Jess: Hey Josh, I think we should double down on our community sponsorships. Did you get a chance to look at those proposals I sent you?
Josh: I did, Jess, but I don't know. That's a lot of money.
Jess: But sales says all our best leads come from them.
Josh: Hi. Yes. Exit Five? Please send me the contract.
Jess: Hey, Josh, remember when I came to you with six-figure proposals for some community sponsorships?
Josh: Yeah, back when we were pre-Series A. I fell out of my seat.
Jess: I was like, "But wait, no, this is gonna be good." "I promise." "I
Josh: promise. I swear."
Jess: These are the people we need to be talking to.
Josh: You weren't wrong.
Jess: I wasn't wrong.
Josh: But at the time, that was scary.
Jess: It was a lot of money. Yeah. And it was definitely our largest line item in our budget.
Josh: Yeah, it was massive.
Jess: But it felt really important to have a presence in these communities because it's within those spaces where all of these marketers are talking and sharing ideas and telling other marketers all the things that they're trying and experimenting with. And it just felt like the right space for us to place a big bet, and I had a pretty good hunch it was gonna pay off.
Josh: Yeah, you weren't wrong. The, these communities have already built the entire personas that we're trying to get after. And I felt like we could either spend a bunch of money on ads and outbound trying to bring people to us, or just get into the communities where they already hang out.
Jess: I think the other thing about people in communities is they're typically folks who care a lot about their craft — Mm-hmm — want to continue their education within their kind of different department or silos and really understand what other people are doing — Yeah — meet other great marketers so they can grow as a marketer. So they're always the people willing to try new stuff. Yeah. And like —
Josh: If you're spending your free time in a community — ... about what your job is —
Jess: You're our people.
Josh: Yeah. Also, touch grass.
Jess: Yeah. Touch grass, but we love you.
Josh: We love you.
Jess: For sure.
Josh: Yeah. It was a good bet.
Jess: It was. Let's talk about the actual communities we decided to sponsor.
Josh: Okay.
Jess: So there were two really big plays. The first was Exit5, which I think a lot of our listeners know, love, are probably a part of. That felt like the preeminent B2B marketing community to be a part of and to be seen in, and it's where all the cool kids hang and all the smart people talk about all the things they're doing. And it felt like a great place to have a very large group of marketers kind of see what we're doing and learn about us. But I think the thing about Exit5, it's like every kind of marketer is in there — Yeah — right? So we also wanted a second community to sponsor — Mm — that felt much more in line with our exact target audience.
Jess: And so we found a community called Demand Collective.
Josh: Yep.
Jess: They're a much smaller, more niche community. Mm-hmm. I think probably now there are around 500 members. Yeah. At the time we started sponsoring them, there were around 300.
Josh: Yeah.
Jess: And they've grown significantly. But the thing about Demand Collective is they are vetted demand gen operators. So everyone that applies, there is an application process, you have to have at least three years of demand gen experience. Cool. So these are, like, real operators that have been doing this a little while and they're there, again, to learn more about the craft of demand gen. Yeah. So we have this two-pronged approach with community now.
Jess: Yeah. So we have this larger, broader community in Exit Five with way more marketing disciplines within it. Yep. And then we have this smaller, more niche play with Demand Collective. Yeah. And obviously, these are the day-to-day operators. These are the people we're trying to reach, who would actually be inside of Vector — Yeah — every day.
Josh: I remember when you first brought... We were, I think we had already sponsored Exit Five. Yep. And then you were looking for this second one. Yeah. And you brought me Demand Collective, and I remember just being like, "Are we, do we wanna take the bet?" Like — Yeah — they were super early. And you had done your research, right? I think you, you had met, is his name Eric?
Jess: Eric Linssen.
Josh: Eric, who is sort of, like, building out the community, and you had met with him, and you're like, "I think he's gonna build something really special here." Yeah. "We should take a bet." And so we ended up being, like, one of their sort of earlier flagship sponsors, and it's worked out really well so far, which I'm sure we'll get to.
Jess: We will. And it didn't hurt that one of our competitors was also vying — Yeah — for that kind of flagship — Yeah — sponsorship spot, and we were like, "Nope."
