Sales and marketing tech is a fiercely competitive space. So if you’re a new entrant, you’d better have a strong proposition that stands out from the crowd.

Demand-Genius is all about better understanding the value and effectiveness of content marketing. Let’s find out what they’ve got to offer…

– Martin

Demand-Genius helps you figure out why your content marketing works (or why it doesn’t)

Content marketing can often be an important part of the modern sales process… but these days it’s not necessarily just about telling people your product exists.

Content can be important right through until a customer hands over their cash. So understanding which pieces content of lead a curious customer-to-be to become an actual customer, and what content they want to consume along their buying journey, can be valuable data to sales and marketing teams.

And that’s where Demand-Genius wants to step in, helping businesses optimise their content strategy and understand its role in generating sales.

Co-founder Tom Rudnai explains that the startup’s market research discovered that content marketers want better attribution data, so they can prove their worth and get promoted. But proving a link between a potential customer watching a video or reading an article, and them then buying a product, is difficult.

Meanwhile, marketing teams need to better understand what content they should produce.

“When you decide what content you’re going to produce, you're doing it based on hunches of what's generating traffic, what you think is front of mind at the moment, and what you have and haven't covered in the past. What you're not able to do is strategically identify specific questions or jobs to be done for your buyer that you aren't yet serving. And that's where we come in,” Rudnai says.T

How it works

Demand-Genius is web-based software that begins by creating a categorised catalogue of all the user’s content. This is a manual, user-led process at present but Rudnai sees a role for AI to play in automating this in the future.

The site then provides a context-specific alternative to Google Analytics, tracking website users, recognising when an anonymous user has shared personal data with you so you can log their journey more easily.

“We’re tracking them as they go through your pipeline from discovery, to demo, to technical, to proposal stage, and then eventually close,” Rudnai explains.

“Whereas Google Analytics lets you break down your traffic in the aggregate, you can now get really specific in each of these stages to understand what content people are reading and how engagement ebbs and flows throughout the journey, so you can start working out where your attention needs to go.”

Because it tracks the journey from content to sales, Rudnai says Demand-Genius can provide an overall view of the ROI content marketing provides for a business:

“It's something that at the moment people are spending a lot of time in spreadsheets to do. There's a whole function called marketing operations, whose job is to basically establish on each channel what the ROI is and whether we should allocate more or less budget. We just make that a really, really simple process.”

And all of this can also help sales reps understand which pieces of content are most effective to share with a prospect at any point in the sales process.

“We're helping them drop in content that's going to nurture and add value at each stage and make that a data-led process,” Rudnai says.

The story so far

Rudnai graduated from university in 2017, after which he says he spent time “splashing around” in various roles, including time at a number of startups. He even launched a startup of his own.

But none of that stuck, and he ended up in a cold-calling sales job.

“It was soul crushing, but it was incredibly good for me,” he says.

“I was quite an anxious, nervous kid and teenager, and it dropped me out of that a little bit, because you just get rejected 50 times a day on calls, and you get a bit hardened to it.”

With some sales experience under his belt, he want to work for dynamic paywall subscription tech company Zephr. It was here he met his fellow Demand-Genius co-founder James Carter.

Having learned a lot about how B2B sales has evolved, they spotted the opportunity for Demand-Genius and got to work on it in April last year. After launching a “bare-bones” version of the product in October, they were ready with the first proper version by the end of 2024.

With their first paying customers now under their belt, Rudnai and Carter are looking to hire a software engineer and further develop their product and customer base.

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