The Adtech Marketing Playbook at a Glance

Adtech marketing is easier and harder than most think.

It’s easier because the channel mix — content, events, and PR — is well known. Determining the channels that work in this business — which is all about building credibility and then relationships to drive high-consideration, high-value sales — isn’t rocket science.

It’s harder because there’s a lot of noise to break through, coming up with a differentiated story that resonates with customers isn’t simple, most tech is commoditized, and B2B marketing measurement is hard.

Here are the fundamentals of an adtech marketing strategy.

The adtech marketing playbook

There are three marketing strategy questions that every adtech and martech company needs to answer:

1) How does marketing support the overall business strategy?

2) What is the message?

3) How will we reach our customers and other stakeholders?

Aligning marketing and the overall business strategy

Business-marketing alignment is the first step to developing an effective marketing program, and it is where many companies go awry. They look at marketing as a vehicle to ‘get the word out.’ But you can’t figure out what the word is or where to put it without first understanding how marketing fits into the broader business picture.

For example, many companies will launch a product, see it struggling to gain traction, and surmise that they have a marketing problem. But is the problem actually what they’re calling the product or awareness of it? Or is the problem that the product isn’t flexible enough to meet customers’ needs? Or maybe customers view the product as a burden — more unnecessary complexity — instead of an opportunity. (The last problem is common in adtech, as advertisers and publishers are inundated with vendor pitches.)

Good marketers interview your customers and executives when putting together a marketing strategy. Combined, these stakeholders will reveal whether the ‘marketing’ problems you face are purely marketing problems or deeper ones that marketing has a role to play in addressing but can’t solve on its own.

For example, let’s say the company’s core challenge is that it offers a superior level of service than its competitors, but it isn’t able to monetize that distinction. Marketing can help by leaning into the depth of the service — through positioning on the site, featuring customers in press pitches and case studies, and producing content, such as white papers, blog posts, and checklists, that trains customers to view the company’s service offerings as indispensable (and therefore its competitors’ practices as insufficient). These tactics can help the company charge a premium and win business from competitors. But they’re only possible to devise if the company first identifies its business goals and aligns marketing with them.

Once you’ve figured out where the company is, where it wants to go, how its customers feel about it, and what the company needs to do, in marketing and other departments, to realize its vision, you can develop a marketing strategy, which means figuring out both what the message is and how you’ll amplify it.

Articulating the message

You should have two tiers of messaging.

The first is an overarching message. It’s a rallying cry that captures your mission in a way that resonates with customers. For example, let’s say you’re a direct advertising company that helps advertisers and publishers cut out programmatic middlemen by streamlining direct deals. Your message might be, “Cut the adtech tax.” My collaborator Paul Knegten, the former CMO of Outbrain and Beeswax, calls this type of message a crusade because it viscerally excites your customers, who are sick and tired, for example, of paying the adtech tax. You engage your customers on the level of the campaign they want to participate in. They are the heroes of the story.

The second tier of messaging is a series of positions on hot-button industry topics. Every company should know the three to five topics it is most eager to comment on, and it should have house positions on those topics to which executives and marketers can refer when content and PR opportunities arise. For example, you might have takes on AI, supply path optimization, and CTV. All these takes should implicitly support your business position. This even includes what not to comment on.

It’s easy to do marketing tactics such as writing press releases or blog posts. It’s easy to pitch reporters on your latest partnership announcement (a pitch that will rarely land). What’s hard in adtech marketing is to devise a story that your customers and the broader industry — influencers, journalists, investors, and competitors — actually care about and then to amplify that message consistently until everyone in the industry knows you for what you want to be known for.

That is the goal of B2B marketing. Few companies attain it. Those that do close more deals and get to charge a premium for their widely respected expertise.

Disseminating the message

Strategy and messaging go nowhere if you don’t put them into action. This is where tactics such as content, PR, and events come in. Those three levers are the basis of most high-ticket B2B marketing programs. They are the way B2B brands build credibility, accelerating deals, starting additional conversations, and transforming products into premium options.

A typical adtech content and PR program might involve the following deliverables: a quarterly tentpole asset like a white paper, thought leadership bylines, daily social content, any web copy or landing pages, sales emails or other sales collateral (e.g. case studies), and media relations to place articles and establish the company’s spokespeople as go-to resources on their chosen adtech topics.

Event sponsorships will involve some mix of the usual suspects: AdExchanger, Digiday, AdWeek, AdMonsters, Beeler, Cannes, et al. For most companies, splashy six-figure sponsorships won’t be worth it. Setting up private dinners around the events where your current and prospective clients can mingle is a great way to get the most bang for your buck.

Many adtech companies rely heavily on events and hesitate to get involved in other forms of marketing. The reason is simple — it’s easier to tie events to specific sales opportunities. It’s normal to start with events. But don’t exclude yourself from the industry conversation forever by shying away from content and PR. These are the investments that allow you to expand beyond your initial network and accelerate growth. It’s a lot easier to close business when every conversation at your event booth doesn’t begin with, “Who are you? What does your company do?” You can only meet so many prospects via the event circuit, and if you’re only ever communicating with them via direct messages and events, it will be harder to close the deals that originate at events due to a deficit of underlying credibility.

Building an adtech brand that gets more deals done

One of my clients, Pattern, coined a term: the craveable brand. It’s more intuitive with consumer products. Apple and Mercedes would be examples of craveable brands — companies that compete on the strength of their brands and induce an “I gotta have it” feeling in consumers.

But make no mistake. B2B sectors, including adtech, have their own version of craveable brands. Paul likes to call this phenomenon the “cool kids’ table.” And as much as the nerds might dislike it, the cool kids get acquired, establish leadership positions, and get more deals done. People talk about them, whereas most adtech brands just languish in obscurity.

For companies that do six- and seven-figure deals, being synonymous with your category is worth millions of dollars in deals. Restricting your marketing spend to events because you can track it using your salespeople’s recollections won’t be enough to get there. But plunging into content and PR without doing the upfront strategic work to understand the mission those activities support isn’t the move, either.

There is a logical order to B2B marketing growth. Figure out how marketing will remedy your business-level challenges, align the message with where you want to go, and distribute it where your customers are. It’s not the toughest nut to crack in business. It does require focus, creativity, and a steady application of force.