Why All Startups Should Start With Branding Instead of Content [Podcast]
Anthony Kennada, VP of Marketing at Gainsight, joins the Content Pros Podcast to share how he prioritized branding with content to create a start-up positioned for success.
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In This Episode
- Why launching a brand new category means pitching it without mentioning it
- How meeting with specialists but following your intuition leads to informed and inspired innovation
- Why starting a new technology platform means focusing on the human, instead of technical, element
- How putting the brand first when starting out leads to better retention, recruiting, and investment
Quotes From This Episode
“If I had tenured experience and all the biases coming into the role, I don’t know that we would have, collectively as a team, really developed the brand and developed the marketing strategy that we have.” —@akennada
“We didn’t seek out to build a new category. It was a strategy that sort of emerged in time.” —@akennada
“No one was trying to invest in making them be heroes and build the industry foundation around that job.” —@akennada
“The decision we made wasn’t necessarily to build a category, but to just double down. Double down on the community, double down on content, double down on making these folks be heroes and pioneers in this brand new thing.” —@akennada
“Customer success is the next big category of enterprise software.” —@akennada
“We were going to take a position where the problem wasn’t going to be solved by technology necessarily.” —@akennada
“We would grow our database as a result, grow our viewership, but also leverage the brand equity of what they were doing.” —@akennada
“The community effort was really based on a fundamental principle that we were going to put the people at the forefront of our positioning and our go-to-market, rather than the technology.” —@akennada
“Brand is actually at the heart of everything that marketers do. But in the B2B world, we’ve kind of, for lack of better term, sort of bastardized it.” —@akennada
“When folks are engaging at the very top of the funnel with your content efforts, they’re establishing a relationship with you as a thought partner and a place to turn for advice on how they can be great at their job.” —@akennada
“Brand is the entire customer experience from first touch through to close through to how to actually support them.” —@tylerlessard
“You have to all be on the same page that this is a journey that we’re on together.” —@akennada
Resources
- Anthony Kennada on Twitter: @akennada
- Gainsight
- An Unapologetic Defense of Brand Marketing for B2B Growth
- Pulse 2017
- CategoryDev
- Pulse Conference 2015 Speakers Sing "Blank Space" (A Cappella)
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