FAQ: B2B Marketing in a Technology Company

An agency makes sense when you already know what you want to say and to whom, and you need hands to execute it, whereas your own person makes sense when that knowledge doesn’t exist yet and someone has to build it together with you, sitting close enough to the company to understand how your clients really buy. Most companies do it the other way around and start with an agency that gets the brief “run our marketing,” even though nobody inside can say how we differ from three other providers from the same city, and that is exactly the work no agency will do for the owner.

In practice, the first marketing person is rarely needed full time from day one. It is more sensible to start with someone part time or with a project-based collaboration with a person who knows the realities of B2B, and only when you can see that content is being produced regularly and bringing in inquiries is it worth formalizing and expanding.

If you are looking for a simple criterion, hire when the only obstacle is a lack of time to do the things you already know work. As long as the obstacle is a lack of decisions about positioning and the offer, neither a marketer nor an agency will unblock that.

Instead of asking about a percentage of revenue, start with how much it costs you today to acquire one client and how many clients you need in a year, because in a B2B company it is those two numbers that set a sensible budget better than any industry averages. With a contract worth hundreds of thousands and an acquisition cost in the range of a few thousand, the question is not whether to spend more, but how many such clients you are able to serve.

For the record: in the B2B companies I work with, marketing spend usually sits at a few percent of revenue, and most of it goes not to advertising but to people’s time, meaning writing, recording, speaking and preparing materials. That cost rarely makes it into the reports, which is why owners feel they spend nothing on marketing, even though in reality they are spending the most expensive resource they have.

Before you set the amount, decide what it is supposed to go toward. A budget broken into three lines (time for content, tools and selected industry events) is easier to defend and to account for than one sack labeled “marketing” which, after a year, says nothing beyond the fact that the money is gone.

At the start, the personal brand almost always wins, because in services the client buys trust in a specific person, not in a logo, and it is easier to build recognition for one person who has something to say than for a company that is only getting started. The problem shows up two or three years later, when all the visibility sits in the owner’s profile and clients ask outright whether he will run the project personally.

The sensible path is to start with yourself and gradually transfer part of the credibility to the company: show the team and its competencies, publish under other people’s names, describe the way of working as the company’s method rather than a private one. The personal brand attracts attention, and the company brand lets you handle that attention without the bottleneck of a single calendar.

If you sell advisory or expert services, the personal brand will stay with you for good and there is no point giving it up. What is worth watching is that the company has assets of its own, meaning content, case studies, a documented methodology and appearances by other people, because those decide whether it can one day be handed over to someone else to run, or sold.

Models answer based on what they find online and what they can unambiguously attribute, so visibility starts with the same things as in Google, only with more emphasis on being unambiguous. The content has to directly answer the question someone is asking, preferably in question-and-answer form rather than an essay where the actual answer hides somewhere in the third paragraph.

The second thing is consistency. If in one place you describe yourself as a sales advisor, in another as a growth consultant and in a third as a trainer, the model has nothing to assemble a single picture from and won’t point to you as a specialist in anything specific. The same name, the same specialization and the same wording on the website, on LinkedIn and in external materials do more here than technical optimization.

The third is presence beyond your own website, because models are more willing to repeat what is confirmed in several independent sources, meaning interviews, podcasts, industry commentary and rankings. Be prepared for the fact that you can’t measure this visibility in the classic way, and the only thing you can really do is regularly ask the models about your category and check whether you appear at all and in what context.

It does, because in B2B what counts is not the volume but who specifically types in a given phrase. A few dozen searches a month for a term describing your problem is usually a dozen or so companies that actually have it, and if, with a contract worth hundreds of thousands of zlotys, you win two clients a year from there, the investment pays for itself many times over.

The trap lies elsewhere. For this to work, the content has to answer the question asked by the buyer, not the phrase typed in by a student writing a thesis or a competitor checking out the market, which is why in narrow niches a few dozen texts answering very specific questions work better than fighting for one general term where you will lose to the big portals anyway.

