ABT – Always Be Testing
Welcome to the Rialto Marketing podcast. Today's episode is a Revenue Acceleration Series interview where we talk to seven-figure B2B business owners and their growth-minded executives who are actively trying to grow their business and get to the next level. We talk about the good, the bad, and the ugly so that you can learn from their experience.
Join Tim Fitzpatrick and Corin Romkey for this week’s episode of The Rialto Marketing Podcast!
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ABT – Always Be Testing
Tim Fitzpatrick
Welcome to the Rialto Marketing podcast. Today's episode is a Revenue Acceleration Series interview where we talk to seven-figure B2B business owners and their growth-focused executives who are actively trying to grow their businesses and get to the next level. We talk about the good, the bad, and the ugly so that you can learn from their experience. Hi, I am Tim Fitzpatrick with Rialto Marketing, where we believe marketing shouldn't be difficult. Thank you so much for taking the time to tune in. I am super excited to have Corin Romkey from Atlantic Data Security with me today. Corin, how are you, man?
Corin Romkey
Good. Thanks for having me on, Tim. I appreciate it.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah, thanks Thanks for joining me, man. I'm excited to dig into this with you today. Before we do that, I want to ask you a few rapid fire questions if you're ready to jump in with both feet.
Corin Romkey
Absolutely.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Okay, man. Very quickly, what do you do and how long have you been doing it?
Corin Romkey
Yeah, I'm at the I'm head of marketing at Atlanta Data Security. We're a cybersecurity company, and I've been here coming up on two years in May. It's been a wild ride, but it's been awesome.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. So what are some of the most important lessons you've learned in your professional experience?
Corin Romkey
I think if I look at cybersecurity specifically, it's that the marketing tactics that work in other industries may not necessarily apply directly to cybersecurity. I come from a background in technology. I've been in SaaS and technology my entire career so far. And oftentimes it's as simple as turning on ads and the lead funnel opens up. Whereas in cybersecurity, it's a lot more nuanced, a lot more educationally focused. And it's really you need to bring your customers and your prospects up to speed with what's going on, because within cybersecurity, it's a constantly changing landscape. What could have been successful last year may not be successful this year, and what was successful last month may not be successful this month. So it's always trying to keep abreast of all that stuff and making sure that we are highly educated or highly educating our customer base.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. Do you think that that difference from this position to others has to do, again, Like you said, with that educational process, the buying cycles tend to be much, much longer. Do you think that's what's playing into that?
Corin Romkey
Yeah, I think within cybersecurity, it requires a lot more touch points than typical SaaS. You need to make sure that you are putting your education, but then you're also bringing them into different events and meeting them face to face, having conversations, helping them stay on top of everything, and then letting them know about what types of breaches are happening out there and what solutions you can implement to help mitigate those breaches or eliminate the breaches altogether.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. Man, growing a business, work, it's hard. Any mantra or something motivational that you say to yourself or share with folks on your team to push through those challenging times?
Corin Romkey
I think the biggest thing really is we're all on the same ship together, so we should be rowing in the same direction. If you have disconnects between departments or within your team itself, it makes it really difficult if you're going against what each other are doing. So really just trying to build a collaboration between departments and collaboration between teams to make sure that we are all rowing in the same direction and singing from that same sheet of music.
ABT - Always Be Testing
Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah, I love that, man. So let's dig into it. You said you've been with Atlantic Data Security for a couple of years now. When you first stepped into the role as Director of Marketing, what were your top priorities that you were focused on, and how did you decide where to begin?
