Can You Afford To Run A Prehistoric Marketing Playbook?
In my experience, most adtech companies fall into one of two camps when it comes to marketing:
1. They do very little marketing at all, mostly driven by the C-suite’s belief that B2B marketing can’t be done well, whereas sales should be able to grow an organization through sheer willpower.
2. They take a conservative approach to marketing. They produce lead magnets such as white papers and webinars to drive downloads that they call leads (though many aren’t qualified). And they do traditional PR, meaning they regularly pitch journalists.
Let’s examine the fallacies driving both of these strategies (or lack thereof) — and then cover what a more modern approach to adtech marketing entails.
Fallacy no. 1: marketing doesn’t work
The great irony of adtech marketing is that so much of our industry is devoted to helping brands and publishers quantify the exact (supposed) value of marketing investments. The premise is that you should be able to look at a dashboard that tells you exactly how much money you put into marketing and how much you got out. These simplistic formulas make marketing decisions easy. Put in $1, get $2 back. Deal!
But while this may work for soap brands (and even then, it’s less of a science than some want to admit), it doesn’t work for the vast majority of adtech companies. Why? Because adtech companies are selling much higher-value, higher-consideration products that don’t lend themselves to easily measurable paid ads.
Adtech marketing is about trust, relationship building, and persuasion. The ideal vehicle to build trust is not direct-response ads. It is social content, Slack posts and comments, WhatsApp discussions, event appearances, PR, and white papers and webinars.
In short, adtech marketing relies on a mix of content, PR, and events. And if your CEO is convinced that the only things that matter are those that can be measured on a dashboard, you are never going to build an adtech brand — or the new customer relationships that develop as a result of it. You have to be willing to build trust and relationships in ways that are not so easily measurable.
Fallacy no. 2: the conservative playbook is enough
There are three different types of conservative adtech marketing playbooks.
1. You’re only doing what can be measured.
See the previous section. Many adtech leaders only believe in marketing efforts that they can easily tie to deals. So, they’ll say, “We have a dashboard that ties marketing to revenue.” Sure. But the dashboard is just white paper and webinar downloads because capturing emails is the easiest way to do DIY marketing attribution.
Now, there’s nothing wrong with these tactics. You should produce downloadable assets and track which downloads end up leading to deals. But if email collection tactics are the entirety of your marketing program, you’re missing out on hundreds of connections with potential buyers who are too leery to download your white paper or sign up for your webinar precisely because they know the game you’re playing.
2. You’re doing what has been done before.
The main manifestation of just doing what’s always been done in adtech marketing is relying too much on traditional PR: emailing journalists to try to generate media coverage. Again, by all means, do PR. It’s a great tool to build your reputation and relationships (exactly what adtech marketing should accomplish).
But times have changed since the dawn of the millennium. PR shouldn’t be the only way you’re trying to build your brand. In part, that’s because the media has dwindled. There are, at best, 5-10 legitimate advertising trade publications. They will only cover one company so often, and most adtech companies don’t have enough news to merit even monthly coverage. So, if you’re holding your PR team’s feet to the fire to generate dozens of ‘placements’ per month, you’re pursuing unreasonable vanity metrics.
However, over the past 10 to 15 years, marketing opportunities have also changed for the better. Your audience is now hanging out on social platforms, Slack groups, and other forums where you can reach them every day — without a third-party gatekeeper deciding how you show up. Given that opportunity, why would you depend entirely on journalists to determine how and how often you connect with your audience?
3. You’re playing it safe.
A lot of adtech companies move slowly and play it too safe. If you’re The Trade Desk or Google, go ahead — play defense. You might argue these companies are attempting to defend their positions more than to engender rapid growth by forging new relationships. But the vast majority of adtech companies are not in that position.
So, adtech marketers need to have a bias for action. More content. Bolder stances. Faster cadence. Remember — the no. 1 danger for adtech brands is not that they piss people off. It’s that nobody thinks about them. And running an overly conservative marketing playbook is a good way to ensure that outcome.
Modern adtech marketing
It’s not that the old stuff is ‘dead,’ as online content creators are fond of proclaiming. Webinars still work. White papers still work. PR still works.
But the options available to adtech brands to do the work of B2B marketing — cultivating a reputation that allows you to foster more relationships and do more deals — have expanded. The job of the adtech marketer is to be everywhere his or her audience is. The trade publications are one channel to accomplish that. Events are another. So are LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, Slack, and WhatsApp — and your audience is active there every day. Plus, you can speak to them without a third-party gatekeeper censoring your contributions.
Marketing strategy boils down to three questions: What is the message? Where and how will we distribute it? How will we think about the value?
Differentiate and captivate. Be everywhere your audience is. Stay in it for the long haul.
Do those things, and you’ll be in the 95th percentile of adtech marketers. Or keep running an overly cautious, limited, and outdated playbook. But first, ask yourself: can you afford it?
