Marketing is all about experimentation – trying new ideas and doing more of what works, and less of what doesn’t.
Hi Neil, could you tell us about your journey in MarTech?
“My journey to CMO hasn’t been a traditional one. I started my career as an electrical engineer, designing semiconductors and circuits. But I quickly realized that while I loved being in tech, getting closer to customers and the business side was something that I wanted to do. So I went to night school and held a variety of product management and marketing roles within B2B tech companies before leading my own marketing teams.
More recently, I’ve enjoyed being part of startups in the cybersecurity, blockchain, and edge computing spaces. In these companies I’ve successfully built actionable go-to-market strategies for marketing and sales teams to find product-market fit and achieve rapid customer growth. Given how important it is to understand technology to use the latest MarTech tools and effectively position B2B products, my journey might be atypical – but I see my diverse background in engineering, product and marketing as an incredibly strong foundation for what I do.”
What challenges did the Covid-19 pandemic pose for your marketing team?
“The ability to meet prospects and customers in-person disappeared literally overnight. For Kasada, a B2B startup targeting large enterprises, this presented new challenges as a lot of the marketing and sales activities had previously been done in-person. So we shifted to digital marketing (like everyone else), which provided new challenges as it was incredibly difficult to break through the noise with thousands of cyber companies all making a similar shift at the same time. All the while the CPC/CPM of our target audience also rose due to the demand, making it more difficult to work within startup marketing budgets. We wound-up getting super targeted in our ideal customer profile and buyer personals to maximize our advertising budget and combined those efforts with some very personalized content and CTAs to help stand out.”
What sets Kasada apart from the competition?
“When people first learn of Kasada it’s usually because of the product, but once they’ve spoken to us they stay for our people. The company was founded by former red teamers and bot builders, so they have a unique perspective on what they’re up against. As a result, we can challenge the way the market has solved this problem in the past.
Security is serious business, but it’s important to not take ourselves too seriously. We’re a fun group at Kasada with expertise hunting down the stealthiest automated threats. That expertise starts from the very first introduction with us and extends all the way through our customer success organization after a sale is made. Being a smaller company allows us to innovate quickly, while focusing on providing the best overall customer experience (in-contrast to the billion dollar, multi-product line companies we compete with). Differentiating in the market with our talented team while steadily growing our operations provided the kind of experience our customers were looking for at Kasada. We’re proud that our customer retention rate stands at over 97% since the inception of the company.”
Given the increasingly sophisticated nature of bot attacks, what are some basic precautions businesses should take to protect their online assets?
“Stopping bots can be really tricky and best left for the experts. Kasada have spoken with prospects who try to do it on their own or try to extend their web application firewalls well beyond their original intention. This is rarely successful because motivated bot operators have learned how to work around basic defenses. The truth is, you get what you pay for. Find a solution that takes care of it for you, without having to constantly manage or maintain your bot defenses.
What’s also counterintuitive is that we’ve seen many others implement “leading” CDN-based bot detection services that are supposed to stop the bots, but don’t. This is because the bot operators are always evolving their methods. It becomes easy for bot operators to bypass defense systems if they aren’t constantly innovating and staying a step ahead. Innovation in our space requires ongoing updates on an as-needed basis vs. providing release updates periodically.”
Read More: Martech360 Interview With John Nardone, President, Mediaocean
How can bots negatively impact marketers?
“As marketers, we’re always using data to make decisions about the effectiveness of our digital marketing and web traffic. Bad bots skew the decisions we derive from this data. As it stands, the majority of Internet traffic is made up of bots – which means that if you can’t filter them out of your analytics, you will have a false understanding of your web traffic, marketing promotions, conversion rates, and more. You’re essentially flying blind if you haven’t properly accounted and characterized the bad bot traffic from your data sources.
In addition, click fraud is a big problem where bots, not humans, click on your paid ads. This is a complete waste of your paid media spend if not dealt with properly. Imagine how frustrating it is to have your advertising investments clicked by bots, with zero chance of converting them to customers. And if the bot traffic overloads your infrastructure, it slows down your website, which also has a direct impact on monetizing the web traffic.
