AMA: Cloudflare Head of Digital Marketing, Nash Haywood on Channel Mix

Stepping into a new role as a Demand Gen leader requires a strong understanding of the core business model, go-to-market strategy and revenue process, first and foremost. Here are the top 4 things I would focus on (in addition to understanding the business) as quickly as possible: Understand business goals and link them to your initial marketing plan: The first step should be understanding the overall business and marketing goals in terms of leads, signup, opportunities, pipeline, etc. Speak with key stakeholders, review strategic documents, and identify which key performance indicators (KPIs) are reviewed weekly, monthly, quarterly, etc. If you don’t have goals in place for what you are managing, create them. This will provide a foundation for all future marketing decisions and help you identify which channels are most likely to help achieve these goals. Analyze past and current marketing efforts for insights: Objectively review and analyze past and current marketing efforts, including the channels that have been used and their performance. Look at metrics like customer acquisition cost (CAC), return on ad spend (ROAS), conversion rates, and customer lifetime value (CLTV) for different programs. This will give you insights into what has worked well in the past, and where there may be opportunities for improvement or new strategies to test. Understanding how your new company has arrived at the current state of performance will help you navigate and plan for future growth more effectively. Isolate your ideal customer profile to prioritize your marketing investments - To choose the right channels, it's crucial to understand who you buyer is (your ideal customer profile) and where they spend their time. Conduct customer research by reviewing sales calls (Gong makes it easy to do this!) and quarterly business reviews. Meet with product marketing to review persona documents. Talk to the customer success leaders on the biggest problems you solve for your customers. Understanding the core customer will help you be much more successful in B2B marketing due to how specific marketing often needs to be to position your solution. Launch something new - Whether a new campaign, program updates, or refreshed marketing offer, you should focus on putting a few small wins on the board within the first 60 days of a new role and align with others to share the success. Now you should have a clear understanding of what the business goals are, what has worked in the past, and where your target audience is. As a new leader, your focus is to grow the business -- and that this should be an iterative process - you will need to test different approaches, measure your results, and adjust your strategy as needed.

Industry event, associations and other organizations that already support your market are typically very interested in working with new brands. Insights on where your market goes to get additional industry information / current events can be found by simply sending a simple survey (with an incentive!), asking your Customer Advisory Board or by having your CSMs or AEs ask customers of various sizes. Additionally, if you buyer is not present on digital channels, you may want to build an account list and the buyers at each organization and then execute targeted campaigns to each company -- including outbound and direct mail -- which can standout with minimal budget.

I've found that using a double-funnel approach to be one of the best ways to balance -- it helps align your team on goals, outcomes and other critical components to growth. The Double Funnel approach focuses on both high-value accounts and always-on marketing channels, and the combination helps improve overall sales and marketing performance. Aligning to key performance metrics with this approach is key as there are significant changes in outputs when transitioning from a lead-gen focus to an account-based approach in terms of volume (goes down) and pipeline conversion rates (goes up). However, because these buyers have more intent to engage with you and are the key personas at your predetermined target accounts, you end up having stronger revenue performance and overall sales. This post from Metadata breaks down the math behind the double funnel very well. The last critical piece is the alignment of the rest of the revenue team to support an account-based approach across the rest of the GTM team -- this includes key B2B functions like sales development, sales, growth marketing and campaigns. If the rest of the team is not aligned to the goals and how the team will work together, it will be difficult to get adoption across the rest of your organization. If you want to focus on getting something started, I'd recommend launching a program pilot for 1-2 quarters with a small list of initial accounts you work with sales to create and a marketing investment strategy to reach those accounts. Measure performance based on success at your target account list and adjust the approach as you learn more. Shift budget and investment decisions as your strategy and execution improves.

B2B marketers should pay close attention to third-party directories. These platforms provide an excellent opportunity for prospects to discover your products or services, gain trust from unbiased user reviews, and, ultimately, assist in the decision-making process. Platforms like G2, TrustRadius, Capterra, PeerInsights and other directories can be very influential in a potential customer's consideration of products in a very specific field or industry. Actively managing your presence on all these platforms should be a key part of your strategy, as the effort is low and the impact is extremely high. Here’s how you can leverage these platforms for your demand gen program: Improve your product’s category visibility and discoverability with a free listing: Directories and review platforms often rank well in for very specific niche product software search results, which can improve your visibility as part of the product consideration process happening as part of the visit on the directory pages. By listing your company on these platforms, you're making it easier for potential customers to find you (and simply know you exist if your company is smaller). In most cases, a profile is actually free, so there’s no reason to not show up here. Focus on getting reviews as quickly as possible - Simply get reviews at first. Encourage all of your customers to leave reviews in exchange for gift cards or company swag. Customer reviews are gold for the sales process when key customers are used to support late-stage prospect questions. Use for paid traffic: Directories and review sites can also drive highly-targeted paid traffic back to your website and provide an alternative from Google and Microsoft as your key drivers of paid search traffic. If paying for traffic, ensure you are bidding in the right categories and regions / countries for your sales team. Make use of intent data: Some directories provide intent data which is a list of companies that are showing interest in the category. This can be extremely helpful data allowing sales and marketing to reach a buyer who has just gone “in market” for their product by marketing specifically to that set of accounts. Reviews are a great way to build your ad copy: Customers' words are powerful and sometimes represent that core of the value you deliver. Analyze your customer conversations and reviews to learn how they refer to their challenges and solutions to improve marketing copy and effectiveness of your message.

