Intro
When Al Kari of Manceps was looking to expand his AI-consultancy, he asked me to help him found the marketing department by implementing a digital demand generation strategy and positioning the company for growth. Over the next several months, we transformed the company’s business, increasing its valuation along the way.
Where It Started
In its few years as a company, Manceps had generated an impressive list of clients, most of which came from personal referrals. The website itself was a landing page and the logo was assembled by the CEO as a placeholder. My joining the business represented their first significant investment in marketing.
Launching a Brand
In October, they brought me in just a couple of weeks before Tensorflow World, the annual Google-sponsored AI convention. I had just a few weeks to develop a brand identity, relaunch their website, and build out several presentations that they’d be giving at the event.
There wasn’t time for a deep dive into the aesthetics of their new brand and so I took Al’s original triangle logo concept and found a way to build out a geometric look that could unfold across all of their in-booth and online collateral.
In preparation for the event, I built brochures, presentation decks, and booth banners, all with the new aesthetic reflected.
Shifting to Growth
Following our scramble to brand the company before Tensorflow, we returned to Portland to develop a growth strategy that would help the company build upon its early wins.
As a B2B service provider, my mission was to develop a marketing strategy to reach enterprise decision-makers. This audience is a challenging one to reach as they are more expensive to reach on Linkedin and tend to be more skeptical of marketing messages.
To reach this audience, I developed a content-based outbound marketing strategy that would raise brand awareness and establish ourselves as subject-matter experts in our space. I created a series of ebooks and white papers that we could use to reach these people. Altogether, the assets I created in those early months, represented 20,000 words of content.
The big question I sought to answer across our ebooks, our ads, our email nurture campaigns, etc. was “How can AI meaningfully transform your business?”
Furthermore, by up-cycling squeeze-page content by republishing it to a variety of SEO-friendly channels (like our blog), this initial content initiative also led to dramatically increasing our visibility across Google search.
After just a few months, Manceps was ranking for hundreds of AI-related keywords. Many were noteworthy, including “AI Case Studies”, which of course, is a massive win for any AI service provider organization.
To further establish our street-cred and build awareness, we created a number of community-driven initiatives. We promoted scholarships, offered internships, and hosted regular meetup events. Although the company’s interest is a genuinely charitable one—just ask our CEO about his affinity for the AI community—, these efforts did redound benefits to the company by increasing awareness for our brand and opening the door to several opportunities.
Results
In just a few months, these efforts have already increased the profile of our business in dramatic ways. Our awareness across social is up ten-fold, our inbound leads are increasing week-over-week, and every month, we break a new record for on-site traffic.
In short, their investment in marketing is working, leading to many new revenue opportunities.