Experienced marketers know that creating a new business category requires a very different approach to capturing demand in an existing category. Not only are budgets for your product yet to be created, there’s no search data to tap into for quick wins and your sales processes can be lengthy, unpredictable and expensive.
Andy Singer, CMO of OpenRaven is deep in the weeds of building a new category in the cloud security space called Data Security Posture Management, helping Chief Information Security Officers understand where their data are located, what types of data are in each location, and critically, how much of each type there is — in order to apply guardrails and reduce risk.
There’s a ton of valuable insights in this podcast, from how to use social listening to identify adjacent problem spaces, to why LinkedIn is better than Google for category creation, to why account-level signals are more valuable than lead-level signals, to why you need to continue prospecting an account even if after you’ve started talking to a champion.
Andy also has a wealth of experience leading marketing teams and has been through economic downturns before. He shares his advice on bad habits to kick, where to focus your marketing efforts and specific tactics that have served him well during periods like these.
I learned a ton from talking to Andy and I know you will enjoy listening to this one! And if you haven’t already done so, please subscribe for more great content like this!
Podcast contents:
0:50: Cheesy question to get us started :) What type of marketer are you and what is your marketing superpower?
1:40: Tell us about OpenRaven and the problem you are solving?
7:50: As marketer what do you need to do differently when creating a category vs capturing demand. Challenges you run into with forecasting.
12:20: Big mistakes marketers make is positioning at the vision level. Need for listening to customers.
14:00: When to use search vs social. How to use social for listening and attach to an adjacent space, adjacent topic.
18:00: What are some bad habits B2B marketers need to kick in the current economic climate?
21:30: How ad platforms use advertisers budgets inefficiently / encourage advertisers to broaden their targeting.
25:00: Benefits of using LinkedIn for ads. Targeting. Creatives. Importance of making your target market small in order
27:00: Importance of tight targeting and matching the creative to the targeting.
30:00; How to use Marketing Qualified Accounts in Account Based Marketing. Measure account level score across buyer personas. Use tools like Qualified to figure out which accounts to focus on.
How to market when creating a category: An interview with Andy Singer, CMO at OpenRaven.