In April 2024 the Australian and Queensland governments agreed to put $940 million into PsiQuantum, a Palo Alto company co-founded by two Australians, to build a quantum computer near Brisbane Airport. Some local quantum companies questioned why the money went to a US-headquartered firm. Whatever you make of the deal, it showed who quantum companies in this country most need to persuade: a small group of people deciding where public and private money goes.
How do you market a quantum technology company?
You market a quantum technology company by translating what it does into the problem it solves for a small, named group of buyers and backers, then earning their trust well before they need you. The physics comes second. The reader needs to know what changes for them, and when.
Our sector page groups cyber security, quantum and tech together for one reason: they are products that are hard to explain, sold on trust. Quantum hardware, quantum software and post-quantum security companies get the same method as our cyber clients. Name the targets, find one idea that sticks, build the pieces, then measure every stage from first contact to signed contract.
How big is Australia’s quantum industry?
CSIRO estimates Australia’s quantum technology industry could earn $2.2 billion and employ about 8,700 people by 2030, rising to around $5.9 billion and 19,400 jobs by 2045. CSIRO calls these conservative estimates. They come from its 2022 update to the 2020 Growing Australia’s Quantum Technology Industry report, and the federal government released its National Quantum Strategy on 3 May 2023.
The split inside those numbers matters more for marketing than the total. By 2045, CSIRO puts computing at $3.6 billion, sensing and measurement at $1.1 billion and communications at $1.2 billion. Computing gets the headlines, but sensing and communications together are worth nearly two-thirds as much.
That gives sensing and communications companies a story closer to use. CSIRO points to quantum sensing and timing systems that could support precise positioning and navigation in difficult environments, which is a defence problem with a budget attached.
How do you explain quantum technology to buyers who aren’t physicists?
Describe what changes for the buyer first, name the technology second, and use one comparison the buyer already understands. A navigation system that keeps working where satellite signals don’t is a sentence a procurement officer can repeat to their manager. A paragraph on atomic interferometry is not.
Three habits help.
Lead with the outcome and the date. A buyer planning a budget needs to know when the technology will be ready for their use, stated honestly. Even the experts can’t say for certain which approach to quantum computing will work at scale, and a buyer who has read that will discount any vendor who claims otherwise.
Put your scientists on camera. A filmed interview with the person who built the system does more for trust than any brochure, because the buyer can hear how carefully they talk about what it can’t do yet.
Test the idea before you publish it. Our free sticky idea scorer checks a message against six principles buyers remember, and quantum messages fail the simplicity test more often than most.
The quantum companies that win the next decade of Australian contracts will not necessarily have the best physics. They will be the ones a busy official can explain to a minister in two sentences.
To see where your marketing stands, take the Marketing Pen Test: 16 questions, about three minutes, scored out of 100.