Paul Knegten: What’s Your Crusade?
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Paul Knegten, who was CMO of Beeswax and Outbrain (NASDAQ: OB) and led marketing at MediaMath and Dapper, is sharing his insights.
Your company is boring.
It just is! You sell stuff to other companies — it’s the most boring thing possible to most people, and if it didn’t make money, nobody would consider doing it. Ever have a top-funnel problem? I bet you do, and it’s because you’re just really boring.
Also, being boring will probably kill you. No, not a competitor, those don’t matter nearly as much as people never even thinking twice about you. Apathy — that’s the enemy you should worry about. In rare cases, being known for being bad is the problem, but most often it’s simply never being known at all.
But here’s the thing: as long as you acknowledge that almost nobody cares about the thing you’re selling, but everyone cares deeply about their own career, success, and fulfillment, you can be incredibly exciting to the people you’re trying to convince to buy the thing you’re selling.
You need a crusade.
A crusade is not your company mission or vision. These things are about what you want to change in the world, what you want for your company to be successful. It’s almost never what your customers would say they want to change in the world.
What keeps your customers up at night? What do you suppose they think about on their way home from work? If you don’t know these answers, you don’t know your customers.
Now, here’s the formula: what is it about what you do that solves for these anxieties? What is it about what you want to change in the world that will make these problems go away or turn them upside down into advantages for your customer? What will get your customer promoted to a bigger role or get them poached by a competitor? That is the basis for your crusade.
An example: back in 2009, this thing called dynamic creative optimization was starting to come of age, and I ran marketing at a company called Dapper. We made it easy to point, click, and create dynamic ad creatives that showed SKU-level pricing and availability in a banner ad. It was a point solution in a sea of far more strategic companies in adtech, and it was hard to get advertisers and agencies to care about dynamic creative when they were just struggling to get campaigns live and performing. But they all knew, deep down, that the ads they were running were mostly garbage: billboards shrunken down to a 728x90. They would all admit, over a glass of wine, that display advertising at that time was fundamentally broken.
So we launched a brand called Fixing Advertising. It was a podcast and event series, a platform for sharing how our customers were adopting new technologies to make display advertising not suck anymore. We may not have been very successful at getting prospects to care about dynamic creative optimization, but we sure could get them to agree to be on a panel about how they were solving ad problems with technology. And it just so happened that our product was also fixing display advertising — who knew!
The magic of the crusade was that it paired a problem our customers cared deeply about — display advertising sucking — with the solution we were developing. But the way we shined a light on that problem and what we called it were also critical. Adtech people love terms like DCO. But if we had focused all our marketing on the ‘technical innovation of dynamic creative optimization,’ our efforts would’ve been selfish and failed to resonate. Instead, we made our customers the hero of the story. They were fixing advertising (with our help). Their problems and solutions were front and center. Our product was propelling them to success from the background.
We were acquired by Yahoo! in 2010 in what was the largest acquisition for a dynamic creative company at that time. Our crusade won over new customers and catapulted us to the status of thought leaders in our space well beyond what we should have been for our small size. Because our campaign focused on an everyday customer problem and our customers’ solutions to that problem, there was nothing boring about the conversation we were leading, and that’s how people found out about us. That became our top-funnel.
Credit where due, I stole this from Saleforce.com. They wrote the book on B2B marketing with their “End of Software” crusade. They may seem boring now, but don’t forget they get tens of thousands of people to descend upon San Francisco once a year to talk about enterprise software.
Working with a third party can help you see your customers and your connection with them through fresh eyes, sharpening your crusade and the messaging around it. But you can start by thinking about those key questions about your customers: what do they think about on their way home from work? If they could wave a magic wand, what would they change about their industry? How can you feature their crusade — and propel it to victory?
