The key to a successful marketing campaign is segmenting your target audience correctly and being customer-obsessed. But your job is not just to drive people to websites and have them fill out a form to become a lead; it’s to be responsible for the entire customer journey. In fact, 56% of high-performing marketers actively map the customer journey across their company. To successfully join this effort, you need to properly nurture customers. THE TOP-OF-MIND NURTURE B2C companies are experts at the top-of-mind nurture. My local wine shop sends me a weekly update of their tasting events and featured recipes on food and wine pairing. Nordstrom sends me daily reminders about exclusive sales “just for me.” These brands know it’s possible to stay in touch with a prospect who may be a good fit, but is not yet sales-ready. To create a top-of-mind nurture campaign, your small business should use educational and research-based content that establishes your company as a trusted advisor. You can include offers like webinars that explore trending topics in your industry, or content that shows how others are using your product. Don’t have the time or talent to make a webinar or demo? No worries — any free resource, whether an ebook, blog post, or how-to guide, can work. All you have to do is think of what free content your audience will find valuable. At Salesforce, we sometimes share thought-leadership content to help our audience become better at their jobs or in their industry. Once you feed your customers content that’s helpful and not salesy, create this drip nurture and sprinkle in secondary or tertiary call-to-actions (CTAs) like demos or trials to entice them to want more. Then, send an email every 7-9 days — an email every week is too frequent and every two weeks might not be enough. THE IN-TRIAL NURTURE, TRIGGERED BY PRODUCT ACTIONS Most B2B companies have a trial period so users can take a test drive before making their customers buy their actual “car.” For example, at Salesforce, we have a 14-day free trial for small businesses to use our CRM, Salesforce Essentials. Before our team creates content for an in-trial nurture, we did a ton of research. As a marketer, you want your product’s action triggers to connect to your marketing automation. This will help you send triggered emails based on users’ actions versus a time-based email journey. Here’s how we ensured we had a successful in-trial nurture campaign: 1. Consulted our data science team: * We learned that by performing an X action, the user will have an X% higher probability to buy * We learned our users are more likely to convert if they login more than once in their first two days of the trial 2. Collaborated with our support team: * We found what blockers prevent users from taking a specific action These learnings helped us adjust our email cadence, our content, and hone in on creating videos, how-to articles, and content to feed our in-trial nurture. If you don’t have a data science team or a customer support team, don’t fret! You can easily gather customer feedback by setting up focus groups with customers. Talk to your trialists. Talk to people who have never bought from you. Get on live chat. You get the point — talk to your customers! In addition to finding high “propensity to convert” actions, make sure you’re looking for features that create habit loops for your customers. Which features will make users want to login more frequently? How do you use emails or even in-app messaging to encourage those actions? Asking yourself these questions will help you craft a successful in-trial nurture triggered by product actions. THE UPSELL OR CROSS-SELL NURTURE Want to improve your customer’s lifetime value? Upsell and cross-sell nurtures can help. All you have to do is create a nurture campaign targeted to existing customers, then provide them with information and incentives to expand the list of products they currently use. With upsell and cross-sell nurtures, your goal should be to inspire and show (not tell!) customers how to reach maximum potential with your company’s products and services. The best part about this type of nurture? You’re already at an advantage because you’re talking to your biggest fans — not cold leads. Make sure you’re intentional with your content, send relevant information on specific products or services that would be beneficial to a specific segment of clients. Personalized recommendations within this nurture type are the key to success — use variable tags or dynamic content to ensure the right customers receive the right content. Also, make sure you explain the value of a new or existing unused product without being overly aggressive. Since your target list will include current customers, the timing for this program can be less aggressive — you can space emails out between 10-15 days.

