Marketing for New Businesses
Most new businesses spend money on the wrong things first, then spend more fixing them later. The decisions you make in the first few months set the foundation for everything after.
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Does your brand match the business you're actually building?
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Is your website ready before your first customer searches for you?
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Do you know which marketing moves will matter most in year one?
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Bottom line: Is your marketing foundation something you can build on — or something you'll have to rebuild?
Startup Marketing
There's no perfect time to start. Just a better one.
“I’m starting a new business.”
You have the idea, but the brand is still fuzzy. Maybe there’s no website yet. Maybe the name, logo, message, or offer still needs shape. This is the time to build the basics right — before a rough first impression starts costing you.
“I’m open, but people aren’t finding me.”
The business is live, but your online presence hasn’t caught up. Word of mouth is helping, but your website, Google Business Profile, social media, and content aren’t doing enough yet. You don’t need to do everything. You need to know what matters first.
“My business has outgrown my marketing.”
The business is real now. Revenue is coming in. Your services, team, or customer base may have changed. But your marketing still looks like the first version of the business — not the one you’ve become.
Wherever you are, the job is the same: stop guessing, get the foundation in order, and put your time and budget toward the marketing pieces that matter first. We’ve helped hundreds of Eastern Washington businesses do exactly that.
Startup Marketing Services
What every new business needs to get started.
You don't need everything at once. You need the right things first — in the right order. Here's where we typically start with a new business.
Brand Identity
A logo, color system, and brand guide that reflect where your business is going — not just where it's starting. Built to scale with you so you're not rebuilding in two years.
Website Design
A professional site that establishes credibility from day one. SEO-ready from launch, mobile-first, and built to work as your primary marketing asset — not just a digital business card.
Local Search & AI Visibility
Google Business Profile setup, local SEO, and AI search optimization — so you show up when people search for what you do, whether that's on Google or asking ChatGPT for a recommendation.
Brand Photography & Video
Real photos of your team, your space, and your work. Professional visuals establish credibility quickly — stock photos do the opposite.
Digital Advertising Launch
When you're new, sometimes you need to get in front of people who haven't heard of you yet. We build focused campaigns that stretch a limited launch budget toward the right audience — not just everyone within a radius.
Ongoing Marketing Support
Once the foundation is built, a monthly marketing partnership keeps it growing. Strategy sessions, content, campaigns, and production — all under one roof, on a budget that scales with your business.
Starting a Business?
The biggest marketing mistakes startups make.
Starting a business already comes with enough unknowns. The goal is not to do everything perfectly on day one — it’s to avoid the early marketing decisions that cost more to fix later.
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Building a logo before you know the brand.
A logo matters, but it should not come before your message, audience, positioning, and how the brand needs to show up. Otherwise, you end up with something that looks fine in one place and falls apart everywhere else.
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Launching without a real website.
Social media helps, but it should not be your whole online presence. A simple, clear website gives people somewhere to learn about you, trust you, and take the next step when they are ready.
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Skipping local visibility.
If people cannot find your business on Google, Maps, or local search, you are making word of mouth work too hard. Your Google Business Profile, website content, location signals, and reviews all help people find and choose you.
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Spending money on ads too early.
Ads can work, but only when they have somewhere useful to send people. If your website, message, offer, or follow-up process is not ready, paid traffic can burn through budget without fixing the real problem.
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Trying to look bigger instead of clearer.
New businesses sometimes overcomplicate the brand, website, or marketing because they want to look established. Clear beats complicated. People need to understand what you do, who it is for, and why they should care.
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Treating marketing like a launch task.
Marketing does not stop once the doors open or the website goes live. The first version gets you started. The work after launch is what helps you build visibility, earn trust, and keep improving.
Calculate Your Marketing Budget
Not sure what to spend on digital marketing?
Our free marketing budget calculator gives you a smart starting range based on your revenue and goals — in about 30 seconds.
Why Cougar Digital Marketing?
We've helped lots of businesses start with a stronger marketing foundation.
We’ve built first websites, new brands, launch plans, and marketing foundations for businesses across the Tri-Cities and Eastern Washington. We’ve also seen what happens when the early pieces don’t connect — the rebrands, rebuilt sites, unclear messaging, and campaigns that have nowhere useful to send people.
Getting the foundation right early saves time, budget, and a lot of backtracking.
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Brand, website, photography, content, and launch support in one place
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Clear guidance on what to prioritize when your budget is limited
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Local insight into how customers search, compare, and choose businesses
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A practical plan for what needs to happen now, what can wait, and what comes next
125+ 5-Star Reviews
When you do great work, people notice.
Cougar Digital took my website to a whole new level! They are very professional and knowledgeable and did excellent work. They also filmed a few videos for me that turned out amazingly well! They were very responsive to what I wanted and envisioned and were extremely patient with me. I would highly recommend them to anyone!