Corin Romkey
I think the biggest thing... We're in a digital industry, and having a digital footprint is extremely important. And that was something that we didn't have a large digital footprint at that point. So that was the first thing that came in to implement was a content generation machine, looking at different advertising avenues And then building out things like educational videos, doubling down on webinars. Everything digitally focused has been really what we've been driving towards. Obviously, we do a lot of events and stuff in person. That has been tried and true. We know that's going to work. But the big thing that we didn't know was going to work was, is SEO going to drive anything? Is the digital advertising aspects with LinkedIn and Google Ads, is that going to actually result in revenue? And the only way you can find that out is by testing it. And so that's the first thing And one of the first things we did was we came in and we started testing. And I think the mantra for marketers everywhere is ABT, always be testing. So that's really what we implemented. And then further along that line, I mean, doing nurture sequences, we had a huge CRM when it came in, but we didn't know if those people were engaged. So coming in, we wanted to make sure we had highly engaged contacts within our CRM. You can have 100,000 contacts, but if only 10,000 of them are replying to your emails, why not just focus on those 10,000? So really just refining the digital process has been a big one. And then, like I mentioned, the content generation machine has been a huge aspect. We started doing a lot more blogs last year. We implemented a a lot more white papers. And now we actually just launched our own podcast last week that's really focused on pulling back the curtain on the cybersecurity industry and letting people see what's really happening on a day to day basis. And then doing videos. I think videos Video is king. If you look at Instagram, Facebook, you shift it away from just static image posts. With TikTok coming into play, I think five, six years ago, it really showed the necessity of having strong video content and that people will consume it. That's been a big focus that we've had, especially in the last year.
Tim Fitzpatrick
You guys are creating a lot of content. You have written blog content, you're doing video content, and then you just launched a podcast. Is your video content primarily shorter form that you're promoting on social, or what How does that look like?
Corin Romkey
Yeah, it's a mix of both. For the most part, it has been short form for now. We do have the intention of doing long form. I think with that, it makes sense to implement the partnerships that we have with a lot of our vendors to really tell more of a holistic story as opposed to just ADS coming and dictating to people and telling them what we do. It's better to have more voices in the room. So for the short form stuff, a lot of it's primarily built around adding extra value to our blogs, adding extra value to the case studies we do to our white papers, to the core aspects of our business itself. With long form, that's where we're going to be implementing, bringing in different partners, and really just having more of a conversation outside of the podcast, doing fireside chats, that stuff.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. What are you guys doing? How often are you doing webinars?
Corin Romkey
That's a good question. It really varies based on the time of year. I think when you have those lulls in events, that's when we try to really incorporate the webinar aspect to it, doing value So I think the added webinars is a big one where the attendees have something tangible to take home, whether that's an e-book or a bottle of wine. We want to make sure that we do something fun and interactive with them. I mean, for example, we have a webinar week. We have two webinar weeks a year. So we have one coming up in March. I think we have seven or eight different vendors lined up for that. And then we have a second one that we typically do the beginning of November, again, to just offset those lulls in the event periods.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Got it. So you're using those. You're doing a lot in a short period of time. So you're bringing in vendors to help support those. How are you promoting those?
Corin Romkey
So we promote those primarily through email sequences. We promote that through direct outreach from our sales reps to their customers and prospects. And then we put that on social. Social media has been a big driver of that. We We're going to do 2-3 week long campaigns promoting each webinar. And then throughout the year, we also do one-off webinars with a lot of our partners as well. It's more on a monthly basis as opposed to cramming six into a week. Those are more situational. Those are really upon request of either the vendor themselves or our sales reps.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Are you doing any paid ads to drive traffic for signups?
Corin Romkey
As of right now, we're not. That is something that we're looking to implement, likely not for this this webinar week, but probably for the November one. And then throughout the year, we want to make sure that we're driving a lot of attendees through paid social to our webinars with our partners. So we'll primarily be using LinkedIn, possibly looking at Reddit, not sure. Know how well that will resonate with the people on Reddit, but a big one is going to be the LinkedIn paid ad side.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. Okay, cool. I want to dig into content creation a little bit, but I want to pull something out really quickly that you shared where you talked about always be testing. The three steps I talk about is test, measure, learn, right? And it's just wash, rinse, repeat with marketing. So important because so many people that aren't in marketing day to day feel like, Oh, I put something together and it just didn't work. Well, guess what? Most of it freaking doesn't work. That's why we're always testing, measuring, and learning. It's that process that helps us find the things that are going to work well for us.
