25 Shocking Marketing Statistics For Startups

In the modern age of business, there is more data available to startup owners than there has ever been. This means that business owners can also learn more about marketing than ever before, with a large number of marketing statistics being available digitally.

Making effective use of digital marketing statistics for startups can assist business owners in making better decisions by interpreting patterns within the data itself, which can lead to increased profitability for the business.

There is a notable difference between the marketing needs of a B2B startup and a B2C startup, due to the different nature of the target market and the different types of products that may be offered. Despite this, the following marketing statistics will help both B2B and B2C startups to better plan their marketing campaigns for 2022.

But first, some helpful definitions.

What does startup marketing entail?

Simply put, startup marketing is a unique challenge because of the limited resources that startups have, whether it's time, money, or talent. You have to be sure every effort, no matter how small, is well-planned and flawlessly executed. Startup marketing is a whole different science.

We all know marketing is essential for all businesses, but it's even more important for startups. Unless people know about your startup and what it offers, they probably won't buy your products or services.

Since marketing for startups is such a unique case, this list of startup statistics should give founders a good place to start thinking about how to best market their startup.

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1. How Many Startups Have Marketing Teams?

Out of 1000 surveyed businesses, it was found that 56.9% of startups had a dedicated marketing team, 20.8% had at least one person dedicated to marketing, 15.3% have the owner as the sole marketer, 4.8% use an outside agency and 2.2% rely on freelancers.

2. Many Startups Still Don’t Have Websites

In the digital age of business, you would think that almost every single startup would have a website, although this is not the case. 36% of startups do not currently have websites, with 35% of small businesses without a website believing that they are not well-established enough to have one.

3.  How Important Is Website Design In Marketing?

Website design is incredibly important in marketing, with 75% of customers saying that they have judged a business for the quality of their marketing website.

4. What Are The Best Methods of Building Brand Awareness?

The most actively used platform for building brand awareness is social media marketing. After falling by 12% compared to the previous year, email marketing came in second place, then content marketing and paid media lag in the third and fourth spots.

5. What Are The Best Marketing Channels To Attract Millennials?

Millennials are actually 247% more likely to be influenced by blogs and social media, so if they’re your target market, now would be a great place to start your PR.

6. 96% of mobile users search on Google

Google is currently the king of mobile searching on the web, holding 96% of search traffic on mobile devices, with Yahoo getting 2% and Bing getting 1%. So if you want to optimize your site for smartphone users put all your bets on Google.

7. What Are The Best Methods for Attracting New Clients?

Similarly to building brand awareness, the most effective method of attracting new clients was stated to be social media marketing. Then, businesses listed email marketing in second and paid media in third, event marketing and video marketing took the fourth and fifth spot while digital display and influencer marketing lagged behind.

The reason email marketing is so powerful is that it’s the primary form of communication that businesses use for lead nurturing. It’s used to retarget active users on your site. So it improves the conversion rates of all the traffic acquisition channels of your business.

For more info check out our Ultimate Guide to Email Marketing Flows.

8. How Important Is Having a Secure Website Connection?

Having a secure connection on your website is arguably even more important than having a good design, with 82% of customers stating that they would not use a website that has an insecure connection. Search engines will actually take penalize sites that don’t use the secure HTTPS protocol.

9. Startup Marketing Spend Statistics

Of the 1000 businesses that were surveyed, 78% stated that they would want to invest more in digital marketing, 73% wanted to invest more in their social media, and 57% plan to increase their investment in email marketing.

Additionally, 19% of the businesses stated they would be cutting back on their traditional marketing spend, whilst 11% are going to decrease their spend on event marketing, 10% were cutting back on email marketing and 8% are scaling back their social media marketing.

10. Startups Don’t Spend Enough Time On Marketing

Marketing is like any other profession, you need to put in the hard work to get the results, you cannot give a half-baked attempt and do well. Despite this, almost half of startups only spend a cumulative two hours or less on marketing per week.

11. What Are The Biggest Marketing Challenges For Startups?

When asked about their biggest challenges in marketing going into 2022, customer acquisition was the most commonly stated challenge with gaining new prospects and leads in second. In the next tier, increasing web traffic came in third, with improving social media following next in fourth and increasing conversions in fifth.