Greatly appreciate the work that Josh and the Cougar Digital Marketing team did for our organization. We had a vague vision and they were able to make it better than we could have imagined. Appreciate their flexibility to work with us on a short turnaround and their suggestions for making the best video possible.
We needed to update our website and Josh at Cougar Digital was very responsive, helpful, and capable. Our refreshed website looks great! -Jennifer Williamson Forster, Executive Director, South Sound Reading Foundation.
Working with Josh at Cougar Digital Marketing & Design was an excellent experience! The process was incredibly collaborative, allowing us to bring our vision for the Pasco School District Career Guide to life. Josh listened to our ideas, provided valuable insights, and worked tirelessly to ensure the final product exceeded our expectations. We are thrilled with the outcome and can't wait to share our new Career Guide with our students and families. Highly recommend Cougar Digital for any design and marketing needs!
Cougar Digital Marketing & Design does outstanding work. Prosser School District has utilized their expertise on multiple occasions to assist in communicating our message. They are easy to work with and most importantly, they deliver!
Had a great experience working with Josh! Super easy to work with and really knows his stuff - especially when it comes to lighting and editing for interior shots. The photos turned out amazing, with just the right vibe we were going for. We ended up adding a few extra shot requests last minute, and Josh had no problem fitting them in. He also helped with staging, which made a big difference, and the drone footage was a great bonus. His pricing was very reasonable for the quality we got. Great value for money. We’ll definitely be hiring him again for future shoots!
Fantastic service! Cougar Digital gave me very professional one-to-one couching! This is making a significant impact on my projects!
Cougar Digital went above and beyond to ensure our complete and total satisfaction with creating and launching our new website which can be a challenging process when multiple opinions are involved. Josh in particular was very attentive, patient and helpful throughout the creative process and also with recommendations for SEO and innovative solutions for soliciting reviews and feedback from customers to boost online reviews. He also facilitated communication with our existing IT support to smoothly transition our domain and emails. I highly recommend the expertise of Cougar Digital for help with all things digital. If they don't offer a solution themselves, they will help you find one!
It was a pleasure to work with Joshua, he made us all feel comfortable despite not having experience speaking in front of a camera. I would totally recommend Josh and his team. The video was exceptional!
We had such a good experience working with Cougar Digital Marketing for building our website. They did an awesome job and worked around our crazy schedule so well for meetings/photo shoots/etc. Would highly recommend for any website/marketing needs.
Working with Cougar Digital to launch a campaign for kids to support the Prosser Boys & Girls Club. I was impressed with their creativity, professionalism, and attention to detail. They helped us to achieve incredible results and bring our ideas to life!
Our website turned out great! Nick was super easy to work with really made the process a breeze. Josh was our photographer for our website, after seeing the results from the first shoot we had to schedule for another! The pictures turned out better than imagined. Josh did a great job staying out of our crews way but managed to catch all the action with great detail. 10/10 would recommend to anyone!
Very easy to work with and extremely professional. Cougar Digital was able to take our vision and make it a reality as well as making it easy and seamless. I would highly recommend Cougar Digital to anyone!
Ordered new business cards and was extremely pleased with the speed and service! Definitely recommend for your next marketing push!
Cougar Digital Marketing & Design assisted us in developing a logo for our apple fruit development project. Their creativity, knowledge, guidance, and patience through the process was remarkable. We are very happy with the resulting concept and image. We highly recommend Josh and Travis at CDMD for your media marketing needs.
Josh and the Cougar Digital team did an amazing job with a drone video production that included narration. The quality of audio and video show a professional production level. I appreciate the attention to detail and quality of work by the Cougar Digital team.
Travis Hartliep and his crew are amazing! I worked with Josh on designing a book cover and he was great... was willing to work through numerous changes and updates, suggested helpful things to push the project along, and was very patient and courteous. We came in on budget and on time for the project and the end result was fantastic. I highly recommend Cougar Digital for any and all of your design and marketing needs.
Josh created a style guide for us to help with consistency throughout our agency. He did a great job creating the guide with little information. He did a great job explaining everything to us. He went above and beyond troubleshooting a zip file issue. Our services with Josh Kandle were 5-star service! He was kind, patient, thoughtful with his work and helpful with creativity in our style guide as well and assisting with technical difficulties. Thanks again Josh!
I honestly don't know where to start. My partners and I could not be happier with the process from start to finish working with Ashley and Cougar Digital Marketing. It was an absolute pleasure working with Ashley and I would recommend her to anyone who is looking to either create a website for their business or enhance their current one like we did. The service and pricing we experienced completely exceeded our expectations.