Corin Romkey
Just to echo that, I think even from the failures, you learn something.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Absolutely.
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Corin Romkey
You are having all those metrics. You're looking at your impressions, your engagements, the clicks onto your actual content itself, even if it doesn't result in a conversion, it doesn't mean that it wasn't successful. Like you said, it's an iterative process. Especially when you look at cybersecurity, where your sales cycles can be anywhere from 100 days all the way up to 500 days, depending if there's an RFP involved. Gathering the information from there and applying what you thought was successful in that campaign to something else, it very well could lead to leads generated. It could lead to sales coming in. But you don't know unless you actually test it and analyze what you're doing.
Leveraging Engineers as a Content Creation Process
Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. To your point, you're never going to get to the successes if you don't fail. So It's part of the process. Really important to think long term and just take the action, test, measure, learn, and you'll get there. One of the things you shared about your content creation process is leveraging your engineers. What steps did you take to get their buy-in? How is this whole process working? How are you doing that?
Corin Romkey
I work very closely with our VP of Services who oversees everything on the MSP side of the business, all the way from our FSA down through to... Actually, our FSA has just moved our sales. But our engineering team falls under him and having conversations with him and saying, we need more of a technical approach to some of our content. Obviously, it can't all be technical because it's hard to get a lot of buy in from end users if it's only technical jargon being thrown at you. So having a good The mix between the two is important, but really leaning on the VP of Services and having him help me understand how can we supplement some of the content that we're doing with a more technical dive in. And then that just led to some conversations internally. One of our engineers wrote something like a 10,000-word blog, and we split it up into four or five different blogs because there was so much technical, such a technical deep dive that we felt if we put 10,000 words out, it's It's going to be really difficult to really comprehend it and to get those bite size pieces you need out of it. So splitting it up and making it more consumable and more palatable, that was a big thing. And then that has snowball involved into having more conversations with our engineers and more conversations within the services side where we can say, look, this was really successful. We felt that it's resonating really well with our audience. It's got great metrics on LinkedIn. Let's continue going down this path. Let's bring you guys into videos. Let's bring you on to the podcast. And we're currently building out a calendar to do that. So right now it's been pretty light on the engineering side, but it's something we plan on ramping up this year. And it was highly successful the first couple of times. So it goes back to always be testing. And the first test went well. So we want to make sure we incorporate that. And I think from a business perspective as a whole, marketing really needs to work with every department. It can't just be marketing, doing marketing. It needs to be marketing, working with sales. It needs to be marketing, working with services and engineering. So the more opportunities we can have for more touch points with our engineers, the more visibility they get. But then also the more education we're putting out to our end users.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. Corin, there's a few things I want to pull out here that I think are super valuable. One, you touched on, hey, as marketing folks, we need to be talking to everybody that's involved in the customer journey. Marketing is on the front-end, you got sales in the middle, and then you've got customer experience, customer service. Your engineers, they got their feet on the ground. They're seeing some of these cybersecurity issues pop up on a daily, weekly basis. Those are all opportunities to create content. Hey, we saw this come up. This is how we addressed it, right? Or we saw this new thing pop up. You need to be on the lookout for it, right? Just because it's coming from an engineer doesn't mean it has to be super technical, right? But leveraging them for that content, it's an untapped resource in most companies. Whether you're an MSP or not, you've got sales, you've got customer service. Those are all opportunities for content.
