From Zero Awareness to Market Saturation in 12 Months

Can a brand go from total obscurity to industry recognition in just one year - without a huge ad budget or big marketing team?
Ray Huang, Senior Director of Marketing at Canopy Connect, joins the show to unpack exactly how he did it.

When Ray joined Canopy Connect, the company was a 12-person insurtech startup with zero brand recognition, no real marketing infrastructure, and a fragmented market.

Fast forward 12 months: they’d saturated their niche, dominated industry events, and flipped their cold-start problem into pipeline momentum.

In this deep-dive, Ray reveals his full B2B go-to-market strategy—how he prioritized brand awareness over bottom-funnel lead gen, why memes outperformed traditional creative, and how Facebook outpaced LinkedIn in ad ROI by 10x. He also shares how he transitioned from solo marketer to team leader, built a paid media engine from scratch, and used list-based targeting to run smart, scalable ABM-style campaigns.

We cover:

• Building brand awareness in a niche B2B market
• Paid media strategy: Facebook vs. LinkedIn for insurance tech
• Content marketing and early-stage demand gen
• Why low-funnel attribution often misleads startup marketers
• Using first-party data to scale ABM campaigns
• Growth marketing vs. brand marketing tradeoffs
• Hiring sequence: content, demand gen, partner marketing
• How to justify brand spend to the C-suite (and get buy-in)

If you're a Chief Marketing Officer looking to increase market saturation or a startup CEO needing to get your company off the ground, this episode is your roadmap.

Want to learn more about Canopy Connect? Check out usecanopy.com.

Need help with marketing? Go to perissonnetwork.com for a free strategy session.