As a Demand Gen Marketer, you need to make sure that your 30/60/90 day plan is skewed towards learning about the company/space. The more time you can devote to understanding the business/space/customer, the better you'll be at your job in the long run. That said, I do sprinkle these "quick wins" into my 30/60/90 plan to ensure I'm moving performance in the right direction. I find the campaigns below to be low-effort yet impactful. 1. Run an a/b test on your website's pricing page. Chances are this is one of your best-performing pages when it comes to traffic and impact on conversion. Test something above the fold and you should come to statistical significance within ~45 days. 2. Send out a closed-lost/expired MQL survey. Ask every MQL that didn't convert in the last 3 months to complete a survey in exchange for a $20 Amazon/Starbucks gift card. The questions should be geared towards learning what initially made them interested in your product and why they didn't end up purchasing. Make sure you ask them if they went with a competitor and if so who. If they didn't purchase another product, re-route them to the sales team with their survey answers. If they did, tag them in your CRM to follow up in 9 months. 3. Run an email campaign that generates new reviews. Determine your business's most important keyword that you currently don't rank on page 1 for. Identify the review site (G2, Sofware Advice, etc) that is ranking the highest for that term and ask your customers to write a review on that site. Pull a list of customers with NPS scores of 9/10 and send them an email prompting them to review in exchange for a gift card. While you might not currently rank for that important search term, you can be visible on the website that ranks for it. 

I'd recommending focusing a lot more on engagement and less on lead generation or MQLs. In general, you should know the people you want to engage in each account, and you'll have them already populated in your CRM. This completely eliminates the need for any "lead source" tracking to prove effectiveness. Additionally, you'll want your team to keep engaging the important few until they're ready to take the next step with your company, so measuring actual engagement with marketing materials/programs is key. Several tools out there help with this such as Demandbase and 6Sense, but it can also be homegrown if you have the appetite for it. If I were to oversimplify a lot, assign points based on activities, roll them up to the account level, ensure they decay over time, and then set thresholds based on what matters most for your business. Maybe you need a lot of engagement within a few key contacts, maybe you need the whole village to get activated! If you're not sure, start somewhere, backtest, measure, and iterate. 

Incorporating experimentation and A/B testing into growth marketing strategies is key for driving sustained growth. Without it, marketing results often plateau quickly. Here’s a 6-step process I’ve used in the past to structure a conversion rate optimization program around. Step 1 - Hypothesis Formation In this initial step, pinpoint crucial variables that influence user engagement and construct hypotheses regarding potential changes and their outcomes. * Identify Key Variables: Recognize the key variables (like webpage layout, email subject lines, ad creatives) that you think have a significant impact on user engagement or conversion. * Develop Hypotheses: Formulate hypotheses based on your observations, analytics data, or customer feedback, predicting how changes in these variables might affect the outcomes. Step 2 - Designing Experiments Here, the focus is on developing different variants based on the formed hypotheses, establishing a control group, and setting up appropriate analytics tools to track the performance metrics accurately. * Creating & Develop Variants: Create different variants of the webpage, email, or ad, incorporating the changes as per your hypotheses. * Control Group: Maintain a control group where no changes are made, to compare the results with the variants. * Define Key Metrics: Set up key metrics (like click-through rate, conversion rate, etc.) that will help you evaluate the performance of each variant. * Setting Up Analytics: Ensure that analytics tools are set up correctly to accurately track the performance metrics. Step 3 - Conducting Experiments During this phase, conduct the experiments by segregating the audience into different groups and launching all variants simultaneously to avoid time-based biases, ensuring a fair test. * Randomized Split Testing: Divide the audience randomly into different groups, each group being exposed to one variant. * Simultaneous Launch: Launch all the variants simultaneously to prevent any time-based biases from affecting the results. Step 4 - Data Collection and Analysis This step entails meticulous data collection and analysis to discern the most effective variant, followed by deriving insights to comprehend customer preferences and documenting the findings for future reference. * Collect Data: Gather data on how each variant performed based on the defined metrics. * Analyze Results: Analyze the data to find out which variant performed the best and if the differences are statistically significant. * Draw Insights: Draw insights from the experiment results, understanding customer preferences and behaviors. * Document Learnings: Document the learnings from each experiment to build a knowledge base for future reference. Step 5 - Implementation and Optimization At this point, your focus is implement any successful test, engage in continuous optimization based on the learnings, and accelerate growth by repeating the testing process with new hypotheses. * Implement Changes: Implement the changes based on the winning variant to optimize your marketing strategies. * Continuous Optimization: Use the learnings to continuously optimize and improve your marketing strategies. * Scale Successful Experiments: Scale up the successful experiments to a larger audience to maximize the benefits. * Iterative Process: Make experimentation an iterative process, continuously testing new hypotheses to foster growth. Step 6 - Knowledge Sharing Lastly, foster a data-driven culture within the organization by sharing the learnings with the team, encouraging collaboration, innovation, and developing a flexible marketing strategy adaptable based on the insights gathered from the experiments. * Share Learnings: Share the learnings with your team to foster a culture of data-driven decision-making. * Collaborative Approach: Encourage a collaborative approach where team members can propose new hypotheses for testing. * Fostering Innovation: Foster a culture of experimentation within the organization, encouraging innovation and agility. * Adaptability: Develop an adaptable marketing strategy that can pivot based on the insights from the experiments. By following this structured approach to experimentation and A/B testing, you can effectively incorporate them into your growth marketing strategies, driving improved results and fostering sustainable growth.

