How Deep Tech Marketing Actually Works

Marketing means different things to different people. To a founder, it's "get us leads." To a designer, it's brand. To a sales leader, it's collateral. To a CFO, it's a line item that's hard to measure.

This ambiguity creates problems. Teams talk past each other. Hiring decisions get muddled. Investment gets misallocated.

Here's a simplification: marketing is four distinct functions, each with different outputs, skills, and success metrics. The framework applies broadly, but the work within each function shifts significantly for deep tech companies. What follows is how these functions actually operate when your product requires genuine technical evaluation.

1. Strategy & Positioning

The job: Answer the questions everything else depends on. Which markets do we prioritize? What problem do we solve and for whom? How are we different? What do we want to be known for?

How deep tech differs:

Category creation, not selection. You're rarely competing in an existing category. The work often involves defining a new frame—one that makes your technical advantage legible to buyers who don't yet know they need it. (More on framing here.)

Layered positioning. Your story needs to work at multiple altitudes: technical truth for engineers, business value for buyers, inevitability narrative for investors. These aren't three versions of the same message—they're interlocking arguments. The 5Cs framework offers one way to structure this.

"Why now" tied to technology inflection. Not market trends, but what's newly possible. Why this couldn't be built five years ago—and why waiting means losing.

Desperate customers, not large markets. You're not segmenting a large market. You're hunting for urgency in a narrow wedge: What do we uniquely offer that a specific, findable set of people desperately need? This is the essence of product-market fit—the market pulling the product out of your hands.

Output: A strategic spine that holds together under technical scrutiny, commercial pressure, and investor diligence simultaneously.

Signals it's working: Internal alignment. Win rates improving against target competitors. Technical evaluators nod rather than push back on core claims.

2. Product & GTM Enablement

The job: Translate strategy into product-level stories and everything a revenue team needs to win deals.

How deep tech differs:

Technical proof is primary. Whitepapers, benchmarks, architecture docs, reference implementations matter more than polished one-pagers. Your buyers will read them. They'll check your claims.

Dual-track enablement. Every deal involves parallel evaluations: technical (engineers, architects) and commercial (procurement, executives). Materials that work for one audience often fail with the other.

POC playbooks are critical. The "demo to close" motion doesn't exist. Complex products require structured proof-of-value processes—scoped pilots, success criteria, evaluation frameworks. This is often the difference between deals that close and deals that stall.

SE-heavy model. Solutions engineers carry deals. Enablement means enabling technical sales, not just arming AEs with talk tracks.

Output: Everything needed to survive rigorous technical and commercial evaluation—not just "everything sales needs to close."

Signals it's working: Win rate through technical evaluation. Deals not stalling at POC. Technical evaluators becoming internal champions.

3. Communications & Brand

The job: Build reach, reputation, and narrative in the market.

How deep tech differs:

Developer relations and technical community. For infrastructure and platform companies, this is often the most important comms investment. DevRel operates on different logic—creating value, not distributing messages. Treating it as a subset of comms undersells its importance.

Technical content with substance. Not thought leadership—engineering blogs, deep dives on hard problems, technical tutorials that demonstrate competence. Fluff signals you lack depth.

Research credibility. Where relevant: conference papers, peer review, research collaborations. Not optional when your differentiation is genuinely technical.

Analyst relations. Gartner and Forrester are part of enterprise buying processes. Ignoring this means answering "who else is in this space?" in every sales cycle.

Traditional PR. Still matters, but weight is lower. A respected engineer sharing your architecture post carries more weight than a TechCrunch feature.

Output: Technical legitimacy—earned credibility with people who will evaluate your claims. Awareness without credibility gets you into conversations you can't win.

Signals it's working: Share of voice in technical communities. Inbound from people who already understand what you do.

4. Growth

The job: Drive measurable commercial impact across the funnel.

How deep tech differs:

ABM as primary motion. Your TAM is often small and identifiable. Account-based marketing matters more than broad demand gen. You're working a finite list, not filling a funnel.

Pipeline velocity over volume. The constraint is rarely top-of-funnel. It's conversion through technical evaluation, time-in-stage, deal progression.

Performance marketing is marginal. Small TAM, technical buyers who don't click ads, keywords too expensive or generic. Paid acquisition supports; it doesn't scale.

PLG often doesn't apply. Product-led growth requires self-service products and immediate value. Deep tech typically requires integration, evaluation, and procurement.

Expansion as growth lever. Land-and-expand matters enormously. The second deal with an existing customer is often easier than the first with a new one.

Output: Pipeline you can forecast and a funnel you can diagnose.

Signals it's working: Deal velocity. Stage conversion rates. Expansion revenue.

The Dependencies

These functions form a chain:

Strategy sets the spine. Without it, enablement creates inconsistent materials, comms tells fragmented stories, growth optimizes for wrong conversions.

Enablement translates strategy into proof. Without it, positioning stays theoretical and sales cycles extend indefinitely.

Comms builds credibility that makes growth efficient. Without it, every deal starts from zero.

Growth converts and optimizes. Without it, credibility doesn't become revenue.

Skip early, fail late. For deep tech, getting Strategy and Enablement right is the game. Comms and Growth amplify what's working—they can't fix what's broken upstream.

Timing

Not every company needs all four at once. Early-stage: focus on Strategy and enough Enablement to close first deals. Comms and Growth at scale are premature until the core story works.

By Series B/C, all four need to operate—and the question becomes whether they're coordinated.

For "Normal" Tech

If you're building simpler products—self-serve SaaS, SMB focus, well-understood category—the functions apply but the weight shifts.

Comms and brand increase in importance. Awareness matters more when buyers decide faster with less evaluation.

Growth becomes the scaling lever. Performance marketing and PLG can drive predictable revenue. The playbooks are established.

Enablement is lighter. Solid materials, but not the technical depth deep tech requires.

Strategy still matters, but errors are more recoverable. Faster cycles let you iterate. Deep tech companies often can't—feedback loops are too slow.

Why This Helps

This is a simplification. Real organizations are messier.

But when a founder says "we need marketing," this turns a vague statement into a specific question: which function?When marketing is underperforming, it helps diagnose where. When you're hiring, it clarifies what skills you need.

Marketing isn't one thing. It's four things that need to work together.

Deep tech fundraising runs on storytelling—and storytelling runs on positioning. If you're building breakthrough technology and struggling to make the market understand why it matters, get in touch.