12. What Marketing Channels Work Well For Startups?

Out of 1000 startups, 69.6% make active use of Facebook, email marketing was the second most common at 64.1%, 52.4% use direct mail, 48.3% use Instagram, and 47% use Twitter. Print ads were also fairly common with 45.7% of startups utilizing it and 42.8% making use of paid searches.

13. How Do Startups Communicate With Their Customers?

The most common method used by startups to communicate with their customers is email at 71.8%. Following in second place, 60.8% use Facebook to keep in contact with customers and in third, the only other method used by over half of startups is the telephone at 55.8%. Interestingly, 47.6% of startups still use direct mail to communicate with customers, even more so than they do with Instagram at 39.9% and 39.8% for Twitter.

14. How Do Customers Prefer To Learn About Your Products or Services?

70% of customers would find it more appealing to learn about your products and services through articles and blogs than ads.

Content strategies are becoming more popular across a variety of industries.

15. Which Marketing Channel Provided The Best ROI In 2022?

Out of the explored marketing channels, the ones that received the most investment in 2022 also brought the best returns. On the top spot is email marketing, Facebook comes in second place and rather unsurprisingly traditional marketing rounded out the top three.

16. How Does SEO Marketing Conversion Compare to Outbound Marketing?

SEO marketing has a massively superior conversion rate to outbound marketing, with SEO converting at 14.6% and outbound marketing leads converting at 1.7%.

17. What Is The Average ROI on Google Ads?

The average ROI on Google ads is relatively straightforward and if you have the budget, it may be a good method, for every $1 spent, you will gain an average of $2 in return, which is a 200% return.

18. How Many Users Move Past The First Page On Google?

This statistic shows the importance of having high-quality SEO, as less than 10% of internet users actually make it to the third page on Google searches, if you want a good chance of standing out, you will need to get on the first two pages.

It’s getting much harder to stand out in search results so companies are focusing on optimizing rich snippets and improving the user experience on their pages.

19. What Makes A Successful Facebook Ad?

Not only is Facebook still the most popular method of reaching customers for B2C operations, but it is still the ideal platform for attracting B2B customers too, with over 60 Million active business pages on the website. To get the best out of an advert, you should an image or a video to it, as adding these will improve the ad’s performance by 70%-90%

All the popular social media platforms are prioritizing video content over images because it’s much more engaging. Facebook video ads revenue rose to an all-time high of $28.2 billion in Q3 of 2021 and is expected to reach 30% of online video ad revenue globally by 2024. According to the Pew Research Center, YouTube and Facebook are the most widely used social platforms today.

20. Customers HATE Pop-Up Ads

How many times have you gone onto a website and tried to click something, only for a pop-up ad to intercept you? A lot of people have had this problem and as a result, 73% of customers have stated that they absolutely hate popup ads. You’re just better off not using them.

21. What Marketing Channels Are Startups Less Likely To Use?

Other marketing channels are rarely used by startups. Only 27.3% make use of Snapchat, 24.5% use billboards, 23.6% hosted adverts on platforms like Spotify, 18.8% use podcast programming, and a small portion actually use podcast advertisements at 18.5%.

22. Marketers are Failing To Use Behavioral Data

Businesses can now track a large amount of behavioral data to start building customer profiles, for tailored marketing solutions. Despite this, 70% of marketers are still failing to make use of such data.

23. What Are The Most Prominent Marketing Goals For Startups?

When pressed about which marketing goals were most important to them in the coming year, acquiring new customers placed at the top of the list, interestingly retaining current customers came in second, increasing the customer value over lifetime appeared in third, with building a loyal fanbase behind in fourth.

24. Marketing Investment Trends For 2022

Startups have spent the most money on traditional forms of marketing, email marketing, and Facebook marketing campaigns. Following behind are paid digital marketing, direct mail, and content marketing.

In contrast, a small number of businesses are investing in search engine optimization (SEO), Instagram marketing, and SMS marketing. Other social media marketing channels such as Snapchat have seen very little investment.

25. What Is The Most Difficult Marketing Channel For Startups To Master?

The respondents in the survey made it clear that the marketing channel that they found most difficult to use was influencer marketing, this was followed very closely in second place by SEO marketing and rounding out in third, not too far behind is paid digital media.