While bots negatively impact marketers, so too can the anti-bot providers themselves. Most of the leading solutions in the market (not Kasada) rely on adding friction to the user experience to validate humans, if the product needs some “help” to make decisions. Friction such as CAPTCHAs or customized visual challenges have a direct impact on online conversions. We think it is ridiculous that technology providers still rely on such outdated methods, let alone the irony of an anti-bot provider having to challenge a human to prove they’re not a robot.”
How do you envisage Adtech evolving, in the years to come?
“Adtech continues to get more personalized, and it’s becoming more practical to get more targeted in ways that can’t be done with traditional media buys. That’s exciting and something we’ve been working towards for a long time, while incorporating personalization into ABM programs.
With so much innovation happening already in MarTech, however, I envision much more consolidation in the industry. It’s what’s needed to get better use of the tech that’s already out there, as it has become increasingly difficult to work with so many vendors with so many disparate products that put the onus on you, the customer, to make it all work together. I’m starting to see different areas of MarTech do a better job at catering to startups , as opposed to those that are best suited and implemented by enterprise companies. There’s no shortage of great MarTech to evaluate, but it can be overwhelming or unaffordable to implement within the budgets and operational support of smaller organizations.”
Your top pick for a book on marketing that everyone should read?
“Every marketer should read ‘The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation.’
The book is technically written for sales leaders, but it’s very applicable to marketing. It highlights the need to provide insight and value to prospects, flipping the conversation from what keeps you up at night to what should be keeping you up at night.
As marketers, we need to provide insight as the number of products promising ROI is overwhelming. It’s essential to break through the noise with interesting content that educates by sharing new and valuable information. This is especially true within cybersecurity, where buyers are looking for factual content that gives them visibility into the evolving threat landscape, so they can make educated decisions on the greatest risks to their organization. Traditional sales and marketing techniques often backfire with security buyers as they want insightful, low-pressure tactics used to help educate them.”
Could you name one other marketer that you would like to see featured here?
“I’d suggest interviewing Rebecca Murtagh, the CMO at Modo. The two of us have taken similar journeys working together – working at a Fortune 500 company for more than a decade as specialists in our respective areas – prior to taking the leap as head of marketing for a variety of B2B startups here in Boston.”
Could you name the Top 5 apps/platforms you use for marketing?
“Since moving to startups, I have a much more modest budget to work with. But there’s a lot of MarTech that can have a big impact with little to no investment at all. For example, we are leveraging a service that provides competitive technographic intelligence, using 3rd party intent data from our contact database, and utilizing Leadfeeder for website visitor intelligence. All of these sources of intent give us buying triggers that allow for a targeted, account based approach to our campaigns and digital ad investments. In addition, inexpensive tools like SpyFu and RankMath have helped guide our strategy and implementation of content marketing and SEO best practices. I believe it’s important to invest in both paid and organic media so you aren’t too reliant on either one. All of these tools help us get better ROI when used in combination with our other platforms such as HubSpot, LinkedIn campaigns and Google ads and Madison Logic programs.”
What are the key ingredients that make a successful marketer, in this day and age?
“Getting the right people on the team is job one, as it’s always been. Give them enough room to run, yet enough guidance and mentorship to help them grow their marketing and leadership skills. With the right team in place, you shouldn’t be afraid to take risks. Marketing is all about experimentation – trying new ideas and doing more of what works, and less of what doesn’t. If you’re just following what all other marketers are doing in your industry, you aren’t going to be successful at breaking through the noise. If you’re a challenger brand – then challenge. Grab the opportunity to upend your market before someone else does.
Regardless of whether you’re a big or small company, focus is key. You need to align with the stakeholders across your business, such as sales and product. Do you really know and align around your ICP (ideal customer profile) so you can be as targeted as possible in your marketing? And do you have KPIs in place that are shared with these other leaders, with an eye towards revenue? Every head of marketing role I’ve embarked on has had a different ICP and go-to-market strategy due to the nature of the business – so each has required a different “playbook” that’s specific to the organization. It’s often a big mistake to think what you did elsewhere will work where you’re at now.
Also, do you have your positioning correct? With so many B2B brands vying for the attention of similar personas, do you have a differentiated message that resonates with your buyers, or do you look like everyone else? Once you’ve got the messaging right, stay the course. It takes many interactions with a brand before it sticks with your target audience. So it’s important to be consistent and focused across your team, campaigns, and channels, so your marketing adds up to something that truly makes the desired impression within your market.”
Thanks Neil!