Many startups have a great story. Often, they just need a friendly nudge to tell it.
At York IE, we spend time with each of the entrepreneurs that we work with on the foundations of drumbeat marketing: writing content, issuing news, developing ebooks, jumping on media interviews, creating and appearing on podcasts, and more. They define their story in a messaging hierarchy and find consistent ways to tell it.
And it’s working. We’re proud to share the drumbeat marketing success stories from these startups:
Wabbi
Wabbi enables development teams to own security in their day-to-day operations so SecOps and DevOps teams can see relevant information and make educated decisions. The company worked with York IE to fine-tune its unique, security-first point of view and align its content production with this messaging to build a compelling brand story.
Coming off a great 2020, Wabbi had plenty of momentum for our team to work into the messaging hierarchy and build a drumbeat marketing program around for 2021. York IE helped identify the moments where Wabbi could not only share its story but also highlight its impressive achievements, including:
- being named one of the most promising DevOps solutions of 2020;
- seeing a 200% increase in demand for its SecDevOps platform;
- winning an SBIR Phase I contract with the US Air Force; and
- being named a top 10 finalist in the RSAC Innovation Sandbox Contest 2021.
Our team outlined a monthly cadence to establish CEO and Founder Brittany Greenfield’s thought leadership and show how Wabbi is staying active with new hires, award wins, new partnerships, and engagement on social media.
Metadata
Leading up to the announcement of Metadata’s $6.5 million funding in an oversubscribed Series A round, the goal was to position the MarTech company in a class of its own to significantly attract attention for its news. Facing a highly saturated market of more than 9,000 other MarTech vendors, Metadata wanted to create an escalation of excitement, specifically around the type of category it was creating.
The first step was to tell the company story, which is to empower marketers and enable them to spend their time doing what they’re good at: creative, strategy and content — not Excel spreadsheets. Our team drilled into the vision of Founder and CEO Gil Allouche to show how marketing can be different and worked closely with Metadata to generate thought leadership pieces, press releases and other owned content to showcase its expertise in the market.
Highlights included the creation of two podcasts, By Marketers, For Marketers and Category Creators, featuring entrepreneurs who built and led trailblazing categories such as Godard Abel of G2, Nick Mehta of Gainsight and Manny Medina of Outreach.
Metadata also had these noteworthy and timely achievements to highlight:
- ranked 233rd on the Inc. 5000 list as one of the nation’s fastest-growing private companies;
- selected as the top leadership position in the G2 Summer 2020 Grid® Report for Account-Based Advertising Software; and
- named LinkedIn’s Innovator of the Year.
Collectively, York IE and Metadata knew if they could create a push around these successes, it would set the stage leading up to the oversubscribed Series A. With a steady foundation of visibility as the springboard, York IE looked to create a news hook around Metadata’s compelling raise and secured an exclusive with TechCrunch.
The next goal was to continue the momentum from the funding news with a steady iteration of messaging that drives the conversation and category creation.
To date, Metadata is regularly featured in top media publications, has a consistent Forbes column, recently ranked No. 56 on The Financial Times’ 2021 list of The Americas’ 500 Fastest Growing Companies, highlighted an integration with G2 Buyer Intent data as well as LinkedIn Conversation Ads and started off the year with record revenue growth, customer growth and overall momentum. All in the past six months!
IPinfo
IPinfo is an IP address data provider that enables companies to pinpoint their users’ locations, customize their experiences, prevent fraud, ensure compliance and more. From its beginnings as a side project of Founder and CEO Ben Dowling to its present-day status as a global company that handles 2 billion API requests per month for over 100,000 businesses and developers, IPinfo has a compelling story.
The company built a trusted brand among its customers, but there were opportunities to reach a wider audience. Its message was ready to be shared with the world. IPinfo and York IE came together to implement a strategy to get out there and tell the story over and over again. York IE filtered through IPinfo’s marketing assets to be able to relay that story as part of ongoing activities, and additional channels were built out for new content, media relations, landing pages and more.
IPinfo already had quality integrations and partnership stories that were prime for a marketing push. One of those examples was its Snowflake integration, whereby businesses that use Snowflake as their cloud data platform can use IPinfo for geolocation data sets, enabling richer analytics. The partnership enabled IPinfo to take advantage of the tremendous increase in Snowflake around the time of its IPO and to become part of a bigger trend happening with data. A well-crafted marketing strategy put IPinfo in a position to be listened to and to attract new customers.
Another example was IPinfo’s Host.io launch. After working with more domain name data as part of the data processing for IPinfo.io, the company started to make that data accessible to customers, and the feedback was immediate and positive.
The additional exposure through media interviews, thought leadership articles, blog posts and social media content allowed for a greater, more widespread connection to emerging trends that ultimately led to a more successful product launch.
Discipline and Consistency
It takes a long time to build a brand. Every single tweet, LinkedIn post, blog and newsletter is an opportunity to develop your brand. It’s your employees pushing out content on their own, and everyone thinking of what could create a moment or marketing momentum to spread the message further.
There needed to be a new way for startups to think about marketing, and it’s not instant gratification or chasing the latest silver bullet. Sometimes it’s not that TechCrunch hit, although we all still cheer when it happens. In reality, the act of being disciplined and consistent — in other words, executing on drumbeat marketing — is the key.
Learn more about our drumbeat marketing and other advisory services for startups.
