Creating the Talent Marketing Category: The Martec

The central source of truth for Employer Brand professionals

At Airtree, we believe the recent advances in Generative AI will enable new opportunities for application software to solve problems unaddressed by existing software providers.

Enter The Martec

In recent years, the tight labour market made companies increasingly aware of the need to build a brand targeting potential employees, not just customers. This led to the role of “Employer Brand” within large enterprises. 

Employer Brand professionals focus on building a brand strategy, finding employee advocates within the company, creating content,  and amplifying that content across a company’s distribution channels. Their goal is to attract candidates who may not traditionally apply. 

The Martec has built a multi-product tool to help these professionals scale their marketing capability across: 

• Content Strategy: Tools to generate content ideas for specific roles, add them to a content planner, and find the best employees in an organisation to create that content as “Employee Advocates” for the brand.

• Content Creation: AI-powered tools to enable employees to write content and create their own videos, as well as tools to help recruiters write engaging job descriptions. 

• Content Distribution: Widgets for a company’s career site, website, and job adverts to help convert more traffic to job applications; tools to generate social media copy to make it easier for employees to share content. 

There are many reasons we are excited to invest in The Martec’s $8m Series A round, including: 

Founder-Market Fit

We often talk about investing in people who can bring together two ideas that haven’t been connected before to solve a pressing problem for customers.  Raaj was part of a founding team that built and sold a marketing software company, then started and scaled a recruitment agency. This enabled him to bring a marketing mindset to the problem of attracting strong talent, and he understood the tools needed to do this successfully.  Raaj’s compelling vision has attracted some extraordinary talent across the world to join him on this journey. 

Technology Tailwinds

Raaj was playing with the OpenAI APIs back in 2020, long before the current AI hype cycle. He saw the possibility of scaling content generation using LLMs and started talking to customers constantly as he tested and iterated ideas for a full product suite. With AI, The Martec is able to personalise content to target every potential employee with the right message, at the right time, to help companies recruit the best talent faster. 

A Category Creation Opportunity

If you’re early to an emerging market and can become the early winner in that category, you can win outsized market share as that category grows. 

Given Employer Brand is a new role within companies, The Martec saw the opportunity to create a space to bring these professionals together to share their experiences and advice. They now run one of the largest Employer Brand communities globally, with 3,000 global talent marketing members. By positioning themselves as the marquee community for Employer Brand professionals, they’ve secured conversations with senior Talent professionals who would have never responded to an outbound email. 

They’ve also enabled strong word-of-mouth growth within the Employer Brand community. When we spoke with The Martec’s customers, many mentioned hearing about them from people in the same role at other companies. 

This is particularly important with a product that can become a central source of truth for customers. Not only does this lead to strong retention with customers, it also creates opportunities for strong revenue expansion within customers, both by adding new products to upsell and by expanding across geographies and departments within that company. The Martec has already proven this out by expanding from regional departments in large global companies, to several regions and then global mandates. 

We feel extremely lucky to partner with Raaj and the team to help them scale a global SaaS company from Australia.