutions, rather than use vanity metrics.
Why Reaching Everyone Does Not Work
Standard advice for early-stage B2B technology companies is to create brand trust with customers so they'll have confidence in your offerings by offering them a compelling story about your company; and that the best way to do this is to reach out to your audience on multiple channels.
The problem with this advice is that it is fundamentally inaccurate, and can cause significant problems for early-stage tech startups. It assumes that in general, technology buyers typically make decisions based more on an emotional connection to the brand than they do on the technical capabilities of the product, or on their ability to manage financial risk in purchasing the product.
The Danger of Reaching the Wrong People
When you attempt to maximize your reach through multiple channels (for example, social media, public relations, podcasting, live event sponsorships, etc.), you are spreading your finite amount of company resources amongst many channels, and not concentrating your efforts on a single channel.
You'll see many people claiming that a buyer needs to see the name of a company five to seven times before it will stick with them; or that a large percentage of consumers purchase based on the authenticity of the brand. The problem with these types of statistics in the B2B technology channel is that they are completely meaningless. An 'impression' made on a college student, a junior developer who doesn't have any budget, or a senior-level executive in a totally unrelated industry is not going to generate any revenue.
Receiving a large number of low-quality impressions gives the appearance that you're making progress; on the contrary, this large number of impressions does nothing but keep your sales pipeline empty.
Understanding Different Types of Tech Buyers
There is no single state of awareness. The audience for technology sales consists of several different types of people, and therefore you need to address all these types with separate types of messages.
For example, end users want to know how the product will improve their daily work life. Technical evaluators want to assess the security, scalability and integration capabilities of your code. Economic buyers want to know if your solution will reduce costs or bring in additional revenue. Procurement teams are especially concerned with contracts and compliance issues.
If your marketing messaging is directed only to end users, you will get a lot of traffic and signups for free-tier products, but you will not close any enterprise deals. If you only send out messages to economic buyers, technical evaluators will stop the sale process. You need to be able to identify exactly who you need to educate about your product at each stage of the sales cycle to build effective tech startup brand awareness.
Growing Too Fast Too Soon
The operating environment in a technology startup is always evolving and changing quickly. The actions that you take prior to finding product-market fit are vastly different from your actions when your company enters into its expansion phase.
When you have not yet achieved product-market fit, your primary objective is not to create broad brand awareness for your tech startup. Rather your focus is survival and gathering data regarding customers.
At this stage of product-market fit, you must first locate a small number of early adopters, then learn about their exact pain points. It does not make sense to be broadcasting your message out to thousands of people when you do not yet know if your product will solve their most pressing problem.
After achieving product-market fit, you will move away from testing various messages to focusing on creating a singular message that has been proven effective. Due to boredom with their own positioning, businesses frequently make the mistake of looking for a 'new angle' to develop their reputation rather than leveraging the established memory of their brand. Memory is formed through repetition and not through a well-known logo.
How to Be the First Name Buyers Think Of
Recognition is established through a company's reputation structure rather than on the grounds of its logo or similar items. A company's brand name should be the first thing that comes to the mind of your target buyer upon confronting a particular problem.
To attain this objective, your startup must connect one established and credible organization to one significant result within their category. You don't have to be well-known to anyone outside of your defined market; you must only be recognized by the individuals who have budget authority over your company's category. Marketing is, therefore, dependent upon how well you utilize your technical resources and actual product to build your company's image.
Proving Your Tech Startup Brand Awareness with Facts
When it comes to creating a brand, many companies rely heavily on creating a brand through the creation of a generic thought leader. Generic thought leadership is the writing of high-level, non-specific articles or the basic definitions of your industry that any author could have written.
Technical purchasers do not purchase products based upon opinion. Technical purchasers buy products because of proof.
While the visual elements of a software company will significantly contribute to its overall brand recognition, your API documentation, developer experience, evidence of security, and integration pages form a significant segment of your software company's brand assets.
