Marketing thatgrows youruser base.

Tech Marketing Agency

Most tech budgets buy new users faster than the product keeps them. Pelagic Search was losing 8.2% of its customers a month. We rebuilt onboarding around time-to-first-value and wired lifecycle email to catch accounts going quiet. By week 18 monthly churn sat at 4.5%, six-month retention was up 60%, and NPS had moved from 18 to 42.

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Proof

Results, measured in pipeline and retention

Pipeline, conversion, and churn in the clients' own numbers. Read the full case studies.

Customer Experience

Pelagic Search

8.2% → 4.5%

Monthly churn, 18 weeks

The retention and activation engine most tech companies never build: we mapped every drop-off from signup to renewal, rebuilt onboarding around time-to-first-value, and cut it from 14 days to 7. Churn fell 45% in 18 weeks.

Read the case study

SaaS

AI-Powered Shoppable Video Platform

$2.5M

ARR in 6 months

A SaaS go-to-market, and the same launch math any tech company runs: positioning-first GTM on a $150K budget took MRR from $12K to $208K, with attribution showing LinkedIn drove 42% of pipeline.

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Operations

Moniveo

48h → 5min

Lead response time

The RevOps plumbing most startups defer to Series B: lead scoring at 92% accuracy, response time cut from 48 hours to 5 minutes, worth $180K a year in saved time.

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What makes Tech different

The market tech is selling into

Tech on this page runs wider than SaaS. Hardware carries inventory and channel partners. Dev tools sell bottom-up to engineers, and IT services win on trust and proximity. A new category has to teach the market before it can sell to it. The buyer is the same in all four cases. Non-branded search CPCs rose 29% in a year, 61% of buyers want no sales rep at all, and AI chatbots now shape more shortlists than review sites do. Every plan we write starts from those three numbers.

What we hear

The four complaints we hear most

Founders and heads of growth bring us the same four problems, and each one has a fix with a number attached.

“Nobody can tell what we do from our homepage”

A homepage that fails the five-second test (what is this, who is it for, why should I care) stalls trials, demos, and fundraises on the same sentence. Web development starts with positioning, then ships the site 61% of B2B buyers say they want: pricing in the open, comparison pages they can read without booking a call.

Web Development

“ChatGPT recommends our competitors, and we're not in the answer”

GenAI chatbots influence software shortlists more than review sites do, at 17.1%. About 89% of AI citations for unbranded questions come from third-party sources. That makes SEO a two-front job: your comparison pages and structured content, plus the G2 profile and Reddit threads the engines quote back at your buyer.

SEO

“We're spending $2 to buy $1 of new revenue”

That is the 2025 median, and the bottom quartile pays $2.82 for the same dollar of new ARR (Benchmarkit). Paid ads get rebuilt around competitor-alternative and pricing-intent keywords and judged on CAC payback rather than click-through, so the spend concentrates where the auction math still works.

Paid Ads

“Signups keep coming, but almost nobody converts to paid”

Free-to-paid conversion averages about 9%. Companies that score product-qualified leads convert near 25% (ProductLed, 2025), so the gap is triage, not traffic. Email marketing carries it: behavior-triggered onboarding, plus PQL alerts that put sales in front of the accounts already living in the product.

Email Marketing

What we do

Five services, run on your unit economics

CPCs, CAC payback, activation rates, a 3-to-9-month enterprise cycle. Each service below is scoped against those numbers rather than against a package tier.

Web Development

A slow page under a "developer-first platform" headline settles the question before the demo does. We ship Next.js builds that load in under a second, pricing pages with the price on them, and programmatic comparison and alternatives pages. Signup flows get built for activation, not for a vanity conversion rate. B2B software sites turn 1–3% of visitors into leads. With 61% of buyers preferring a rep-free journey, that page is doing the selling.

SEO

Bottom of the funnel first, where the budgets are: "[competitor] alternatives," "[category] pricing," integration and use-case pages. SEO-sourced SaaS leads move from MQL to SQL at roughly 51% against 26% for PPC. Organic acquisition runs $480–$942 per customer, against $1,980 for outbound. Then the AI layer, because roughly half of software buyers now start research in chatbots and 89% of AI citations come from third-party sources. Your pages and your G2 and Reddit presence both have to get quoted.

Paid Ads

Non-branded B2B software CPCs averaged $5.34 by mid-2025, up 29% in a year, and high-intent terms run $15–$60 a click. Broad category bidding hands the auction to whoever has more lifetime value to spend. So we go narrow: competitor-alternative terms, pricing-intent queries, branded defense, and LinkedIn ABM against your named account list. Every campaign is measured against the $2.00-per-$1-of-ARR median. Fifty keywords that pay back beat 500 at breakeven.

