When you are starting your own business, it can often be tricky to know how to divide your time and your budget most effectively to deal with each of the different aspects of successfully running a company. One of the most important aspects to consider is marketing.

How much of your time to invest in marketing

When you are first starting your business and have not yet built brand awareness, marketing is one of the most essential ways to spend your time. When you start out, you are likely to have significantly more time than you have money to spend, especially if you have not yet built a customer/client base. During these early stages, you may even be able to spend the majority of your time on marketing (as long as you do not neglect other vital aspects of running a business).

This time can be taken to try out different marketing techniques and channels, choose your brand personality, and generally work out what works best for you. Once you have set up reliable marketing channels, the time needed to spend on marketing can decrease, but you will still need to regularly update and monitor channels such as social media accounts. As you gain more business, time spent on marketing can likely be reduced, usually to somewhere between 10% and 20% of your total weekly working hours. As time spent is reduced, financial investment in things like paid ads can likely increase.

How much of your budget to invest in marketing

There are many expenses associated with starting your own business. For example, if you are starting a business in the state of Florida, you are legally required by the government to have workers compensation insurance if you employ four or more members of staff, and/or if your business is in the construction sector.

Deciding what percentage of your business’ budget to invest in marketing can depend on what sector your business is a part of. Not only do certain sectors have fewer expenses than others, but taking an active approach to marketing is also more essential in some sectors than in others (although some marketing is vital in all sectors). Businesses in sectors such as banking, transportation, and energy have on average some of the lowest percentages of their budgets spent on marketing (usually less than 10%), whereas consumer goods providers spend around a quarter of their budget on marketing.

If you are not sure how much of your budget to allocate, a good general rule-of-thumb recommended by business experts is to aim for approximately 10% if you are looking to grow your business, although this can be reduced to around 5% if you just want to simply maintain your current level of brand visibility. When starting out and aiming to get clients/customers, marketing will be more important and worth more funding than later on when you have a consistent client/customer base. Of course, the specific percentage of your budget will also depend on your sector and overheads.

How data analytics can help you

Using data analytics can help you to identify the most profitable marketing channels for your business, which can make your time and your financial investments more efficient in future.

Being adaptable to changing circumstances and regularly revising your marketing budget, strategy, and timetable can help you to create improved ROIs on your marketing activities.

Whether you’re a vendor or a creator of cybersecurity software, marketing your product is critically important for your business’ success. Moreover, as cybersecurity experts are more than aware, informing consumers, workers, and business leaders about the threats they might come across online can dramatically reduce phishing, malware, and ransomware attacks – saving businesses billions of dollars each year. Getting your message out when you’re a cybersecurity provider might feel difficult, but this article argues that it’s an absolute must for anyone working in this crucial space.

New Threats

Most businesses and individuals are aware of cyber threats. They may have had a social media profile hacked in the past, or there might have been news stories about some of the most famous data breaches in recent history. However, consumers and business leaders, many of whom already use a cybersecurity system, are less aware of the developing nature of online threats. This is a key message to communicate to consumers: the ever-changing nature of online threats. This means that businesses should always review their cybersecurity offerings and should be prepared to switch providers if they find a blind spot in their protection at any time.

New Platforms

While the likes of Microsoft Teams and Slack have been around for many months, the cybersecurity risks and provisions that serve businesses on these relatively new platforms have only followed suit fairly recently. The result is that thousands of businesses are using online communication and team collaboration platforms which contain well-known backdoors that hackers can penetrate to extract data or inject malware. These Microsoft Teams protection tips, courtesy of McAfee, go to show just how important new security systems are in protecting businesses that have rushed to onboard with new platforms – especially since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic. 

Varied Providers

There are dozens of different cybersecurity providers online – all of which offer slightly different packages to businesses that use different forms of technology in their backend. CEOs and business leaders are simply not equipped to scour through the online space to find the perfect cybersecurity solution for their firm and, even if they had the time, they wouldn’t know what they were looking for. Instead, cybersecurity providers can communicate the benefits of their product through smart marketing, including guest posts on tech websites and features in comparison lists and online reviews. 

More Customers, More Data

As any cybersecurity whizz will tell you, the more customers they serve, the more data they receive on the capacity of their product to protect businesses. With this additional data, engineers are able to spot patterns of attacks and data breaches more easily, leaving them with plenty of information that they’ll use to patch up weaknesses in your product, making for a more competitive cybersecurity solution over time. This is a final, important benefit of marketing your cybersecurity product: the more consumers use it, the more insights you’ll receive on how you can tweak and improve it over time. 

These four points serve to urge cybersecurity firms, consultants, and professionals to market their knowledge and the products they sell for the good of businesses across the world.