Our next SaaS marketing perspective guest hails from LumenAd, an ad management platform. Ember’s background is in marketing, business development and demand gen. We’re talking about performance marketing, customer conversations and making money. Read on for her insights!
KIM: Explain LumenAd a few sentences.
EMBER: At our core, LumenAd helps marketers make better, faster decisions with their advertising dollars. Our advertising management software makes it easy to know what’s working, what’s not and optimize in real time.
KIM: How does LumenAd currently market itself?
EMBER: LumenAd started as a performance-driven digital media agency, so we understand at a very visceral level the pressure marketers are under to make sense of and act on all of the disparate data available to them. As an agency, one of our biggest challenges was aggregating and normalizing all of our advertising data so that we could truly compare performance across channels in an apples-to-apples way. With so many disparate data sources and so many proprietary success metrics, it’s almost a joke how hard it is to truly get a sense of what’s performing and what’s not. So, we built software to solve for that.
KIM: You’ve worked in business development, marketing and demand gen – how can these functions best work together?
EMBER: I believe all B2B marketers – especially in SaaS – owe it to themselves to step into the world of a BDR or an SDR for a period of time. Business development and marketing are two parts of the same demand gen strategy. Especially in early-stage companies, outbound/business development efforts serve as your front-line messaging testing. You can uncover pretty quickly how well your value props are resonating with very specific personas and do it in a way that’s easy to iterate upon. There is no better way to inform marketing strategy than getting on the phone with potential customers and having real conversations about the things that matter most to them. Once you find an angle that’s gaining traction, it becomes easy to incorporate that into a broader marketing strategy. It probably goes without saying, but business development is also absolutely essential for filling pipeline while building a solid, sustainable marketing engine.
KIM: How is your success measured at LumenAd?
EMBER: The ultimate reflection of a successful demand strategy is revenue. At the end of the day, that’s why we’re here – to make the money. That said, there are a lot of ways that we’re measuring early indicators of success: marketing sourced pipeline, marketing influenced pipeline, etc.
KIM: How does PR fit into your demand gen strategy?
EMBER: PR has evolved so much in the last decade. It’s gone from being relegated to the realms of media relations & press releases to truly being integrated into every aspect of demand – from content strategy, advertising strategy, to overall GTM strategy. It can be as tactical as SEO backlinks and as broad as taking a stand on an industry topic and creating a narrative around it.
KIM: If you could market any other business, what would it be?
EMBER: I’d love to market a super eccentric artist, musician, chef or fashion label. The more bizarre & out there, the better.
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