Founders and CEOs, when you first created your start-up and dreamt up your product you no doubt imagined the nerve wracking moment where your fantasy became a reality and your product went live. But, did you ever fantasise about the moment where you needed to start marketing your product? Or think about how to do this when you don’t have a team? 

Undoubtedly there are a few marketing geniuses out there who started companies with marketing in mind, but how do you do it when you have no team? How much should you spend and how on earth do you put a budget together?

We’ve got you…

How to start marketing your B2B product 

It doesn’t matter if you start marketing before or after the conception of your product, but the reality is that you’ll have more quick wins and sales initially if you start marketing sooner rather than later. 

In many cases as a Founder or CEO you’ve already amassed a network around you who would support and champion your new venture so to start with lean into this:

Start posting on your LinkedIn and remember these three golden rules:

1. Be useful and helpful. 
2. Be supportive and champion others around you. 
3. Be engaging - comment back and join in conversations.

Set-up a company LinkedIn profile and keep this in mind:

1. Set-up the profile even if you aren’t ready to post.
2. Invite your network to follow your company page. 
3. Use a tool such as canva to create initial graphic design (or use a designer if they’re in budget!). 

Understand your audience and who you’re trying to sell to: 

1. Map out who your audience is and how you help them to solve challenges. 
2. Include things like digital channels they use (YouTube? Tik-Tok?).
3. Note down your buyer personas. 

Set-up a website with Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) in mind! 

1. You will need to work with a web developer that has SEO expertise as it’s hard to fix this retrospectively.

Start creating content with this in mind: 

1. Content that’s useful and resourceful will get you noticed - start creating this now with SEO and your audiences in mind. 
2. Top-tip for on-page SEO using a tool such as Yoast for free will help (although recognise there is more to it than that!) 

Distribute your content: 

1. Think about what digital channels are on offer to you and how you can best distribute your content in a way that supports your audience. 

Work with early adopters and advocates: 

1. Work with anyone who is an early adopter of your product to see if they’d co-create content or talk openly about their experience. 
2. Ensure you stay well connected with your advocates and work with them to see if they’d recommend you to their own networks.

There are infinite places and ways to start marketing, but the key to doing this successfully is that you make a start and work out the most cost effective marketing channels to get you going. 

How much should you spend on marketing when you create a new product or service?

Tricky questions to answer, but this will be easier to determine if you can answer the following questions:

1. What’s your total addressable marketing (TAM)?  
2. What’s your revenue goal for year 1, 2 etc etc? 
3. How much of that revenue do you expect to come via marketing? 
4. How are you planning to resource that? 

We’d highly recommend including headcount cost in your spending plans as it’ll help you workout accurate ROI later.

Even without a marketing team in place you should also start tracking and measuring the success of your marketing efforts, the sooner you do the sooner you can answer some of the questions above.