On Tuesday, September 23, Madrona Venture Group hosted the WTIA’s Tech in Focus event on B2B Marketing at their downtown Seattle location. The panel was made up of seasoned marketers, reflecting on strategies and experiences in their industry.

Panelists Dave Rigotti, Head of Pipeline Marketing at Bizible, Justin Baker, Director of Worldwide Demand Generation and Operations at Extrahop Networks, and Isabell Sheang, Senior Strategy and Marketing Manager at Bing Ads, were led by moderator Madrona’s Director of Growth Marketing, Ryan Metzger.

When speakers were asked how they generate topics, everyone agreed that content marketing really starts and ends with the research you do, and the significance of doing everything it takes to understand your customer and audience.

“One thing we think a lot about is how can we be controversial?” said Baker, while talking about strategies for content execution. “We will call out competitors on our site. If you look at it from the inbound traffic perspective, our traffic can be off the charts. Don’t be afraid to take risks.”

On the topic of piggybacking other people’s content, Sheang said, “For us it’s been, how do you leverage the influencers and their authority in the marketplace and associate that with our brand.” Ritter added, “[o]ne of the reasons we do content marketing is because it has a compounding effect.”

Content marketing can be challenging to measure, especially for un-gated content. “We really focus mostly on the channel and where are they coming from, not so much what they are looking at,” shared Ritter.

To wrap up the conversation, Metzger asked panelists to share their most successful campaign story or lessons they’ve learned from their best experience. Baker closed by sharing, “The single most important piece of content is material that helps the sales people sell. Unless you can bring them in and convince them that what you are selling is what they need, you are going to lose.”

After the panel, Madrona raffled off two books to attendees who completed the WTIA Tech Animal Quiz. Thank you to our host, Madrona Venture Group, our moderator and speakers, and those of us who joined us for the event. The last Tech Crawl of the year is tomorrow, September 25, in Pioneer Square and you don’t want to miss it—we’ll be visiting member companies Galvanize, Ivy Softworks and Zonar Systems!