B2B marketing is all about constantly navigating multiple touchpoints and discovering platforms to achieve maximum efficiency. While it’s an uphill battle, it yields valuable outputs if done right. Paired with creativity and a strong business mind, startups can scale content creation and brand awareness even with limited resources.
On today’s episode of Startups On Demand, I am joined by David Horesh, Director of Marketing at 4M Analytics, a tech company that provides a subsurface utility map with a complete, accurate, and up-to-date subsurface-infrastructure database in the US.
Today, we share our thoughts on marketing as a revenue generator, how to scale content creation with a limited budget, the pros and cons of marketing startups in a traditional industry, and the layers of multi-touchpoints in marketing.
Omri: Tell me something about 4M Analytics and where you guys are coming from.
David: We’re a construction tech company and we’re on a mission to create a global map of subsurface infrastructure. Today, when you pave the road or put a pipeline on the ground, you trench, you activate. And when you do that, you often encounter already existing utilities in the ground like oil, gas, electricity, etc. And when I say “encounter,” I mean we “damage” them. The reason for this is no one knows where they’re buried. So what we’re doing is we’re creating a combination of satellite imagery and AI to allow civil engineers and people who plan the project to help them decide where the route of the road and pipelines are going without committing damage to the infrastructure.
Omri: Can you elaborate on what your overview is on marketing attribution and how exactly you see marketing as a revenue generator?
David: I think a lot of business leaders think of marketing as a team that does nice things – nice one-pagers, nice designs, etc. But I think that good marketing leader are business people. Their goal is to bring in money and clients to the company. It’s a combination of science and creativity, and I think that combination is the way to create revenue. Obviously, being creative is part of it like grabbing people’s attention, but the way you distribute and analyze data, you need a business mind to be able to do that.
Omri: How do you convince the management that “we’re all in for the revenue, but it takes time?”
David: I think that’s one of the biggest challenges for early-stage marketers, because you’re taking all these resources from the company, and you’re investing an asset that’s gonna take you 6 to 12 months to prove, but it takes time because building a brand takes time. I think most startups are very much focused on capturing demand – like getting out there, pounding the phone, reaching out to people, etc. But if you want to scale, marketing is definitely the route because it’s the only way to reach your entire market and create a perception of your company in their mind – and that takes time. There are stages – there’s awareness, trust, and demand, and each one of these takes 3 months to create. If you want to build a scalable asset for your company, there’s no shortcut.
Omri: What are your tips for startups with limited budgets on how to automate and scale content creation?
David: For startups, it’s very tempting to do everything – to do SEO, to do socials, and to PR, etc., which doesn’t make any sense because they won’t be able to do everything right. What we do is that we adopted the concept of long-form content strategy. For example, you record a podcast of 60 minutes, and you cut it into 60 bits of 1 minute, and you’ve got tons of content that you can distribute to your channels automatically with nearly no effort. That’s the route that we’re taking. And the biggest bonus of doing something like that is you get an intimate understanding of your ideal customer profile because you interact with them in a non-salesy way.
Omri: What are some marketing tech stacks that you recommend?
David: We can see a lot of people coming in, either directly or via search. But 80 or 90% of the inbound we have come from LinkedIn. And the reason for that is we put in a self-attribution form, which means we have them fill out a mandatory section where they need to tell us where they came from. It’s the best way to learn about what’s working and what’s not working. I know it takes a lot of work, but it’s efficient. I’m not a big fan of tech stacks, but we do have Hubspot, for example.
