Building in Public: How Revelio Labs Uses Media Coverage to Drive B2B Growth
Most B2B companies treat media coverage as a nice-to-have. But what if sharing your data insights with journalists could become a core growth driver? In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Revelio Labs founder Ben Zweig revealed how they’ve turned data journalism into a powerful marketing strategy that both builds credibility and drives growth.
“We’re in the media almost every day now,” Ben shares. “We’ll work a lot with we have a bunch of reporters we have good relationships with at Bloomberg and Business Insider and Wall Street Journal and New York Times and like, a bunch of those just because they’re in the business of looking for data to support their story.”
What makes this strategy particularly interesting is how Revelio Labs approaches it: “We provide that for free, really, because it helps us with getting our name out also. So we love those relationships and I think they are starting to rely on us also.”
Their media strategy was put to the test when they published controversial findings about a tech giant. “We had a newsletter that we did in collaboration with Bloomberg that basically showed that Meta basically stopped hiring people in VR AR and all the Metaverse skills,” Ben recalls. “They had been hiring a lot, but they basically shut that down and other companies like Accenture were hiring much faster.”
What happened next reveals both the risks and rewards of this approach: “The team at Meta, the communications team, reached out to us and they said, hey, we want to dispute this and this isn’t like we’re seeing slightly different numbers.”
Rather than backing down, Revelio Labs doubled down on their analysis: “We kind of went back and did a more thorough analysis and we tried to slice and dice it in tons of different ways and at the end of the day, we had the same pattern and we basically said, thanks for alerting us, but we’re not going to retract this, we stand by it.”
Their stance was vindicated: “And then a couple of weeks later, then they had their big announcement about how they’re kind of stopping hiring. So we got vindicated eventually, but it was stressful.”
This incident highlights a key aspect of Revelio Labs’ media strategy: they treat data integrity as non-negotiable. When challenged by one of the world’s most powerful tech companies, they chose to stand behind their analysis rather than water it down.
The company’s approach to media relations is part of a broader strategy to build credibility in the workforce analytics space. They maintain a weekly newsletter where their team of economists writes insights drawn from their data. These insights often become the basis for media coverage, creating a virtuous cycle of content creation and distribution.
The strategy has helped them expand beyond their initial financial services customers. “I think they are really starting to rely on us,” Ben notes about their media relationships, highlighting how consistently sharing valuable insights has turned journalists into ongoing partners rather than occasional contacts.
For B2B founders, Revelio Labs’ experience offers several key lessons about leveraging media relationships:
- Focus on providing genuine value to journalists through unique data insights
- Build relationships with specific reporters rather than targeting publications broadly
- Maintain data integrity even when faced with pushback from powerful companies
- Use media coverage to build credibility in new markets
- Create a consistent pipeline of insights that can feed media coverage
Looking ahead, Revelio Labs sees their media presence as crucial to achieving their vision of becoming the Bloomberg terminal for HR. By consistently sharing workforce insights through established media channels, they’re simultaneously building their brand and educating the market about the power of workforce analytics.
Their experience shows that building in public through strategic media relationships isn’t just about getting press coverage – it’s about establishing your company as a trusted source of insights in your industry. For B2B companies with unique data or insights to share, this could be the growth strategy you’ve been overlooking.