Josh: No.
Jess: "Gotta block that from happening." Work with us. Yeah. Right? Yeah. And so that, that felt like a really big win for us.
Josh: Yeah. Okay, so let's jump into these two communities that you ended up — Yeah — sponsoring. I'd never sponsored a community. I didn't know what it was, if it was events or webinars or whatever. Let's start with Exit Five. Sort of — Yeah — what, w- what do we sponsor in that community, or how did you approach sort of building out your community sponsorship here?
Jess: The way I think about community sponsorship is the more kind of inventory that I can get in my sponsorship package that allows me to put my customers at the forefront and let them do a deep dive and make them look good, I look for opportunities within sponsorship packages that allow me to do that the most.
Jess: So with Exit Five, there's actually two parts to our partnership with them. We have a media sponsorship, which is the newsletter and the podcast and live events. Yeah. And then we have an event sponsorship, which we are, this is so exciting — the lead sponsor — Wow — for Exit Five Drive this year.
Josh: That's huge.
Jess: Our logo is at the very top, and it — Oh — just gives me chills.
Josh: Sounds expensive.
Jess: Worth it. Worth it. Worth it. Worth it. Worth it. ROI. ROI. Just keep thinking that.
Josh: Sends a message to the market, for sure.
Jess: Absolutely. It's huge. And so those are kinda the two halves. So on the media side, we get to have Dave Gerhardt, who's the founder and still runs the podcast and so much of what the community does, he actually does an on-air read about Vector, which is really cool. It's great to hear Dave talk about us. We also get newsletter spotlights, so we get a little ad mention with the newsletter, which actually performs really well. Yeah. But the things I get the most excited about are things like — We get to have a customer on a webinar, right?
Jess: Yeah. We get to have... I got to be on the podcast. Yeah. And that was really exciting. And I don't always want our customer to only talk about us. I, I — Yeah — don't think that's fair to them. I want them to talk about all the cool things they're doing. I want the people listening to be like, "Man, this person is smart and doing some really interesting things. I want to try a couple of these things." And also, one of the things that they are doing just happens to be Vector, right? Yeah. And so we look very smart by association. Yeah. And that feels really important to me. So we did a really awesome live virtual event with Exit5. We put a panel together.
Jess: Kelly, our demand gen marketer got to be on there, along with three or four different customers, and they walked through a single ad play from beginning to end. It ended up being Exit5's top-rated live event ever.
Josh: Wow.
Jess: Live virtual event ever. Yeah. Which was really cool. That's neat. And we ended up, we decided we're gonna do a handful more of those, because of what we got back out of it was so exciting.
Josh: That's amazing.
Jess: Yeah.
Josh: I remember that particular day when you did that. What was the title of that podcast? Or that webinar that you guys did? It was like —
Jess: It was What's Working in B2B Ads Right Now.
Josh: Yeah. So this very non-Vector thing. Yeah. Right? It was just like a topic that's on everyone's mind, right? The mention of Vector was like a small component of it. Yeah. But even though we weren't front and center, I remember, we have a Slack channel where demo form submissions come in. Yeah. And it was just like blowing up. And we have the, of course, every marketer has the "How did you hear about us?" And it was just like, "Exit5, Exit5, Exit5." Yeah.
Jess: Webinar, webinar, webinar. Yeah.
Josh: Yeah. So you don't have to have marketing that is forcing your product down someone's throat — No — in order for it to work.
Jess: No. It was really very much like these are very intelligent, sophisticated demand gen marketers. Look at the cool stuff they're doing. One component of that happens to be Vector, that gives them insights they didn't have before. And I think that was what made it so successful. We weren't cramming it down people's throats — Yeah — for sure.
Josh: Super cool.
Jess: So that's one piece of it, is kind of the media component. We get a lot of exposure, again, because Exit5 is a broader community with a lot of different marketing titles. So people from content all the way down to demand gen know who we are. Yeah. And that, that's amazing. We also have the event side of things there, so we're gonna be sponsoring Drive this year again, which we did sponsor last year. This is a bigger sponsorship — Yeah — which is super exciting. We get to have kind of an on-site experience. Maybe that's where the Toyota Corolla comes in. Oh, we can have them scream inside this car.
