AMA: Counterpart Marketing Lead, Erika Barbosa on Channel Mix

Your demand generation and account-based marketing strategies should complement each other, not compete. If they feel at odds, it’s worth reassessing your goals. Demand generation builds broad awareness and fills the funnel, while ABM focuses on high-value accounts with tailored engagement. To balance both: * Define shared objectives – Ensure both teams align on pipeline and revenue goals, not just lead volume. * Segment your efforts – Use demand gen to drive volume and ABM to nurture key accounts differently. * Leverage intent data – Identify which leads from demand gen show strong buying signals and move them into ABM tactics. * Personalize at scale – Use automation to tailor messaging while keeping efficiency. * Align sales and marketing – Both teams should agree on lead qualification and follow-up strategies to maximize impact. By integrating both approaches, you create a strategy that captures interest widely while converting high-value opportunities more effectively.

Start with where your audience seeks trusted information and engagement. A product-led company’s channels will likely look different from a sales-led one because the buyer journey is different. For product-led growth companies: * Self-serve experience is key – Invest in organic search, content marketing, and in-app prompts to drive activation. * Community and word-of-mouth matter – Engage in forums, review sites, and social proof to drive organic adoption. * Freemium conversion focus – Use email nurture, lifecycle marketing, and AI-driven recommendations to move users from free to paid. For sales-led companies: * Relationships drive deals – Account-based marketing, LinkedIn outreach, and webinars tend to be more effective. * Hypertargeting is essential – Paid LinkedIn, intent-based ads, and direct outreach help identify and engage decision-makers. * Sales enablement content – Whitepapers, case studies, and thought leadership pieces are critical for lead nurturing. The key difference? PLG relies on scalable inbound channels and self-serve motions, while sales-led depends on high-touch outbound and relationship-driven approaches.

The key is understanding where your audience goes for trusted information. There's no single answer, but a few things to consider: * Research habits: Do they turn to search engines, communities, or social media? * Engagement style: Are they reading in-depth reports, watching videos, or scanning quick updates? * Industry norms: Some industries thrive on LinkedIn, others rely on industry-specific forums. Test different channels, but don’t spread yourself too thin. Once you see what's working, double down on the highest-impact ones.

Start by looking at how your audience prefers to engage. If they’re actively searching for solutions, inbound methods like SEO, content marketing, and organic social will help pull them in. If your product requires more education or direct outreach, outbound tactics such as paid ads, cold outreach, or targeted events, may be more effective. Also, consider your sales cycle. Longer cycles often require a mix of inbound for nurturing and outbound for accelerating pipeline. Budget also plays a role: inbound takes time to build, while outbound can deliver faster results, but at a higher upfront cost.

Attributing pipeline and revenue across different channels can be tricky, but the most effective approach is to use both incrementality testing and Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM). Incrementality Testing: This method helps you understand the true impact of each channel by comparing groups that were exposed to the campaign with those that weren’t. You can run A/B tests or use controlled experiments to isolate the effect of a specific marketing channel on pipeline and revenue. * Why it works: It helps prove if a channel is genuinely driving incremental revenue or if it’s just shifting existing demand (e.g., overlapping with another channel). * How to implement: Select test and control groups, run your campaigns, and measure the difference in outcomes like sales or conversions between the groups. This will show you the incremental value that each channel adds. Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM): MMM uses historical data to assess the performance of all your channels and understand how they contribute to business outcomes. It factors in various external variables like seasonality, market conditions, and budget changes, which gives you a clearer picture of the overall impact. * Why it works: MMM allows you to assess how each channel contributes to both short-term and long-term goals, helping you make more informed decisions about resource allocation. * How to implement: MMM requires data from multiple sources (e.g., ad spend, web traffic, sales data) over time. By analyzing this data, MMM can estimate the contribution of each channel and give you the insights you need for optimal budget allocation. When used together, incrementality testing and MMM can provide a well-rounded view of how your channels are driving pipeline and revenue. While incrementality testing gives you more granular insights, MMM helps you see the bigger picture and optimize your overall marketing strategy.

A/B testing helps optimize performance, but not everything is worth testing. Prioritize high-impact areas like: * Messaging & positioning: Which key value props resonate most? * Channel selection: Does LinkedIn drive higher engagement than Google Ads? * Audience targeting: Are broader or more niche segments performing better? While testing is important, some decisions require a strategic bet rather than waiting on perfect data. The balance is knowing when to test and when to trust experience.

Staying ahead of trends is critical, but it’s easy to chase every new thing without a clear strategy. Here’s how to approach it: * Monitor audience behavior. If your target market is shifting to a new platform, that’s a signal to test. * Start small. Instead of overcommitting, run a low-investment experiment to gauge results. * Evaluate ROI quickly. Some trends fade fast. If a new channel or AI-driven tool isn’t delivering, move on. The key is to balance innovation with proven strategies. Keep testing, but don’t lose focus on what’s already working.

Alignment isn’t a one-time setup — it’s an ongoing process. A few ways to keep things on track: * Agree on definitions. What counts as a qualified lead? When does marketing hand off to sales? * Share insights in real time. If a campaign is driving great leads (or bad ones), both teams should know immediately. * Over-communicate. If you think you’re talking too much about campaign plans, lead quality, and pipeline trends, you’re probably communicating just enough. When marketing and sales stay tightly connected, multi-channel campaigns become far more effective.

Some of the biggest pitfalls include: * Assuming customers move in a straight line. The buyer journey is rarely linear, so don’t expect prospects to follow a perfect funnel. * Spreading efforts too thin. Trying to be everywhere at once often leads to shallow execution and wasted resources. * Ignoring cross-channel coordination. A paid ad, email campaign, and sales outreach should reinforce each other, not operate in silos. * Failing to adapt. What worked last year might not work today. Regularly evaluate and adjust your approach. A successful multi-channel strategy is flexible, data-driven, and designed to meet customers where they are.