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.

If you're still on an inbound (MQL) model, I would start by pivoting every report through the lens of "target account vs. non-target account". * # of campaign responses * # of opportunities generated * $ pipeline generated * ACV * # closed won * $ closed won What matters gets measured. Over time, (ideally) it will reflect that target accounts drive the biggest impact to the business. (If not, it likely means that you'll need to take another look at the target account / ICP criteria.) In my experience, that usually is the catalyst to change how can we drive more "target account" pipeline? To do that, we'll need to think differently about engaging with an account & identify more of those leading indicators. Then, you can start thinking about the KPIs and what it means for an Account to be "Qualified".

Marketing cannot close business without sales. Sales is the most important partner to marketing, ABM or not. While you can gain the support of the leadership teams, sales ops, etc, if you don't have your sales team onboard with your plans, you will not succeed. Bring your sales team into the process early and keep them informed ia regular status updates (bi-weekly, monthly, or quarterly). Highlight your wins and your losses.

This is a tricky one as the business can often communicate all of these features and products are equally important. In reality it often creates too many messages for your audience if you try to go after them all at the same time, not to mention it will quickly burn one to two people out! Consider spending time with product marketing to map out a focus over the next quarter or two. Really force the conversation around prioritization. Pick a product or two or combo of features and ladder them up to a theme or concept. Figure out the story you want to tell and execute on that whether that be through ebooks, whitepapers, webinars, etc. Then repeat for the next quarter. Your prospects and customers will benefit from a focused and directed journey. Ideally the product or feature you focus on in one quarter should lead to the focus for the next quarter so it feels cohesive. Last thing to note, creating an effective an efficient always on engine will significantly ease this burden. I recommend an 80/20 split. 80% of your efforts should be focused on driving always on (trial, ebooks, whitepapers, web, etc) and 20% should be focused on Point in Time (PIT) (webinars, trainings, hands on). As your portfolio of always on assets grows it will naturally cover more products.

Honing your craft and being able to share insights and recommendations (based on data) is a great start. Managers often don't have time to get into the weeds, but if they get insights they don't know or recommendations on how to do something differently, this is a good first step in becoming influential. Being concise in your delivery is also important. If you're putting together a written proposal, it's always recommended to start with a brief summary of the expected outcomes/key findings at the start. More generally, the more you understand the business, the better. For example, if you're aiming to be more influential with sales, understanding their challenges, having shared KPIs, talking their language and really knowing the customer will help you gain respect and become more influential. Finally, being a good person to work with naturally drives this. Being a good listener, giving others a voice, taking ownership, avoiding blame, and keeping everyone focussed on what matters.

For ad-hoc campaigns, we typically would either repeat and iterate if it’s performing well or kill it if it’s not. Even if it’s not performing well, we would take that learning to inform future campaign strategy or other workstreams. Typically, we monitor performance throughout the campaign flight to make optimization. For example, we recently launched a lead gen campaign driving customers to book a call with a rep upon qualifying. Because users may not be familiar with our products, we launched a standalone page to provide overview and a separate form page so we can integrate the scheduling tool using another platform. One week post launch, the data shows that there was a huge drop-off from the first landing page to the form page itself. We had to make an immediate decision to reduce the steps in the user journey and drive users to the form page directly. After updating the backend user logic and content on the form page, we made the change and saw a significant uplift in form submission conversion. However, there isn’t too much increase in the number of calls scheduled. For this campaign, our recommendation would be to kill it but we plan to repurpose the integration we have done and benchmarks collected to inform an upcoming market expansion GTM approach.

In most cases, you would want to keep the URLs of the posts and pages the same. If the pages had good organic rankings, maintaining the URLs is essential to maintaining those rankings. Additionally, if URLs are changed, and proper redirects are not in place, users will experience errors, and your site risks losing rank. Whether or not you change positioning is entirely up to you. With every website update looking at content and whether it brings value to visitors is critically important.

I answered this more comprehensively in another question, but to summarize: 1. Vanity Metrics: Anything that can be gamed or doesn't directly reflect impact with your target audience (e.g., raw traffic, followers, engagement metrics, etc.) 2. "Leads" Without Context: There are lots of low-value, scam-y ways you can incentivize someone to fill out a form on the internet. For that reason, "lead" volumes without context (qualification criteria) tell you very little about whether demand gen efforts are working.

Content audits are very complex and for a good reason, content forms the bedrock of your Go-To-Market (GTM) strategy. It powers the education of your category and product, nurtures trust, and transmutes mere words into the embodiment of your brand and its distinctive voice. To get to the questions, you need to think about the audit in terms of phases. Phase 1: Stage and persona framework: Do you have content that touches every stage of the customer journey, pre and post sale, for every layer of the buying team including. 1. Individual contributor/end user. 2. Mid-level or Senior Management. 3. C-Level. Phase 2: Relevance and engagement framework: Is the content accurate and up to date? Is it current, factual, and relevant? A great way to break this out is a simple spreadsheet that lists your content, and columns that capture content type, date published, target persona, funnel stage, in market, status (relevant/not), action (keep, refresh, cut). The next part of this exercise is to measure the engagement level? While KPIs will differ based on “role” or “job” of the content, it’s important to list these out, granularly. Phase 3: Summarize your plan forward: Where are the gaps? What’s the plan for the future? Does it fit into your overall content strategy? Do you have the right infrastructure to measure success? From there you have an attack plan for campaigns, ads, enablemen, nurtures and more. And remember SEO is a strategy of its own. So while it’s integrated, a campaign content audit must be approached uniquely from SEO. By keeping these phases anchored on these questions in mind, you can conduct a thorough content audit that helps refine and optimize your content strategy for better results.

There is definitely not a single career path for demand gen. Everyone must carve their own path based on the existing skills they have today, and being honest about what they really want to do in the future. I began my career with a heavy focus on developing my skills with marketing tech and operations, and invested heavily in enterprise marketing skills - such as developing a total addressable market and go-to-market strategy, account-based marketing and paid media management. A good overall basic framework is the "T-shaped marketer" framework. (Google it!) It is a good starting point for understanding all of the disciplines of demand gen and understanding how deep and wide you want to go in your skillset.