Tech startups are proliferating in North America. The professional non-profit Tech Toronto estimates there are up to 4,100 active tech startups in Canada alone. And the US still leads the world in the total number of tech startups. 

Unfortunately, most of those companies are not destined to last.

63% of technology-oriented startups fail in the first five years. Competition for venture capital is intense, and differentiation becomes critical early on in the life of these businesses. 

Fortunately, a brand strategy can keep tech startups competitive, attractive, and win over the hearts and minds of consumers today. What does that look like in practice? 

Strategic branding is complex, and companies in technology sectors face challenges others don’t.

If your company is less than five years old, and you’re aiming to court large Venture Capital firms or Fortune 500 business clients, keep reading.

In this guide, discover the unique branding challenges startups like yours face. Then, learn how brand strategy can meet those challenges head-on. 

Brand Strategy for Technology Startups: Overview

There are certain tenants of a smart brand strategy that apply across many industries. But, technology startups need to keep their relatively unique market position in mind. 

Fortunately, the core of the brand strategy is the ability to define the problem you can uniquely solve for your target audience. If a tech startup can get a clear idea of who that audience is, it’ll be ahead of the competition. Not only this, you’ll have to become really good at communicating your unique position visually and with language that connects with your audience consistently. 

Tech start-ups are uniquely challenged with being able to simplify the language around complex ideas and industry jargon that can be easily understood by various audiences. 

Let’s dive into some of these audiences to learn how you can cater your brand messaging to meet your business objectives.

Who Is Your Audience—And How Do You Speak to Them? 

As a tech startup, you’ll want to translate your brand strategy into brand messaging that targets three different audiences:

• Venture capital firms 
• Business clients seeking SaaS solutions
• Tech-savvy talent (future employees)

Each audience category will be looking for something different about why they should care about your brand. How do you communicate with all three?

Venture Capital

If you’re trying to win venture capital funding, branding matters from the jump. In surveys, 88% of VC CEOs say a startup’s brand matters.

VC CEOs figure that even if your product changes and evolves, your brand identity won’t. Your brand needs to communicate a trustworthy, innovative corporate persona to attract the interest of venture capital.

Branding includes visual identity (logo, graphics, colors) but that’s not all it is. To quote Jeff Bezos, “[Your] brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room.” 

Now, tech startups are in a bit of a challenging market right now. There’s been an investment slump in the past two years. IPOs down by 76%.

This means your goals when attracting venture capital funding might shift. Aim to build brand value and equity to mitigate risks inherent to market instability. 

This means your broader communication and marketing should focus on messaging that communicates your unique value, differentiators, brand purpose, and mission. 

VC Audience Profiles

On that note, make sure to create a specific audience profile for your VC messaging. What is your ideal VC’s investment thesis? 

What makes your company compatible with that thesis? Ultimately, an effective brand message in this context is going to focus on your core business strategy and model. This includes how your marketing and sales strategy but most importantly how you position yourself in the market. What is your value-add? What innovation can you highlight? What’s your expertise? What is your vision, mission, and what are your values? How are you different?

Build a brand strategy that positions your core product or service as the only option in the market. Value-driven development is the key to sustainable growth and company longevity. That’s what VCs are looking for from tech startups right now. 

Business Clients Seeking SaaS Solutions

When it comes to business clients (B2B, it’s important to note that prospects spend very little time actually talking to sales teams.

When decision-makers at a company are considering a software solution, they spend 45% of their time conducting independent research. Then, they spend 33% of their time building consensus among stakeholders.

As a result, SaaS customers have a different customer journey than other types of clients. So, when creating a brand that appeals to business clients, keep the weighted nature of this journey in mind.

Focus on creating informative content that demonstrates thought leadership. How does your solution add value? How reliable is this assessment? How does your solution address your customer’s problems? Are you using language that speaks directly to decision-makers in your messaging and content?

It’s critical to build your brand’s adoption by understanding your impact to your potential client’s business as well as within your industry, and community. To improve your brand’s success during the consensus-building stage, create a wide range of audience profiles.

Consider different roles at a company that needs to buy into a software solution. And, research the types of concerns different business partners may have, that your software might resolve. 

Specificity and accurate message targeting will elevate your brand in this phase and keep you top of mind as the top choice. 

Tech-Savvy Talent

One of the most pressing challenges for tech startups is the talent shortage. There are more technology companies than there are high-skill tech employees. This creates major competition for top talent and high rates of attrition. 

