AMA: Front Head of Digital Demand Gen & ABM, Moon Kang on Channel Mix

I can share two particularly successful campaigns. One is a bit boring and obvious and the other was an interesting and fun one for me. 1. The boring one: It was a product launch for a consumer electronics brand. The product was a Bluetooth headphone launching in 1 week and we sent an email blast to the entire customer list minus those who had recently purchased a headset less than 30 days ago. The header image was a beautiful image and the reason why I say this one is boring is because I didn't do anything fancy -- it just followed the best practices. Subject line contained the what and when. The copy of the email contained the Why and the How. New headset launching in 1 weeks. Best noise cancelling headphone we've ever made, order directly through this link. In an effort to convert, you simply need to create demand for the item for a user. We used beautiful imagery along with brief, concise explanations of what job the item was meant to do -- offer a quiet environment anywhere you went -- long-lasting battery for every flight your business takes you, etc. 2. The more interesting one was a survey collection and an opt-out campaign to clean up our list. The subject line was a simple one: "Can we ask you something?" but the body of the email was an A/B test. Version A: Typical company header image and template along with branded template. Version B: 100% plain text email like it came from your dad. The email asked a few things including why they joined our email list, what they want to see more of, etc. and finally, a very clear to opt-out. Both emails' CTA was to simply reply to the email and send us a response. Version B had a very statistically high amount of responses compared to the theme'ed email and way fewer opt-outs. We learned a lot about our audience with this email test. 

1. DG team -- it's important for me to take a quick glance at the numbers but more important to get a better, fuller, picture from the team. What in the last 6 months has been going on? What's worked, what's not worked, and very important to me: what did you work on that you enjoyed? 2. Start from the bottom of the funnel: Revenue. Track revenue in SFDC then work my way up the funnel; which channel(s) contributed to this deal? Which keyword(s)? What touchpoints did the champion visit before turning into an opp? 3. Google my closest competitors. Am I showing up? Are they bidding on my keywords? Do they have a competitive landing page against me? What are people on G2 saying about me compared to the competition? If they bid aggressively on me -- they see me as a threat let's make sure we are fighting back. If they are not -- I'm probably eating their lunch -- I better show up on every keyword and review. If not -- that's low-hanging fruit. 

Great question -- I like to rely on our product marketing team to help me understand where my audience hangs out. If it's events, I work with field marketing to identify the best places our current customers go, and make sure we have a heavy presence at those events to capture more mindshare of that audience and even our existing customers. I also like to ask my PR team what publications (digital and print) a specific audience group is heavily influenced by. I run digital programs there knowing their digital program will be cheap and try to tack on email and future event sponsorships because I know the deal will be better if I try to negotiate the digital-first approach. Ultimately if you have customers in that group, you need to divert some attention to your current customers. Ask them where they get their industry news, what's the biggest event in their industry, where their peers go, what their competitors do annually etc. Having regional events where some of your best customers are will really go a long way in identifying new channels. 

PLG all comes down to a frictionless product experience. Many products out there claim to be PLG but without a human sales engineer to customer your experience, none of your customers will understand the product and convert. PLG comes down to ensuring you have the best tooltip experience inside the product along with analytics to help you understand where the biggest friction points are in your product. Understanding where users spend the MOST amount of time, and the LEAST amount of time in your product is probably a good start. The most amount of time either indicates confusion or a set of features they are really enjoying. The least also could indicate how intuitive it is so you can do more of that, or where they decide to give up -- follow the user's journey and you will get your answers for PLG. As far as channels go, a free trial of your product will work on every and all channels. PLG simply is language that gets people into your product. Depending on your product and the target audience, things like FB, Reddit, or Quora might be cheap ways to get SMBs and solo users into your product. For enterprises, it's usually targeting the tactical executioners of a department to get into the product. The faster you can help these users understand your product and how to use it, the quicker and more effective they will be in explaining the product to their superiors who will likely be your decision-makers and buyers. 

IMO -- we are tapped out in "cutting edge" tools in 2023. There are no cutting-edge tools that would replace good strategy. It doesn't matter how easy your tool makes sending physical gifts to prospects or how well your enrichment tool works -- without the right strategy in communicating with your prospects, none of the tools work. 

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. 

Everything. Without being able to differentiate your product in the marketplace, what are you besides just noise? Competitive research isn't specific to PLG or any strategy -- it's necessary for any business to survive and properly compete. The "build it, and they will come" strategy doesn't work in the real world. It's about building products/software that people WANT that does a JOB and stands out amongst your competitors. You're not doing this without properly doing research 

The hope is to be joining a company that's got some good data and documentation hygiene :) Unfortunately, if this is missing, then the source of truth for me is Salesforce. I will always go to the sales operations team to start at revenue and work my way back toward up to the top of the funnel to marketing camapigns' successes or shortcomings. The way I do this is to tie back campaign launches and the spending to calculate CAC:LTV over time. 

Some of the biggest challenges are broad, anecdotal feedback from sales & marketing that nothing ever works. I think it's important to remain objective and quantitative and share how things actually went based on a baseline metric vs the campaign metrics. It's also really important to bridge the cap between sales & marketing. Marketing isn't successful with sales closing deals, and sales isn't successful unless marketing builds awareness and drives users to convert. Without harmony between the two teams, your 30/60/90 day plans won't succeed.