4
min read
When your marketing looks like everyone else's
The foundation — website, nurture sequences, blog, webinars — is the floor. It gets you in the game. The differentiation comes from what you build on top.
If you read our piece on the B2B SaaS marketing foundation, you might have walked away thinking: great, I need to build all of that.
You do. But here's the thing: the foundation is the floor, not the ceiling.
An optimized website, webinars, email nurture, a blog, LinkedIn posts, basic PR — these are necessary. They need to be done, and done well. But they're also what every company in your category is doing, or trying to do. If your entire marketing program lives at this level, you'll generate some leads and maintain a presence. You won't build the kind of brand gravity that makes prospects come to you instead of the other way around.
If you want to truly break through — become the name people think of first in your category — you have to layer something unconventional on top of that foundation. Something rooted in what makes your company, your data, your customer relationships, or your team genuinely unique.
What unconventional marketing actually looks like
This isn't about being weird for the sake of being weird. It's about identifying an asset or an advantage that's specific to your company, and building a marketing program around it that no competitor could copy because it comes from something they don't have.
A few patterns we've seen work.
If you're sitting on proprietary data your market cares about, publish it. When I worked at Liftoff, early on we realized we had aggregate performance data that the entire industry wanted but nobody was sharing. We started publishing quarterly benchmark reports — timing each one to seasonal relevance — and it became our single most powerful demand gen asset. Co-marketing partners lined up because they wanted access to the audience those reports attracted. The reports fueled the blog, the newsletter, our webinar calendar, and the sales team's outreach. One asset, compounding across every channel.
If your customers know things your marketing team doesn't, build with them. Another program I ran turned customers into co-creators. Instead of writing thought leadership content internally — which would have been generic, because our marketing team weren't practitioners — we partnered with customers to produce it. The customers got professional visibility and career acceleration. We got content that was more credible and more useful than anything we could have written alone. That program is still running today, a decade later, because it delivers so much value to the customers being featured, the company running it, and the broader market that gets to learn from the expertise being shared.
If your events feel like everyone else's events, stop doing them the same way. Conferences are predictable. Vendors get on stage and do pitches loosely disguised as presentations. Audiences spend the whole talk looking at their phones. One very unconventional approach we tested and ended up practicing for years: we replaced presentations with interactive game shows that were also educational. Originally inspired by “Family Feud,” we designed "Mobile Feud" — complete with a "game show screen" using an interactive PowerPoint deck. We booked “guests” who were conference attendees ahead of time, our VP of Marketing hosted, and of course there were prizes — for the players and for the audience. Over time, this game show evolved into our own unique format. Sounds absurd for B2B. But the energy in the room was electrifying, and the conversations afterward — with prospects who actually remembered the experience — were worth more than any slide deck. And the industry noticed that we were willing to take risks and be different.
The pattern underneath
Every one of these examples shares three things.
First, they were built on top of a solid foundation. Each company had the basics in place — the website, the content engine, the email infrastructure, the event presence. The unconventional programs amplified what already existed. They didn't replace it.
Second, they were rooted in something specific to the company. The data reports worked because we had proprietary data. The customer co-creation program worked because the company had deep customer relationships. The game shows worked because the CMO was naturally a great entertainer. You can't copy someone else's unconventional marketing and expect the same result. You have to find your own version.
Third, they fed the foundation. The reports became newsletter content. The customer profiles became webinar speakers. The events generated relationships that turned into co-marketing partnerships. The unconventional programs weren't separate from the marketing system — they were the fuel that made it spin faster.
How to find your ceiling
Start by asking two questions.
What does your company have — data, relationships, expertise, access, perspective — that your competitors don't? This is your raw material. It might be a dataset nobody else publishes. It might be unusually close relationships with a specific customer segment. It might be a founder with a distinctive point of view the market hasn't heard yet.
Then: what does your audience need that the industry isn't currently giving them? When you talk to customers and prospects — really talk to them, not survey them — what are they hungry for? Education? Community? Recognition? Access to peers? The gap between what they need and what the industry provides is where your unconventional program lives.
The answers won't come from a brainstorm in a conference room (well, sometimes they do). But more often than not, they come from conversations with the people you're trying to reach. The best marketing programs we've seen — the ones that we ran for years and became defining assets for the company — all started with us talking to our customers and hearing something nobody else was paying attention to.
The foundation gets you in the game. What you build on top of it is what makes you memorable.