Enterprise marketing often feels like this strange paradox:

You’re running the right channels, doing the right things, reaching the right people — and yet the story of what it’s accomplishing never quite comes together.

The impressions are there.

The reach is there.

You see movement everywhere… except in the place the company cares about most: attribution.

It’s not because the work is wrong.

It’s because the model used to interpret the work was never built for an enterprise in the first place.

Most teams still try to measure channels as if each one independently “creates” a pipeline, as if LinkedIn, search, CTV, events, content, and outbound each deserve a neat column in Salesforce labelled Sourced.

But enterprise buying doesn’t move in straight lines.

It behaves more like weather patterns than a funnel, you don’t understand a storm by staring at a single cloud.

Enterprise GTM is a system.

And systems only make sense when you zoom out.

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Enterprise GTM Has Three Layers — Not One

Every healthy enterprise GTM motion, whether intentionally designed or accidentally assembled, is built on three layers: exposure, engagement, and activation.

Exposure

This is where marketing creates familiarity.

Buyers see LinkedIn ads during their commute, LinkedIn CTV when they’re streaming, native placements on industry publications, event promotions, POV content, videos in-feed.

Nobody converts here.

But people start recognizing your name.

Exposure sparks the conversation — nothing more, nothing less.

Engagement

This is where interest quietly reveals itself.

Not through forms, but through behavior:

returning website sessions, deeper content consumption, more people from the same account visiting the site, event attendance, 3rd-party intent, upticks in branded search, spikes in direct traffic.

Tools like Syft help you see which accounts are showing up even when individuals stay anonymous.

This is the layer most teams overlook — yet it’s the layer where demand actually forms.

Activation

This is where outbound and sales convert the quiet interest into a real conversation.

Enterprise buyers don’t lack interest — they lack time.

They don’t click “Book a Demo” from an ad because their buying process doesn’t work that way.

A targeted InMail, a consultative gift-card offer, an event invitation, a case study send, a well-timed SDR touch — these aren’t gimmicks.

They’re how you lower the cost of exploration for a buyer who is curious but busy.

Activation is what transforms latent demand into active pipeline.

Without it, exposure and engagement remain inert.

Once you see these layers clearly, the illusion that channels “aren’t working” disappears.

They are working — they’re just doing different jobs.

Where Enterprise Measurement Breaks Down

The frustration most teams feel isn’t that LinkedIn or programmatic or CTV are failing.

It’s that they’re being judged with metrics built for B2C and SMB.

Channels that create demand get measured like channels that capture demand.

And so everything looks underwhelming:

• CTV: “no clicks”

• LinkedIn: “no direct pipeline”

• Events: “no attribution”

• Programmatic: “low CTR”

• Content: “soft”

• Outbound: “separate”

But the truth is simple:

enterprise demand doesn’t show up in attribution — it shows up in behavior.

The question is whether you’re looking in the right place.

What the CTV Data Revealed

We recently analyzed 54 days of LinkedIn CTV data and compared daily impressions with website activity.

By traditional attribution standards, the results were meaningless: zero clicks, zero “conversions,” zero pipeline.

But when we ran correlation analysis — the kind of measurement enterprise actually requires — a very different picture emerged:

• Strong correlation with total traffic (0.69)

• Even stronger correlation with organic search (0.81)

• Notable correlation with direct traffic (0.65)

• Roughly 352 incremental sessions per 1,000 impressions

• Implied cost per session: about eight cents

• Lift pattern: same-day spike + sustained 7-day effect

• Primary behavioral path: CTV → Brand Search → Site Visits

This is exactly how enterprise awareness works.

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It doesn’t generate clicks.

It generates curiosity — and curiosity shows up as search.

Enterprise demand doesn’t emerge in platform.

It emerges around the platform.

Which means if you’re only looking at attribution, you’re measuring CTV (and LinkedIn, and programmatic, and events) through the one lens where they will always look like they’re underperforming.

Why MMM and Correlation Are Better than Attribution in Enterprise

Attribution is good at capturing bottom-funnel demand.

It was never designed to measure stimulus-response patterns in long sales cycles with multiple contacts and anonymous research behavior.

Correlation and MMM are what allow you to see the system:

• whether your spend is increasing brand search

• whether more accounts are showing up on the site

• whether engagement patterns spike during campaigns

• whether buying groups widen

• whether outbound reply rates rise

• whether overall demand becomes more active

Enterprise GTM isn’t a sequence of discrete touchpoints.

It’s a field of influence.

You measure fields through patterns, not click paths.

Attribution captures the moment of harvest.

MMM reveals the conditions that grew the crop.

You need both.

Pipeline Emerges When the System Connects

Once you adopt a systems lens, the pipeline story becomes obvious:

Paid creates familiarity.

Search reveals interest.

Content builds belief.

Events deepen understanding.

Outbound activates the account.

Sales converts the demand.

Pipeline isn’t the output of a channel.

It’s the output of a coordinated system, moving a buying group from unaware → aware → engaged → ready.

Enterprise GTM stops feeling chaotic the moment you stop asking each channel to prove its worth in isolation.

Enterprise GTM Isn’t Broken.

The Way We Look at It Is.

Your channels are working exactly as they should.

They’re simply being evaluated through a model that can’t see their impact.

When you measure the system — not the parts — the whole thing becomes coherent:

• CTV drives search

• Search drives visits

• Visits drive signals

• Signals fuel outbound

• Outbound drives meetings

• Meetings drive pipeline

The work was always working.

It just needed the right lens.

The $2,500 Question Every Marketer Faces

What would you choose: 100 demo requests or 100 mid-funnel (MOFU) leads?