This one is going to be simple. Focus on being close to the numbers and be ready to be creative! I do think there are some foundational pieces to building a demand generation engine. The first is having a balanced program mix, make sure are bringing names in a consistent and steady flow. Being close to the numbers helps understanding what channels are working, which channels to invest more time & money in, and making sure these are the programs that convert to meetings and closed won. Once you have that foundational piece, focus on getting creative. At the end of the day, most demand gen teams are running the same types of programs—webinars, emails, etc. It's up to you as the leader of your team to think out of the box. Tip: Look at those programs that are converting well and see how you can hypercharge them by adding a gift card incentive for taking a meeting!

I believe that all integrated campaigns should exist to drive pipeline & revenue (there is an exception though: when this is not true is when you are creating a category). The biggest difference between these two goals is the volume and the type of buyers you choose to ignore or add to your campaign strategy. For example, an integrated campaign strategy that is focused on meeting pipe goals (assuming limited funds) is focused (more) on two buyer stages - Consideration & Intent. It therefore already assumes that the majority of buyers are aware of the product category and the existence of possible solutions in the market. * Your biggest leverage point here is to make yourself known in specific buying situations (eg. 'we are an affordable alternative to XYZ', 'we are easier to use compared to ABC'). Think of these as inputs to your ad creatives, content assets, etc. * You contain these seemingly disparate buying situations into a 'Campaign theme', a singular go-to-market messaging that focuses the collective energy of all GTM teams in your organization * You now create the right mix of offers that get your buyers to self-select themselves into the demand funnel. What is the type and number of webinars, owned vs 3rd party events, content assets, Demos, Free Trials, Free for forever plan, etc? * You develop a media plan that lays out these offers in a certain sequence, and the time period and is promoted using specific tactics. Since your focus is pipe-gen, it's important to have an educated pov on gated vs ungated content strategy. This, usually, is not as big a concern area in a Brand marketing campaign.

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? 

In the Demand Generation world, KPI's are ever-evolving but one always remains consistent - "to drive marketing pipeline for the business." When starting out your career in DG, KPI's will be decided by your MLT team and assigned dependent on the annual, bi-annual or quarterly goals. Some of the most common may be dependent on: - a low performing product line needing a boost - a regional team needing pipeline assistance - or a channel needing support As you grow into DG leadership, additional KPI's come into play around driving better ROIs on campaigns, driving down business costs, while delivering additional pipeline, as well as employee development for your team.

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.