The Dreamdata Playbook: Marketing to Marketers Without Looking Like Everyone Else

Try marketing to marketers, and you’ll quickly discover they can see through every tactic you use. In a recent Category Visionaries episode, Dreamdata CEO Lars Grønnegaard revealed how they’ve turned this challenge into an advantage by completely rethinking B2B marketing conventions.

The Marketing-First DNA

Unlike most B2B SaaS companies, Dreamdata was built with marketing at its core. “With three co-founders, two came from product, one came from marketing, and Stefan, who is the marketing guy, he is a very strong marketer… So no sales guy,” Lars explains. This unique founding DNA shaped their entire go-to-market approach.

Breaking the Marketing Playbook

When marketing to marketers, conventional tactics often fall flat. Lars puts it bluntly: “If you’re marketing to marketers, I think you need to try things, whatever you do, but especially marketing to marketers, you can’t just do what everybody else does. You need some creativity in what you do. You need to be bold.”

This philosophy led to unexpected marketing experiments. One of their most successful came from an impromptu idea: “One of our salespeople was going to New York… she came to me and said, ‘hey, Lars, can I buy a billboard on Times Square?’ I was like, how much is it? She’s like, $500.”

The team turned this small investment into engaging content by creating a billboard that playfully stated their CMO wanted to spend the money on Google Ads instead, then captured his genuine surprise reaction.

Going Where the Audience Lives

Instead of trying to build new channels, Dreamdata focused intensively on LinkedIn. “We sell to marketers – B2B marketers, they love LinkedIn and they live their life there. So it’s a very good place for us to exist and be like, we connect with the market there,” Lars notes.

Their LinkedIn Lives strategy has been particularly successful, sometimes reaching the platform’s maximum capacity of 600 viewers. “We had Chris Walker recently that maxed out at 600 for sure. That was a great LinkedIn live,” Lars shares.

Data as Content

Recent research has become a cornerstone of their content strategy. “We have a free product. So that means we get a lot of data from a lot of companies and we can see,” Lars explains. This data led to insights like their report on B2B sales cycles: “Everybody knows that sales cycle. So you enter the sales pipeline, you exit it, everybody knows that. But what about all the stuff that happened before?”

Their research revealed surprising findings: “I think it came out at like more than 200 days.” This kind of data-driven content helps them stand out in a space crowded with opinion pieces and best practices guides.

The Product-Marketing Hybrid

Rather than following either pure product-led or marketing-led growth, Dreamdata created a hybrid approach. “We do a lot of organic social, we also do some paid, of course, and then, yeah, we’re product people. We can sort of escape that. So we have, I wouldn’t call it product led growth, but it’s very much product assisted sales motion,” Lars explains.

This approach combines content marketing with product experiences: “Everybody will go through a trial. We also have a free product. So we do sort of have people entering, doing either the free product or free trial and upgrading.”

Focus as a Marketing Strategy

Perhaps counterintuitively, Dreamdata found that narrowing their focus actually improved their marketing effectiveness. “When you think you’re focused, you’re not so narrow down,” Lars reflects. “Find a very narrow ICP when you start. And don’t mistake your initial ICP for your tam.”

The Future: Automation at Scale

Looking ahead, Dreamdata sees marketing automation as the next frontier. “The big picture for us is this automation angle,” Lars shares. “You’ve seen automation in B2C go to market for the last 20 years, and you’re definitely seeing it now in the B2B space as well.”

Their journey shows that marketing to marketers doesn’t require following conventional B2B playbooks. Sometimes, the most effective approach is to break the rules, experiment boldly, and trust that sophisticated buyers will appreciate genuine creativity over formulaic marketing tactics.