Corin Romkey
And when I look at it from a marketing perspective, realistically, the only times we have boots on the ground from marketing is that field marketing events. We are not the ones having conversations with customers and understanding where are their pain points, where are they having potential breaches. So that's where utilizing our engineering team, who is it? They're on the back end every day. They're the ones looking at all these different solutions and architecting it all. And then I think also leveraging sales is big, too, because they're the ones having the conversations. They're the ones hearing all the issues that customers and prospects are having. So having a holistic marketing approach where everybody is involved, I think it's extremely important, and it's just going to result in better content, better education, and at the end of the day, hopefully sales.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah, totally agree. You mentioned field marketing. I want to dig into this a little bit because you've combined your field marketing and digital strategies in some interesting ways. First off, when you talk about field marketing, what are you talking about for people that aren't familiar with that term?
Corin Romkey
I think it's a mix of in-person events and digital events. So we do, I think we had something like 50 events last year. I was just looking at our campaigns the other day. We had 55 campaigns total for field marketing. A lot of the times it's just one-off events, like dinners where we invite six or seven CSOs and we have them sit down with our chief cybersecurity evangelist, and he'll give them the spiel about who is ADS? Why do you care? And then we will layer in our engineers. We'll bring in sales reps to have conversations. And then it can go all the way through to one of our marquee events like our Northeast Tech Summit on the Green that we're going to be playing. We have 18 holes of golf. We have a tournament set up. But at the start of it, we have a partner showcase. We're bringing in anywhere from 15 to 25 vendors. We have a little pow wow at the start. We have our title sponsors do a presentation, and then we encourage all the attendees to go and talk to every single vendor. We incentivize it, too, with giveaways and We have this little passport program that we do where there's a secret question each one of them has. And if you get your passport filled out, you're entered to win a draw, that stuff. That really resonates well. And it creates a lot of opportunities for cross-selling between our vendor partners.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. Are you guys... So it sounds like you're hosting a lot of your own events. Are you also doing events that are more trade show type conferences and that stuff?
Corin Romkey
Yeah, I think this year we've got, I want to say five or six conferences lined up. We got two in Toronto, a bunch in Boston or the New England area, I think one in New York, and then a couple down in the Southeast as well. It's very interesting when you go to those, a lot of the time on the trade show floor, you're not going to be having the conversations that lead to sales. But we also incorporate doing things after the event, like happy hours, or we'll take them out golfing afterwards, or something like that, where we can have more of a one on one conversation for a longer period of time because nobody wants to stay at a trade show booth for an hour and talk. I mean, those days are gone. Now it's how do you get that person into their comfort zone to have more of a one on one conversation, make that personal connection, and then bring in the business aspect of it afterwards.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. So what are some of the more successful initiatives you've had around some of your events? Anything come to mind there?
Corin Romkey
I think the Tech Summit on the green, we have two of them. Those have been probably our most successful events, at least in my tenure here. Having the opportunity to go and sit in a golf cart with three people that are very important and producers and having conversations around where are their pain points, what solutions can we implement, and then having fun. Those have always been very successful. We always get a lot of really good opportunities out of those, and usually some good sales, too. But I think the building the connection part is the most important aspect of that. And I always say this to everybody. I think when you look at sales and you look at creating a sale, the most important thing is building a relationship. If you don't like the person that's trying to sell you something, you're not going to buy from them. So you have to create a friendship. You need to create that relationship. Even if it's at a superficial level, you need to have a personal connection with the person or they're going to say, well, I could go to a different company and get the same thing with somebody I know.
Leveraging Co-op and Marketing Development Funds
Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. Cool. I appreciate you sharing that. Corin, one of the things that we talked about in the pre-interview was co-op and marketing development funds. You guys leveraging that. How did you go about... Let me take a step back. You're leveraging it. A lot of MSPs that I talk to are not. And so I want to pull it out from you. How did you navigate these programs and any advice that you'd give other companies that are looking to utilize those resources effectively?
