Marketers: It’s Time to Own More of the Funnel The SuccessLab Podcast: Where Entrepreneurs Collaborate for Success

When most people think of marketing, they think big energy, big talkers, big ideas and even bigger results. And while this may be true, building an effective marketing strategy—and team—is about starting small and ensuring quality always overrides quantity. It’s with this mentality that Charlotte Bohnett, senior director of demand generation at WebPT, and Brooke Andrus, content marketing manager at WebPT, have helped develop an extremely effective inbound marketing engine that has led WebPT to become the third-most sought after resource for compliance and billing in the rehab therapy industry. In this episode of The SuccessLab Podcast, Charlotte and Brooke talk about how they got their start in marketing and how they’ve built a powerhouse marketing engine that has helped grow WebPT from a bootstrapped startup to a rapid-growth tech company. This dynamic duo also explains the pivotal role WebPT’s content marketing strategy plays within the team’s approach to demand generation as well as why marketing teams should own more of the funnel. Read on for a selection of questions, and listen to the entire interview by clicking the player above.
What led you to WebPT? Charlotte: I started at WebPT eight years ago. I finished graduate school in Northwestern Ohio and was working at a B2B company that was a distributor of media to public library systems in the US and Canada. They had just expanded into developing a software that libraries could use for checking out video content so I started dabbling in software as a service in the B2B space. My husband and I both wanted to spread our wings in marketing so we applied for jobs all over the country. Fortunately, WebPT reached out to me for a copywriter position. I had a really good feeling about it, so my husband and I packed up and we drove across the country. I knew it was the right fit for me. Brooke: I went to journalism school at the University of Montana and started out my career as a community newspaper reporter and photographer. The parent company that ran our newspaper was constantly reducing newsrooms across the entire organization and I always felt like my job was in jeopardy. Me and my editor were doing the work of six people so I burned out really fast and I decided that it was time to look for something else. I expanded my reach beyond journalism and dabbled in some communications and media relations roles. The company that I was at before WebPT was basically a startup that ended up failing right in the middle of my contract with them. I started looking around and saw the listing at WebPT and was immediately struck by how different and fun it was. I had no idea what an EMR was. I didn't know what SaaS was, but the style and tone of the listing spoke to me so I applied. They called me an hour later to set up an interview. I ended up taking the job, driving across the country and started a new life in Phoenix.
What have you been most proud of during your time at WebPT? Charlotte: The team. I have played a hand in hiring every single person in the marketing department. It’s my top highlight because without this team we wouldn't have been able to demonstrate the overwhelming value of marketing and of intentionally crafting a very human brand. Without this team, we wouldn't see month-over-month and year-over-year success regardless of the economic or political climate. WebPT has been a juggernaut for over a decade and it is in large part due to this marketing team. Brooke: Making our “Annual State of Rehab Therapy Report” into what it is now. Originally, it was supposed to be a product marketing project to survey the industry and find the data they need to make sure what we were developing was solving our industry's needs. In the middle of the survey our product marketing manager ended up leaving and nobody was stepping in to close the loop on the project. Even though I didn't necessarily want to, I knew it needed to be done so I ended up taking the reins and