Clearcode: Earning Trust through Deep Expertise
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This week’s insights come from Piotr Banaszczyk, CEO of Clearcode, and Michael Sweeney, Clearcode’s Head of Marketing.
1. Highly specific adtech content drives the bulk of Clearcode's leads. This makes sense for a company that does custom adtech dev projects. It reflects the alignment of the company value prop and marketing.
2. Consultative selling and expert content go together. This is one of the sales-marketing combos that delivers results in a high-consideration B2B GTM strategy.
3. Generative AI doesn't offer much value yet for companies producing non-commodity content that can't easily be replicated by others.
JZ: You've developed advertising and marketing technology for a lot of companies. What channels and tactics have had the biggest impact on your growth?
PB: Two factors have made a big difference. One was hiring Mike, who has been focused on generating content to position us as a brand that deeply understands adtech and wants to solve customers’ problems, not just provide a developer workforce. The content we produce has allowed us to generate a lot of inbound leads.
The second key point in our growth was when we gathered a critical amount of experience, which allowed us not just to position ourselves as experts but to say we have built a solution multiple times before and could speed up the customer’s time to market. So, one, to be visible, and, two, to validate your experience with something that customers can verify.
MS: We've invested a lot in content marketing over the years, primarily in our blog posts that we have on our website. That helps us generate a lot of marketing qualified leads through organic traffic — a majority of our leads and customers come through that channel. We also go to events, network on LinkedIn, and have experimented with ads on Google and LinkedIn.
PB: Through the content we’ve generated, whether it’s the blog or our book, we have been able to be the first interaction many people starting careers in adtech have with a brand. We walk them through the whole complexity of the ecosystem. That's basically like teaching your potential future customers the basics of the industry.
JZ: To tie these two pieces together, how do you show that experience in your sales and marketing efforts? Because, for example, a lot of companies probably have written a blog post entitled “What is a DSP?” or “How to build a DSP” — typical SEO content. How do you differentiate and let that experience shine through in the content?
MS: We write evergreen posts but also more specific pieces of content. For example, we have articles on how to build an ad exchange on AWS — that’s a deep level of specificity most companies writing about adtech haven’t developed.
BP: Also, there is the second part of customer acquisition where the salesperson must convince the customer on the first call that what we have written reflects our actual knowledge. Marketing brings in the lead, and sales helps prove that we know what we're talking about.
JZ: You need to have a consultative selling process led by people who are very knowledgeable.
PB: Yes. We are not selling generic solutions. You need to be well aware of what you're actually selling. Salespeople need to know what platforms and projects we’ve built in the past. They need to understand very well the ecosystem in which the customers exist so they can ask proper questions but also confirm our capabilities. The later we are going into the stages, the more experienced people need to join.
JZ: I could imagine two different types of customers for you. One type would be a very early-stage startup that says, “We have an idea, and we want you to help us build it.” The other would be a more advanced company that maybe already has a DSP and now they want to build an SSP, or the retail media phenomenon would seem very relevant. Is that accurate? And if so, how does the marketing and sales process differ for those personas?
PB: The size, of course, matters, but the bigger factor is how aware they are already of what they want. Sometimes, from the business perspective, they are very aware of what they have and what they want to build from there, and they just need our expertise in terms of how to specify the requirements, how to go to the discovery stage, prepare the roadmap, and allocate and develop the project. The other ones are unsure of what they do have and how they can use or monetize it. Sometimes even large companies approach us and say, “We have a lot of traffic, we have a lot of user profiles, and we don't know what to do with this data.”
JZ: It’s “How do we build it?” versus “What do we build?”
PB: Exactly. In one case, you provide them with technical support. In the other case, you need to create a demand for them to develop this technical support.
JZ: You guys wrote the book on adtech. I'm curious what influenced your thinking on that because it takes a lot of confidence for a company to invest that much time in a marketing project.
MS: Definitely. The project started in 2016. I'm pretty sure that Clearcode's co-founder, Maciej Zawadziński, came up with the idea. The goal was to take everything that we've learned from developing adtech and share it with people. We obviously work on the technical side of things, so we develop those insights on a daily basis. Maciej spearheaded it with an internal working group supporting him. It also overlapped with the adtech training materials we developed in house.
PB: What were the initial expectations? Did you expect it to take several years?
MS: I'm not sure. I think Maciej’s expectations were that we'd publish it a lot sooner than what we did. But to get back to your point, Joe, about the confidence we had to have in the project’s value, I think that with adtech there is more than one way to do something most of the time, especially when it comes to building the software. When it comes to building a data platform, there's a few different ways that you can go about these different systems you can use. It's just like building a car. It's essentially the same thing, but each car is built a little differently. That complexity has required that we be very vigilant about the accuracy of what we’re producing. And that’s consistent with the mentality we bring to both the book and our other content, including blog posts — we need to be prepared to defend our work almost on an academic level.
JZ: Yeah. I did a PhD, so you're bringing back my academic nightmares. The book is admirable in that it shows the depth of your knowledge, which is critical because it's the ethos on which the company rests. To go back to SEO, it is the linchpin of your marketing strategy. Especially because your customers are tech people, I imagine they’re using generative AI to learn about adtech. I'm just curious what your thoughts are on that and if you're monitoring potential disruption to search.
MS: I did test it out because I was more curious to see what it would actually produce, see whether it matched the hype. We don't really use ChatGTP or any other AI tool. We don't really use it at all, even to help with research, because we don't see that it adds a lot of value yet. You can get it to write a blog post, and it will make sense. But it’s really written in a very, very simple way.
PB: The blog post that we would sign our name under would be the one that we feel very comfortable with and we can validate. I have tested generative AI for some presentations, and it’s useful. But if you are looking for high-quality content, if you want to be trustworthy, then I don't think we can allow ourselves to be based on a single source of truth.
JZ: In a way, you're a bit insulated from the disruption because your content hinges on great technical specificity and accuracy, and ChatGPT isn't excelling at that yet. But the long-term threat will probably be people going to ChatGPT instead of going to Google. That's a bigger ecosystem shift, and we’ll have to see how that plays out over years.
