Every business goes through its own stages. You start with an idea and your first customers. Then comes growth, and hopefully, one day you’re running an established company with eight or nine figures in revenue.
But where does marketing fit into all of that?
How much marketing does your business need? How much should you spend on it? What should marketing be doing for you as the company grows, and who should be doing the work?
Let’s look at three stages of business growth: startup, growth, and established business, and see how your marketing should evolve along the way.
Startup Stage: Find What Works
You’re building a business and trying to gain traction. Your team is probably small, with people wearing multiple hats. Your processes are still developing, and you’re learning which customers are the right fit.
Growth can be aggressive at this stage. A startup may be working with a team of one to 10 people. Those numbers aren’t rules. What matters more is that you’re still establishing your position in the market and figuring out what can reliably bring business in.
Marketing at this stage needs to stay focused. Build a professional brand presence and make sure your website clearly communicates what you do. Then start testing ways to reach customers through SEO, paid advertising, social media, content, and partnerships. Start collecting first-party data and building your email list early too.
The startup stage is where you learn what brings customers in. Build on those wins as the business grows.
Marketing Budget for a Startup
A startup may invest around 10% to 25% of revenue in marketing, depending on its industry and growth goals. B2C businesses can land closer to 20% to 25%, while B2B businesses may be closer to 10% to 15%.
With a limited budget, spreading your money across too many tactics can make it difficult to learn what’s actually working. Start with a focused mix, measure the return, and use those results to decide where to invest next.
Should You Work With a Marketing Agency at the Startup Stage?
You probably don’t need a full in-house marketing department yet. But that doesn’t mean marketing should become another job for the owner to figure out between everything else.
A marketing agency gives you access to experience and different marketing specialties without hiring an entire team. If your business depends on local customers, a local marketing agency can bring another advantage: knowledge of the market you’re trying to enter.
Madroit Marketing agency is based in Grand Rapids, so when we work with a new West Michigan business, we’re already familiar with the market they’re trying to reach. That local knowledge can help you make better marketing decisions while you’re still figuring out what works.
Growth Stage: Scale What Works
You’ve made it past the startup stage, and the business has traction. You know your market better, have a clearer picture of your best customers, and can be more selective about the opportunities you pursue.
A growing business may be working with a team of 10 to 50 people. At this stage, the challenge is scaling without letting your growth outrun the systems behind it. Your marketing needs to scale with the rest of the business.
This is the time to look closely at where your best customers are coming from and double down on your strongest marketing channels. It’s also time to improve conversion rates and bring more automation into your marketing and sales process. A CRM, email automation, or other tools can take repetitive work off your team as the volume increases.
The growth stage is where you take what worked during startup and make it work at a larger scale.
Marketing Budget for a Growing Business
A growing business may invest around 8% to 12% of revenue in marketing. B2C businesses may be closer to 10% to 12%, while B2B businesses may fall closer to 8% to 10%.
You also have something you didn’t have at the beginning: more data. You can see which channels bring in your best customers and how much it costs to acquire them. Use that information to shift your marketing budget toward the opportunities producing stronger results.
Should You Work With a Marketing Agency at the Growth Stage?
Marketing gets more complicated as the business grows. You may need SEO, paid advertising, content, automation, and analytics running at the same time.
This is also a stage when bringing marketing leadership in-house may make sense. But one person doesn’t have to do everything. A digital marketing agency can work alongside your internal team and provide the specialists you don’t need or aren’t ready to hire full-time.
The goal is to build a marketing operation that can keep pace with the business. Your internal team and agency should have clear roles, with everyone working toward the same growth goals.
Established Business Stage: Protect What You’ve Built and Keep Growing
At this stage, your business has a solid position in the market. You have established revenue, a larger team, and customers who already know your name. Growth may be less aggressive than it was before, but maintaining your market share and finding new opportunities become bigger priorities.
An established business may be working with a team ranging from 50 employees to the thousands. Growth goals may settle around 5% to 15% year over year. Again, the numbers don’t define the stage. A business can reach this point earlier or take decades to get here.
Marketing now has a different job. Customer retention and loyalty become more important. So does protecting your reputation. At the same time, marketing can support expansion into new markets or help introduce new products and services.
The challenge is staying flexible. A larger company can be more like a ship than a speedboat. Changing direction takes longer, which makes it even more important to keep reviewing what works instead of relying on a strategy simply because it worked five years ago.
At the established stage, marketing helps you protect the position you’ve earned while looking for the next place to grow.
Marketing Budget for an Established Business
An established business may invest around 5% to 10% of revenue in marketing. B2C companies may land closer to the higher end, while B2B companies can be closer to 5% to 8%.
The percentage may be lower than it was during earlier growth stages, but the actual marketing budget can be much larger. Where that money goes matters. Your investment may shift toward customer retention, brand reputation, sales support, or expansion into new markets.
Should You Work With a Marketing Agency at the Established Stage?
You may already have an in-house marketing team at this point. A marketing agency can bring an outside perspective when you’re looking for the next opportunity to grow.
That may mean identifying a new market for your business or finding new ways to reach an audience you haven’t targeted before. Madroit Marketing Agency has experience with both. We can work alongside your existing team to find new opportunities and build the marketing strategy to pursue them.
Conclusion
As your business grows, marketing needs to keep up. What worked at the beginning may eventually stop being enough, especially when your goals take the business somewhere new.
Wherever you are in that journey, Madroit Marketing Agency is ready to support your next stage of growth. Whether you’re starting local, expanding into new markets, or looking for the next opportunity to grow, we’re built to help you move forward.
Ready for what’s next? Contact Madroit Marketing and let’s grow from here.
