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.

I have one question that I love to ask in all of my in-depth interviews: "What is the challenge you are looking for at your next opportunity to help you grow to the next level in your career?" The best answers are those that sound intentional, thoughtful and deliberate. "I want to grow in my ability to do (x), and through this role, I'll be able to take on challenge (y) to help me get to the next step on my career path to (z)."

* Metrics are the data points you are measuring the success of the campaign around (either leading or lagging indicators). This can be # of meetings from your account list, # of campaign responses per account, # of impressions or CTR by account, # of opportunities, $ pipeline generated, etc. Any goal you’re measuring yourself on. * Analytics is the process of acquiring Insights from the data. Why should the team care about these metrics? * How are those metrics driving the business? * What action items can we take from here? * How will we apply these learnings to future campaigns?

There is definitely not a single path for demand gen. I personally transitioned into demand gen from field marketing. I can't say there is a single path that makes more sense than the next, but I can say there were a few things that helped me make the seamless transition. 1) All the events I ran had a quantative goal along with a qualitative goal. All programs had success metrics attached to them so we could look back and understand was it sucessful or not. 2) The other was that I always had buy in from the sales, CSM, and other GTM teams. I would start with communicating that this path forward would help them hit their goals and then share how their partnership would bring it even more success. 3) Events are expensive! Field marketing and demand gen will always cost money. Learning how to communicate upwards to c-level and other leadership positions is key. Whether you are on the content team, product marketing team, or a fellow field marketer and want to transition into demand gen, focus on proving value of your programs, have a close relationship with sales, and be ready to prove value of your demand gen mix to leadership. 

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.

5 things I would consider quick wins within 90 days are: 1. Understanding challenges in the market and what differentiates your product in solving them. 2. A solid grasp of average deal sizes, time to close, and past 3 years of sales metrics and goals. 3. Completing a detailed analysis of past Demand Generation campaigns for successes, failures and most profitable ROI. 4. Received feedback on previous campaigns from cross-functional stakeholders and took a "needs assessment" to help them be more successful. 5. And lastly, and probably the most obvious, begin generating a pipeline with a solid 6-month plan. 

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. 

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.

Programmatic display. You cannot GENERATE demand without properly getting in front of folks and visually displaying what you're about. You'd be wasting money without the capabilities to target the RIGHT people to create demand. The right combination of intent data, funnel-specific messaging, and analytics will create the best top-of-funnel experience for prospects you're looking to generate demand. 

This depends on your experience level. If you are new to your field, joining with the right mindset and attitude can take a long way. If you engage with your teammates with a desire to learn and display a positive attitude, you can advance quickly in your career. In many junior roles, hiring managers are looking at culture fit and attitude more than anything else.