As PostFunnel is already a year old, Optimove is stepping out of the vagueness to acknowledge its mint-condition publishers' hat. This is a bigger step towards one of our main values - a commitment to content
Before Optimove even had a marketing department, we devoted our time and what few resources we had towards content marketing. I think of those early years in our content strategy as a crucial, yet slightly overlooked part of our history. While not the forefront cog in the early days of Optimove’s machine, content always played a central role, allowing us to share our values, knowledge, and narrative.
In the years before founding Optimove, our Founder and CEO, Pini Yakuel, blogged and shared his wisdom for anyone willing to read. After starting the company, he continued sharing his thoughts, posting one blog a month about anything he believed could be valuable to marketers, data scientists, entrepreneurs and human beings in general. This urge to share knowledge, experiences, and thoughts was the foundation of our community that allowed us to educate and spark new ideas. This initiative was, still is, and probably always will be an innate part of Optimove’s DNA.
The Seed, The Sprout
Fast forward to 2016. Optimove reached 110 employees and we received our first round of investment. When anyone receives money, they must ask themselves, what do we do with the sums? Our spend, or rather investment strategy, was to double down on one of Optimove’s greatest strengths: our content. We started envisioning what this would look like and eventually, it hit us. We needed to step into a new role and become a publisher. That was the seed that sprouted PostFunnel.
We didn’t know how to begin, if we wanted internal writers or to outsource articles, whether we needed an agency to guide us on our not-yet-paved path, what the publication would look like, whether we wanted to create a new brand, and what level of association it would have with Optimove. We didn’t even know what to call our future content being, but we knew we wanted to develop and spread our insight, philosophy, theories and best practices on customer marketing. We wanted to continue realizing the very ideas we built Optimove on in 2009. We knew we wanted to establish ourselves as a resource for customer-centric, data-driven marketing professionals, no matter their expertise or career stage; to build that bonfire that would gather the relationship marketing community together.
We didn’t even know what to call our future content being, but we knew we wanted to develop and spread our insight, philosophy, theories and best practices on customer marketing”.
We started the process by hiring an Editor in Chief, external advisor, Managing Editor, in-house writer and researcher, and a team of four freelance writers—all working together to shed light on everything post-acquisition. We offered best practices, thought leadership pieces, and articles outlining strategies from brands around the world. It took little more than five months from the time we decided to become a publisher to the moment PostFunnel went live, on May 28th, 2017. During the first year, we developed PostFunnel’s point of view, expressed our values, gained readership, built authority, and reveled in the excitement of our new brain child, the perfect mix of left and right hemispheres at work.
Support of the Community
Now, one year later, we have more than 30,000 monthly readers and more than 25,000 newsletter subscribers. Our mission was to build credibility amongst the relationship marketing community. And with the help of our staff, team of writers, graphic designers, advisors, and of course, our readers, we exceeded our expectations. Birthdays are always a good opportunity for introspection. One year after dreaming up the concept of PostFunnel, we ask ourselves, what’s next? When you teach someone something new, they’ll follow your outline, they’ll subscribe to your ideas. At the very least, they’ll tune in to what you have to say. It’s with this notion that Optimove is stepping forward as the publisher behind PostFunnel. We promise to continue our mission to build authority, deliver value, and provide the knowledge that empowers our community to boost their business.
We’d like to take this celebratory occasion to ask for a favor—please share with us when something you read on PostFunnel resonated with you, piqued your interest, sparked a new idea, or served as grounds for feedback. That will allow us to improve and take another step in the right direction. Everyone can take part in the release of PostFunnel’s next “version,” and we couldn’t have hit this milestone without our community supporting us and reading our words.
Thank you to those who have journeyed with us. Here’s to many more years to come.
