Adtech marketing strategy boils down to three questions:

1. What is the business objective we’re trying to support?

2. What is the message?

3. Where and how are we distributing the message?

The objective is usually cultivating awareness or differentiation. Early on, adtech companies are unknown, and they need to get on the radar of their target customers to have a shot at making deals (beyond the immediate network of the founder and initial sales hires). Marketing can certainly help with that. Later on, the problem becomes differentiation, especially if you’re not the biggest player in your category. If you’re one of dozens of DSPs or SSPs, marketing helps you win by showing the customer why you’re different.

But whether the goal is awareness, differentiation, or something else, the third strategy question is important: Where and how are we distributing the message? Because if you’re not getting in front of your customers and/or the influencers who will help you get in front of them, marketing is ineffectual. You could have the most brilliant message and marketing assets in the industry, but if a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, for the purposes of marketing, it doesn’t matter.

The importance of reaching your customers should concern a lot of adtech companies because many of them are essentially anonymous. Yes, those of us in the industry know they exist, and their customers may know that, too. But their customers rarely see them. They are not top of mind. If members of their target audience (let alone those who influence them) were pressed to explain what makes them different from their competitors or what their message is, they would have no idea. 

Now, if you’re one of the small adtech companies or not-so-small adtech companies that has never invested in marketing, anonymity is to be expected. You’re giving up the benefits of being top of mind for your customers. But if you do have a marketing team, why are they anonymous? Why isn’t every one of them out there evangelizing you in the market? 

Let me put it this way — I’m a one-man marketing band. And marketing isn’t my entire job; most of my time actually goes to servicing my clients. So, why am I, one loudmouth, more present in digital advertising discourse than a lot of adtech companies with full-time, multi-person marketing teams? 

Here are three steps every adtech company should take to do better on that third tenet of marketing strategy: distributing the message.

Appoint a Chief Evangelist

Every adtech company should have one person, likely an executive, whose role is to evangelize the business. This person is the face of the company in the market. They are present on LinkedIn, Twitter, and industry Slack groups. They speak at events. They pop up on webinars. They liaise with the press. This person lives and breathes the message and mission of the company. They can tell you why it exists, how it’s different from competitors, and why customers and other people in the industry should give a hoot.

When I went on the Marketecture podcast, host Ari Paparo asked who’s doing good adtech marketing, and I thought of two people who I’d say fit this role of evangelist: Paul Gubbins, who announced this week that he had left Publica by IAS, and Lauren Wetzel of InfoSum. I thought of them because I see them often on social channels, and I admire their approaches. Paul provides a lot of educational content on CTV. Lauren is adept at evangelizing the data clean room sector and differentiating InfoSum from its competitors. Matt Barash is another person who immediately comes to mind as a very present force in digital advertising discourse.

If I were the CEO of an adtech company, I would want to be sure that, when people brought up my company in conversation, there was at least one person that made them say, “Oh, yeah, company x. I see person y everywhere. They’re the z company.” Jeremy Giffon of Tiny even argues that tech companies should have a chief audience officer. You don’t need to go that far. But at the very least, be sure someone is owning boosting your presence in-market. Otherwise, you’re leaving money on the table.

Talk Your Book and Also Talk About Other Stuff

Most adtech companies and most adtech executives are anonymous. So, I applaud anyone who gets out there and amplifies their company. But I think most people fall short of what I’d consider the ideal balance of self-promotion and thought leadership (or educational content). 

Some people are almost exclusively self-promotional. This is the notorious CEO or CMO who only shows up on LinkedIn once a month to announce that the company won an award or inked a new partnership that nobody cares about. Obviously, this approach will fail because it doesn’t offer value to the audience. People might ‘like’ the content pro forma, especially if you’re rich and powerful. But they won’t really view you as a trusted source of insights about the industry, which is the holy grail of marketing: building trust to drive more deals.

On the other end of the spectrum, some people don’t talk their book at all. This is also a missed opportunity. Especially if you’re regularly sharing educational and entertaining content, you have earned the right — the audience’s trust — to do some messaging on what you’re working on, why you’re different, and why people should care. Use your platform to this effect.

The majority of your content should be educational. Help people understand the industry and how to do their job better. Instead of telling them you’re the best fit to solve their problems, show them by telling them how to solve those problems themselves. The rest (let’s say 20%) should be a mix of more personal stuff so that people build a relationship with you and directly promotional messaging.

Get the Whole Marketing and Sales Team Involved

To return to the initial point about marketing team anonymity, while every company should have a chief evangelist, the whole marketing team, and the sales team as well, should be involved in evangelizing the company. This is especially pertinent to companies with dozens or even hundreds of salespeople and marketers. If you have a large team and are as present on marketing channels as a company with a few employees, something has gone very wrong.

If I were made chief audience officer or chief evangelist of a company with a marketing team of twenty, I would want to know what each person is doing concretely to evangelize the company. Cut the red tape. Slaughter the sacred cows. What is our message? What information of value do we have to offer to our audience? Where does our audience hang out online? And why is every person not taking concrete steps daily to evangelize the company and convert the members of that audience into believers?

That’s what modern marketing requires. The benefits of being top of mind for your customers are too great to be anonymous.