How Do You Create a New Category?

Ben: Welcome back to another episode of Content Amplified. Today I'm joined by Luke. Luke, welcome to the show.

Luke Kline: Hey Ben, thanks for having me on. Excited to be here today.

Ben: Luke, I am excited because there's so much to learn today from your experience and what we're going to talk about today. But your experience is really relevant to the discussion. Maybe really quick before we dive in, let us know who you are and a little bit about your career and just a little bit about why you love content.

Luke Kline: Yeah, I can give a quick Spark Notes version about how I got to where I am today. So graduated in 2019 with a marketing degree. Didn't get into marketing originally. I actually chose the sales route, which very glad I did because you learn a lot about communicating with people and how to write, which is kind of the foundational skill for all of marketing, I think, is writing.

But very quickly learned that I did not like sales at all. It was super repetitive. A lot of doing the same thing, a lot of the same conversation, kind of just feels like you're going off of a script all the time. And I looked around. I've always been a huge fan of HubSpot, all of the content they put out. And just everything marketing does just seems so fun, so cool. Always experimenting, never doing the same thing over and over. A lot of A/B testing.

Operating across tons of different channels, wearing tons of different hats. And I'm someone who gets really, really bored. So I did sales for about a year and a half at a small data consultancy and then kind of positioned myself in the org to transition into marketing. And really, really enjoyed that because you get to wear so many different hats. I actually used to help produce a podcast. So it's very fun being on the receiving end today.

Yeah, I did marketing for about six months at that company. Then one day, joined an all-hands meeting, and suddenly we were acquired by a Fortune 50, Fortune 100 company, and engulfed into this giant thing that I didn't really sign up for. So I read the writing on the wall and was looking to potentially make a move because acquisitions usually come with consolidation down the line.

And I stumbled across this really cool company called Hightouch. I really thought their technology was cool. They were a tiny Series A startup at the time. When I joined, they were around $200,000 in revenue, negligible in SaaS terms. But I thought the technology was cool, and the founders were some of the most unique people I've ever talked to. So I ended up joining Hightouch as the first marketing hire about three years ago. Since then we've grown exponentially. We have, I think, well over 500 customers today and upwards of 100 employees. Around $90 million in funding. The growth curve has been pretty crazy.

Ben: Very cool.

How to Create a New Category

Luke Kline: I've gotten to do a lot since coming here. Everything from customer marketing, a lot of work on the SEO front, and then building product categories, which has been really, really exciting and fun.

Ben: I love it. Well, Luke, I'm excited to talk about your experience because you've had the unique opportunity to really create categories with the business where you've been able to go out there and something that didn't exist. You've kind of created this movement. What's involved in creating a category? How does that start? How do you think about that on the marketing side? How does that develop and grow? And what are some thoughts in general about category creation?

Luke Kline: Firstly, I just want to say, I don't think it's one person who can create a category. A lot goes into it. The two most important things are the founders and the product. The founders really control the product vision. For Hightouch, it's been really cool to see because when I joined the company, the category had been coined, but it wasn't adopted by the market. One of the challenges we faced is how do we create content and awareness for people to realize and accept that the problem our product solves actually exists. I can't take credit for the actual terms we've coined, but as far as building a lot of the awareness around them, that's where I've contributed. As far as the actual terms in the category itself, all credit goes to our founders, the product team, and our product marketers.

Now, around that, there's a lot we do to move the market and convince them of that. At Hightouch, the two terms that our company is synonymous for are reverse ETL and composable CDP. Before I dive into that, it'd be helpful to do a quick summary of what Hightouch is.

Ben: Yeah, absolutely. Let's hear it.

Luke Kline: I'll try not to do our standard boring boilerplate. Essentially, Hightouch is a tool for marketers. We help them synthesize and use their data to power any marketing use cases. Everything from loyalty programs—PetSmart is one of our customers and they power their entire loyalty program through our product—to lifecycle marketing campaigns like emails, push notifications, SMS, even hyper-targeted paid media on Facebook, TikTok, and all the ad platforms. We help marketers build audiences and then push those audiences to marketing tools to drive performance, growth, and whatever business metric they're chasing after.