If you are a development infrastructure organization, one unique benchmark latency report has the power to dramatically increase the level of trustworthiness of your company over the hundreds of marketing pieces that you publish through generic social media accounts.
All other marketing materials are peripheral; the primary message is contained within the tools themselves. When producing a software product, demonstrate the utility of the device with actual product demonstrations, raw data, change logs, and transparent pricing pages. These all provide an effective means of transmitting to the marketplace your confidence and willingness to provide proof of potential success through effective communication and easy access.
Focusing on One Main Channel
Instead of developing and maintaining a presence on LinkedIn, X, YouTube, Discord, and your industry podcast at the same time, utilize one designated anchor channel that represents a collective identity for your business.
Your product may use a product-led growth method and target the developer community and possibly utilize an open-source community or dedicated Discord server to drive growth; however, if you are trying to sell high-ticket software to enterprise-level decision-makers, the most effective channel would be LinkedIn or other targeted private events.
Become proficient in the economics, format, and audience of your one channel before trying to scale a second channel. Focus is where you have concentration and power; dispersion creates destruction.
Looking at Real Market Results
We can utilize the evidence found in documented campaign data to see how truly successful execution differs from theoretical planning. Most successful campaigns for early-stage companies do not target "everyone." They target a small, defined, and even localized area either physically or digitally.
Focusing on a Specific Area and Group
Using a MarketingSherpa case study, we analyzed a B2B campaign launched by SOFTSWISS. Instead of running a global digital campaign, they selected a very small geographical area (Malta) and focused the campaign there.
Malta is a small island country with an estimated population of under 500,000, but at that time, approximately 10% of all online gaming companies in the world were registered or represented in Malta. In addition to this, this campaign identified a definite 29 specific target client offices to advertise around. SOFTSWISS executed a series of out-of-home advertising, air-traffic placements, radio spots, as well as local public relations efforts, all surrounding those physical locations.
The results validate the company's concentration strategy. By "surrounding" such a definitive and concentrated, small group of buyers, the company was able to achieve a 104% increase in branded keyword clicks, a 45% increase in organic traffic and a 33% increase in tracked direct leads. By concentrating their efforts on a very small segment, they managed to spend 40% less than their original forecast of what they would spend based on their marketing plan.
They did not go after broad reach. They purchased the ability to have a dominant presence in a small portion of the market.
Small Daily Improvements Bring Big Results
The journey to attain brand recognition takes time and requires sustained grassroots type growth over a long period of time. The following is a case study of Virtustant, which clearly illustrates the impact of daily small incremental improvements.
They didn't plan to launch one major public event to gain an initial foothold in the market. They planned for the compound effect of small, continuous improvements to their marketing plan every day, aiming for 1% better marketing plan results every day, and ultimately achieving 9 clients in 2022 and another 11 in the first half of 2024. They grew their team from two founders to 30.
In terms of marketing, consistency is far more important than intensity. Continually producing and publishing relevant high-quality content will yield far greater results than short-term bursts of PR (public relations) that generate temporary attention without building any kind of sales pipeline.
How to Measure Your Sales Success
What gets measured gets improved. One of the biggest pitfalls of many leaders is the tendency to mistake engagement with demand. The number of impressions, likes and views are NOT business metrics or outcomes; they are early indicators of success or simply noise.
To track true brand recognition, you should be tracking the impact of your actions in the marketplace on your ability to close more business as a result of your marketing actions.
Tracking Exact Name Searches
The most reliable indicator of true brand recognition is branded search volume. When a buyer types in your exact company name in Google, it is an indication that they already know who you are.
The first point I want to make is that people are searching for your business specifically, instead of using a category term that may or may not apply to your business. So to track this, you can use the Google Search Console to create filters that only show searches with your brand name, product names, and common misspellings of either.
Reach: This tells you how many potential customers saw your ad or post.
Awareness: Awareness shows you whether potential customers remember you.
