Getting started with marketing for your scale-up
- Marie-Louise Cleeren
- Sep 17
- 2 min read
Following last week's article, ”Nordic Software Summit 2025 – Part 1 – How to scale your tech business”, which pointed out that ”you need a marketing machinery to help grow your business,” we received the following question from one of the readers:
What's a simple way a new company can start building that marketing "machinery" without a huge budget?
We would recommend the following approach to get you started:
Start with solid marketing foundations: "put the right things in place" to be able to start generating awareness:
Identify company wanted position, brand values and what you wish to be known for
Develop a visual identity that fits those ambitions and your target market and be consistent in how you implement it across marketing, sales and product
Do a thorough Target Audience Analysis / identify your ICP (ideal customer profile), their behaviors, characteristics and problems/needs
Create your value proposition based on their painpoints and needs and implement it on your website with relevant content and SEO/AI optimization
Create basic marketing materials that address those same needs
Select a few marketing channels to reach your target audiences, e.g. relevant social media + your own website + a couple of events. Expand when you have more budget/resources. Be active, consistent and visible in those channels.
Invest in content creation (articles, videos, social media posts, etc) – value-add content that builds trust by addressing prospective customers' needs, key concerns and paintpoints. This builds trust in your competence and abilities to solve customers' problems.
Don't hide value-add content behind lead-gen forms – let prospective customers explore freely on their own so they can form an opinion, compare and get some of their questions answered before they contact you.
Don't waste money on lead-gen / conversion type of activities too early in the company's journey – do brand awareness first. 95% of potential buyers aren’t ready to buy today. If you don’t invest in brand awareness, and only focus on more short-term sales activation campaigns, you will be targeting only the 5% who are ready to buy but who likely have never even heard of you. At that stage, it is unlikely they will choose you over other well-known and trusted alternatives. To grow a brand – and create future sales – you therefore need to advertise to people who aren’t in the market now (95%), so that when they do enter the market (become one of the 5%), your brand is one they are familiar with, trust and like.
Hope this helps!
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