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A Conversation with Anupam Dasgupta, VP of Marketing at Quintype
In today’s MarTech conversation, we speak with Anupam Dasgupta, the VP of marketing at Quintype, a leading CMS SaaS business that provides solutions for the digital and print publishing industry.
Dasgupta explains how he defines his role, how he approaches his marketing plan, and what he predicts about the future of digital marketing.
Quintype's flagship product is our Bold CMS. It began as a product for Bloomberg Quint, but for more than five years now, it's been on offer for other news and media companies who want to streamline and automate their digital publication processes. We can help them by making publishing much easier, by improving traffic flow, and by improving the user experience.
Bold CMS typically goes by the value proposition of 30-40-50, which means that it brings in the following improvements: a 30% cost reduction, a 40% improvement in productivity, and a 50% improvement in revenue.
Aside from the CMS, Quintype also provides other products such as Ahead, which is a front-end framework for setting up the front end of your website. So while the CMS is the back end, we also provide a head to the Bold CMS—which is a headless CMS. By headless CMS, we mean it can integrate to any of the front ends. Ahead provides a framework that seamlessly fits into Bold CMS.
We also offer Accesstype, which allows you to monetize subscriptions on your website, so you can have premium subscribers, free subscribers, and so on; and Metype, which allows you to enhance audience engagement and moderate the various comments on your blogs or articles on your website.
Right now, the company has around 100+ publishers as clients. Our clients are from Europe, the US, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia.
A recent example of what we can offer is what we did with a 140-year-old European publisher. They were looking for a digital-first CMS while maintaining their print offering. This is something that Quintype's Bold CMS offers. The system is live and we are expecting growth in traffic of anything between two to six times.
I am part of the leadership team here and I report to the CEO. The team that I have is the senior manager of marketing, who deals with performance marketing; a manager of marketing who is in charge of product marketing and content marketing; and then a lot of people who report to these folks, including specialists in SEO, content writing, graphic design, web development, social media, and so on.
My role is twofold. Like any head or VP of marketing would, I need to enhance the brand recall of the company in geographies where we are already present and create an awareness in the geographies where our presence is slightly less prominent. We have defined KPIs to measure both brand awareness and brand recall. And then, of course, a lot of qualified demand generation, which becomes a feed for the sales team to work on.
In terms of KPIs, we focus on MQLs for every region for demand gen. For branding, we focus on a variety of KPIs, such as awards, qualified social media following, and audience engagement with thought leadership pieces.
I approach demand gen with a two-year roadmap that lays out a vision for the growth of the company: What are the numbers that the company is looking for, how do those numbers trickle down into the pipeline, what is the demand generation expectation from the marketing team and from the partner channels?
On the branding side, we look at getting more and more organic publications, speaking opportunities, more and more analyst relations working, more discussions like this one we're having now. These are the things that contribute to brand awareness. So, I make all of these plans, and the execution is done by a team of senior marketers and specialists.
A typical day would consist of reviewing the campaigns that the team is working on, providing them with guidance, and trying to make sure that the AB tests are all on track so that we get increasing results. In general, it's about keeping an eye on where we are versus the goal that has been committed to management. Broadly speaking, that is my role on a day-to-day basis, but of course, there are other detailed aspects that need to be addressed.
In terms of the tools being used, we have all the usual ad platforms going on like LinkedIn ads and Google ads. We have a bunch of tools like SEMrush for measuring the SEO performance and analyzing competition performance on SEO. On the outbound marketing side, we have recently onboarded ZoomInfo intent data. With that, we know which companies are actually searching for the intent topics in our industry, so we know that these companies are likely to be searching for a purchase now.
In terms of what we want to give our customers, I'll go back to the 30-40-50 mantra: a 30% cost reduction, a 40% improvement in productivity, and a 50% improvement in revenue. This is what we've typically observed, and this is the result we expect publishers to have from us.
In the Indian market, a large chunk of notable publishers are already Quintype customers. We also have notable clients in North America, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. In terms of business strategy, we are looking to aggressively expand in the US and in Europe, and we are actively looking for partners in these regions as well, other than direct go-to-market.
Contentful, Contentstack, Sitecore, and, of course, WordPress are all direct competition for Quintype's Bold CMS.
Any digital marketing agency or any web development firm that is building custom front ends is, in a sense, competition for Ahead. In terms of our subscription monetization, Accesstype, we have competitors like Piano, Leaky Paywall, and Recurly.
In the B2B software product space, I am very excited about developments in intent data. Intent data is, in a way, exactly the reverse of search engine optimization. With search engine optimization, you would expect people to find you and come to your website. With intent data, you're actually finding out who exactly is searching for your keywords. And there are even some other tools like Zymplify that claim to provide you the exact persona who's searching for you. That is very interesting because then you're looking at a future where your target audience is very well-defined.
And then you've got a bunch of technologies coming up in terms of measuring which messaging works better versus the other. So we may be looking at a future where you may not actually need a human performance marketer—machine learning would tell you which messaging to use for which audience.
The role of content marketing at Quintype is very important because our customer base is composed of newspapers and media companies who eat, drink, and breathe content all the time, so it is very important for us to be able to provide genuine, authentic, and frequent content.
We are always looking at creating more authentic content, genuine content, and also video content—video content gives you leverage over your competitors. We're also looking at personalized video content: You have these tools coming up that can send you personalized video mailers based on your interaction on other websites. In general, in terms of content, I think more and more personalization of content is key.
You can find Anupam Dasgupta on LinkedIn and get more information about Quintype on their website.
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