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Strategic Communications Advisory For Visionary Founders
Actionable
Takeaways
Event Investment:
Investing heavily in key industry events can yield significant brand awareness and lead generation. Focus on quality over quantity by making a substantial impact at fewer events.
Email Marketing:
Don’t disregard email marketing. Craft emails with valuable content and avoid overt sales pitches to engage and convert leads effectively.
Content Creation and Distribution:
High-quality content should be paired with robust distribution strategies. Ensure that valuable content, like professional videos, reaches a broad audience through various channels.
Focus and Consistency:
Avoid being distracted by every new marketing tool and trend. Stay consistent with your core strategies and focus on creating value over time.
Agility and Experimentation:
Be willing to try new things and learn from failures. Experimentation is crucial for finding what works best for your audience and industry.
Conversation
Highlights
How Sensonio Built Brand Awareness in Waste Management Without Traditional Playbooks
Most B2B marketers chase the latest trends and tactics, constantly switching strategies quarter after quarter. Martin Kosak, CMO at Sensonio, took a different path—one that prioritizes consistency, value creation, and doing less but doing it properly.
In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Martin shared how Sensonio, a smart waste management platform that’s raised $12.6 million, approaches marketing in an unsexy but essential industry. His journey offers tactical lessons for any B2B marketer navigating crowded markets and long sales cycles.
From Handball to Waste Management: An Unconventional Path
Martin’s route to B2B marketing started far from Silicon Valley boardrooms. At 16, he moved to Germany to play handball almost professionally, studying sports management and communication. “I was always very fascinated about sports marketing and I love the atmosphere of sports events. I still follow NFL and I love their marketing,” Martin explains.
After working in sports marketing for three years, life took an unexpected turn. “Life is pretty unpredictable and I ended up in a waste management or technology industry,” he says. But rather than viewing this as a step down from the glamorous world of sports, Martin found his stride. “I’m really happy with this decision and what, really satisfied with what I do right now.”
The Marketing Philosophy: Simple But Not Easy
When asked about his marketing approach, Martin cuts through the complexity. “My personal approach is pretty simple, and I don’t claim that marketing is some kind of rocket science. Most of the things, it is already well known in our field, what works and whatnot.”
His strategy centers on standing out through execution rather than reinventing the wheel. “You don’t necessarily have to do things or content that everybody else is doing, but when you already do, at least trying to not make it in some kind of same or boring way and try to create that extra point that makes us better.”
The foundation of his approach rests on a critical insight about B2B buying cycles: “I also agree with the statement that 95% of our buyers are just not ready now to buy from us, but one day be ready. And when they will enter the market, we just need to be on top of their minds.”
This perspective shifts how Martin thinks about ROI. “Every small step or every activity that we do in order to increase our brand awareness, we cannot be disappointed when it doesn’t show instant or immediate results because know that everything will pay off in the future.”
Events: The Post-COVID Brand Awareness Weapon
While many B2B marketers debate the value of trade shows, Martin goes all-in on the right events. He recently returned from a major waste management exhibition in Germany with concrete results. “After Covid, people really miss those off site meetings. And we saw that now in Germany, it was like number one even in Europe for the waste management. And we gathered like 250 leads over five days.”
But Martin views these events through a dual lens. “On the one hand it was a straight B2B, marketing and only brand awareness. But on the other hand, it’s something that shows the result. Maybe later, because I’m sure there were many visitors. They saw our presence and how beautiful our stand was.”
His events strategy evolved over time. Last year, Sensonio attended three major shows plus six or seven smaller events—a pace that proved unsustainable. This year, they refined their approach. “We decided just to go to this one big event in Germany and really go all in,” Martin explains. The concentrated investment paid off, validating his belief in doing less but doing it better.
Email Marketing: Very Much Not Dead
In an era where every marketing channel seems perpetually “dead,” Martin pushes back on conventional wisdom. “Some people claim that newsletter or email marketing is dead. And I totally don’t agree because we have some pretty good leads already now from the emailing campaigns.”
But success requires sophistication. “Definitely not working is the emailing campaigns from which you can smell sales already before you open the email. So you really need to choose the subject very carefully. And also the body of the email should not be very salesy as well.”
