My Philosophy on Branding and Marketing Budgets for Startups

You’ve had your moment that tells you it is time to start your new business. You know you have to spend money on attorney fees to do your legal paperwork. You have to spend money on your tech stack to support your business. You have to rent a storefront or office space. It all adds up, so you’re looking at ways to cut startup costs.

At some point you might start looking at branding and marketing as something that you can DIY, or do the bare minimum, or wait to invest in it “at some point in the future.”

I can understand how it might not seem to be a necessity in quite the same way as an office. However, consider this situation:

You have your monthly outlays that you’ve committed to. Every month those amounts are due, regardless of how the business is growing. You get a few clients, but it is still less than your monthly outlays. So every month, you are operating at a loss. How long is your runway that you can afford to operate at a loss?

Instead, consider what good and integrated branding, marketing and communications can do for you: my goal is to help you grow at a rate that you cross the profitability threshold as quickly as possible. By spending the money upfront, your have the potential to reduce your long-term spending, because you’re spending less time before you reach profitability.

It is well worth spending some money upfront because having a presence that reaches your target audience with the right look and messaging can give you ROI that happens so much faster to get you out of the red and into the black.

Let’s talk about what your budget looks like and ways to be strategic about spending money on integrated branding, marketing, and communications as you are starting up.