It is also worth remembering that the same texts later work outside the search engine, because you send them to clients before a meeting, use them in proposals and quote them in conversations. Even if the traffic from Google turned out to be small, the material remains and shortens the sales cycle.

Describe the situation instead of the name, because what interests the reader most anyway is whether you have already solved a problem similar to their own. The sentence “a software house employing forty people, where all sales rested on the owner” carries more information for them than the name of a company they may not even recognize.

The rest depends on specifics, so show the starting point, the decisions that were made, and what changed, preferably with numbers in a form the client will agree to. If you can’t give revenue figures, give relative indicators, such as a shorter sales cycle, the number of conversations being run or proposal conversion, because those are rarely a secret and they show the scale of the change.

Before you conclude there will be no name, simply ask, but not in general terms: with a ready text for approval and a proposed quote. Quite a few companies refuse to “describe the collaboration” but agree when they see a specific paragraph in which they come across well. If consent is still not forthcoming, ask at least for permission to mention the name in sales conversations, because that is not the same as publication, and in practice it is often enough.

The simplest test is the first conversation. If within an hour nobody asked you who your client is, what your sales process looks like and how much the average contract is worth, and instead you heard a proposal for a package with a number of posts and articles, you are buying execution, not marketing.

The second signal is quantitative promises without caveats, meaning a declaration of a specific number of leads in a specific time made by someone who knows neither your market nor the conversion on your proposals. In B2B with a long sales cycle, nobody honest will give such a number after one meeting.

It is also worth asking outright who will run the project day to day, and asking to talk to that person, because often a partner or a director does the selling and a junior does the work, learning your industry on your budget. Finally, ask for two references from companies with a similar sales model and call them, because one such conversation says more than an entire portfolio.

With a cycle like that, classic attribution from analytics tools will mislead you, because it will show the last click, usually a visit from a search for your name, even though the decision matured over six months under the influence of several different touchpoints. In B2B companies, therefore, the simplest solution delivers the most: a question asked in the first conversation. How did you hear about us, and what made you reach out right now?

The second of those questions is more important than the first, because it separates the source from the moment. A client may have known you from LinkedIn for a year and reached out only when their salesperson left or sales dropped, and that is information which genuinely changes the way you shape your communication.

It is worth recording the answers in one place, even as a simple field in the CRM, and reviewing them once a quarter. After twenty or thirty conversations you will see a pattern sufficient for budget decisions and closer to the truth than any attribution report.

A redesign makes sense when you know what you want to say and the only thing in your way is the form: the site loads slowly, you can’t edit it yourself, the content is scattered or the look is out of step with how the company works today. In that situation a redesign tidies up something that has already been thought through.

It becomes an escape when the real problem is the lack of an answer to the question of how you differ and who you are for, because a new site will carry that gap over in a prettier wrapper. I have seen companies go through their third redesign in four years and each time feel that this time it would be different, even though the message stayed the same.

A simple test before deciding: write one sentence about who you help and with what, then show it to three people outside the company. If they can repeat it in their own words, you can build the new site. If they look at you quizzically, the site is not the problem and no designer will fix it.

Start by checking whether the competition is visible everywhere or only where you happen to be looking, because watching a few of the loudest companies distorts the picture and it is easy to believe that everyone except you has great marketing. In reality most of the market is silent, and the visible ones are the few companies that have been doing this consistently for several years.

The answer is rarely a louder presence in the same places, because where someone has been for five years, you won’t win on frequency. Narrowing down turns out to be more effective: choosing one segment or one problem and talking about it so specifically that people from that group feel it was written exclusively for them, because narrow visibility with the right people is worth more than broad visibility with random ones.

In practice this means one channel, one topic and a dozen or more months of consistency instead of trying to close the gap everywhere at once. Companies that in this situation scatter themselves across five channels usually end up a year later with neither visibility nor the energy to keep going.