B2B Marketing Strategy

Launching B2B Marketing Campaigns as a Socially Responsible Business (Schitt's Creek gif version included)

Brett McGrath

July 13, 2021

Launching B2B Marketing Campaigns as a Socially Responsible Business (Schitt's Creek gif version included)

B2B Marketing & Sales industry peers - this is for you!

If you’re more of a visual learner, here’s the exact same message spelled out in Schitt’s Creek gifs.

What is the #MoneyWellSpent campaign?

Like every business, we have goals because eventually...we have to, you know, make money. 

But we did NOT get into this startup business just to MAKE MONEY.

We’re here because we saw that something was broken and we want to fix it. B2B marketing is broken because it’s too focused on the marketer’s goals. (Have you EVER heard ANYONE say they like forms???!!)

And it’d be icing on the cake if we could fix that problem for a LOT of people AND use the money we make from solving that problem to make a positive impact in our community.

This isn’t revolutionary. Lots of businesses try to do this. Call it social entrepreneurship. Call it a socially responsible business (SRB). There are lots of names for it and mature models for how to make it work. 

We don’t have a long-term plan yet for how to live out the values of our team, as it pertains to business operations. But we decided that it can’t hurt to jump in and start building our values into our short-term campaigns.

Enter our first major campaign: #MoneyWellSpent.

One big, lofty, kinda scary goal that I’m working towards is getting 20,000 of you lovely folks onto Fathom’s waitlist. And while we believe in our heart of hearts that you’ll really benefit from the platform we’re building, it’s hard to SHOW you that without the actual platform. 

Someone in my role would normally run ad campaigns on Facebook or Google to generate interest and sign-ups for our waitlist. We’re not totally against that - we’re doing a bit of it. But, frankly, we don’t love it. 

We’ve learned in the first 5 weeks of being a team that we would like to move away from “traditional” marketing tactics that slant towards benefitting marketers and big ad platforms more than the consumers. (Remember what I said above about forms? Why do we do that??)

The concept for #MoneyWellSpent is that we try to crowdsource our first ~2000 waitlisters and then donate the money that we would have spent on Google or Facebook Ads acquiring those waitlisters. 

Right now, this makes sense for us as a business AND builds in a way for us to give back, now.

Plus, think about how much money we could donate if we do this every time we launch a new version of Fathom and want to promote it, or the waitlist? It’d be like if Apple had chosen to donate the money they saved on advertising their big releases (because PR/media spread the word for them)...or at least that’s what we hope this evolves into. 

We created the hashtag #MoneyWellSpent because we want to inspire other companies to consider this method of advertising, crowd-sourcing leads and then donating ad budget, should it work for us. 

Paid social media spend in the US totaled over $36 billion in 2019. Can you imagine how we could change the world if we gave even a FRACTION of that to good causes?

Who are we donating our advertising dollars to?

For this round of #MoneyWellSpent, we’re donating our advertising dollars to Kicking the Stigma, an initiative led by the Colts to raise awareness and support for mental health in Indiana.

This cause means a lot to us, especially after almost 1 year of social distancing and working from home. Mental health is at a very low point for so many of us and we don’t think there should be a stigma about getting help. 

How can you help?

If you’re sick of the B2B content experience, like we are, JOIN THE WAITLIST > https://www.meetfathom.com/sign-up

What does “joining the waitlist” even mean??

We’ll email once per week to ask for product feedback, to send you brand updates (spoiler: “Fathom” is the temp brand name), and to share our favorite marketing and sales content until Fathom is live and we can give you early access!

Not included in the waitlist experience: Sales pitches, business jargon, other boring/annoying sh*t.

So far, we’re donating ~$200 to Kicking the Stigma ($5 per waitlist sign-up). We’re aiming to donate $10,000 by the end of February!


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