Email Marketing

In product-led growth the onboarding sequence is the sales team. Behavior-triggered emails average 30.6% opens and 7.4% click-through, against 20.7% and 2.3% for batch sends. Lifecycle work is what moves a 9% free-to-paid average toward the 25% teams reach when they score product-qualified leads. We build the activation nudges, the expiring-trial win-back, the PQL alert that routes a hot account to sales, and the expansion campaign aimed at customers you already have.

AI Automation

This is the revenue plumbing a startup defers until the first RevOps hire. We score PQLs off product-usage signals, then enrich and route leads into your CRM. Replies to demo requests get drafted in minutes rather than days, and review-request loops build the G2 presence the chatbots cite. For a B2B client the same stack cut lead response from 48 hours to 5 minutes and tripled lead capacity per rep.

Who we work with

Running a SaaS funnel or building AI? Those get their own pages, Technology & SaaS and AI. This page is for the rest of tech: hardware, dev tools, IT services, and startups still picking their category.

Dev tools & API-first products

Developers distrust marketing and convert through docs quality, free tiers, GitHub, and community credibility. We market the way developers buy: ungated docs, honest comparison pages, and presence in the threads they read.

Hardware & connected devices

Physical margins, channel partners, and longer cycles change the math, but the buying committee still self-serves online first. Spec pages, comparison content, and review presence carry the deal to the demo.

IT services & MSPs

Bought locally, shortlisted online. City-level service pages, Google Business Profile work, review velocity, and fast response on inbound quotes decide who wins the contract.

Agtech

Salinas is an agtech proving ground: the Western Growers Center for Innovation & Technology puts startups a mile from the growers who buy from them. We turn pilot fields into case studies, and case studies into contracts.

Advanced air mobility & aerospace

The Monterey Bay corridor holds the nation's highest concentration of advanced air mobility companies (Joby, Wisk, Archer, Parallel Flight). B2B and B2G cycles here run on credibility content, not clicks.

Pre-Series-A startups

No marketing hire until Series A means the founder does everything. We work as the fractional growth team: positioning, site, first channels, and attribution, without the $140K–$180K loaded cost of a senior hire.

AI visibility

AI Search Visibility for Tech Companies

Tech buys itself now. 61% of buyers want no sales rep involved at all, and the research they do instead runs through an AI chatbot more than a review site. The engines assemble shortlists from readable HTML plus outside corroboration: G2 review counts, Reddit threads, comparison pages that name a trade-off. Plenty of tech sites fail the first half, because most AI crawlers do not run JavaScript and the positioning sits in client-side components. For dev tools, hardware, or managed IT alike, we publish the pages and review presence a machine can use. Point the free SEO report at your domain and you get the crawler's version of your positioning.

Explore AI visibility Run a free SEO & AI report

8.2% → 4.5%

Monthly churn, cut in 18 weeks. SaaS platform, six-month retention up 60%.

85%

trial-to-paid on a SaaS launch we ran, against a 9% average

$2.5M

ARR built in six months, from $12K MRR

At $2.00 of spend for every $1.00 of new ARR, the median software company buys growth at a loss. The winners fix the funnel before they feed it.

Case study

Monthly churn from 8.2% to 4.5% in 18 weeks

Most tech marketing budgets chase new logos while the funnel leaks users out the back. Pelagic Search, a retained search firm, came to us with 8.2% monthly churn, an onboarding flow only 61% of clients finished, and 14 days between signup and first value. Over 18 weeks we mapped every drop-off from signup to renewal, rebuilt onboarding around time-to-first-value, and wired behavior-triggered lifecycle email to catch accounts going quiet before they cancelled. Onboarding completion rose to 92%. Time-to-first-value fell to 7 days. NPS climbed from 18 to 42, support escalations dropped 55%, and monthly churn fell 45%, with six-month retention up 60%. Acquisition gets the applause; this is the work that makes the CAC math close.

Read the case study

−45%

Monthly churn, 8.2% → 4.5% in 18 weeks

The Shortlist Engine

How we work

The Shortlist Engine: three phases, one goal. Be the vendor on the buyer's day-one shortlist, then convert and keep them.

Find where the funnel loses money

A free audit of positioning, site conversion, search and AI visibility, and your CAC math against the $2.00-per-$1-of-ARR median. Most tech companies lose more revenue to activation and churn than to weak acquisition, so we measure the whole funnel, not just traffic.

Win the surfaces where buyers decide

Bottom-funnel SEO, comparison pages, review presence, and narrow paid campaigns go live against the queries and AI prompts your buyers use. With 61% of buyers preferring a rep-free journey, the goal is making the day-one shortlist before the first form fill.