Current market conditions make it easy for lucrative brands to recruit or poach employees. Some companies are well positioned to acquire struggling competition for less. 

How can you address these challenges and extend a positive and meaningful brand experience to your employees?

Your brand strategy has the answers. What are your brand values? What is the future your brand is building towards? What is the impact you are creating ie mission? Who are you as an organization? What do you care about? And what are you willing to do to deliver on all your promises? 

Talent Targeting

Here are a few branding considerations to help your tech start-up attract and retain your ideal talent. 

First, your brand can communicate your commitment to promising entry-level and mid-level employees. Train talent earlier in their careers, and emphasize mentorship and paths for advancement. 

Second, cultivate and promote a strong internal brand experience. Ensure your leadership team is aligned in creating strategies to motivate, communicate, and manage employees that fosters a positive and meaningful experience internally as your brand does externally. 

Third, in addition to cultivating a growth-oriented work culture of care, make sure talent has opportunities to innovate. Limited opportunities to innovate or work creatively are a key reason tech workers feel unmotivated and leave their companies. 

Other attractive aspects of work culture include easy collaboration, mutual respect, and a celebration of accomplishments. 

Tech Startups Face Unique Challenges 

Innovators and leaders in tech face unique challenges. An effective brand strategy helps your startup rise to meet them. The most common challenges businesses face in the tech marketplace include:

• Cybersecurity threats
• Data privacy legal compliance
• Rapid technological change
• Digital transformation (Internet of Things)
• Using “big data” effectively
• Supply chain management, shortages

Communicating how you’re solving these problems is key and delivering on your solution is more important for building trust and credibility with consumers. 

Strategic Branding Rises to Meet Them

Tech startups need strategic branding to meet the market’s challenges and speak directly to their audience’s needs. Here are three key pillars of focus on: 

Identify Branding Strategy Targets and Goals

Balance marketing goals between growing brand performance and business objectives to build brand value and mitigate risks. Common risks tech startups face include: 

• Cybersecurity threats
• Data privacy and legal compliance
• Rapid technological changes 
• Digital transformation and the internet of things 
• How to use big data effectively 
• Supply chain management and shortages
• Building trust and credibility with customers
• Communicating how you solve problems

As a startup, your brand-building objectives are:

• brand awareness
• brand adoption
• brand advocacy

Your goals will be unique to your business but should focus on cultivating trust, brand recognition, and building relevancy for each of the audiences mentioned above. When crafting your brand message, you must outline how you solve the most common problems companies face with technologies. 

Design Visual Branding From the Inside Out

There’s no shortcut to visual branding. In tech (and any industry for that matter), your visual brand is informed by your knowledge about your target audience and your unique position in solving a problem for them. It is also informed by your company’s values, beliefs, mission, vision, and most important of all a point of differentiation from your competitors in the market. 

When creating visual branding materials, you must also convey your message. This is again where you highlight how you solve problems and mitigate risks for your customers. This also helps build trust and credibility. 

Most start-ups fail to place importance on visual communication. Placing your logo on visual assets as a start-up with little to no brand equity or recognition won’t have the same impact as a mature brand like Apple. You want audiences to see your logo and connect it with how you mitigate threats, use big data, and enable digital transformation. 

Make sure to spend the time in the early stages of start-up to develop unique distinct brand assets (logo, graphics, colors, imagery, fonts, style) and a brand management system to consistently communicate who you are as a brand and your brand’s value at a glance. 

Develop Document Content Strategy

Brand recognition and memorability are sustained by effective content. But content isn’t effective when it’s done with no strategy. Yet, a full 21% of all B2B companies admit they have no content marketing strategy whatsoever.

Consider the following:

• how does your content allow your target audience(s) to like, know and trust you?
• what are the calls to action?
• are you creating content to meet business goals?
• are you creating content to meet brand-building goals?
• how does your content provide value to your audience(s)?
• do you look and sound like your competitors?
• how are you measuring content performance?

If you struggle with knowing what content to create, you don’t have a strategy. Your content should educate audiences on common threats, like cybersecurity issues or how to thrive with rapid technological changes. This way you position your brand as a true expert and it helps to enforce your messaging. 

Brand Building Done Right: BrandHouse

At BrandHouse, we know no two businesses are the same. That’s why we work with startups like yours directly to develop a brand strategy, brand marketing, and brand management. If you’re ready to grow your brand and don’t know exactly what to do or how a brand marketing partner like Brandhouse can help you – book a free consultation to better understand what that could look like. 

Ready to boost your brand’s online presence? Talk to one of our experts today.