Jess: Scream inside the Corolla. It's an experience. We all wanna do that.
Josh: We should do it.
Jess: I, I — We should do it — think it's — I think Dave and Dan will go for it — I think people, I think they would love it. We get to have an on-site experience. We actually get to have a booth, so we'll be bringing a couple of sales folks who can kind of show people the inside of Vector and what does it look like and what does it do and how could it help you — That's cool. We didn't have that last year — which is cool. Didn't have that last year. Yeah. We're also gonna be doing the ghost tour there, which is really cool. So we have a lot going on. We got a lot at that one. Lot going on. And then we get cool things like Dave is gonna talk about that for sure, right? He's gonna talk about the sponsors and — Yeah — on his LinkedIn and at the event, and we get to look bigger than we are. Yeah. Right? And we love plays like that. You and I both — Yeah — do, where it's like, let's build the perception of how big we are — Yeah — and that we punch above our weight — Yeah — which is really cool. So those are kind of the two components of the Exit Five package.
Jess: And then on the other side, we have the Demand Collective package, and Eric Linssen at Demand Collective, this was like his first full year — Yeah — of running this community full time. Same. So Eric came from Keyplay. Yep. And he decided, "I actually think I wanna do... I'm gonna go all in on this community. I believe in it that much." Yeah. And he was looking for his first handful of sponsors, and he came to me, and I was like, "Okay, let's do this. I want it to feel so easy to say yes to you next year."
Josh: Yeah. 'Cause he knew, he knew, like — Yeah — this is a new community. It's kinda my first year doing this. I think he knew we were taking a pretty big leap with him. Yeah, we need to hit a home run here.
Jess: Totally, and he is doing everything — Mm-hmm — in his power to make that happen.
Josh: Yeah, he's great. Yeah.
Jess: So we've done some really great things with him. We've done a handful of... He does a lot of virtual events, usually two to three a quarter.
Jess: And so we've gotten to get some customers out there talking about how they're using us, and then what they're doing in general. Cool. Kelly has been able to host some kind of discussions and live events there. We just had a virtual demo day where it was like eight really hot demand gen tools. Yep. But it was the people who actually use them, so no one from the company was allowed to demo.
Josh: Oh, interesting.
Jess: It was actual users, customers of the companies who got to demo. That's cool. So you get the good, the bad, and the ugly, right? Yeah. Very honest opinion.
Josh: I love that play.
Jess: Super cool. And so they get a ton of registrants for these things — Wow — which is really exciting. And again, that was one of the things we saw in the demo request channel — Yeah — start to light up. It was like, they have a one of their virtual events is called the Demand Day Summit, and I think we saw six in a row that day of Demand Day Summit, Demand Day Summit, Demand Day Summit.
Jess: Wow.
Josh: Yeah.
Jess: That was real exciting. That was one that Kelly spoke at.
Josh: Do you see a... So it sounds like we, when we do these communities, we sort of invest in a variety of different mediums that they have, right? Like newsletter sponsorships — Yep — events, some case in person. Do you think there's one that rises above the rest, or do you think it's really important that you sort of have a ongoing presence across different things for them to work together?
Jess: I think it's super important to have a presence across different channels because some people are newsletter people. Yeah. Some people are webinar people, right? Yeah. And I think you can use the same content across all of it — Yeah — because people are akin to liking more for — They like a certain format better.
Josh: That's a great point. I never thought about that. I'm not personally a webinar person. Yeah. I don't tend to have the time to sit down for an hour, but I know people do it. Yeah. We've seen the results of it. But I am a newsletter person. Yep. Right? There's a handful of newsletters that I'll open. Exit5 is actually one of them. Yes. So I always see the sponsor at the top of it — Absolutely — or in the middle of it. It's a great point.
Jess: I would say for us, no matter the channel — Mm-hmm — the fact that we're able to get really good deep dives from our customers in there — Yeah — is where we see the most movement. Yeah. With Demand Collective, we've had three really great newsletter features that happen to be a deep dive with our customers.
