The way that Customer Marketing teams and functions should be staffed and organized will vary greatly from company to company, especially when looking at more traditional B2B or sales-led organizations vs Product-led organizations. In my experience, though, the best way to orient the team is around three core responsibilities: * Activation & Engagement: Measurement of activation metrics and time to activation, often in the form of lifecycle marketing. Driving customer education and programmatic communication that support enterprise onboarding, end-user training materials, and aircover to gain as much traction within paying accounts as possible. * Upsells & Expansion: Driven through targeted programs that aim to increase revenue from existing enterprise accounts through targeting new teams, referrals, and surfacing new MQLs to account managers. Can be done through Customer Advisory Boards, 1:1 Account Events, Customer Webinars, and account-based acquisition campaigns. * Advocacy: Measurement of output-based programs that develop champions and put your customers on a stage like case studies, referencable logos, and customer stories across channels (webinars, events, content). When first starting out or when you have a lean team, I've found starting with an account-based customer marketing approach is the best way to drive meaningful impact and quick wins for your CSMs and on your company's bottom-line. Identify the top renewals or any accounts at risk of churning and create targeted account plans to save and expand each. This will provide the frameworks and structures to scale as the team grows.

One of the great things about Demand Gen is that there isn't a set path into it. For example, I started my career in sales and account management before transitioning over to marketing. While somewhat atypical, I've found having a sales background to be beneficial as I've grown my career in DG because it gave me a first hand look into what the sales and marketing relationship looks like from the other perspective, and a deep empathy for being quota carrying. I've worked with incredible DG marketers who have come to DG from different fields (both from other functions in marketing and fields outside of marketing) and landed on Demand Gen. My recommendation would be to think about how your skills in another field can transfer over to a Demand Gen role. Chances are they are transferable and will provide you with a differentiated view point because of them. Use that to your advantage!

Let's first define an 'integrated campaign' approach. * At its core, the 'Integrated' approach implies three things - knowing and using the buyer's journey as the premise to building the marketing strategy, aiming for consistency in marketing across touchpoints & sequencing your messaging across these touchpoints * A 'campaign' is nothing but a coordinated set of assets & tactics to help your buyers progress from Awareness to Consideration to Decision. The other underrated impact of a campaign is its ability to corral organizational focus, time, and efforts toward a single goal and theme (sales, product, customer success, marketing) An Integrated Campaign strategy is an amalgam of these concepts. So do all businesses need an integrated campaign strategy? Yes. But does an integrated campaign strategy look the same for all businesses? No. The need for a Series A startup to craft an integrated campaign strategy is as much as it is for a Series C & Post-IPO business. The nature and scope of integration, however, vary significantly. These factors might help as you think through this. 1. Have you achieved Product-Channel(s) fit? * If are a Seed stage startup and have reliably managed to scale one or two acquisition channels, you have other things on your mind than 'integrating' these two channels. That is because, today, you do not have the channel width to capture a large part of the buyer's journey (community, email, in-app, review sites). * If you have a larger business, you might already have the channel width that covers a large proportion of your buyer's journey. This is the right time to think about an 'integrated campaign' strategy. Some of the questions to ask are - a) Do I know my buyer's journey with a fair degree of confidence b) Are they experiencing the same 'messaging theme' across touchpoints c) How can I sequence my tactics & messaging based on the demand funnel 2. What is your GTM motion? * Are you PLG or Sales-led or both? If you are PLG, you focus on specific channels that drive inbound demand - SEO, Paid Search, Content, In-app virality, Community, Review sites & Emails. If you have a Sales-led motion, you (mostly) focus on channels that go beyond these to also include Webinars, Events, SDR messaging, & Content. In both scenarios, your buyers want to experience your business in a way that is consistent across these touchpoints and takes them through a journey (sequencing in messaging) irrespective of whichever touchpoint they are in. 3. Do you have an established Brand marketing strategy within your organization? * If your org runs brand marketing campaigns, you'll need to redefine the architecture of your demand-gen-led integrated campaigns. In this new scenario, you'll have to view the buyer's journey together and build out common areas of leverage. For example, a Brand marketing campaign usually targets a large proportion of 'Problem unaware' buyers. So how can your demand-gen team nudge these buyers down the funnel via an integrated approach? Here, the role of demand-gen shifts to nudging these buyers to the 'Consideration' & 'Decision' stages using the same messaging theme and leveraging tactics (such as collecting a retargeting pool of qualified intent, etc.) that capture their engagement and intent for your category or business. 

