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 d ...Read More

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: ...Read More

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 nurtu ...Read More

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 ...Read More

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 dow ...Read More

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 ...Read More

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 ...Read More

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 evaluat ...Read More