Josh: That's cool.
Jess: And within that deep dive was a short paragraph or an interesting mention about how they're using Vector. Mm. And so there was one with Kevin Driscoll from Datadog. There's one with Cindy Dubon from Goldcast Cvent, and there was one with Tanmay Sarkar from Airbyte. Yeah. And all three of those drove a handful of demos for us, that was really exciting, right? And again, because we know the makeup of that community is sophisticated demand gen marketers — Yep — every single one of those coming in was, like, a real hot — Yeah — qualified lead.
Josh: Yeah. How do you think of... You mentioned a couple names that we've also used as direct influencers. Yeah. How do you think of the balance between sort of sponsoring communities, sponsoring events, sponsoring influencers? There's this Venn diagram of like — Yeah — trying to create coverage. Like, how do you know where to put your sponsorship dollars across those three different buckets?
Jess: Ooh, that's a good question. I feel like you kind of have to have a nice little mix — Yeah — and start to see, like, where the return comes from. Mm-hmm. But for me, it's like if I were to take one of those away, the other two might not do as well. Right. Right? I think for me, any time I can make my customer a rock star — Yeah — and get them out in front of more people, even if they're not talking about us — Yeah — eventually, when they do or eventually when someone asks them like, "How are you doing the things you're doing?" And they mention Vector — Yeah — like that, them being elevated in that way only helps us.
Josh: Yeah. I think it's really smart. Yeah. The choosing a customer to elevate, whether it's either in a community or sponsoring them themselves, is such a great flex. Obviously, it helps from a retention perspective — Yeah — but you also make the customer just feel super special and welcomed.
Jess: Totally.
Josh: Like, we're relying on you, right, as this like a superstar of our product, which is cool.
Jess: Yeah. And we want people to hear how you're talking about us, how you're — Yeah — how you are using us in such an interesting way.
Josh: Yeah, versus like a founder steps up and record... You know, just like — Yeah — no one wants to hear from the company. They wanna hear from, like, how people are actually using it.
Jess: They wanna hear from you and me.
Josh: From us, obviously. As we're sitting here recording a podcast — I know. — with Mr. Founder.
Jess: I hope they wanna hear from us. They staked a lot on them wanting to hear from us.
Josh: This is the last episode of the season, so if you stuck around this long, you wanted to hear from us — Yes — which, good on you.
Jess: God bless you.
Josh: God bless.
Jess: Josh, it is that time.
Josh: What time is it?
Jess: It's time for positive affirmations. Gonna say some nice things,
Josh: and it's gonna go into your ear holes.
Jess: And stay in your brain waves.
Josh: Because you're great.
Jess: You are. Never forget it.
Josh: Dear marketer, you don't need no more budget. You got Canva and Notion and Spite.
Jess: Dear marketer, bitch, you doing a good job.
Josh: Okay, so we sponsored ExitFive. We sponsored Demand Collective. How do you measure the performance and, like, how have the results been?
Jess: I'm so glad you asked that. Oh, gosh. She's gonna — I have numbers.
Josh: She's gonna pull out paper.
Jess: Get my papers. It gets harder every time. I'm getting older.
Jess: All right.
Josh: She's got her, she's got her papers.
Jess: All right, Exit Five. So across the handful of webinars that we have done with them, we've had 1,100 registrants, which is incredible. Geez. And I'm sure there's some repeat — Sure — registrations there. Yep. And we've generated almost half a million in pipeline from that.
Josh: Amazing.
Jess: So, right? Yeah. We've seen the return — Yeah — which is really exciting. More than we've spent — More — on it. More than we've spent. Exactly. Demand Collective, we've actually seen, ooh, I'm gonna start a little friendly competition here — Okay — between Dave Gerhardt and Eric Linson. Yeah. Oh, man. Ooh, shots fired, you two. Yeah. Okay. We have seen over 1,500 webinar registrants.
Josh: Interesting. Yeah.
Jess: We've seen 15,000 impressions — Okay — on the deep dive customer stories in the newsletter. Yeah. And we have generated 350,000 in pipeline — That's awesome — which is pretty exciting.
Josh: That's awesome.