Josh was easy to work with. He returned my calls and emails promptly! And he did amazing job. I will not hesitate to reach out to him again for up coming projects!
Travis and his team are top notch and very professional! They kept us on tract to make our website target date with daily/weekly tasks. They made the job seamless and supported us through the whole process! Our site is interactive with our industry software because Travis took the extra time to learn what we needed to make it work. Thank you so much Cougar Digital!
Josh was fantastic to work with! He took Real Estate photography photos on the 14th, and had all of them beautifully edited and back to me in 24 hours! Highly recommend his services!
Cougar Digital answered the phone, literally. During a company name change, we reached out to multiple design and marketing groups from the Tri-Cities to Walla Walla to Spokane. Although we'd left messages with each vendor, Cougar was the only one courteous enough to respond. After a couple consultations, Joshua Kandle, Director of Marketing took charge of the design of our new company logo. With patience and professionalism, he listened to our concepts and following a series of modifications, he created a logo that is printed on millions of labels and boxes that're shipped globally. The logo is headlined on our website and our email, along with being printed on our work garments. Digital art might be easy with today's technology, but without Joshua's patient nature and ability to listen to our ideas, the incredible logo wouldn't have been possible. Vehemently I recommend Cougar Digital. They're professional yet personable. They're communicative and driven while remaining patient.
Working with Cougar Digital on our logo design was fantastic! Their creativity, professionalism, and attention to detail brought our vision to life, delivering a result that exceeded our expectations. Highly recommend their team!
Had a great experience with Cougar Digital. We lost our photographer last minute and called Cougar Digital and they stepped up and really did a bang up job for us. Plus their WSU Alum and that added good fun to the shoot. Super appreciate these guys and recommend them to anyone. #AGENT509
Cougar Digital should be your only call for web design. I would give them 6 stars if I could. #Silverline
We had an amazing experience working with Josh at Cougar Digital for our excavation company's new website. He was extremely professional, detail-oriented, and made the entire photo shoot and drone footage process seamless. The quality of the photos and drone shots exceeded our expectations, capturing our work in a way that truly showcases our expertise. Josh's professionalism and creative eye made a huge difference, and we couldn’t be happier with the results. Highly recommend him and Cougar Digital for any photography and digital needs!
Josh Kandle was absolutely terrific to work with and the quality of his product is outstanding. Josh made great use of our time and was very collaborative for our project. I would highly recommend Cougar Digital Marketing they produce great product at awesome value. Cheers, George Stanley General Manager Audi/BMW Tri Cities
Sonar Insights had the pleasure of partnering with Cougar Digital Marketing & Design, LLC on two separate occasions - a video campaign for the Benton Franklin Census 2020 and a video for a client. It was a big undertaking to take the script sand creatively execute on them. Josh Kandle and his team did a masterful job at realizing the vision for the projects with a fantastic end product. Could not be more pleased!
Travis, Josh and everyone at Cougar Digital have been super to work with. They have become a partner in our business. Our web design and online media presence has greatly improved by implementing their recommendations. They go the extra mile.
Always a pleasure to work with the Cougar Digital Marketing & Design team! They excel in creativity, effectiveness and efficiency.
I originally had a very basic logo for my business, but after Travis, at Cougar Digital, kicked it up a few notches, now it really stands out! I have used them for a number of graphics projects since, including business card and rack card designs and I am always impressed with what they produce! They are very easy to work with as well.
I have been working with the team and Cougar Digital now for almost five years and I genuinely love working with them. They have become such valuable partners on the marketing side of our business. I can't recommend them strongly enough!! I would give them 10 stars if I could!!!
Working with Josh Kandle on several video projects was such a great experience . He is not only a real pro and easy to work with but he was also so open to all of my ideas for creativity and understood a lot of what I was looking for as an independent recording artist. i would highly recommend him and look forward to hopefully being able to do more in the future. ~ Lisa Mitts, Recording Artist Songwriter, Performer
We have nothing but great things to say about Cougar Digital Marketing! Travis took the time to understand our goals, worked around our schedule, and went above and beyond to make our vision come to life. Ashley was a whiz and was always available when we needed her. Our site turned out better than we imagined. Can't recommend them enough.
I absolutely love working with Cougar Digital for every aspect of marketing our business utilizes. From digital content and graphic design work, to helping us create content (photos, videos and language) for various types of media and needs, Cougar does it all. The staff is awesome! Everyone is personable, prompt and professional. They are fun and I look forward to working with them on each project because I know the results will be incredible every time. Cougar's team members are open and flexible in helping us reach our goals and are authentic in their approach to meeting expectations and timeliness. Their consistent delivery of high level results within projected timeliness makes them my first choice for all marketing needs
We had a great experience working with COUGAR DIGITAL for creating our website and helping us with our ongoing marketing needs. Ashley, did an exceptional job with the website. Josh created an awesome logo and branding bible for us, and Makayla's photos added a professional touch. Highly recommended for top-notch digital marketing solutions!
Josh has a great eye and delivers on what he promises. Easy to work with and very responsive.
We had the privilege of working with Cougar Digital to create a video for our annual Hospice Gala, and we couldn't be happier with the results. The team captured the heart of what we do beautifully, creating a piece that was both moving and true to our mission. Josh, in particular, was outstanding. His compassionate approach made our interviewee feel comfortable and valued, allowing them to share their story openly and genuinely. The video resonated deeply with our guests, effectively conveying the essence of hospice care and the impact of our work on patients and their families. Thank you, Cougar Digital, for helping us share our story in such an impactful way!
It is always a pleasure working with Cougar Digital, especially with Josh and Mykaela. It's been a very good partnership with them. Very professional, always available for any questions or inquiries. Looking forward for more years of partnership.
We've had a great experience working with Cougar Digital. We purchased a package deal with a new logo, photography and web design for the Grace Brethren Church of Sunnyside. Nick and Josh were both great to work with. We've had a lot of positive feedback on the work they've done.
Josh did a great job on our logo! He even let us sit with him at his personal computer so we could be involved with the finishing touches. Thanks Josh and Thanks Cougar Digital!!
If you need a website. Call these guys and you won't be disappointed. You'll be surprised at how affordable they are and with the great LOCAL customer service they provide. These guys know their stuff.
Josh was quick to reply and great to work with. I would highly recommend and look forward to the next opportunity we get to work with him.
Thank you Cougar Digital. Over the past couple of years we have worked with Cougar Digital for rebranding, website updates, new logo, updating our business card and promotional material. They also produced an amazing testimonial video - so much fun working with Josh and his team to create this. I can’t begin to express how happy we are with the work Cougar Digitial has completed for us over the years. They are professional, punctual, very creative and so easy to work with. Looking forward to our partnership for years to come. I would highly recommend Cougar Digitial. Our team at New Leaf Creations is thankful for all of your amazing work and looking forward to working with Cougar Digital in the future.
So great to have a guy like Josh and the Cougar Digital team in your corner. Professional, fast, and awesome to work with.
Cougar digital was awesome to work with. They made the website design experience very simple and were very helpful in accommodating my companies' specific needs!
Business Startup FAQs
Questions? We've heard 'em all.
If you’re thinking it, there’s a good chance someone else asked it too.
What’s the first marketing move a new business should make?
The first marketing move for a new business is getting clear on your foundation: who you serve, what you offer, how you want to be positioned, and what your brand needs to communicate.
From there, your logo, colors, website, photography, content, and ads have something to build from. Skipping that step is how new businesses end up spending money on marketing pieces that look fine on their own but do not work together.
What should a new business budget for marketing in year one?
A new business marketing budget depends on your goals, timeline, industry, and how much of the foundation is already in place.
General marketing guidance often points to a percentage of revenue, but that can be hard for startups that do not have steady revenue yet. In year one, it often makes more sense to invest in the core pieces first — brand identity, website, photography, local visibility, and basic content — then layer in ads, SEO, social media, or ongoing marketing as the business grows.
We’ll help you sort out what needs to happen now, what can wait, and what fits your actual budget.
Does a new business need a website right away?
Yes. A new business should have a website as early as possible, even if it starts simple.
Social media is helpful, but it should not be your entire online presence. A website gives people a place to learn who you are, understand what you offer, check your credibility, and take the next step. It also supports local SEO, branded searches, Google Business Profile, and AI search results because it gives search engines and AI tools a clear source to understand your business.
How long does it take to launch startup marketing basics?
A typical startup marketing launch takes 6 to 10 weeks when it includes brand identity, website design, basic content, and photography.
A logo and brand identity project usually takes 2 to 4 weeks. A small business website often takes 4 to 8 weeks depending on scope, content, revisions, and how quickly decisions are made. If photography is needed, we usually schedule it after the brand direction is approved so the visuals match the look and message of the business.
Can you help with one marketing piece, or do I have to hire you for everything?
You can hire us for one piece of your startup marketing, such as a logo, website, photography, or launch campaign.
You do not have to do everything at once. We’ll give you an honest recommendation based on your stage, budget, and goals, then help you decide what matters first. Many clients start with one project and add more support over time, but the first step should be the one that gives your business the strongest foundation.
Digital Marketing for Busy Professionals
Learn more. Grow faster.
Quick, useful reads to help you think bigger and market smarter.
Ready to get started?
Tell us where you are. We'll help you figure out what comes next.
30 minutes, no homework required. Tell us what you're building, where you are in the process, and what you're trying to accomplish. We'll give you an honest read on where to start and what it actually costs.