Convert, activate, and expand

Lifecycle email, PQL scoring, and revenue automation turn signups into revenue: onboarding that drives activation, alerts that route product-qualified accounts to sales, and expansion campaigns for the accounts you own. Attribution ties every dollar to pipeline, so next quarter's budget goes where this quarter's revenue came from.

Playbook

The Tech Marketing Playbook

The median software company grew 26% in 2025 with $2.00 of sales and marketing spend behind every $1.00 of new ARR (Benchmarkit). Efficiency, not volume, is the constraint. Ten tactics we run for tech companies from the Central Coast to the Valley, each with the math attached.

Rewrite the homepage until a stranger passes the five-second test

Positioning is the first marketing decision, and most tech homepages never make it: they describe the product ("AI-powered workflow intelligence") instead of the problem it kills. Run the five-second test: can a stranger say what this is, who it is for, and why it matters? If not, trials, demos, and investor meetings all stall at the same sentence. The stakes rose with rep-free buying: Gartner's 2025 survey found 61% of B2B buyers prefer to complete the purchase without ever talking to sales, which means the site carries the pitch alone. B2B software sites convert 1–3% of visitors to leads on average. Before spending a dollar on traffic, fix what the traffic lands on: one sharp claim, named customers, transparent pricing, and a comparison page that admits trade-offs.

Own the "[competitor] alternatives" queries before the category head terms

Head terms like "crm software" belong to incumbents whose retention lets them outbid you forever. The money queries sit lower: "[competitor] alternatives," "[category] pricing," "is [product] worth it," searched by buyers with budgets and deadlines. Build a real page for each: honest comparison tables, migration guides, pricing you publish. The economics reward it twice. Non-branded B2B SaaS CPCs averaged $5.34 by July 2025, up 29% year over year (Dreamdata), with high-intent commercial terms at $15–$60 a click, so every organic ranking is a rising ad bill you stop paying. And SEO-sourced leads convert MQL-to-SQL at roughly 51%, against 26% for PPC, because the buyer arrived comparing, not browsing.

Get quoted where ChatGPT reads

GenAI chatbots became the top influence on software shortlists in 2025 at 17.1%, edging out review sites at 15.1%, and 85% of buyers think more highly of a vendor an AI chatbot recommends (G2 Buyer Behavior Report, 1,169 decision-makers). The engines rarely quote you directly: about 89% of AI citations for unbranded questions come from third-party sources, so the work is off-site as much as on-site. Build review velocity on G2, because 45% of buyers call review-site citations the most trust-inspiring element of an AI answer. Show up in the Reddit and community threads that rank for your category, since ChatGPT quotes them verbatim. And keep your own pages in server-rendered HTML, because most AI crawlers do not execute JavaScript.

Score product-qualified leads and stop chasing every signup

58% of B2B SaaS companies now run a product-led motion, but most treat all signups equally: sales chases everyone, and the average free-to-paid conversion sits near 9% (ProductLed, 2025, 600+ companies). Companies that score product-qualified leads from usage signals convert around 25%, nearly triple the baseline, because sales only engages accounts that already activated. Define the activation events that predict purchase (invited a teammate, hit the API, imported data), score against them, and wire alerts into the CRM so a rep calls the account the day it crosses the threshold. This is a two-week automation build, not a platform migration, and it usually reorders the entire sales queue.

Treat onboarding as your highest-paid salesperson

In a rep-free buying world, onboarding closes the deal the website started. Behavior-triggered automation emails average 30.6% opens and 7.4% click-through, against 20.7% and 2.3% for batch campaigns, a 3x gap in the metric that matters. The sequence to build: a welcome flow tied to first-value milestones, nudges triggered by stalled setup, expiring-trial win-backs, and expansion prompts once usage grows. We rebuilt this engine for a SaaS platform: onboarding completion rose from 61% to 92%, time-to-first-value fell from 14 days to 7, and monthly churn dropped from 8.2% to 4.5% in 18 weeks. Judge the program on clicks and conversions, not opens, since Apple Mail privacy inflates open rates 10–15%.

Hold every channel to the $2.00 rule

The 2025 median is $2.00 of sales and marketing spend per $1.00 of new-customer ARR, up 14% in a year, with the bottom quartile at $2.82 (Benchmarkit, roughly 1,000 companies). Run that ratio per channel, not blended. The 2025 benchmark roundups put referrals near $150 per customer, organic search at $480–$942, paid search around $800, and outbound at $1,980, which is why "more SDRs" so often deepens the hole. Healthy CAC payback runs 12–18 months; under 12 is top-quartile. When a channel misses the bar for two quarters, cut it and move the budget to the channels compounding. Spreadsheet discipline is unglamorous, and it is the difference between a growth engine and a burn rate.