Jess: So between the two, we're looking at almost a million in pipeline.
Josh: Wow.
Jess: And we know for a fact that there are real sophisticated demand gen marketers — Yeah — coming to us. Which is real exciting.
Josh: And this one, it's funny, we always get asked, "Out of all the things you're doing, like, how easy is it to prove?" This one's super easy, 'cause it's in our form submission. We — In our, yes — so easily we can see, Demand Collective, Exit Five. Yes. This one, if there's, like, all, out of all the things that we do in marketing, if there's something where you're just like, "What can't we cut?" Yeah. It's actually, this one.
Jess: This one, absolutely. In fact, we're spending more. Yeah. We're doubling down.
Josh: Yeah, we're doubling down. This is —
Jess: And the thing that led me to be like, "Josh, I think we need to do more of this" — Yeah — was when sales came to me and said, "The best quality leads we get are from these two communities." Yeah, yeah. They come in real informed. Mm-hmm. They know what they need. They've already had demand gen scaling for a while. Yeah. And now they just need that next kind of thing that's going to get them to the next level. Yeah. And it's Vector.
Josh: I, you know this, I just got out of a board meeting a couple weeks ago, and there was one particular month where we hit our pipeline goals, but there was one month that was, like, lower than the rest. Yeah. And they're like, "What happened in that month?" And I was like, "We didn't have any events."
Jess: We didn't run anything with those — Yeah — two communities.
Josh: Yeah, which is like, you can see it in the high level numbers, which is wild.
Jess: You can. And so guess what? Yeah. Every month from now on, we have at least one of those communities has an event going on — I love that — if not more than one.
Josh: Yeah.
Jess: So yeah, I think when you see that something is working, you can make it happen.
Josh: Yeah.
Jess: And when sales tells you that those are the best leads, listen up. Yeah. Make sure you — Yeah — you follow through on that.
Josh: Yeah, if sales is happy.
Jess: Yeah.
Josh: What a world. If sales ain't happy, ain't nobody happy.
Josh: Ain't nobody happy. What's the investment outside of the sponsorship itself, meaning content and time and all of this? What goes into supporting the community?
Jess: Luckily, the kind of community organizers and founders and team members do a lot of the heavy lifting. Okay. They're doing most of the writing of content. They're doing all of the writing of scripts for podcast ads. The place where we have to come in and kind of do the most work is usually with live events. Yeah. So sourcing the actual folks that are gonna be on there, customers, and anyone that internally that should be a part of it. Coming up with the concepts, we took some time to really figure out what should this webinar be? What should we do? And it worked so well, we're just actually gonna repeat that a couple more times with different customers and different demand gen marketers — Yeah — later this year. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Josh: Yep.
Jess: And same thing on the Demand Collective side. He's doing all of the interviewing with our customers. Eric's writing all of the newsletters. Wow. It's really on us to provide them the resources to be able to do that. Yeah. And then also give that a really thorough review, make sure what is being said actually lends itself to what we would want it to be — That's cool — be said.
Josh: How do you think about community saturation versus — Hmm — like, differentiation, meaning, we've doubled down on some of our communities. We want to sponsor more newsletters — Yeah — from Exit Five. But we've also had sort of this conversation around, should we find a third community? Yes. Right? How do you think about, like, when to do which?
Jess: Ugh, great question. Okay. So when we started to see so much success with these two communities — Yeah — it was like, "Okay, why wouldn't we just sponsor more communities?" Right. Let's go out and find some more. Right. And I did some of that. I did some research, and I sat down in some discovery calls with sales folks at a couple different marketing communities that we weren't sponsoring yet. Yep. And they have great packages, very similar to Exit Five, very similar to Demand Collective. And then you and I kind of talked about, hey, how do we know that the folks in Exit Five aren't also in some of these other communities?
Josh: Yeah, it's overlapping.
Jess: Right. Yeah. And we were like, "We don't know that."
Josh: Yeah.
Jess: And there will be a stage of our company where we also want to then sponsor those other communities because overlap or not, there's still people in there we're not hitting. Yeah. But what we, you and I talked about in our one-on-one was, like, we have not squeezed — Yeah — nearly enough juice — Yeah — out of these first two. Yeah. Let's just keep putting our money there until we're like, "Okay, we have exhausted this space, and we need to kind of move into some spaces we haven't touched yet."
