Meltwater

Sr. Content Marketing & Creative Strategist

Building a Marketing Department from Scratch

Meltwater, a B2B SaaS media intelligence company with a Sales-forward culture, had never had a Marketing department. I was the third hire.

The challenge: move from also-ran to segment leader

Competing against better-known and better-funded American companies like Cision and Salesforce was going to be difficult. Marketing to other marketers is also difficult. In addition to low brand recognition, the Sales team (which made up 80% of the company) had never worked with a Marketing Department before.

The solution: differentiated Content Marketing strategy and Sales Integration

Our CMO had one charter for me: “Be the smartest.” At the end of the day, B2B Marketing is about whether or not you’re helping someone do their jobs better, so we needed to make sure that everything we were producing was being written for a customer-centric reason. An early win: at the time, our business was called “social media monitoring,” which I found both long and boring. Since it was fairly new technology, my CMO gave me license to change the name, and I started calling it “Social Listening.” The term caught on, and soon the category was redefined - and we had the early SEO advantage.

We also needed to get the Sales team on board with new terms to them like MQL, so worked with Sales leadership to create an attribution funnel and overall process to integrating the material I was producing.

The “Social Listening Across the Organization” concept that I wrote first an an article and then the “Listen Up” book became the foundation for the “Outside Insight” concept that fueled the Meltwater rebrand, as well as the book that the CEO published a couple years later.

My time in bullets

• Performance Marketing: Built sales & marketing integration program from the ground up to a team of 4 FTE & helped the company grow from $15M -> $40M over 2.5 years.

• Content Marketing, SEO, & Performance Marketing: Drove the creation of a full-funnel acquisition stack for a high-demand B2B media intelligence firm, leading to a 40% increase in customer retention and a 30% decrease in customer acquisition cost. The Meltwater blog was responsible for 65% of direct jtraffic within a year. SEO efforts paid off, and drove 30% of traffic.

• Product Marketing: This function was a side job for me, as we didn’t have this position staffed. Built competitive matrices, ran SWOT, etc.

• Writing: Wrote 90% of creative content: 12 books, 5 webinars, and 200+ articles spanning 13 languages and multiple countries. Piloted social media and social selling program.

• Creative Direction: Took on creative director role, optimizing design department while managing FTE, freelance writers, videographers, and multimedia firms. Led rebrand.