Zoelle Egner, former head of marketing and customer success at Airtable, discusses early acquisition tactics and how Facebook advertising dynamics have changed for B2B startups.
“The boring answer that I will caveat this with is that one of the pieces of our acquisition playbook, it was very standard that did work quite well, was like some unconventionally targeted Facebook ads. That era is over. So like, don't expect that that is going to work for your B to B business now, because that that's totally changed.”
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