This content was originally published on the AudiencePlus platform by AudiencePlus CEO and Founder Anthony Kennada.
Today is a special day for AudiencePlus.
I’m pleased to announce that we recently closed a financing round of $7M led by Emergence Capital, High Alpha, and PHX Ventures. This new round of capital completes our seed financing with over $12M raised to date, and introduces incredible operators to AudiencePlus’s cap table, including marketing automation pioneer and founder of ExactTarget Scott Dorsey, founder and CEO of CampusLogic Gregg Scoresby, former CEO of DataRobot Dan Wright, and former General Counsel of Okta Jon Runyan.
Emergence Capital joins our board of directors with General Partner Santi Subotovsky serving as Board Director.
This investment will enable us to double down on our R&D resources to accelerate our value creation for customers, while also investing in Marketing programs to educate the industry around owned media best practices.
Here’s what Santi and Scott had to say about why they invested.
"AI is fundamentally transforming the way marketing teams operate -- shifting how content is created, distributed, and ultimately leveraged to drive revenue," said Santi Subotovsky, General Partner at Emergence Capital. "Anthony and the AudiencePlus team have been at the forefront of this generational platform shift, and we're excited to double down on our investment in them as they introduce the next chapter of marketing automation."
"With changing privacy laws, market conditions and buyer behavior, it’s never been more important for brands to build direct, 1:1 relationships with their customers,” said High Alpha Managing Director Scott Dorsey. “Just as marketing automation ushered in a new way to engage with customers, AudiencePlus is building a powerful platform that enables brands to create subscribers, and develop direct, first-party relationships with customers. We’re thrilled to invest in Anthony and AudiencePlus.”
We’re also incredibly excited to announce that Colin Fleming, Chief Marketing Officer at ServiceNow, has officially joined the AudiencePlus advisory board. Colin is one of the most innovative CMOs in enterprise software, and is an early pioneer in audience marketing during his storied 13 year career leading global marketing at Salesforce.
Colin and team are credited with launching Salesforce+, a media network that provides a variety of original content, including live events, on-demand videos, and original series focused on business, technology, and leadership.
Reflecting on AudiencePlus’s First Chapter
AudiencePlus has been in business for just over two years now, and throughout that time, we have been evangelizing Owned Media as the next generation of inbound marketing – a two-decade old playbook that is no longer an effective strategy for driving pipeline.
Our conviction is that the only way forward for marketing teams is to own their audience relationships – taking control of distribution and unlocking a treasure trove of engagement data to inform marketing decisions.
We introduced the world to the industry’s first Owned Media platform – a software platform now used by over 30 customers to turn their website into a modern channel for content distribution and convert web traffic into high-quality subscribers. Incredible brands like Crossbeam, DroneDeploy, Qualified, Thermo Fisher Scientific, and others have become the first movers in this important new movement.
In less than one year in market, both Gartner and G2 have validated our software category.
We’ve also launched our own media network, building an audience of over 5000 subscribers who benefit from daily content drops and exclusive access to best practices content and experiences. We hosted Goldenhour, our new-format industry conference for the marketing community that welcomed over 300 attendees onsite in Brooklyn, New York, and thousands who participated from home online.
I am so proud of all that we have accomplished as a small company, but also all that we have learned.
From Owned Media to Audience Marketing
Owned Media was always meant to be a means to a greater end.
B2B marketing teams are starting to embrace the creation and distribution of media as an evolution of their content strategy. Progressive brands are extending their digital experience to become the home for premium thought leadership in their category – some with AudiencePlus and others through in-house development.
While subscriber growth is an important early indicator to future pipeline, marketing teams need more in order to fully connect the value of audience engagement to revenue.
In a recent open letter to the marketing community, I make the case for ‘Audience Marketing’ as the new playbook for B2B marketing teams. Where today’s digital marketing strategies focus on converting the 5% of your audience in-market for products like yours, Audience Marketing helps build relationships with the 95% of your audience paying active attention.
The foundational belief is just as true for B2B marketing as it is for our human experience in our personal lives – you can’t force relationships.
Attempts to ‘create demand’ from an audience who is not looking to buy software is difficult if not futile. Rather, by focusing on building trusted, meaningful relationships with your audience, you can influence the masses with your unique point of view and your brand will be top of mind when your audience is ready to buy.
I see three key pillars to the Audience Marketing playbook:
Engage
The promise of owned media remains a critical first step – companies need to evolve their marketing websites into multimedia surfaces that allow them to build deeper relationships and community with their audience through membership. In this new approach, brands become their own channel for content distribution and driving engagement with their audience.
Understand
With more engagement on their owned surfaces, marketing teams stand to benefit from the first-party data their audience creates. Audience Marketing puts this engagement data to work in order to help brands deeply understand their audience, the topics they’re interested in, and where they currently sit in the buying process.
Imagine having backend access to YouTube or TikTok, and securing privileged access to all the trending topics, creators, and conversations happening within your specific audience. The value of ‘being known’ by a brand you care about is profound to the audience as well, as they can benefit from personalized content and experiences that actually add value, rather than cheap attempts to sell them software.
As marketing teams continue to reimagine their operations with AI, activating “owned” data with generative and agentic workflows will officially bring marketing into the AI era in a way that goes beyond hyperbole, but instead, gives them the superpowers they need to reclaim their impact on revenue.
Act
As companies begin to mature their Audience Marketing execution, the way we run our teams and make decisions will evolve. Think about how marketing decisions are made today – what content to produce, with which creators, in which formats, and how that content is distributed, in which channels, at which time, and with which message – it would take a full-time team of data scientists, MBAs, and channel experts to be able make the right recommendations at scale.
But with AI (powered by your first-party data), this future is now within our grasp.
Marketing teams will be able to unlock powerful first-party intent signals from their own audience data and receive specific recommendations and next best actions that can improve outcomes. Initially these signals will be surfaced as an AI-assist capability to help marketing teams run smarter, but overtime, a collection of AI-agents will execute automated workflows on their behalf – enabling teams to spend their precious time intentionally on the actions that drive the most impact.
I believe Audience Marketing has the potential to become the primary GTM strategy for modern marketing teams. It enables us to leverage the power of first-party data and AI to do what we do best – build meaningful and authentic relationships at scale with the audiences we serve.
What’s Next for AudiencePlus?
I’ve never been more excited about AudiencePlus and our opportunity to help usher in a new era for B2B marketing. To be more specific, the second half of 2024 will see an acceleration of our mission across each of our key focus areas:
- Product: Getting the initial “Engage” use case of the AudiencePlus platform into General Availability as we work through some important features that our customers are asking for. This milestone will enable us to reveal more of our platform vision for operationalizing Audience Marketing to help companies build meaningful relationships.
- Content: Doubling down on our content efforts to educate our 5,000+ subscribers (and growing) on how to execute Audience Marketing programs at scale – including original series, virtual workshops, monthly Q+R (question and response) calls, and more.
- Community: Scaling our Goldenhour brand of events and community programs to include local chapters in key cities, digital events, and our second annual executive forum for Chief Marketers planned for September 19th in San Francisco.
…and that’s just what we’re able to talk about.
Thank you to our investors for helping us usher in the next chapter of AudiencePlus, and to our customers, teammates, and families for the continued support.
We won’t let you down.