Our challenge was that we started out as a data tool, helping data teams move data out of their warehouse into operational tools for business teams. We realized almost all the use cases we were solving were marketing-related. Data teams set up the product, but marketers actually want to use it. Marketers don't care where the data is; they just want to use it. They go to the IT team and ask for an audience to target on Facebook, and the IT team doesn't want to deal with that but also doesn't want to give marketers access to their tools. Hightouch bridges the gap between the two.

Marketing Strategy for Category Creation

Ben: Now that we know what the business does and the categories are, and I love the team approach—everyone's involved. But when it comes to your responsibilities on the marketing side, how did you start to educate the market on these categories and make it synonymous with who you are and really start to get people to catch momentum with these legitimate categories that solve legitimate problems?

Luke Kline: It's really been two things. One, compelling thought leadership content from our founders and product marketers. The second part, which I'm more involved in, is springboarding off that thought leadership to build compelling SEO content and rank around anything our buyers will be searching for. That means owning everything around moving data out of the warehouse, specifically for reverse ETL, which is a term synonymous with data engineers. We've built a ton of content on the SEO side. So anyone searching how to move data out of tools like Snowflake or Databricks will find our solution. It's a top-down approach, not explicitly selling our product but entering the conversation when someone searches a problem we can solve.

We've done a hub and spoke approach for SEO content. Anytime we want to own a term, we write a compelling pillar post and all our sub-content falls underneath that.

Ben: Very cool. So with that pillar strategy, are you specifically omitting certain things from the pillar content that gets answered in the sub-articles? Or are they purely extensions? How does that structure work to make sure you're not duplicating efforts but really helping that out?

Luke Kline: There's always going to be some duplication across articles. The key is to make sure the pillar post touches on sections and links to each subpost for more depth.

Generating Demand for a New Category

Ben: When I think about SEO and content creation, especially for new categories, often the new category has no search volume. You mentioned going after specific terms people would search for. But how do you think about generating demand and creating searches that don't currently exist?

Luke Kline: There's always some search volume for something. You have to be specific with how you name the term. We've had categories we tried to create that didn't take off. One was data activation. The term you create needs to be specific to the problem it solves. In the case of reverse ETL, ETL is a big word in the data community meaning moving data from point A to point B. Reverse ETL is a specific subset of that. If a data engineer sees it, they're curious and click on it. Composable CDP, which stands for Customer Data Platform, is another subset. We made subsets off of things we already knew were popular. Both terms were coined by our early customers. It's crucial to listen to what the market is saying. Let customers coin your product.

Ben: Even if it's something you're not excited about, that's such a good tip. Don't have pride. If this is how they describe who you are and what you do, that's the best way to talk about yourself.

Luke Kline: A lot of the time, the way they describe you is the easiest way. Marketing tends to overcomplicate things. Keeping things simple is not something we're good at. I always want to include everything instead of sticking to the core message.

Customer Marketing

Ben: When you're looking at creating new categories and SEO, you mentioned customer marketing. How do you look at that motion, and how does it contribute to your content and category creation?

Luke Kline: It comes down to understanding your ICP, who's buying from you, what they're using your product for, why they care, and what the search intent is behind their searches. We don't search the way we ask questions. We search to filter information. Understanding the search intent and crafting content for users, not search engines, is key. Focus on what the customer wants to know and how you can address that question. Trim the fat wherever you can. Simplify your content and get your message down to its core.

Ben: I love that. Well, as promised, these podcasts go by quickly. The idea here is quick bursts of really good information. I've learned a lot and have a lot to think about when it comes to category creation. Luke, thank you for sharing your insights. If anyone wants to reach out and connect with you, where can they find you online?

Luke Kline: Connect with me on LinkedIn. I'm always happy to chat with other marketers and share tips and tricks.

Ben: Love it. Well, Luke, thank you so much for the time today. Really appreciate the insights.

Luke Kline: Yeah, thanks for having me on.

Ben: You bet.

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