By David Steifman and Michael Greenhut, Co Founders and Managing Partners, Energize Marketing
Five years ago, when we started Energize Marketing, did we envision building one of the fastest growing private companies in America?
Actually, yes.
That may sound confident. But it came from years spent working with B2B marketers and seeing firsthand how much their world was changing.
Buying committees were becoming more complex. Marketers were struggling to identify and reach the right people inside the accounts that mattered most. More customer and prospect data wasn't necessarily translating into better targeting. And there was more content everywhere, but not necessarily more worth paying attention to.
At the same time, marketers were being asked to do more.
More pipeline. More precise targeting. More personalization. More content. More accountability.
Often with larger budgets and better technology, yes, but also with greater expectations for what every marketing dollar should produce.
We believed there was room for a company built specifically around those realities.
Now, Energize Marketing has been named to the Inc. 5000 list of the fastest growing private companies in America.
It's an incredible milestone. But more than anything, it validates what we believed when we started.
B2B marketers today have capabilities we could only have imagined earlier in our careers. ABM platforms, intent data, automation, AI and enormous volumes of first and third party data have created increasingly powerful ways to understand and engage audiences.
Yet ask most marketers whether their jobs have become easier.
Technology can give you more data. It cannot automatically tell you which data matters. AI can help you create more content. It cannot guarantee anyone will care about it. And a platform can help you reach thousands of people, but it cannot make the wrong audience the right one.
Generating a lead is also very different from creating meaningful engagement with a potential buyer.
That distinction has shaped Energize from the beginning.
We have built our business around helping B2B marketers understand and reach the people who matter to them, whether they are prospective buyers or existing customers, and giving those audiences a compelling reason to engage.
Sometimes that means highly targeted demand generation built around complex target accounts and persona requirements.
Sometimes it means putting a subject matter expert in front of the right audience through a webinar, sitting down with an industry leader to unpack a market or go to market challenge, or using original research to create a point of view that gives buyers something worth paying attention to.
Increasingly, it means bringing those things together.
And we have seen what happens when those pieces work together, from programs achieving 25% stronger cost per lead performance against industry benchmarks to retargeting initiatives generating 25% engagement rates.
The tools will continue to change. The objective has remained remarkably consistent.
We are enthusiastic about what AI can do for marketers. We use it ourselves, and its capabilities are advancing incredibly quickly.
But it is also creating a new challenge. There has never been more content competing for a B2B buyer's attention, and producing another article, email or asset has never been easier.
That makes originality more valuable, not less.
The brands that stand out will bring something substantive to the conversation: proprietary research, real expertise, useful data, original perspectives and content built around what their audiences actually care about.
Not content for the sake of content. And certainly not undifferentiated AI generated content that sounds like everything else a buyer has already scrolled past.
That belief is one reason we have invested so heavily in research, editorial content and our own media capabilities alongside data and demand generation.
Our clients are not simply trying to reach buyers. They are trying to matter to them.
There is a big difference.
Inc. measures growth, and we are extremely proud of ours.
But there is another measure of Energize's first five years that means even more to us: how many clients have trusted us to grow alongside them. Our 98% customer renewal rate is one reflection of that trust.
We have watched individual campaigns turn into annual programs. Demand generation engagements have expanded into research, content, webinars and global programs. We have helped clients go beyond a single interaction by reengaging audiences with relevant content and experiences, creating more engaged leads and greater insight into buyer interest.
Some of our strongest partnerships are with enterprise organizations where we work across multiple business units, becoming an extension of their teams as their needs evolve. Clients have asked us to solve increasingly complex audience and data challenges, introduced us to colleagues and taken us with them when they move to new organizations.
That kind of growth is built over time. It comes from trust, not a single campaign or asset.
We have also remained committed to the markets we know best, particularly cybersecurity, fintech, IT, SaaS and enterprise technology.
Those roots matter. Understanding an audience is about more than having the right job titles in a database. It means understanding the market they operate in, the problems they are trying to solve and the information that will actually earn their attention.
We built Energize to be the kind of partner we believed sophisticated B2B marketers needed.
The Inc. 5000 recognition tells us we were not the only ones who believed there was a need for it.
The Inc. 5000 marks our sixth business and industry recognition in five years, and we are incredibly proud of that.
But companies do not grow because two founders had a good idea. They grow because people make that idea real every day.
Our team has done that.
They have built campaigns under tight deadlines, solved problems clients never knew happened, worked across countries and time zones, challenged us when something could be better, adapted as our business evolved and cared about our clients' success as much as we do.
They have helped turn Energize from the company we imagined five years ago into the company it is today.
Our clients span the globe, which means a day at Energize might start with a conversation about a campaign in Asia Pacific and end with one in North America, with Europe somewhere in between. It's been an incredible ride, and we wouldn't change any of it.
So, to our team, this recognition belongs to you. And to our clients and partners, thank you for trusting us with your brands, audiences and marketing investments, and for growing alongside us.
Yes.
Did we know exactly what Energize Marketing would look like five years later?
Not even close.
Some of the most important parts of our business today did not exist when we started. The technology has changed. Our capabilities have expanded. Our team has grown. And our clients have pushed us into areas we could not have anticipated.
We are still building.
That might be the part of making the Inc. 5000 that excites us most. It recognizes how far Energize Marketing has come, but it does not feel like an arrival.
It feels like validation that what we’re building matters.
So today, we are going to enjoy this one. Celebrate with the people who helped us get here. Thank our clients for believing in us.
And then?
We get back to work.
David Steifman & Michael Greenhut
Co Founders & Managing Partners
Energize Marketing