Inside the Value Loop: How Cognism Turned Consistent Audience Growth Into $6 Million in Revenue
Most marketers treat webinars like sprints. You plan the event, promote it, hope people show up, and then move on to the next thing. If you’re lucky, a few leads trickle in. But momentum? That’s rare.
Cognism saw the same problem and decided to do something different.
Instead of chasing spikes of engagement, they built a system that compounds. A repeatable engine that consistently grows their audience, deepens engagement, and drives revenue. They call it the “value loop.”
In this guide, we’ll walk you through how Cognism turned that system into a revenue-generating machine, delivering:
- $6 million in influenced pipeline
- Doubling engagement
- Growing their mid-market audience by 31%
This is the exact strategy, structure, and setup behind those results and how they brought it to life.
Laying the Foundation
Cognism is a leader in B2B sales intelligence, known for building a brand that resonates across the sales and marketing landscape. Under the leadership of Liam Bartholomew, VP of Brand & Customer Marketing, Cognism’s content and event strategy has become one of the most disciplined and effective programs in the space.
Liam’s team focuses on growing brand equity while delivering measurable impact, bridging the often siloed goals of awareness and revenue. The value loop approach reflects this balance. It is equal parts brand-building and demand generation, grounded in a formulaic structure but flexible enough to evolve.
Before launching this approach, Cognism faced a familiar challenge: webinars were inconsistent, attribution was unclear, and scaling the program required more resources than the team could support. While individual events sometimes performed well, there was no system to carry momentum from one session to the next.
The turning point came when the team restructured their program around a repeatable framework. This shift enabled them to treat events not as isolated tactics, but as components of a broader strategy designed to compound over time. They called this the “value loop.
The Strategy: Building the Value Loop
A key strength of Cognism’s value loop is how seamlessly it integrates into their broader media ecosystem. Their live event series doesn’t operate in isolation—it feeds into a larger media machine that includes podcasts, blogs, social campaigns, newsletters, and influencer collaborations. This alignment ensures that core messages are reinforced across channels and that no piece of content stands alone. Each live event is not only a moment for real-time engagement but also a foundation for cross-channel amplification.
Cognism’s value loop is not limited to virtual events. It’s built on a cross-channel content foundation that reinforces key themes throughout the quarter. Core messaging is carried through live events, blogs, social content, podcasts, influencer collaborations, and “Big Rock” campaigns. The value loop thrives because every piece of content serves both a brand-building and demand-driving role.
At the heart of Cognism’s strategy is the decision to structure their events as a consistent series. Instead of reinventing the wheel for every campaign, they committed to a formula that allows for repeatability, scalability, and clarity across teams.
Each quarter, the team identifies key brand themes and content pillars—often centered around concepts like compliance, sales enablement, or strategic planning. These become the foundation for campaigns such as “Cold Calling Live,” “Date-a-Vendor,” or “Fix My Funnel,” all of which are designed to be engaging, persona-specific, and immediately relevant. From there, they develop a slate of content, including live events, thought leadership, and digital content assets that all reinforce the central theme.
Events are organized as part of an ongoing series that align to target personas. Initially, Cognism experimented with running different live series for each core persona—sales, marketing, operations, and customer success. Over time, they optimized around the audiences and formats that delivered the most consistent results, allowing them to focus resources where impact was greatest. This persona-first structure strengthens brand familiarity and builds content equity over time.
Crucially, Cognism doesn’t measure success based on registrations or MQLs alone. Their system is underpinned by a three-part measurement model:
- Engagement: Time spent on page, participation in chat and polls, qualitative feedback, and attention metrics.
- Audience Quality: The makeup of attendees, with an emphasis on ICP fit and growth in mid-market and enterprise segments.
- Pipeline & Revenue Influence: Sourced through tools like Dreamdata and Sequel.io, and self-reported attribution, this layer connects marketing activity to sales outcomes.
This model ensures that the team is not just tracking activity, but understanding impact.
Building an Integrated System That Scales
To make their value loop strategy repeatable and scalable, Cognism needed to create a seamless experience for their audience while capturing deeper insights into engagement and intent. That required a platform that could integrate with their existing systems, support embedded experiences, and deliver reliable behavioral data.
Cognism uses Sequel to embed live and on-demand events directly on their website, allowing them to own the entire experience and maintain control over branding, data, and distribution. With Sequel, the team can track pre-event, in-session, and post-event engagement at both the company and user level.
This visibility allows Cognism to understand who is engaging, how deeply, and where those signals align with pipeline opportunities. Because the platform integrates with Salesforce, Pardot, and HubSpot, the team is able to route data across systems and ensure marketing insights inform outbound and ABM strategy.
By embedding events on their site and eliminating the need for third-party landing pages, Cognism also reduces friction in the buyer journey. Visitors can register and attend events without ever leaving the Cognism ecosystem, which improves conversion and creates a more unified experience.
