AMA: Salesforce Sr. Director, Small Business Demand Generation, Keara Cho on Channel Mix

The key to a successful marketing campaign is segmenting your target audience correctly and being customer-obsessed. But your job is not just to drive people to websites and have them fill out a form to become a lead; it’s to be responsible for the entire customer journey. In fact, 56% of high-performing marketers actively map the customer journey across their company. To successfully join this effort, you need to properly nurture customers. The top-of-mind nurture B2C companies are experts at t ...Read More

Have a beginner's mind.  What worked in the past might not work in your new position (or it may? But you have to test it first before implementing something full blown). The challenges you have faced leading other teams are not going to be the same set of challenges you will face in your new role. I will think about my conversion path and buyer's journey before I even think about what go-to-market channels I need to build or optimize.  Step 1: I would start off by listening to all the functional ...Read More

Everything starts with a great organic strategy and an SEO friendly website. When I ran demand gen at a very small company, the sales team was just starting to ramp up and I didn’t have a budget so website/content was where I focused on first. In parallel, if you have a direct sales team outside of a product led selling motion, I would align with your sales leader and all the regional managers and individual AEs. Demand generation is an extension of your sales team and tight alignment between sa ...Read More

This question is very similar to the one titled: Are there specific channels you think are a foundation to a Demand Generation strategy? Short answer is focus on your website and email channel first. In addition to what I discussed in that section, I would highlight recommend aligning with your product leaders and support/customer service leaders the same way a demand gen leader would if they had a sales leaders they align with.  Your job is to convert users and help them adopt the product. Use ...Read More

Here's a quick laundry list of things to consider without diving into your business model and marketing plans. 1. Partnerships: Do you have partners you can work with to integrate a call-to-action? For example, in one of our small business campaigns where we were targeting small business owners we were able to partner with local banks to include our offering in their small business loan welcome package. I know integrations are tough and it requires more than marketing to champion so I would also ...Read More