I’d begun working for an IT security company as their VP of Sales & Marketing back in late 2012. The company was a application whitelisting alternative startup, had about 10 employees at the time, and mainly serviced B2B sales during this startup phase. When I arrived at the company, marketing content was sparse and there were no dedicated resources towards the marketing department. I was one of the first additions to the marketing team and knew I had a lot of work on my hands. The website was a basic wordpress site of which I made sure to press for the employment of a web designer to help us bring the site to life with professional in-house HTML and CSS. I began creating extensive marketing content campaigns that had marketing schedules/calendars, various types of marketing collateral (videos, blogs, infographics, white papers, etc…), and smarketing funnels to help guide customers from the introduction stage to customer delight stages.
The company also didn’t have a social media presence. I made it a requirement to post some new content of value to our customers on the social media channels every day. To attract customers to the site, I relied on providing valuable content that helped the customer understand that we were a resource center, a knowledge base that they could turn to for important security information. We didn’t always try to sell, we tried to provide value, knowing that if the customer trusted us, that sooner or later it would help us build brand loyalty and lead to more product users. The marketing campaigns relied heavily on providing customer’s valuable resources, all they would have to do was share their email address with us. This inbound marketing tactic didn’t force emails on the customers either as customers were able to opt out of email communications while still obtaining the inbound marketing collateral (checklists, blog article, white paper, infographic, video, etc…). I’d created dozens of landing pages with contact info forms for each marketing content offer. Thank pages complemented these landing pages, and these thank you pages were connected to other marketing collateral landing pages of which additional, ungiven personal contact information was asked for from the customer and placed into the CRM.
I utilized a software application which enabled us to see which known company IP addresses were visiting our company so that we could know which customers to research, and then send our sales team to them to discuss any potential pain points and/or issues that may be perceived with our company and/or product. I maintained all of this, the website and its landing pages, the CRM system, the marketing collateral content, marketing campaign schedule and calendar, and much more throughout the years I was with the IT security firm.