Four Companies to Add to the High Growth B2B Stack
Don’t sleep on these approaching shifts in the B2B tech marketing budget.
Where will the best marketers spend their money? In recent conversation, research, conversation and the ensuing research with good friend Paul Andre de Vera, we analyzed where marketers think marketing is headed. Some background, Dre leads global web marketing for Anaplan, the enterprise planning cloud (and tech unicorn) while I run a boutique marketing firm for early stage B2B tech marketing.
As we see the future of marketing and marketing technology, here are the four high growth marketing technologies for content production, landing pages creation, employee advocacy, and flipping the entire marketing funnel.
4. Content Production: MEDIUM.com , Where Content Meets Community.
There is no better platform to crowdsource long-form content. Writers are already writing about the subjects that matter to you and your brand. Why not have them write for your publication? Or why not reach a publication’s audience by contributing content to their larger community?
Medium is where content meets community. Anytime a social media platform grows, you want a share of it. The meteoric rise of Medium from Ev’s project to cool place for thought leaders to blog to where Barack Obama contributes and where Bill Simmons is building his next publication. It’s quite simply the best place to connect with people who are already writing about what your brand is about. The top B2B divisions of the biggest tech companies, like Google for Work & Salesforce on Marketing, have already been creating company and employee authored news outlets for years.
3. Landing Page Creation: CAPTORA.com, Dynamic Landing Pages Based on User Intent
This tool creates a content heavy page that gets indexed by Google, as if your next marketing hire was a robot. Many companies have built versions of Captora in house, like dating sites creating indexable pages based on search filter criteria. Quite simply, 77% of people searching the web are expecting a personalized experience. By implementing quality content, the pages they generate are legit.
Captora has its roots in black hat SEO, and it’s mainstreaming the B2B version of the auto content generation generation. Dre has been thinking about building something like this for years, but it’s tough to auto generate content relevancy. Dre created a lite-version in a past job: when someone clicks on this ad for “keyword a”, the ensuing landing page would display the matching keyword a and copy, but that is just the tip of the dynamic landing page iceberg. Softwares like Captora are softwares that create strategies employed by high growth B2B tech companies; this strategy forces you to play into the expectation of personalized content.
2. Employee Advocacy: GAGGLEAMP.com, Turing All Employees into Brand Advocates
GaggleAmp gamifies the employees sharing company sponsored content via their social media channels. It’s a great way to increase social shares, traffic and it has the side benefit of increasing employee retention. Back at SuccessFactors, Dre recalled a meeting where the CEO Lars Dalgaard, at an all hands on deck meeting said, said something to the tune of, “Why does our announcement have only 3 ReTweets— I have 300 people in this room! — I should have more than 3 ReTweets!” You don’t need an all hands on deck meeting to get more than 3 ReTweets from your colleagues.
The role of social currency in your marketing plan cannot be underestimated. With everyone having a voice via social media, every employee could become a marketer for the company. It’s an evolution to what I have done for clients: for example, signing up and setting up the willing marketing and sales team to twitterfeed in order to autoshare the RSS feed of company blog content to their business facing social networks. Every extra person that is sharing content is another footprint, another link back, another advocate! And it’s better to gamify the system with a thorough program in place, via a provider like GaggleAmp.
1. ABM (Account Based Marketing): Demandbase, Flip the Funnel Upside Down by Giving Your Retargeting Program Steroids
If you want to target your marketing and sales efforts to only a certain job title at Fortune 100, 500, or 5,000 — as many B2B tech companies do — you can. Many are crediting account based marketing as a flipping of the entire marketing funnel. Dre recently went to a conference, where the entire panel was made of individuals who used to be executives at marketing automation tech companies, and over the last year became executives at ABM tech companies. On notable example is Jon Miller, who went from co-founding Marketo to founding Engagio. That’s as simple as it gets, the people who built marketing automation companies believe ABM is what’s next. It’s choosing your customers, and then marketing to them — instead of marketing to all and letting your customers choose you. It’s like having a rooftop view.
With ABM solutions like Demandbase, because you know who your target customers are, you never spend an ad dollar on impressions displaying to anonymous profiles. If you start to reverse engineer B2B sales, you know there are only X potential customers out there, and identifying every X is about as simple as cross referencing publicly available information. If you want to build your whole company around conquering one buyer profile, your marketing and sales leaders should be discussing an ABM tech solution.
When you consider ways to market like the big boys, you have to consider how to modernize your stack. To recap, high growth B2B companies are leveraging Medium to scale content production, Captora to customize landing page creation, GaggleAmp to incentivize employee advocacy, and Demandbase’s ABM to reverse engineer the entire marketing funnel. If you all like this insight in the tech stacks of high growth B2B companies, hit the recommend button below and we’ll write another one.
Paul Andre de Vera (Dre) leads global web marketing for Anaplan, and David Smooke runs a boutique marketing firm for early stage B2B tech marketing firm, ArtMap Inc.