In terms of defining success, more top line KPIs are aligned to the targets set for pipeline and ACV (annual contract value) and my team's marketing contribution. Since my team focuses on building new C-Suite relationships for a set global list of top accounts, we're able to measure and hold ourselves accountable to the ability to drive new C-Suite relationships and expand our footprint within the top accounts. Qualitatively I also check in with my key stakeholders to ensure my teams are aligned to their top priorities.

ROI and marketing attribution is the most challenging KPIs for startups in the technology space; most of these companies do not measure CLV and instead, they measure results on an annual basis, depending on factors such as average sales cycle, average deal size and market maturity, reporting returns of marketing investment in the short term is challenging. One important KPI that demand generation teams may overlook in fast-growing technology companies is the customer lifetime value (CLV). CLV is a metric that calculates the total amount of revenue a customer is expected to generate for a company over the course of their relationship. It takes into account factors such as customer acquisition cost, average purchase value, and customer retention rate, and provides a more accurate picture of a company's revenue potential than simply looking at short-term revenue or leads generated. By focusing on CLV, demand generation teams can prioritize their efforts on acquiring high-value customers who are more likely to generate long-term revenue for the company. They can also identify areas where they can improve customer retention and increase the overall value of each customer. Overall, CLV can provide a more comprehensive and strategic view of a company's revenue growth potential and help demand generation teams make more informed decisions about their marketing and sales strategies.

This is a great question! I can't tell you the number of times I've created content because someone in the C-suite thought it would be a good idea, or because a sales reply simply couldn't close a deal with a highly customized 1-pager. The truth is - content should be created with a purpose. Here are the questions I like to ask when conducting a content audit: * Does this content answer questions our customers are asking? Does it help our customers & prospects accomplish their goals? * How does the reader feel after consuming this piece of content? Does that feeling align with what our goal was when we created the piece? * What is the purpose of this piece of content? Is it still serving that purpose? * How often is this piece of content used, by who, and in what capacity? * When was the last time this content was refreshed? Is this something we want to be a staple in our library? * In what other forms does this content exist (blog, podcast, short video, webinar, etc)? If the answer is none, should it be created in smaller, more digestible snippets? 

Our demand generation team has three major pillars: * Website - responsible for our corporate website. While they care about impact, they also need to service other needs for the company beyond pure demand generation. They're held to a slightly different standard, as a result. * Acquisition - responsible for acquiring new leads. We have it split between Organic (SEO), Paid, and Channel (BD partnerships) * Customer Marketing - responsible for educating and upselling/cross-selling customers There's multiple teams that live within those major pillars that are structure more tactically, but the three pillars comprise the major differences in expectations and OKRs that would be associated there.

This is a great question and a tough one to answer! Every org should develop this based on need. If I were to design a Demand Gen org for Global, it would look like this: * Demand Gen Strategy & Operations: You need one (or multiple people depending on the size of the org) to own the general Operations for the team. Meeting scheduling, global team interlocks, OKR setting, etc. * Demand Gen Analysts: This team will own the campaign data and so your focus can be on deriving insights and demand gen orchestration. * Global Interlock Lead: This person should own the relationships with the regions and the process of how assets get localized and delivered to the global teams. Is there a regular meeting cadence? How do you introduce new campaigns to the global teams so they are aware? * Campaign Leads/ Orchestrators: These are the Demand Gen warriors who own building their campaigns end to end. You can consider dividing this team up by segment type (Prospects vs. Customers, specific target audience segments, etc.). * Content Strategists: This team can own building the content and ensuring they are including global insights to make it relevant for global teams. Often the pitfall when building global demand gen teams is that the teams build for the region they are in and are not considerate of how to extend the message to be global. This team can own building assets such as infographics, webinars, etc. 

The key variable that affects the choice of channels is -- target audience. 1. Audience type - Is this a new business campaign or install base, cross-sell / up-sell campaign? New business campaigns are heavy on paid media and install base campaigns are heavy on owned media 2. Market segment - Is this an SMB/mid-market campaign or an enterprise campaign? New business SMB/Mid-market campaigns are largely driven by inbound tactics such as paid search, website, SEO whereas Enterprise campaigns require an ABM strategy Other key variables that affect choice of channels are of course pipeline goals and budget.

I would recommend building target account lists based on where that account is in their customer journey. Channels are usually pretty constant. Your targeting ability, level of intent, tactics/offers, messages, and the budget you're willing to spend on them will change. It will cost significantly more budget & time to acquire a new customer, so focus on where you see the biggest potential impact first. Within a tiered 1:1, 1:few, 1:many structure: what is the potential ARR of an account within each segment? That could help determine your effort & willingness to spend on a given account list.