Corin Romkey
I can't take all the credit for it. I have to really give a shout out to our field marketing team. They're the ones that really are getting those funds and putting them to good use. But my advice to companies that have the opportunity to use Co-op and MDF is use it. There's no reason not to use it. I mean, it's there. They want to use. They want to give you that money so that you can go and promote their business and you can go create opportunities for them. If you have it, use it. There's so many different events you can do. I mean, we do. Sometimes we use it for those CISO dinner. Sometimes it's for the tech summits. Sometimes it's for advertising. If you have the opportunity to use that and not have that come directly from your budget, even if you're doing a split on the funding, there's no point not using it. It's there for you. Those programs are in place for a reason. You're obviously a valued partner to that organization, if they're offering you co-op or MDF, they have faith in your marketing team and your sales team, go and use it and have the conversations around what are the stipulations behind it? Are there certain things you can do and you can't do with. Get the education on it, get an understanding from your partners on what they've seen successfully or seen MDF used for successfully in the past. And I think the name of the game in marketing is if you find something that works, don't try and fix it. If it works, it works. If they've got experience in MDF being successful in the past, use it. And if they haven't, it goes back to always be testing. Test it. If it doesn't go well, you're in the exact same spot you are right now.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. To me, it's found money. But like you said, you have to understand what the requirements are for you to be able to utilize the money. Sometimes you got to co-brand things or whatever. I would think that in field marketing, it's a lot easier if there's co-branding requirements, your field marketing efforts make that much easier. I think it can be a lot more difficult than a digital setting if you've got a co-brand, depending on what type of campaign it is, but any particular thoughts around that?
Corin Romkey
I mean, in the past with us for the digital aspect, it really comes down to, like you said, the co-branding and making sure that your collateral speaks to both businesses. It can't just be all about ADS. It can't just be all about our vendor partner. Needs to really be about how we work together and the story we can tell together. If I look at some of the case studies we've put out, a lot of the time we want to make sure that if a vendor did a great job, we highlight that. And then when you go to market with that, you want to make sure that same story is being told and that it's cohesive. And that, again, it's the same thing as I said about the mantra. You're all on the same ship, row together, find the best way that you can work with a vendor partner or anybody, really, understand what the stipulations are behind using it and then maximize it. It's tough. In digital, it is tough. And field marketing is a lot easier. But in digital, you have more of an opportunity because you're able to put that out to 100,000 people versus not a field marketing in-person event. You're only going to be able to reach out to maybe 100.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. The challenge I see on the digital side with cobranding is in your position as an MSSP and a VAR, most people aren't buying a specific vendor product. They're buying at data security and what you do, the problems you can help solve and the results you can help people get. And so figuring out if you've got a co-brand in some way, how can you do that while it's still being effective? Because pick a vendor, but advertising just a set vendor and what they do in a digital ad, it's not going to do much.
Corin Romkey
Yeah. If I look at it from that perspective, for the most For the most part, those vendors are already doing that. So it's really honing in on the story and adding value. I mean, the V and VAR is for value add. So finding ways to tell a story, highlighting a customer that had a great outcome from working with ADS and our vendor partner. Those are the things that work the best. And I mean, that's really what gets new people interested in having a conversation with your company. A lot of the time you can keep it more vendor agnostic. You can say, we have a solution for firewalls, and you don't need to dive directly into the vendor. But once you get them on the phone, that's when you say, hey, I have this vendor. They do phenomenal firewalls, and they have all these other products, too. We should have a conversation around that with them so you can understand what they do. So using it as more of a foot in the door is really useful. That's often what we have done with our advertising. And we haven't done as much advertising as I want us to do. And that's something we're ramping up this year. And I mean, again, it's just the proof is going to be in the pudding. If we can get great leads in and have great conversations, then awesome. If we can't, then I think you focus those MDF and Co-up funds on something that you know is going to work.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. How big... You had mentioned And you have some field marketing people. How big is your marketing team and then the sales team at ADS?
Corin Romkey
Our marketing team total, with myself included, is eight people, hopefully going to be nine soon. And then our sales team is twelve sales reps and then our VP of sales. And then we have a handful of FSAs, field security architects, who are... They lead in. They're the link between the engineering side and the pre-sales side. I think we have three right now. So we've got a pretty robust team from the sales aspect. And then marketing for the company size that we have, and I give a lot of credit to our ownership and letting us really grow the marketing team. When I started, it was three of us. Now we're up to eight. So it's got to be a very results-driven department. And hopefully, since we still have eight people, we're delivering those results.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. Because how many people are in the company total?
