insights | 05.09.2025

Beyond the colleges: Digital marketing for Cambridge tech sector

Article topics

Establish a clear brand identity
Promote yourself as a thought leader
Work with the local community
Measure your success

Cambridge isn’t just famous for its University, architecture, and punting tours – it’s well-known for its technological and scientific research.

Home to ground-breaking, innovative companies including AstraZeneca, Arm Holdings, and GSK, it’s no surprise that Cambridge is known as the Silicon Fen!

If you’re a small business specialising in technological, medical, or scientific developments, it can be hard to know where to begin with your digital marketing.

Who do you need to target? Which marketing channels should you use? How do you know if your marketing is successful?

Here are four things to think about to ensure your marketing gets the right results for your business.

1. Establish a clear brand identity

A brand identity covers everything that represents your company’s style and personality – from your colour palette and logo to your taglines and tone of voice.

This ensures your branding aligns with your values and mission as a business and is instantly recognisable to your target audience.

Tone of voice is particularly important as you may need to use different tones for different types of customers, while keeping your overall brand voice consistent. For example, some customers may be happy for you to use technical jargon, while others may not appreciate it.

Take Genomi c s, an international healthcare company with a presence in Cambridge.

The brand wants to reach as many people as possible and make science open to everyone. It does this through the use of soft colours, bright photos, friendly language, and large, accessible typography.

Once you have a brand identity in place, it’s vital you use it the same way across all marketing channels – for example, you don’t want a disconnect between your website and social media accounts. Having brand guidelines in place will keep employees and third-party agencies in the know.

2. Promote yourself as a thought leader

It takes a lot of skill, knowledge, and qualifications to build a successful tech company.

A Canadian study showed that 94% of tech entrepreneurs have an undergraduate degree, with 51% of those entrepreneurs also receiving a postgraduate degree.

Showcasing this knowledge to stakeholders and prospective customers shows them why they should invest in you and builds credibility in your business.

It can give you a boost in the search engine results too.

E-E-A-T (expertise, experience, authorativeness, and trust) is a key part of Google’s search quality guidelines. By demonstrating your expertise and experience, you increase the chances of ranking highly for selected words and phrases.

AstraZeneca does this through its blog – regularly posting thought pieces by named members of the team, with links to their LinkedIn profiles for additional credibility.

As well as creating a blog and posting articles, you can show your knowledge through:

Social media posts (LinkedIn is perfect if you’re in the tech industry)
Guest articles on relevant, high-quality websites
Webinars and virtual events
Whitepapers

3. Work with the local community

While it’s vital to publicise your business on a national (and even an international) scale, it’s also important to promote yourself a little closer to home too.

Engaging with Cambridge residents and other local organisations builds trust in your business and helps you create strong personal relationships with relevant people.

It can also help you achieve your values and mission goals – with 69% of people saying they prefer to buy from businesses that align with their own values.

And of course, with the University of Cambridge producing over 3,000 science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) graduates every year, creating a strong local presence will help bring top talent into your business.

Raspberry Pi, a manufacturer of low-cost computers, opened the Raspberry Pi Computing Education Research Centre at the University of Cambridge in 2021. The aim of the centre is to

work with teachers and educators, so they can help children understand how computers work and how to use them.

Of course, while what Raspberry Pi is doing is amazing, we appreciate that not every tech business in Cambridge can do the same.

Sponsoring a STEM event, holding a drop-in session for students, or hosting a science class in a local primary school are great starting points for smaller businesses.

4. Measure your success

When you work in technology or science, quantitative analysis and carefully measuring the results of experiments are a vital part of what you do.

The good news? Digital marketing is very much the same!

While it’s important to be creative, it’s equally important to regularly measure the results of your campaigns, so you can see what you’re doing well and where you can improve.

It’s always best to identify a handful of metrics that align with your overall goals as a business that you can easily measure and act upon. Here are a few examples to get you started:

Customer acquisition cost (CAC): How much it costs to acquire a new customer
Customer lifetime value (CLV): How much a customer will spend over the course of their relationship with you
Conversion rate: How many prospective customers are converting on your website. We recommend breaking this down by marketing channel so you can see which channels are most effective
Monthly recurring or annual recurring revenue (MRR/ARR): How much you generate each month or year from your subscription-based services
Churn rate: How many customers you are losing over a specific time period

Don’t wing your digital marketing: Call on the experts

Over 79% of businesses in the Cambridge area now operate in the science and tech sectors. This means it’s more important than ever to use digital marketing to show stakeholders who you are and what you do.

We have over two decades of experience working with businesses in the technology industry including Epson, Plantronics, Lumion, and Sage.

No two tech companies are the same, and we create a bespoke marketing strategy for your business. We work to understand your goals, unique selling point, and value proposition, so we can recommend the digital marketing channels that will bring you the best results.

Not only this, but we have a lot of experience working with Cambridge-based companies. We understand the local area, the economy, and what it takes to stand out from the competition. Ready to let the world know about your business? Drop us a line today.

Ready to let the world know about your business? Drop us a line today.