Spectrum Labs Case Study | Matli Consulting

Key Results

3×

Sales Pipeline

in 18 months

5.9%→13.7%

MQL-to-SQL Conversion

in 6 months

+188%

Marketing-Sourced Opportunities

year over year

+255%

Community Growth

year over year; 90% of closed-won deals were members

−31%

Cost per Lead

from SEO content

Exit

Acquired

by ActiveFence, August 2023

This Case Study Answers

How do you scale pipeline at a Series B AI company?
How do you position a technical AI product for non-technical buyers?
How do you build a community that drives enterprise sales?
How do you prepare a brand for acquisition?

Justin DavisCo-Founder & CEO, Spectrum Labs (acquired by ActiveFence)

Dave’s brand and product marketing leadership was instrumental in building the Spectrum Labs brand to become the most trusted leader in AI content moderation, positioning it well for its eventual acquisition.

What Happened

The Challenge

Spectrum Labs’ contextual AI could detect hate speech, grooming, scams and harassment that keyword filters and other AI missed — in multiple languages, in real time. But the category was crowded with look-alike vendors, the product was deeply technical, and the brand talked mostly about itself.

To grow from Series B, Spectrum needed a story buyers could see themselves in, a funnel that produced qualified pipeline rather than raw leads, and a reputation strong enough to stand out to customers, press and eventual acquirers.

The Spectrum Labs brand in market

Positioning: From What We Do to Who Our Customers Are

The problem

Trust & Safety teams were buying a mission, not a model. Messaging built around detection features put Spectrum side by side with every other moderation vendor.

The solution

A brand audit and positioning brief laddered the story up from “I manage these behaviors” to “I make my platform safer” to “I make the world better.” The master brand became the leader in Contextual AI, with a mission to make a better internet, and each product got its own single-minded promise: Guardian to cover more content, Amplify to retain more users, and a compliance offer that made new EU and UK safety regulations easy to meet.

Brand architecture

Building the engine

Brand, Community & Pipeline

A Full-Funnel Website, Paid Media & PR

We rebuilt the website around how customers buy: industry pages for gaming, dating, social platforms and marketplaces; persona pages for Trust & Safety, product, engineering and marketing teams; and dedicated pages for regulatory compliance and generative AI moderation. Optimized Google Ads nearly tripled engaged sessions per user.

PR placed Spectrum in the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, CNBC, MIT Technology Review and Forbes, alongside speaking slots at GamesBeat and our own ProSocial Summit. Organic traffic grew 26.6% to 13.1K visits a month.

Website, Google Ads performance, display ads, press coverage and event appearances — Website, paid media and PR

Community & Content: The Trust & Safety Collective

Founded in 2021, the Trust & Safety Collective gave the people who keep platforms safe a place to share what works — through master classes, webinars, a newsletter and the ProSocial Summit. It became Spectrum’s most powerful pipeline source: members grew 255% year over year, two-thirds came from priority accounts, and 90% of closed-won deals were members.

With lead scoring in place, qualified leads grew 446% and marketing-sourced opportunities 157% in a single year. Webinars averaged 274 registrants with 54% attendance, and the newsletter held a 44% open rate.

Product Marketing & Sales Enablement

Product marketing gave every buyer the materials they needed: API and engineering resources, product one-sheets, a marketecture of the platform, competitive positioning against Hive, Two Hat and ActiveFence, and full-journey attribution so sales could see which touches moved deals. Intros and demos sourced from product marketing lifted MQL-to-SQL conversion 230%.

Sales enablement materials: product and API pages, marketecture, competitive landscape and attribution dashboard — Marketing-attributed sales enablement

The Result: A Category Leader, Acquired

In 18 months pipeline tripled, conversion more than doubled and cost per lead fell 31%. In August 2023 ActiveFence acquired Spectrum Labs, a direct competitor and by then the trusted leader in AI content moderation.