Offline channels are a good way to standout and diversify your marketing mix. I've found that direct mail is a great way to get started and can be core to an effective and personalized 1:1 or 1:few ABM strategy, especially if you have an interesting direct mail piece. Here's a blog post from Sendoso with a few dozen examples for direct mail ideas to add into your campaigns. Direct mail is much easier to tie to revenue within a typical demand gen organization. For OOH like billboards or street signage, this is a bit harder to execute against a typical B2B target persona however, if you can find short-term placement around a venue of a major conference your team or industry attends, this is a great way to ensure your market will see you. Many times, using the billboard as a focal point of an integrated campaign will provide extra impact from a brand investment. While OOH is harder to measure and tie to revenue, it does provide a good option for teams with larger budgets or scrappy startups that can get extra mileage from it.

Generally, adding as much spend to the lower portion of the marketing funnel (aka demand capture) will typically result in high ROI on paper but sacrifices the upside effective brand marketing provides. Typically I recommend maximizing paid and organic search budget to capture all in-market buyers (product interest searches) and building a marketing funnel to convert it. Understanding the total number of search impressions (demand) and your ideal customer profile (unique companies and people with these job titles that would buy your product) to estimate your potential share of voice for your market. Allocating as much of your budget as possible to these programs is likely to result in the highest short-term ROI. Combining this effort with brand marketing (demand creation) will typically result in the strongest ROI, so definitely do both as soon as your budget allows!

Planning for and setting channel-specific goals in B2B is complex due to most channels being used at multiple stages of the funnel, creating a complexity in planning how to invest and evaluate performance. I’ve found these things to be most helpful when setting channel-specific goals across different types of teams, funnel stages and business models: * Only set goals that align teams cross-functionally and tie to the true key business objectives - Before setting channel-specific goals, it's essential to align on revenue generating outcomes in terms of pipeline and recurring revenue. These could be to increase the overall pipeline by 30% or drive growth of $1MM ARR a new industry or international market you might be entering. Ensuring your goals are aligned means you’re all working towards the right outcome and there are no gaps in the overall plan. Now, your job is to create the right mix of marketing channels to contribute directly to these broader goals in a measured way. * Define channel role in your full-funnel media mix: Next, identify the role each channel plays in your marketing strategy. For example, paid social may be more focused on specific account list awareness and engagement, while email marketing might be a key driver of growth marketing metrics like pipeline and inbound lead flow. Every company is very different for what actually works most effectively. This is to be expected and as you learn more about what works you have to adjust quickly. I’ve found it extremely helpful to whiteboard all of your marketing programs and identify where your next investment priorities might be. * Use attribution to support analysis of marketing programs at different stages of the funnel - Now that you know exactly what your full-funnel investments strategy looks like, you can use attribution to analyze performance. One powerful approach here is to use different models at each stage of the funnel to understand the true impact. Almost all B2B marketing teams are too caught up in what channel and campaign is driving a fractional part of growth that they miss the big picture. Set attribution goals of first touch (FT) for brand awareness efforts, lead creation (LC) for engagement focused campaigns and opportunity creation (OC) across your marketing investments. Each channel can function in multiple ways and this full-funnel view of performance helps identify big areas for improvement. * Adjust your marketing strategy to reflect the goals of each stage and commit to measure that way - Now that you’ve allocated your marketing programs in those three areas, you can focus on the actual goals of your marketing -- building awareness, driving engagement or creating pipeline. You should work to build a bottoms-up plan with your team that creates a data-driven model for contribution from each marketing program and stage of the funnel to hit your overall goal. Your channel marketing and campaign leaders should tell you that they should be able to hit the goal and how. If not, they’ll need to be adjusted and accounted for quickly until all of the “math” works. * Set specific KPIs and channel goals as part of employee compensation: Your revenue, demand gen or performance marketing team’s KPIs should be linked directly to a revenue outcome, ideally qualified pipeline / product signups, that overlaps with other areas of the business that are supported by those metrics. Your team’s compensation should involve being aligned directly to the goals set “top-down” from the executive leaders/board within your organization. * Benchmark your performance with internal and external sources: Use historical data to define your internal benchmarks and 3rd-party sources like industry studies, other marketers you network with and a benchmarking tool to inform your goal-setting process. A marketing benchmark product like Varos can also be helpful for reviewing industry-specific acquisition metrics to ensure your funnel is performing comparable to the market. * Constantly measure and optimize channel performance to drive growth: Be prepared to adjust your goals as you start executing your strategy and collecting data on your performance. Use revenue analytics tools (Adobe Measure, Google Analytics, HockeyStack, etc) to regularly track and measure your performance against the goals you've set for each channel and your overall marketing program. If a channel is underperforming, analyze why that might be and adjust your strategy accordingly. On the other hand, if a channel is performing particularly well, consider whether there are ways to further optimize your efforts or whether similar strategies could be applied to your other channels. * Analyze investments by marketing program and not channel-level -- When looking at investment in each area, you should adjust expectations for the time frame to get accurate data (brand awareness efforts can take 6 to 12 months to really show up in your data) to support your decision making. Try to avoid getting too caught up in the details of marketing attribution as B2B buyers often interact with many different channels during the buying cycle -- in fact, this means your marketing is working. Tuning your overall marketing program is like balancing an investment portfolio -- it’s really the sum of all parts and you need to focus on net-gain over specific periods of time. Your channels help guide the way, but are not the way to measure growth. Remember, each channel is part of the larger demand gen program and all of the associated goals. It's important not just to set and achieve goals for individual channels, but also to have these channels work together to achieve your overall revenue target. No one will be happy that your digital marketing team hit it's goal, but marketing missed it's broader goals.