While closing the gap between the top and the bottom of the marketing funnel is every brand’s challenge, it can be particularly difficult for B2B brands who navigate long buying cycles across varied buyer groups.
The B2B world has historically focused its marketing efforts on the bottom of the funnel. Brand campaigns are often seen as abstract, expensive and disconnected from revenue generation. Because Sales is directly responsible for revenue, it tends to take precedence over brand marketing and gets bigger budgets. Meanwhile, the shift towards growth marketing, RevOps, and marketing automation, has created higher expectations around marketing.
“Some potential clients will come to us focused on leads. They may not be interested in an integrated strategy, understanding how they’re perceived in the marketplace, what their customers need or want to see, or thinking beyond the next quarter,” says Derek Roldan, managing director and head of client services at B2B enterprise marketing firm Titan One. “When clients and agencies think and work this way, the result is an oversaturation of reactive, generic messaging, content and tactics created in silos to drive short-term objectives. We believe that with a holistically integrated longer-term approach, we can create healthier, lasting growth by energizing brands creatively, and driving measurable demand.” 
“Brands have a massive opportunity to create momentum by leveraging how brand gen and performance can work together,” says co-founder Scott Lanaway. “We think that everyone is getting tired of rinse-and-repeat tactics. Through strategy-first research and collaboration, we’re able to uncover what we call ‘pockets of passion’ and unseen perspectives that can inform out-of-the-box brand and GTM creative and strategy. There’s an individual, human dimension at play underneath every product and service, and when we find and communicate that energy, the market notices – as do internal audiences. When it’s delivered with an impact measurement framework, everyone can contribute. That gets people more enthused, and rowing in the same direction.”
Lanaway stresses that Titan One is laser-focused on working with clients who want to collaborate this way. “We’ve grown our agency around the idea of working with people who share our values and intent – both internally (our people) and externally (our clients).”
Titan One recognized that too often the top and bottom of the funnel were often being served by separate teams in separate silos, resulting in mixed messaging and lack of alignment. “A lot of big agencies come in with a great brand strategy and a big campaign that’s going to help elevate the brand,” says Roldan. “But at the end of the day, it doesn’t necessarily tie back to a quantifiable metric for growth. Building and connecting the two in concert is what we bring to the table.”
A case in point is Zayo, a global connectivity infrastructure provider and a Titan One client. Zayo builds and delivers global infrastructure for secure, high-volume, high-performance data for education, finance, government, healthcare, media, SaaS and more. It’s also a “middle mile” player, focused on serving “last mile” ISPs – building the infrastructure that connects local ISPs to the big national networks – an initiative that is helping address digital inequity in rural areas of the U.S. Titan collaborated with Zayo on a GTM strategy for this mid-mile initiative.
As Zayo’s senior manager of brand and content strategy Marla Schilling tells it, Titan One had deep conversations with brand and demand gen marketing team leads to understand current GTM efforts, positioning, and establish campaign KPIs. They interviewed Zayo salespeople to understand carrier pain points, executed a content audit, competitive positioning review, and a ‘discoverability audit’ to ascertain topic authority.
With core insights and recommendations in hand, Titan One’s Creative Director Gerard Adderley led the group through ideation of three new thematic brand campaign territories in support of a bold new ‘carrier-focused’ message. Zayo’s team leads on both brand gen and demand gen collaborated with Titan on selecting and refining the campaign theme, and Titan built out a full GTM kit including content and paid media.
“The brand awareness campaign is built on the idea that Zayo enables our customers to say ‘yes’ to their customers,” says Schilling. “Titan One started by priming the market for a few months with a brand awareness video that dimensionalized the word ‘yes’ in various scenarios. After a few months, they started running the demand gen piece.”
This process began in late January, and within six months the campaign, priming and awareness benchmarks were exceeded and the brand video completion rate was 70%. The demand gen tactics yielded 200 contacts, 32 leads and two new customers. That may not sound like much to a B2C marketer, but these are multimillion-dollar contracts with a typical sales cycle of a year or more. “Zayo told us that while they have run campaigns before, the results and quality of this activity were remarkable. So they were very excited when that first campaign lead closed in such a short period of time,” recalls Roldan. 
Schilling says she sees Titan One as an extension of Zayo’s marketing team. “They understand our business and they understand what our customers care about. They’re super strategic but also results-driven. We didn’t have a huge budget for our latest campaign, but they pulled out all the stops and delivered something that is truly creating impact for our business.”
Learn more about Titan One at www.titan-one.co or reach out to Mark Glucki at m.glucki@titan-one.co.
