The Problem With Tech Marketing: Action-First vs. Strategy-First

Janessa Lantz
6 min readSep 12, 2016

If you took a glance at the RJMetrics Pardot dashboard in May 2016 you would see that, on an average month we generated several thousand new leads. These weren’t special months where we launched a mega-awesome campaign, just a normal month. And the leads coming in were from content assets created 1, 2, some even 5 years earlier.

Our blog was visited by nearly 30,000 people every month. RJMetrics has been mentioned in VentureBeat, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and many more prominent tech and general interest publications. Our marketing was legit enough to earn us partnerships with the likes of Hubspot, Zendesk, and Mattermark. When it came to marketing tactics and execution, our team was top-notch, and I’m incredibly proud of the work we did.

But (of course there’s a but) we made a mistake that is so common in the world of tech marketing: we got really good at tactics and fumbled on strategy.

And we felt that pain. Hop in the wayback machine and you’ll see a series of hodgepodge homepage tests. At the time it seemed like a great idea (A/B testing!), in retrospect, we had a strategy problem. Here’s a tweet that kind of sums it up:

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