Put the founder on LinkedIn until the brand can walk on its own

Early-stage tech sells on founder credibility. A founder posting a genuine point of view outreaches the company page roughly 10-to-1, and it seeds the dark funnel: the Slack groups, DMs, and podcasts where deals start long before your CRM logs "Direct." The discipline is small: two posts a week with a real opinion, teardown, or customer number, and comments answered like a person, not a brand account. Pair it with self-reported attribution, a "how did you hear about us?" field on the demo form, so the channels the CRM cannot see still get budget credit. Across a 3–9 month enterprise cycle, the vendor buyers already trust on day one wins the deal that opens in month six.

Pick your category fight on purpose

Category creation is glamorous and expensive: category kings capture roughly 76% of their category's market cap (Play Bigger/HBR), but educating a market costs years and millions most pre-Series-B companies do not have. The common failure mode is worse than either choice: vague middle-ground messaging that neither claims a new category nor wins an existing one. For most tech companies the higher-ROI move is sharp positioning inside a category buyers already search for: own a wedge ("the CRM for construction crews"), win it completely, then expand. You can rank, run ads, and get cited on a category that exists. You have to fund one that does not.

Track expansion revenue like acquisition, because it now carries growth

Median net revenue retention fell to 101% in 2025 (Benchmarkit), which means the average software company barely replaces what it churns, and expansion now drives 40% of all new ARR. Marketing that stops at the signup ignores the cheaper half of growth. Instrument the post-sale funnel with the same rigor as the top: activation rates, feature adoption, accounts trending toward renewal risk. Then market to them: expansion campaigns triggered by usage ceilings, win-back flows for going-quiet accounts, and review requests timed to NPS highs. Retention moves the valuation math too. Cutting a SaaS platform's monthly churn from 8.2% to 4.5% raised six-month retention 60%, worth more than an equivalent spend on new logos.

Hire the go-to-market muscle the Central Coast doesn't grow

The Central Coast has real tech density and a specific gap. Santa Cruz produced Looker, Joby Aviation, Paystand, and Jane Technologies; the Monterey Bay Tech Hub anchors the nation's highest concentration of advanced air mobility companies; Santa Cruz Works' accelerator has launched 52 startups with 28 liquidity events; and Cal Poly's incubators feed a San Luis Obispo scene projected to add 6,000+ tech, aerospace, and clean-tech jobs by 2027. UCSC and Cal Poly supply world-class engineering talent. Go-to-market talent mostly stays in the Valley. That is the gap Machina fills: a growth team in Hollister, 45 minutes from San Jose, inside the Monterey Bay corridor, for founders who left Silicon Valley rents but still sell to the world.

Sources

Related industries

Tech marketing by city

Tech marketing in San Jose Tech marketing in San Francisco Palo Alto Sunnyvale

Tech

Let's fix your CAC math before next quarter's board deck

Start with a free audit. We'll pull your positioning, search and AI visibility, activation numbers, and CAC by channel, and show you where pipeline is leaking. Twenty minutes, no obligation.

Get my tech growth plan

Free audit first No long-term contracts Based in Hollister, California. Working nationwide.

Last updated July 4, 2026

Marketing thatgrows youruser base.

Tech Marketing Agency

Results, measured in pipeline and retention

The market tech is selling into

The four complaints we hear most

“Nobody can tell what we do from our homepage”

“ChatGPT recommends our competitors, and we're not in the answer”

“We're spending $2 to buy $1 of new revenue”

“Signups keep coming, but almost nobody converts to paid”

Five services, run on your unit economics

Web Development

SEO

Paid Ads

Email Marketing

AI Automation

Who we work with

Dev tools & API-first products

Hardware & connected devices

IT services & MSPs

Agtech

Advanced air mobility & aerospace

Pre-Series-A startups

AI Search Visibility for Tech Companies

Monthly churn from 8.2% to 4.5% in 18 weeks

How we work

Find where the funnel loses money

Win the surfaces where buyers decide

Convert, activate, and expand

The Tech Marketing Playbook

Rewrite the homepage until a stranger passes the five-second test

Own the "[competitor] alternatives" queries before the category head terms

Get quoted where ChatGPT reads

Score product-qualified leads and stop chasing every signup

Treat onboarding as your highest-paid salesperson

Hold every channel to the $2.00 rule

Put the founder on LinkedIn until the brand can walk on its own

Pick your category fight on purpose

Track expansion revenue like acquisition, because it now carries growth

Hire the go-to-market muscle the Central Coast doesn't grow

Explore adjacent verticals

AI

Technology & SaaS

B2B

Let's fix your CAC math before next quarter's board deck