Branded Search Queries: Branded search queries show whether potential customers have intent to learn more about your business.
Pipeline: Pipeline tells you how many people searched for your business, learned about it, and became paying customers.
In order to track the success of your marketing initiatives and campaigns and whether they are creating direct leads for your company, you will need to establish a baseline from which to measure your growth month-by-month. You will want to eliminate any navigational noise (like your employees searching for the login page to the company website) so you can accurately track your branded search volume from month to month. If your reach is increasing by 50 percent per month and your branded search volume is flat, then your content may be entertaining to your audience. But it may not be turning into commercial memory in your audience's minds.
The second point I want to mention is the connection between recognition and customer acquisition cost. With a strong market presence, it is assumed that over time you will be able to lower your blended customer acquisition cost.
The way to connect recognition to customer acquisition cost is to view multiple points of data, such as direct traffic in Google Analytics. However, you should note that the majority of the direct traffic you see in Google Analytics is likely to be dark social traffic. This may be in the form of links shared in private Slack channels, Discord groups, and text messages that lose tracking capabilities.
To fix this issue, I would recommend adding a mandatory "How Did You Hear About Us?" text field on all of your primary inbound forms. The attributions that are provided by the software tracking systems are limited to how and when the software logs in the usage of those systems. You have an advantage over that with your customers, and that is how you will continue to grow your business. Your sales cycle will be more efficient and productive as a result of the alignment of your sales and marketing teams.
Next Steps for Building Tech Startup Brand Awareness
Building tech startups’ brand awareness is not something that needs to be done creatively—there’s a logical path to establishing a defined methodology that’s known and trusted by your target audience.
Stop trying to project yourself like a big company because you are a small business. Stop investing in the kinds of things that attract and engage non-potential customers or prospects. Stop publishing content that does not provide original data. Stop seeking recognition from the wrong audience.
Start defining your specific problem and how it is solved. Then start publishing the evidence that supports your assertion that you solve that problem. Focus on creating and distributing that information or evidence through a specific concentrated channel and then measure how many of your targeted buyers are searching for you right now.
Common Roadblocks and How to Fix Them
How Do We Show Results Early On?
The key question is: how do we demonstrate ROI in the early stages of brand development when the search volume is down? Keep tabs on the percentage of target accounts engaged with your company by monitoring sales feedback and profile views. This will also allow you to identify micro-conversions in your target audience that could eventually lead to increased aggregate search volume.
Why Do We Get Lots of Visitors but Few Good Leads?
High traffic but low qualified pipeline is generally the result of companies optimizing their content for broad search volumes vs. buyer intent when trying to grow tech startup brand awareness. For example, if you create a basic industry terms glossary, you may generate thousands of visits from college students; however, these visitors typically will not have a budget or buying power to buy from your business.
To remedy this situation, you need to reduce the quantity of traffic you receive by publishing articles on specialized technical topics that only economic buyers or senior engineers will read. By doing so, your traffic numbers will decrease, but your pipeline numbers will increase.
How Can Founders Stand Out Without a Big Marketing Team?
Many founders mistake media creation for launching their product, when in fact they should be focusing on utility and raw data. Your marketing doesn't have to be so polished. Don’t worry about using fancy graphics to represent your work; simply write plain text updates detailing the engineering problems you are resolving.
Post screenshots of your current builds; and publish the hard lessons you learn as you scale your infrastructure. Buyers tend to value transparency and competence more highly than they do heavy production value and media creation. Build in public and allow your product to do most of your marketing for you.
When Should We Start Paying for Ads?
Paid media should not replace organic distribution but should amplify organic distribution. You shouldn’t experiment with paid media to test core messaging, since the variables are too complex. You won’t be able to determine whether campaigns failed because of poor positioning or bad targeting.
Use organic channels to test what resonates with your audience. Once you determine what resonates with your audience through organic channels, you will then be able to use paid media to ensure that all target accounts in your market see it.