As An Adtech Marketer, My Main Competitor Is Inaction

As an adtech marketing agency owner, my main competitor is inaction: prospects hire no one as opposed to hiring another agency. This is especially true if the person who comes through the proverbial door is a founder or CEO (as opposed to a marketing leader who is obviously sold on the benefits of marketing).

Inaction undermines adtech companies’ marketing potential on several levels. Here are three common forms of inaction — and the case for bucking the trend.

Complete Silence

The mostly deadly form of marketing inaction is complete silence. This applies to companies whose entire go-to-market program runs through sales, networking, and (maybe) events. They make little to no effort to cultivate an online audience or reputation.

This is a good instinct in the initial stages of an an adtech company’s evolution. Unless the founder has a personal knack for content creation or existing relationships with the press, it probably won’t be worth it to hire a dedicated resource to build the company’s reputation and drive inbound leads. Rather, the company should pursue cost-effective customer acquisition through one-to-one networking and event attendance: old-fashioned sales and biz dev.

But every successful adtech company hits a point when failing to add inbound marketing amounts to leaving money on the table. Let’s say your average customer is worth $100,000. You’re generating $5M in revenue, and the founder and sales team have been pounding the pavement to get to that point. At this stage, spending $120,000 per year to build a reputation and generate inbound leads is likely worth the investment — even if it won’t generate tangible returns for a quarter or two and even if the results are harder to measure. If your customers are high-value and you’re currently doing little to nothing to attract them, you’re highly likely to see positive ROI on a marketing program that puts you in front of them every day.

Of course, you still can measure the efficacy of content and PR — the figures just won’t pop up on a dashboard. There are two ways. One form of measurement is leading indicators. Are you getting featured in the press? Is your target audience engaging with you on social? The other metric is leads. If you're intent on measuring content and PR, you should be asking leads how they heard of you. And you should notice an uptick in opportunities influenced by your content and press appearances.

Reluctance to Say Anything Interesting

The adtech companies undermined by inaction are not just those who don’t invest in marketing. You can invest in marketing and still suffer from a bias for inaction.

One way this manifests is reluctance to say anything interesting — or, to be more specific, anything your audience and secondary stakeholders such as industry journalists and influencers will find worth reading and commenting on.

If you’re thinking, “This is obvious. Of course it would be better to be interesting than uninteresting. But how?” I have two answers for you.

First, talk to your customers. Ask five of them what’s top of mind. What industry issues are they concerned about? What sources do they read? Which voices do they trust? Engaging your customers on the issues they care about is the easiest way to generate relationships at scale (the point of B2B marketing).

Second, engage people based on the discussions they’re already having, not just the discussions you want them to have. If everyone in your industry is talking about The Trade Desk’s new product or the Privacy Sandbox, you should probably participate in that discussion — because that is what it takes to earn people’s attention. I know — you want to talk about issues related directly to your product. And you should. But it is by joining in the already-lively discussions that you earn people’s attention — and their engagement with the discussions you want to lead.

Resistance to Reaching Customers Where They Are

The third form of adtech marketing inaction concerns cadence and distribution. Most adtech companies do not share helpful content with their audience nearly enough. And they do not take advantage of the channels where they can distribute that content daily without the mediation of third-party gatekeepers.

For example, many adtech CEOs are concerned that they are not sufficiently known within the industry. Yes, they have happy customers on the buy side or sell side. But their company’s name ID is low. If you asked 50 people within digital advertising (or especially within adtech specifically) to name companies in their category, they wouldn’t be among the top five (or their category might be undercovered and their peers may not think about it at all).

There’s a simple way to solve an adtech name ID problem. It’s called X (aka Twitter). A lively adtech discussion is still going on there daily, and industry heavy hitters like Eric Franchi, Ari Paparo, Terry Kawaja, etc. pay attention. The real challenge for many adtech companies is not that they don’t know how to solve their awareness problem — e.g., I want to increase my adtech name ID to boost my chances of meeting investors, acquirers, or talent — but that they don’t want to allocate the resources required to solve that problem.

Again, inaction is the root of poor awareness.

The Case for Action

Ironically enough given that we are in the advertising and marketing technology industry, many adtech and martech companies do not believe in marketing (beyond easily measurable tactics such as events and webinars). For those of us who understand that building an online audience and reputation drives pipeline, financial opportunities, and talent acquisition, this is an exciting opportunity.

There are industries in which online discussion is so saturated that breaking through is a Sisyphean task. In consumer categories, legions of full-time social media managers compete for share of voice. Adtech is the opposite. Most marketing programs are antediluvian. Most companies are silent.

You’re not going to build a reputation by writing a “What is a DSP?” SEO blog post. But you can build one by being active on the social channels where your audience is gathering, providing value to the press, and centering the concerns and voice of your customers. For those who want to cultivate authority, which will help them generate more deals and close deals faster, the biggest roadblock is inaction.