Market visibility of startup businesses remains one of the core tasks for many entrepreneurs. So it becomes crucial to launching a startup with a well-thought marketing strategy. This was a key feature of the podcast.
To understand the background of the company, Elias asked Timothy about Smart IT’s areas of activity. Timothy divided the company’s activities into two main directions:
- partnering with startups by providing them profound consulting, team building, and the right technology stack;
- working with enterprise-level companies by providing legacy modernization, switching to new technologies in the shortest possible times, and more.
Marketing in a startup is a challenge, especially in software development companies, and expense management is the most painful part of it. It’s sometimes hard to sort out how best to allocate budget resources.
Timothy suggested a human resources management advice that works, as he said, not only for startups but for any company: get generalists on board. Look for ambitious people open to experiments and ready to take action. Startups would benefit more from participants who have expertise in different areas.
2022 is already here and what startup entrepreneurs need for their marketing strategy is a tactical plan. This may mean you need to have a good understanding of what to start with. The first step Timothy would’ve taken as a startup marketer is a unit economics calculation.
It is the key to predicting current financial outcomes and future growth in the early stages of a startup. Timothy stressed that it’s very important to understand how much money the customer can bring you so that you know for sure how much money you would be able to spend on every customer. The entire analytics falls apart without attention given to details, and setting up the analytics is crucial for every business.
Unit economics gives you an understanding of:
- how much can you spend;
- how much money each customer will bring you (including short-time and lifetime revenue);
- how can you redistribute the budget (for example, to improve and scale your software product).
Despite the fact Elias communicates with a lot of B2B marketers on a daily basis, he was surprised to note that a lot of them don’t have this insight in place. However, cost per lead calculation is a mandatory step in building a successful marketing strategy.
What can be a relevant lead generation channel in 2022 if you’re running a software company? Three main points were made.
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO). To this day, it is one of the most effective lead generation channels worth investing your time and money in. You should work on your website content, on your backlinks,
- Referral channels. Specific aggregators of similar businesses are great centers of influence and are a good source of referral leads due to the types of people they interact with or based on the compatibility of your company’s products or services. However, it is important to point out that SaaS businesses need to keep an eye more on paid advertising lead generation channels. SEO is not the best possible channel here as it takes a lot of time to show results. SaaS companies have to run a lot of testing to find out the best channel.
- LinkedIn outreach. You can connect with people relevant to your business via different events like groups and webinars and reach out to them with a personal conversation.
Another remarkable way to generate leads that had been mentioned was a combination of online and offline channels. Radio commercials on business channels can be a good addition to online campaigns.
In the absence of proper testing and concerns about data privacy violation, the benefits of direct contact with customers through sending gift cards for improving conversion rate, therefore, remained in question.
By the end of the podcast, Timothy shared his view on the current year trend. For a successful startup’s marketing strategy in 2022, you’ll need to assemble a team of generalists. Integrated knowledge in your team matters a lot. Whether you have a marketing department or running a marketing agency, hiring people who are experienced in different marketing areas is half a battle.
Check out the full episode here: Start-up marketing for software companies in 2022 – Tim Partasevitch, Chief Growth Officer at Smart IT
The Marketing Technology Podcast Host
Elias Crum is an owner at Marketing Guys, digital strategist, and marketing automation & technology specialist based in the Netherlands.
06 January 2022
