Building Brand Leadership through Category Creation

Description

After winning its C-round financing, this geospatial analytics company needed to create its brand and define a go-to-market strategy to support its aggressive ARR growth objectives.

The Goals

• Brand Architecture and Creative Development

• Annual Recurring Revenue growth

The Approach

• Build a collaborative, differentiated brand

• Support ARR growth with global scalable marketing

The Results

• Recognized as a category leader in geospatial analytics

• $100M sales pipeline growth

When I started, 90% of the company was made up of engineers and data scientists. As the first marketing hire, when I asked 10 salespeople to describe what the company did, I got 10 different answers. 

Adopting an agile marketing approach, I relaunched the website highlighting customer benefits and moving away from feature/functionality marketing. Using A/B testing, we optimized for traffic and conversion. Data-driven analysis was supported by conducting primary customer market research and competitive research to align the organization and build competitive positioning and sales messaging. With executive alignment achieved, the sales team was trained on how to pitch the company and build consistency with our go-to-market strategy.

Integrating Salesforce.com and Marketo Marketing Automation into the website scaled up the demand generation engine. Developing a test-and-learn, data-driven content marketing strategy grew global demand 10x. A cornerstone of the strategy was illustrating industry use cases using product analytics and insights to tell compelling customer stories.

The marketing mix consisted of data-driven public relations, events, email marketing and nurture campaigns, social media, search engine marketing (SEM), and a channel partnership marketing strategy. These tactics were aligned to the customer journey based on in-depth customer research and the development of Ideal Customer Profiles (ICPs).

Aligning with the CRO increased the speed of the marketing revenue engine and catalyzed ARR growth - propelling the sales pipeline to over $100M. These building blocks form the foundation of the company’s marketing strategy today.