< Blog

A peek into SentinelOne’s MarTech doctrine

Yotam Gutman Marketing Director at Sentinel One.
29 September 2020
Case Studies

“Like most companies”, Yotam tells us, “we started with a very disjointed marketing stack. But we’re slowly but surely moving to a more unified platform.”

Yotam works for SentinelOne – an endpoint cybersecurity platform which is currently going through a huge growth period.

“We’re one of the top three players in our niche”, Yotam tells us, “and we’re building on that all the time. This is one of this year’s big goals – to really push us to the top in terms of recognition.”

We sat down with Yotam to ask him about the marketing tools and tech which are helping SentinelOne with that push.

About SentinelOne

SentinelOne is a well-established cybersecurity company, with over 550 employees worldwide.

Yotam is the marketing representative in Israel. “I deal with local marketing, demand generation and so on. We’re on a big growth push, so one of my main tasks at the moment is to recruit top talent. At the moment we have 250 people here, and we want to expand our team a lot by the end of the year.”

He’s also part of what he calls the ‘Growth team’. “It’s part of the extended content marketing team. I work on lead generation and that kind of thing.”

An interesting job, at an exciting time for the company. So, what marketing tools is Yotam using to bring about all this growth?

The main components of SentinelOne’s tech stack are:

WordPress.
“Our website is on WordPress. We find it has pros and cons, but overall it works pretty well for us.”

One of the cons is that, for SentinelOne, WordPress is a lot of work to maintain.
“We put up a lot of content, and we often update it. WordPress can do a lot, and it’s very versatile, but it’s also a big workload to update it as much as we do. We’ve actually come to a point where it’s too much for the current team, so we’re hiring a digital marketer to work exclusively with the website.”

WordPress is known for its versatility, but, as Yotam says, its ease of use depends a lot on what you’re doing with it.

If you’ve got a big, complex, multifaceted site like SentinelOne’s then updating the WordPress can be a big job. Especially if you’re making changes on a regular basis. Hiring someone to run the website means that marketers like Yotam can focus their time and energy on important, value-adding things like content creation and analysis.

Marketo.
“Marketo is the industry standard, and it ties in very nicely to our CRM. It takes care of all the automation.”

Marketo is a SaaS-based marketing automation solution. It helps companies to create automated, personalized marketing campaigns across all digital channels. Marketo has a lot of potential applications, from automating workflows to driving leads, to monitoring engagement and gaining audience insights.

SentinelOne’s marketing team uses Marketo to drive leads. “When everyone was working from home March-May, we saw a huge growth in traffic. Our goal for Marketo is to drive that kind of growth, and to turn it into meaningful leads.”

Salesforce.
In order for the Marketing team to push the bottom line, collaboration with the sales team is essential. So, it made sense to implement an integration between Marketo and Salesforce. This enables information-sharing between Marketing and Sales, which in turn drives conversions.

“To be a good marketer”, Yotam explains, “and to create great content, you have to be connected to the other teams. The sales team, for example. They’re the first line of defence when it comes to the customer. Interaction and communication between different teams is so important for understanding your leads.”

Salesforce makes this kind of cross-team communication and insight-sharing possible.

Drift.
Drift describes itself as ‘The world’s leading conversational marketing platform’. It aims to help marketers get closer to their audiences through human-style interaction and connection.

“The idea when we implemented Drift was to capture more leads, but also to tailor the kind of content we show according to what the visitors want to see”, Yotam tells us.

“Drift helps us to quickly identify who our customers are so we can make the right content available to them. It’s increased our conversation rate significantly, and also made the leads we’re getting a lot more relevant than they used to be.”

“We also use tools outside of our own framework to increase engagement”, Yotam explains, “like Socialive.”

Socialive.
Socialive is an enterprise video platform which makes it easy for companies to make, edit, and share videos.

“It’s very robust”, says Yotam, “not at all clunky. That’s important, because our video quality has to be great. It also connects well to LinkedIn, which doesn’t really have the streaming capabilities of Facebook and required 3rd party tools like Socialive in order to broadcast live videos

“It also gives us the option of creating pre-recorded content, which is great because live videos aren’t always that useful for a company with customers and employees all over the world. For example, one of us can record a clip at their convenience in, say, rural England, and someone in Australia wouldn’t have to be watching it in the middle of the night.”