Execution and Activation
Cognism’s value loop comes to life through a disciplined operational process, executed by a lean team and supported by well-aligned technology. Two key team members (Amy on content and Holley on customer marketing) lead much of the day-to-day execution, proving that even a compact marketing org can run a high-output program with the right systems in place.
Event Structure and Planning
Execution is where the strategy becomes tangible, and this is where Cognism has refined a system that any marketing team can learn from. First, the team established a repeatable event structure that aligns with both internal workflows and external audience expectations. Every live session follows a predictable format—same flow, consistent branding, and reliable production quality. This makes content creation easier and lowers the barrier for internal collaboration.
Each event is planned and aligned with quarterly campaign themes. The team begins by identifying relevant messaging that aligns to their ICPs and the broader campaigns they’re running across other content channels. Topics are chosen not just for what’s timely, but for what has repeatable value across multiple sessions and audiences. This intentional planning reduces cognitive load and enables reuse of templates and processes.
Rather than creating new assets from scratch every time, the team develops and maintains a bank of reusable messaging templates across email, social media, and paid ads. These assets are iterated on based on performance, creating a compounding effect where best-performing messaging becomes more effective over time. Rather than reinventing every asset, they use consistent messaging templates across email, social, and paid channels. When something performs well, it’s reused and iterated, not discarded.
Promotion and Audience Development
Promotion begins 2-3 weeks before each session. The marketing team owns the outreach process, leveraging Cognism’s internal data to create targeted email lists and paid audiences. Campaigns are focused, direct, and designed to reinforce familiarity with the series format, making it more likely that a registrant becomes a repeat attendee.
Strategic collaboration with sales happens selectively. SDRs are invited to support outreach only when there is alignment with ABM campaigns or active pipeline activity. This focus ensures the marketing team can operate at scale while sales is only pulled in when it’s likely to drive high-value conversions.
Seamless Delivery and Live Engagement
When the session goes live, Sequel enables a branded, frictionless experience. Events are hosted directly on Cognism’s website rather than a third-party platform, helping keep prospects in the brand environment from registration through to post-event engagement.
Sequel powers interactive features like chat, polls, and reactions, which Cognism uses not only to improve engagement during the event but also as valuable intent signals. Participation in live features becomes a real-time indicator of interest, allowing marketing to identify who is engaging most deeply, sometimes even before the event ends. Sequel also powers live engagement features such as chat, polls, and reactions, which help surface high-interest participants in real time.
Post-Event Analysis and Lead Routing
After the session, Cognism uses Sequel’s Audience Insights and CRM integrations to review attendee engagement. This includes tracking who clicked, participated, revisited, engaged in multiple sessions or viewed other website content.
Rather than routing every registrant to sales, the team uses behavioral signals to determine lead quality. This includes both quantitative metrics, such as clicks, time on site, and poll participation, and qualitative feedback. Liam’s team regularly reviews chat transcripts and direct feedback to understand what topics resonated, which speakers drove the most interaction, and what content formats triggered follow-up discussions. These insights are then used to refine upcoming topics and series direction.
For example, if a particular cold calling session generated a spike in engagement and strong qualitative feedback, that theme might be expanded into a multi-part series or used to inform sales outreach messaging. High-intent contacts are routed into ABM workflows or flagged for SDR outreach based on predefined criteria.
Content Repurposing and Lifecycle Extension
Repurposing is a core pillar of Cognism’s execution strategy. Each session is recorded and strategically broken into modular content. These assets are distributed across paid campaigns, organic social, newsletters, and blog content.
This approach ensures that one high-quality session continues to drive awareness and engagement long after the live event ends. It also allows the team to test different formats—short clips for social, long-form thought leadership for SEO, and insights summaries for email—without having to start from scratch for each channel.
This closed-loop system allows Cognism to do more with less. One example: during a recent event in their Cold Calling Live series, the team identified a segment of attendees who not only participated in polls and asked questions, but also revisited Cognism’s site multiple times post-event. Using Sequel’s engagement tracking, these high-signal accounts were flagged and prioritized for ABM outreach, resulting in significantly higher conversion compared to general registrant follow-up.
These kinds of insights—delivered in real time—allow the team to focus efforts on the audiences most likely to convert. Every event drives immediate value, feeds into broader campaign themes, and contributes to measurable revenue. It’s not just about producing events—it’s about building a high-leverage, data-informed engine that accelerates brand and pipeline growth.
The Results
Cognism’s value loop strategy delivered clear, measurable impact:
- $6 million in influenced revenue
- 31% growth in their mid-market audience
- 2x engagement
Beyond the numbers, the strategy created alignment across teams, simplified execution, and enabled Cognism to treat content as an asset, not an obligation.
Cognism’s success wasn’t about running more events. It was about building a better system. Their value loop strategy shows what’s possible when you prioritize consistency, put your audience at the center, and use the right technology to scale.
For marketing teams looking to move beyond disconnected campaigns and start building content that drives both trust and revenue, Cognism’s approach offers a clear path forward.
