Led Zeppelin might be rolling in their grave, but Coupa doesn’t care. The company is climbing the stairway to (marketing) heaven, giving procurement a makeover, and gathering a tribe around its cloud platform for business spend.

“My role is to build a marketing engine to get the flywheel effect of … awareness, acquisition and advocacy,” said Chandar Pattabhiram (pictured), chief marketing officer of Coupa Software Inc.

Pattabhiram spoke with Lisa Martin (@LisaMartinTV), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Coupa Inspire event in Las Vegas. They discussed Coupa’s “flywheel effect” marketing strategy (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

Marketing strategy for the social era

Pattabhiram is a thought leader in the digital marketing domain with his Zeppelin analogy of awareness, acquisition and advocacy as the B2B marketing stairway to heaven.

The first step on the stair is “to drive awareness in a very thoughtful way to the right contextual community,” Pattabhiram said. Next is acquisition, where Coupa will “drive close synergies between sales and marketing to ultimately drive pipeline and win rates and ultimately deals,” he stated. The third, and most overlooked, step is advocacy; getting “your most passionate customers to evangelize about the brand.”

This is critical in today’s marketing world where the positive exposure on a company-owned brand channel can be overpowered by customer feedback and comments on other channels. “Prospects who have all the buying power today are looking to your existing customers to guide them in their purchasing decisions,” Pattabhiram stated.

Honest reviews and recommendations on a non-company-owned channel are known as “earned” and hold more weight for a prospect than company created marketing materials. “So, that’s why we [have] got to balance the boat and distribute our advocacy spend dollars across both owned channels and earned channels,” Pattabhiram said.

Marketing is about building a tribe

At the end of the day, the true measure of marketing success, especially for a software as a service company like Coupa, is customer lifetime value. “Because if a customer stays longer with you, pays you more, and is shouting from the rooftop, then, invariably, that SaaS business is doing well,” Pattabhiram stated.

Coupa’s customer community, known as spendsetters, are eager to tell their success stories. “We have well over 1,000 companies that we’ve helped spend smarter, effectively,” stated Coupa’s chairman and chief executive officer, Rob Bernshteyn in a recent theCUBE interview. Both Bernshteyn and Pattabhiram are looking to a big future for Coupa, and they understand that cultivating an active, supportive community is a key factor.

“In technology, you have to create a tribe to be a titan,” Pattabhiram stated. “If the community is bigger than the brand, it is about the community itself and learning, sharing and growing with each other and being successful.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Coupa Inspire event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the Coupa Inspire event. Neither Coupa Software Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE