Can you launch a B2B Health Startup on a ￡100k marketing budget in 2024?

If I was starting completely from scratch, with a limited marketing budget of ￡100k for the year, I would focus on these 3 steps:

1. Get focused on your ideal clients

Initially you'd be focusing on a lot of very hands on work, a deeply collaborative team effort with the founders, sales team etc. This includes:

• Create a laser targeted list of your top 10-30 clients
• Research your target clients, can you attend events they attend? Can you create a credible webinar/podcast series and invite key players at your target clients? Do you have experts that can give valuable presentations to your target clients (e.g. supporting health in the workplace).
• Create focused content that you can use to support discussions with these clients (e.g. if you're highlighting a health issue that impacts a typical work population, you could tailor that to client X, e.g. 'at an organisation like yours, this means Y number of employees might be impacted and Z number of work days could be lost).

2. Build your credibility with content

As a new startup, emphasising your credibility and trustworthiness is vital. You should focus on building up a bank of high quality content to support this.

• Invest in video and written content that answers the key questions potential customers might have, and ideally targets the key question areas for search optimisation.
• Exploit the opportunities on video platforms, a lot of bigger players that rank well in traditional search engines don't have as strong a presence on video platforms like YouTube and TikTok. Meaning you can instead!

3. Pick your performance marketing play

Depending on how much you invest in the above areas (video production can get expensive if you go all out) you are likely to have a good chunk of budget left, so then comes the challenge of where to spend this.

• One option is to go for performance marketing i.e. digital ads. It's likely linkedin would be a sensible choice as you have a high degree of targeting you can include to focus on specific organisations, professions, levels of seniority. But there may be industry specific platforms that will work better for you. Just don't expect this to light the world on fire, especially for a smaller budget. It can provide a good bit of background noise to keep your brand visible though. Of course, don't ignore other platforms. Facebook/Instagram/Google PPC/TikTok, can work really well for business customers too.
• Events and conferences. These can be expensive, but if you know some key clients are attending, they are worth it. Despite our digital world, having a physical presence for your brand and business can add a lot of credibility too. It also provides opportunities to create strong content that you can repurpose, for example interviewing attendees, target clients, team members on the stand etc. If you can secure a presentation/talk with your package, even better!
• You could also decide to double down on your long term content and SEO, investing more resources to build a strong foundation for this as your business grows and evolves. The great think is that money invested here generates marketing assets, as opposed to being used to rent exposure on paid advertising platforms like linkedin or Facebook.

4. Bonus - manage your expectations

I'm confident any new B2B startup in the health space could do a lot with ￡100k, and frankly even with a much more modest budget, as long as they are happy to do the work.

But you will need to manage growth expectations wisely within the team, and with any business founders/owners/investors. The steps above provide for a stable, strong foundation that can be built upon in future years when there's more budget, resources and staff available. But everything has to start somewhere!

Hi ?? I'm Karim, I wrote this post to share some of my experience marketing and growing health startups over the past decade. If you'd like to discuss profitably growing your health startup or scaleup, feel free to reach out!