Once an early innovator, this late stage cloud and data infrastructure startup had raised more than $250 million from top tier VCs like Andreessen Horowitz and Khosla Ventures. In the mid 2010s, Docker was a unicorn taking the startup world by storm, with every big tech company, from VMware to IBM, looking to jump on the container and, later, the Kubernetes bandwagon. The so-called “Container Wars” saw dozens of new entrants to the space every month, followed by a period of fierce market consolidation. With technology preferences trending in a new direction, the company was at risk of getting left behind in a crowded market.
Challenge
When Tract Co-founder, Tiffany Cotter, joined the company, it was acquiring only a few hundred of leads through its website each month. Its small marketing team was focused primarily on in-person events with SDRs doing the majority of the outreach effort. With competition growing, the pressure was on to fill the sales pipeline with qualified leads from the Global 2000.
Demand Generation
Tiffany defined the vision and demand generation strategy to achieve aggressive global acquisition and pipeline targets leveraging owned and paid digital channels—including website, webinars, paid search, social media, partners, retargeting, and email marketing. Re-architected and modernized the MarTech stack to efficiently and effectively support the shift to high-velocity lead acquisition.
Rooted in a deep understanding of the client's buyer journey, we developed a robust demand generation strategy to:- Identify the three most common use cases that drove customers to purchase our client's products (containerization, big data, and hybrid cloud)
- Create, commission, and/or license content (ebooks, webinars, research, whitepapers, analyst reports) for each use case + funnel stage — from awareness through purchase
- Package and launch each use case as an integrated, omni-channel digital campaign with continuous iteration
- Attract and convert prospects into the demand gen funnel with high-value, gated content offers
- Automatically nurture leads with orchestrated remarketing and email nurture sequences to guide prospects step-by-step through our content flow
- Hand off high-value target accounts and warm leads to SDR team leveraging AI-powered lead scoring
Tiffany added value from her very first week. She has done an exceptional job building and optimizing our digital demand generation campaigns, delivering against all expectations. She is a data-centric, logical thinker. That kind of metric-driven approach to marketing was sorely lacking [here], and her presence is helping me change the tone and approach to marketing.
Chief Marketing OfficerResults
Within 18 months, this comprehensive demand generation strategy grew pipeline, evidenced by:- Acquiring over 100,000 net new leads within 9 months — growing the database from 20k at onset
- Reducing cost per lead (CPL) by 70% and growing social engagement 3x
- Achieving >50% penetration in targeted accounts, generating tens of millions of dollars in pipeline through account based marketing (ABM) strategies
- Modernizing the MarTech stack to increase efficiency with marketing automation, personalization, predictive analytics, social listening, and automated lead routing solutions
- Implementing lead attribution and campaign reporting to transform into a data-driven marketing organization