What works? Value-first approaches. Martin shares an example that caught his attention: “I received a cold mail where the company was suggesting a free audit of our social media ads which they would present during the call. So I jumped on it.” The call was worthwhile, and the audit contained genuinely useful ideas—proof that leading with value still cuts through inbox noise.
Content Distribution: The Missing Link
One of Martin’s sharpest observations concerns how companies sabotage their own content investments. “I think what many, maybe competitors or companies are struggling is that they create really expensive content like, let’s say professional product video, but they don’t perform very well on the distribution part.”
The result? Content that cost thousands ends up “just on their YouTube channel or LinkedIn with some hundred views, but that’s it. And they don’t maximize the potential how they could work with such a video after it was already created.”
For Martin, creation is only half the battle. Distribution and repurposing determine whether content delivers ROI.
SEO That Creates Actual Value
Sensonio’s SEO strategy exemplifies Martin’s value-first philosophy. Rather than churning out keyword-stuffed articles, they built comprehensive content clusters around deposit refund systems. “We basically cover the whole DRS topic. We took it as a cluster and we wrote articles from very explanatory basic articles, but up to very in house research articles where we gathered, for example the numbers of the collection rates in european countries.”
The results speak for themselves. “When you right now searching Google for deposit refund system or you put in deposit refund system in european countries, you will probably find our bulk article.”
Every three years, Sensonio creates the Global Waste Index—a comprehensive ranking of OECD countries on waste management practices, developed with a professional PR agency. “This is actually the most visited page on our website after the homepage,” Martin notes. While visitors to this research content may not immediately need sensors, the traffic benefits the entire domain. “It really helps us to reach high positions on Google. So later when people who are looking for sensors can easily find us.”
Staying Focused in the Age of Distraction
Martin identifies focus as B2B marketing’s biggest current challenge. “Nowadays it’s a lot about not losing your focus and getting distracted, not losing the sight of a big picture.” With over 13,000 marketing tools available and new AI capabilities emerging constantly, “it’s very easy to get sidetracked.”
His solution? Consistency over experimentation. “The challenge right now is to stay consistent and not changing the marketing direction every month or quarter.” Given B2B marketing’s broad scope—digital, outbound, social, events, content—selective execution becomes critical. “You simply need to realize that you cannot be everywhere and do everything.”
Martin’s philosophy: “I really prefer, and I think it’s important to do, for example less channels but properly also creating value. That’s what I’m always saying. It’s better than just being everywhere, just for being there and not creating any value.”
The AI Opportunity: Playground, Not Threat
While some marketers fear AI, Martin sees opportunity. Beyond ChatGPT, he’s excited about Midjourney and emerging video generation tools. “It’s really probable you will not even need filmmakers anymore because you will create content by yourself exactly how you wish to do that.”
His advice? “We should not be afraid like marketers of AI, and it offers us a really nice playground where we can improve and how things will be possible that we couldn’t imagine before. And we needed some kind of, let’s say, extra capacities for that. Skilled people or money.”
Three Pieces of Tactical Advice
When asked what advice he’d give another B2B marketing leader, Martin offers three principles:
First: “You should be agile and not be afraid to try things and fail early and often. This can be also considered to the previous question. With AI, the experimentation brings you such a valuable experience and a great insights.”
Second: “If you are a startup, you don’t have to seek for perfection with everything. You may have probably limited capacities in terms of people and budget, but many things you will need to do very fast on your own. So not everything will be perfect, but I think continuous improvement is better than delayed perfection.”
Third: “Be a doer and not a talker. I know many people who are more theoretic. They say we could do this and we should do that, but there are still less people who really roll up their sleeves and start to do things.”
The Underestimated Power of Marketing in B2B
Perhaps Martin’s most important observation concerns how marketing itself is perceived. He references a quote from David Picard shared by Tom Fishburne: “Marketing is too important to be left to the marketing department.”
Martin elaborates: “I think that even my colleagues sometimes don’t get how significant is marketing for our whole company and how the whole brand awareness begins already with other departments like customer support, delivery, product management, or even of course, sales.”
In B2B, where sales cycles stretch across months or years, marketing isn’t about instant conversions. It’s about building the brand awareness that makes future sales possible. For Martin and Sensonio, that means showing up consistently, creating genuine value, and being on top of prospects’ minds when they finally enter the market—even if that takes years.
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