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.

Typically, most campaigns can fall into one of the two buckets: awareness or performance. We need to create campaigns that have a balance of brand and performance as we can’t have brand work that doesn’t perform and performance work that doesn’t elevate your brand. Your campaign should have brand expertise as well as showcasing your product offerings in solving your customer’s challenges. * Brand campaigns are meant to create demand through inspirational content * Performance campaigns are meant to capture that demand by converting the audience The type of campaign prioritized depends on your business KPIs and brand saturation. If your brand/product has fairly low awareness, it is important to build a full funnel approach balancing both types of campaigns to drive awareness, consideration and conversion across your marketing funnel.

First, I’d like to define a B2B campaign as a set of tactics that will drive pipeline revenue for a particular solution or a market segment. The campaign timeline can span over a quarter or 6+ months. To launch a successful campaign you first need to answer these 5 questions. * What are the campaign goals * Begin with the end in mind. * Keep your eyes on the prize and optimize relentlessly * Who is the Target audience * Persona - Business and technical buyer * Segment - Enterprise, Mid-market, SMB * Geo - North America, EMEA, LATAM, APAC * Verticals * What is the value proposition * What are the buyer pain points * How can our solution help solve * Why should they choose us over competitors * What is the content mix by persona and buyer jobs to be done * Buyer jobs to be done including problem identification, sol exploration, req building, vendor selection, validation and consensus building. Be sure to include different formats such as e-books, checklists, analyst content, video demos etc * By persona - business buyer and/or technical buyer * What is the budget * This will guide the channel/tactic mix * Define the tactic mix including both * Paid media - paid search, paid social, third party programs, trade shows * Owned media - website, email nurture, webinars, blogs Once you have the answers you are ready to plan and launch a solid campaign. Pro tip: Don't wait for everything (ads, emails, landing pages etc.) to be perfect. The mantra is to launch and optimize :))

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. 

Across every role in growth there's one common trait I try to ensure. The ability to look at seemingly disparate data, make sense of it, create hypotheses, and prove or disprove them. Lots of people will answer yes to this if asked as a yes/no question, but the ones that truly get it can articulate examples. These are the folks that take data and turn it into action. I have often seen people be really good at collecting and presenting data, but not be as good at the "so what" part of it.

Work with your sales team! You can use a lot of different tech and methods to identify target accounts, but if your sales team isn't bought in, you won't be successful. I suggest using tools or conducting a TAM analysis to narrow down the list of potential accounts a tad small. Have the sales team participate in the account selection process. One of the most common mistakes I see people make is allowing their sales teams to pick companies like Verizon, ATT, Amazon etc. These companies are broken out into several lines of business and divisions. Sales should understand the account and where they'll break in. If you are going to use digital channels, ensure you have a list large enough to meet audience size requirements on your preferred media partners.

I am focused on B2B marketing to create, drive and capture demand with the end goal of creating a pipeline for sales teams (well, ultimately to acquire customers!). From my perspective, the pillars that feed into the strategy for driving pipeline include: * Knowing our target audience * Creating compelling narratives, value propositions, and messaging * Developing best in class point of view content to educate the market while establishing our brand as trusted thought leader in the space * Integrated campaigns and multi-channel strategy: getting our message to the right audience at the right time, in the right place (buying journey is complex and requires multiple messages, solutions, tailored to multiple personas at different stages, at any given time, via multiple channels- from digital, to in person events, to social and more) Aligning stakeholders in these processes is typically done by following an established framework I mentioned in a previous question. In summary- a single project or campaign champion would create a proposal for the project/campaign in the form of a brief that is circulated amongst stakeholders. Alignment and approvals take place with the right decision makers, from there, workstream owners or channel owners are identified and brought into a project/campaign kick off. Shared goals, metrics, targets are established, timelines and workback schedules created, and regular check ins/status updates to ensure we are on track, or to remove roadblocks. Once the project/campaign is complete, a retro is conducted with all stakeholders- this can help ensure best practices are identified, key learnings are addressed, or failed initiatives are deprecated ;)

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.

Understand what's currently working when you come in, and accelerate it. If you're in an established business, they must be doing something right to be generating demand and revenue right now. Understanding what that is will help you from a prioritization and early impact standpoint. Over time, understanding why helps you identify other areas of impact that you can spin up that match where prospects are and the internal GTM flywheel.

When you are coming in new to a role, your first month should involve getting a lay of the land. Understanding and reviewing past metrics, meeting with stakeholders, learning your team and company's strengths and weaknesses, OKRs, etc. Once you have identified the above, you should then start building a 6-month roadmap. In this roadmap make sure you are kicking off multi-channel programs and campaigns. Start with the easiest to execute and continue to build on it. A great example of this is starting with a solid eBook. From that eBook you can create a blog, design an infographic, create an email/BDR campaign and then run a larger-scale webinar on the topic. Build your hero asset and then launch multiple variations. Make the squeeze worth the juice.