AMA: Spotify Associate Director, Growth Marketing, Joann Guo on Demand Generation Strategy

Typically, most campaigns can fall into one of the two buckets: awareness or performance. We need to create campaigns that have a balance of brand and performance as we can’t have brand work that doesn’t perform and performance work that doesn’t elevate your brand. Your campaign should have brand expertise as well as showcasing your product offerings in solving your customer’s challenges.  Brand campaigns are meant to create demand through inspirational content  Performance campaigns are meant t ...Read More

Before going into strategy setting, it’s important to align and joint plan with your fellow counterparts in sales, business, product, analytics, operations, PR, and other marketing functions, etc. to establish the topline business target for the year (or quarter). If your team is not currently involved in this cross planning process, I would advocate to be part of it. From there, identify the key products rollout and timing. This helps to develop the key marketing moments and activations needed ...Read More

For ad-hoc campaigns, we typically would either repeat and iterate if it’s performing well or kill it if it’s not. Even if it’s not performing well, we would take that learning to inform future campaign strategy or other workstreams. Typically, we monitor performance throughout the campaign flight to make optimization. For example, we recently launched a lead gen campaign driving customers to book a call with a rep upon qualifying. Because users may not be familiar with our products, we launched ...Read More

For B2B marketing, customer testimonials play a critical role if you are looking to drive awareness and consideration of your product or services. Testimonials can be in the format of video, case study or simply quotes and reviews. Having testimonials across different markets and multiple industries helps establish an immediate connection with prospects during their discovery process. Though keep in mind, this certainly is not the only thing we should rely on but as a complementary messaging as ...Read More

The key is having fluid strategy because things are constantly in flux (ie. business priority shift and budget reduction due to macroeconomic conditions). Hence, it’s always important to set clear OKRs (objective & key results) that the team can be accountable for. It’s important to use these as the north star metrics and communicate pacing and progress made across stakeholders and teams. For example, we run always-on performance first paid campaigns. The key metric we use to measure the eff ...Read More

This one is slightly tricky but a good rule of thumb is getting primary stakeholders’ inputs as early as possible, especially for things that need resourcing from other teams and anything that involves technical implementation. Throughout the planning process, this is where you can pinpoint the members for the working team. It’s also important to identify one primary PoC from each functional area to avoid having too many cooks in the kitchen. From there, establish a clear RACI (responsible, acco ...Read More