Thrilling Tales of Smarter GTM

The idea 💡

The comic book was the result of several ideas, all coming together at once. Justin, Director, Social & Influencer Marketing at Demandbase told us:

“We were launching a rebrand - new logo, mascot, messaging, website, colour palette, new everything! But we wanted to do something that was outside of all of that.”

Demandbase had created a new mascot, DeeBee, that was itself a superhero, blessed with Account Intelligence superpowers. That proved to be the spark of the whole comic book idea.

As Justin said:

“How could we take our mascot and do something different with it?” 

“This concept of the infographic came up - but we didn’t just want to do a normal infographic. We wanted it to be interactive. And since I’m responsible for influencer marketing, I wanted to build the campaign off of that.”

And so the concept of DeeBee leading a team of B2B superheroes - based on real-life industry thought leaders - was born.

Justin took up the story:

“We found some of the top influencers in B2B marketing - some of them were friends of mine - and we worked on building an integrated campaign that revolved around them fighting against traditional B2B marketing tactics such as spam.”

The real-life influencers were given characters with superpowers that matched their messaging - such as Jay Baer using data to personalise campaigns, or Pam Didner aligning sales and marketing.

We asked Justin, why superheroes?

“When you’re building influencer campaigns, everyone uses the same influencers. There’s a very wide network of people who have attained a level of influence.” 

“If you look at the types of companies that stand out, and the influencers that want to engage with those companies, you see ones where those influencers are made into something different.”

“They want to share things that are in line with their brand, but that go beyond just an interview or just a video.”

“That’s why we made them into cool comic book characters that fight against the things they often talk about in B2B marketing and sales.”

It also tied into Demandbase’s new brand messaging, as Justin explained:

“People are sick of these things - they’re tired of spam, unwanted messaging and the never-ending onslaught of emails.”

“We wanted to take our new brand messaging - helping to unspam, launching smarter GTM - and make our mascot DeeBee and our influencers into superheroes battling against those things.”

“Because essentially, that’s what we saw Demandbase as doing. We help our customers and prospects to reach out to accounts intelligently.”

Justin concluded our interview by saying:

“The comic continues to pay dividends for us - not just in terms of traffic, but brand awareness as well. More people are aware of Demandbase now because of it.”

And before we ended the call, he shared some great advice for other B2B marketers who don’t want to be boring:

“One of the best things was to see the reaction of other people in B2B marketing and sales.”

“It got a lot of buzz and a lot of positive feedback from the industry. They loved how we did something more lighthearted and fun with B2B content marketing.”