What about social media tools?

“We have a lot of people working for us and they’re all pretty active on social media. We keep an eye on it that way”, Yotam explains.

“We try to be as responsive as possible and to schedule content as closely as we can for real-world relevance. We also do this on less mainstream platforms, like Reddit and Quora, to engage with different audiences.”

Is this an easy thing to achieve? Yotam shrugs, “well, it’s getting more difficult to engage with audiences directly, but we try our best. We want to be as active and engaged on social media as we can – that’s the best way to generate organic interest.”

Content is key for Yotam in driving social media engagement. The trick is to tailor each channel’s content to the audience which uses that channel.

“We opened a channel on Medium called SentinelOne Tech, where we post very technical content for our more R&D-based audiences that are not always present on other social media platforms. That’s one of the things we’re really doubling down on for the second half of this year. Pushing hard on building audiences for our content.”

How about segmentation?

One of the key ways to build audience engagement is to intensively segment and target. How is Yotam segmenting his audiences?

“We ask them! We have a Drift chatbot, which asks them what content they’re interested in. So, we immediately know what they’re looking for.”

When someone clicks through to the SentinelOne website, they are greeted with this chatbot:

If they click the ‘Sure :-)’ option, the bot will run through the data protection consents depending on the visitor’s location (GDPR in the EU, PIPETA in Canada and so on). Having got consent to gather data, the ‘bot then gives the user this set of choices:

“We use this both to direct people to exactly what they want to see, and to segment them according to their interests. Then we can show them more of the kind of thing they’re interested in.”

What tool can’t SentinelOne’s marketing team live without?

Yotam thinks for a moment, then gives a rueful smile.

“At the risk of sounding obvious, I’d have to say Google Analytics.”

Nothing wrong with sounding obvious! Often the most obvious tool really is the best one for the job.

Yotam agrees. “My job is to create and share the best content. The content that drives the most traffic. So, I want to know what works. Google Analytics seems to be the best for that. It tells us what people want and it tells us what they’re looking at.”

“Everyone uses it, but that’s because it’s good. For us as a marketing team, it gives the best reality check. You can gain so much value from it.”

Are there any areas of your marketing stack you’d like to improve?

“Videos”, says Yotam, immediately, “We need to work on video conversion. That’s the next thing on our list to improve. So, if there’s a tool out there which can help us make a greater impact with video, we’d love to hear about it!”

If you had to invent a new tool, what would it do?

Our final question makes Yotam think. He considers the question for a moment, then says:

“It would probably be a hybrid of several capabilities. Some AI, some insights…what I’d like to do is open my dashboard every morning and get a list of, say, three topics that people want to see today. Three topics that are driving the best traffic. Preferably segmented by audience.”

Sounds interesting! Yotam explains further:

“For my job, I want to be able to create a piece of highly relevant content as quickly as possible to catch all that internet traffic. I mean, here in Israel I have a ten hour head start on the US, but I still have to google the cybersecurity topics that people want to see every day. That takes time.

I’d love a tool which could do that research for me each morning, so I could just get going and make the perfect piece of content for today’s world!”

If you’d like to know more about marketing tech, follow our blog or check out the rest of our website.

Register to our Newsletter

Stories and trends of tech b2b marketing websites, zero fluff, tons of fun stuff

Related posts

Airfleet’s Website Redesign Project Kick-Off

Airfleet’s Website Redesign Project Kick-Off

How LawGeex was quick to build a valuable resource to the global legal community during Covid-19

How LawGeex was quick to build a valuable resource to the global legal community during Covid-19

The ultimate tech stack for B2B marketers:How Anodot is taking data-driven marketing to the edge

The ultimate tech stack for B2B marketers:How Anodot is taking data-driven marketing to the edge

How WhiteSource created one of the biggest open source vulnerability databases on the internet, using AirFleet’s expertise

How WhiteSource created one of the biggest open source vulnerability databases on the internet, using AirFleet’s expertise

Expecting more from your website?

So do we. Let’s chat about ways to improve your buyer journey.