Josh: It reminds me, I was in a, like a CEO cohort, I don't know, like a peer mentorship sort of thing, and there was this one CEO that was talking about his problem for the week. And he was like, he's like, "We've had such great..." Oh, oh, and by the way, he was in like the home services space — Okay — where like cold calling works really well. Okay. And he's like, "We've... Cold calling's just crushing it for us." He's like, "We've hired like three SDRs, and they all pay like 5X back their, their — Wow — cost in revenue closed." And we were like, "That's awesome." And he's... And we're like, "What's your problem?" And he's like, "I really wanna figure out how to make inbound marketing work for us." And we were like, we were like, "Wait, wait, you have this channel that none of us have been able to make work, by the way." Right. "You have this channel that's working for you, and you wanna... Your question is, how do I go get a different channel to work?" We were like, "Just keep hiring more SDRs — Yeah — until the wheels fall off of it." Yes. Right? Yeah. Do it until it breaks.
Jess: Drive it into the ground.
Josh: Into the ground. Yeah. And I think that's how we feel about our communities, which is like eventually, yep, we'll hit a point of saturation — Yep — where it doesn't make sense to sponsor every, every newsletter, every event. Yep. Right? People eventually get tired of it, but — Until we start to see like that sort of ratio of efficiency drop down, just we'll just keep going.
Jess: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.
Josh: So to wrap, we've been doing... This is a fairly new channel for us. Yep. We've been doing community sponsorships for nine-ish months. Yep. But it's already become our number one channel for pipeline.
Jess: Yep.
Josh: What are your sort of parting takeaways for marketers that are thinking of exploring this channel?
Jess: I would say, one, get them to tell you who is in this community. Not necessarily by name, but make sure they break down for you, slice up their data as much as they can around seniority, industry, function, department, right? Get them to give you a really good breakdown of who is in that community, and you want it to read back to you like your ICP.
Jess: You want it to feel like the majority of the folks in here, or a very good portion of the people in this community, are aligned with my ICP. Like I'm going to be talking to the people who can make a decision, or at least go to their manager and be like, "We need this."
Josh: That's a great point, because the cost of the, the sponsorship doesn't discriminate, right? If only 25% of the community is your ICP, you're still gonna pay the 100% amount — Yes — to reach that community.
Jess: Absolutely.
Josh: Yeah.
Jess: Yeah, for sure. Well said. Okay. So that's a really big one. I would also say I think the thing that's worked out really nicely for us is having kind of the two communities, the yin and yang, if you will — Yeah — of communities, right? Where we have kind of this broader, like more awareness play and kind of perception play. And with in Exit5 and with Demand Collective, we're like really getting in the weeds of how — Yeah — Vector works and how people are using it and what kind of data they're getting out of it, what kind of results they're getting out of it. Cool. So we're using different content — Yeah — because the audience makeup is different.
Josh: Yeah, I like that. Using the almost like the persona of the community to figure out what it's going to lift. Like it's not enough to just be like, "We sponsored it. Our logo's there." Like — Correct — what is the utility and like — Yeah — the vibe of the community, essentially. Yeah.
Jess: So that was maybe like a twofer. That was like — Yeah — a two-pronged approach is actually really nice for like an awareness and more of a like mid-funnel play. Yeah. But then also tailor your content to those communities.
Josh: Yeah. If communities are so great, should we just start our own?
Jess: That's like... No, I can't even... They're doing all the... I... No. Come on. Let's, we'll, let's talk about this in our next one-on-one. This was a great meeting though.
Josh: This was a great meeting. I'll look forward to the next one. This meeting could've been a podcast.
Jess: And it was.
Josh: It was.
Jess: This meeting could've been a podcast is a Vector production. Vector lets you build ad audiences from real people that visit your site, click your ads, and research your competitors. Imagine seeing exactly who will see your ads by name before you spend a dime. It's a great time to be alive, marketers. Go give it a whirl at vector.co. See you next time.