Corin Romkey
I believe around 65.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Okay. Yeah. So, yeah, you guys, your owners are investing heavily in marketing. So kudos to them because if you want it to work, you got to invest in it and you got to do it consistently over time. So are you guys outsourcing any marketing efforts or is it all being done in-house?
Corin Romkey
So we are going to be outsourcing some of the content generation from the blog perspective and maybe some of the white papers, a little bit of SEO. But for the most part, we do almost everything internally. I think we've outsourced a couple of video edits and stuff, but primarily it's the boots on the ground within the company that are the ones that make these things happen.
Conclusion
Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah, cool. That's awesome, man. I love it. To wrap things up, I want to ask you one last question. Knowing what you know now, anything that you would have done differently on your professional journey?
Corin Romkey
My professional journey, specifically?
Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah, or anything. I mean, if there's something that you did at ADS that you would have done differently. Whatever you want to share.
Corin Romkey
I think, honestly, I wish I got in to cybersecurity a long time ago. I've been in here for almost two years, and I still feel like I know very little about how cybersecurity work because like I said, it's just constantly evolving what I could have learned 10 years ago versus what I know now. I mean, if I were to have that extra 10 years in cybersecurity, I would just be a step ahead of where I am right now, and I would understand the market a little bit better. And I think that the marketing team has done a great job of helping each other really learn how to market better to this industry. But I mean, it's a fun industry, too. So I wish just for a There's no reason that I was in it for a little bit longer. And then I think from my marketing journey as a whole, I started in communications and then moved into PR for a little bit. I wish I would have just gone right into marketing from the get-go. But even though when I look at the start of my career in marketing versus where it is now, it's entirely different. When I started, events were really the biggest focus of marketing. Digital marketing was obviously a thing, but it wasn't as robust as it is now, and it wasn't as important as it is now. So, yeah, I think for me, it's just I wish I would have been in marketing a little bit longer, a little bit earlier in my career, so I could have seen that evolution of how marketing really works from, I don't know, back on like 2014, it would have been great to see how Google Ads has evolved over time and how the implementation of meta ads and LinkedIn Ads have really changed the landscape of how we go to market. So, yeah, It's a tough industry, I guess, an industry segment to learn. And it's just one of those things where if you want to get into marketing, get into it now and learn now. I mean, there's no better time than the present. And again, what works now with the content side and the digital side, maybe in 10 years, we're going to be saying, That was stupid. We shouldn't have done that. We shouldn't be approaching it from a different perspective altogether.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. It's very dynamic. But what I should add to that is the principles of it don't change. The fundamentals in any discipline, they're immutable. They're always going to be there. So the fundamentals of marketing don't change, but the tactics are all constantly evolving. Corin, I appreciate you coming on, man. Thank you for taking the time. You shared a ton of great stuff with us today. Where can people learn more about you if they want to connect?
Corin Romkey
Yeah, I mean, they They can connect with me directly on LinkedIn, Corin Romkey. I think I'm the only one on the planet named that. So it's pretty easy to find me. And if you want to learn more about Atlantic Data Security, you can go to AtlanticDataSecurity.com or you can go to our LinkedIn, same name, https://www.dhirubhai.net/company/atlantic-data-security-llc/.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Awesome. We'll make sure that those links are in the show notes. I appreciate you taking the time. Those of you that are watching, listening, appreciate you as well. If you want to connect with us, you can do that at rialtomarketing.com. That's rialtomarketing.com. The other resource we've got for you is over at revenueroadblockscorecard.com. When we work with clients to help them build their marketing engine, we focus on nine key areas. If you want to know which of those nine are slowing down your growth, that's where you can do it. So thank you again. Until next time. Take care.