At first glance, the answer feels obvious. Demo leads are hotter, closer to revenue, and often come with a clear buying signal. Even if they cost 5x more—say, $2,500 vs. $500—you'd still lean toward the demos. After all, we're all trying to make next quarter's number.

MOFU leads, on the other hand, feel squishy. They're labeled as "subscribers" or "content downloads." They take longer to convert, aren't ready for sales, and don't satisfy our craving for quick wins.

But that framing is fundamentally flawed.

The 95% Problem: Why Most B2B Marketing Misses the Mark

Here's the uncomfortable truth: only about 5% of your total addressable market (TAM) is actively in-market at any given time. That 5% is dynamic—it shifts constantly as priorities, budgets, and internal conditions evolve.

Which means the other 95%? They're not shopping for a solution right now.

If your marketing only focuses on the tip of the iceberg—demo-ready prospects—you're leaving the bulk of your future pipeline untouched. You're also fighting for attention in the noisiest, most competitive part of the funnel.

Yes, in-market leads are expensive. But if you want sustainable growth and lower CAC over time, you need to start building trust and awareness with the out-of-market majority—before they raise their hand.

The Demand Generation vs. Lead Generation False Dichotomy

Before we dive deeper, let's clear up some industry confusion that's been muddying the waters.

The Current Narrative:

• Demand Generation = "Educating prospects through ungated content and LinkedIn ads to generate demo requests"

• Lead Generation = "The evil twin that generates leads that never convert because marketers focus on leads, not revenue"

Why This Framing Is Wrong:

We often describe 'demand generation' as pure brand awareness—creating mental associations between your product and specific scenarios. But here's the reality: marketers don't actually create demand. No amount of marketing convinces someone to buy enterprise software out of thin air.

B2B products are considered purchases. Before buying, prospects must evaluate financial circumstances, IT requirements, business processes, integrations, security, and support. Marketing's real job is explaining the value proposition and how it fits into your prospect's world.

The truth? Both approaches have merit when used strategically.

Why Marketers Abandoned the Middle (And Why That's a Mistake)

The MOFU Reputation Problem

MOFU has a bad reputation—and we have ourselves to blame.

For years, marketers flooded the middle of the funnel with:

• Shallow eBooks nobody wanted

• Lifeless webinars that were thinly veiled sales pitches

• Templates that solved nothing

• Content passed directly to sales with zero nurturing

Sales teams, understandably, pushed back: "These people don't even know who we are."

Instead of fixing the approach, we overcorrected. We ditched gated content, stopped scoring leads, and declared MOFU a dead zone.

But here's the truth: the middle didn't stop working—we just stopped doing it well.

The Current "Solution" and Its Problems

Frustrated marketers pivoted to running completely ungated content via paid media, hoping prospects would eventually return as direct traffic ready to buy.

This approach has several critical flaws:

1. Attribution nightmare - Nearly impossible to connect paid media spend to sales conversations

2. Budget uncertainty - No clear understanding of required investment levels

3. Organic vs. paid confusion - Would prospects have found you anyway?

4. Marketing credit games - Stories abound of six-figure social spends with zero results

5. Unpredictable GTM motion - No repeatable system for growth

Think about it: no matter how many ads you see for a product, when the need arises, you likely start Googling. If the brand doesn't show up, you choose the next best option.

The Third-Party Intent Band-Aid

Next came the third-party intent and reverse IP lookup phase. Instead of hoping for the best, marketers began:

• Spending media dollars against specific accounts

• Tracking which companies visited their websites

• Using tools like Bombora or 6sense to flag "intent signals"

• Coupling this data with outbound sales motions

This works better and feels more predictable, but it's becoming increasingly fragile.

The Privacy Problem: Third-party intent relies heavily on cookies and data sharing. Here's how it works: when you browse an article about server security on CIO.com, an intent vendor purchases that data (cookies, device fingerprints) from the publisher, then matches it to your company through IP addresses or previously collected form data.

With GDPR, CCPA, and browsers blocking third-party cookies, this process becomes less accurate and more complex. Plus, you never know if it's the intern reading about CRMs or the CRO making the purchase decision.

The First-Party Data Advantage: Why MOFU Matters More Than Ever

Building Your Own Moat

With increasing privacy restrictions and algorithm changes across search and social platforms, having first-party data on your prospects becomes incredibly valuable. The best way to build this asset? Get prospects to take action on your own web properties.

1P Data in Action:

Imagine you sell logistics software to warehouse companies. Instead of buying a Zoominfo list (which isn't opted-in and may be inaccurate), you:

1. Launch a newsletter and webinar series featuring industry SMEs

2. Create valuable content addressing real logistics challenges

3. Gate some premium content behind simple forms

4. Build an opted-in database of engaged prospects

5. Survey subscribers, share relevant content, and announce events

6. Maintain direct communication without algorithm gatekeepers

The key insight: don't immediately pass these prospects to sales. They're not in-market today but will be in 6-12 months. Use email and content to build mental availability until they're ready.

First-Party Intent Signals

1P data also generates 1P intent signals. When an HR Manager repeatedly reads content about employee handbook creation on your website (and your product helps write handbooks), that's a qualified signal worth acting on.

The Revenue Stacking Framework: A Balanced Approach

Rather than choosing between BOFU and MOFU, successful B2B marketers need a balanced approach:

Layer 1: Capture In-Market Demand (BOFU Focus)

Start here to prove marketing impact quickly:

• High-intent keyword targeting (Google/Bing)

• Bottom-funnel content and remarketing

• Paid social for ready-to-buy prospects

• Strategic partnerships

• Everything measured on revenue and pipeline impact

Layer 2: Build Future Demand (TOFU Investment)

Run parallel programs for out-of-market prospects:

• YouTube and video content

• Social media and community building

• Brand awareness campaigns

• Content that builds mental availability

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Layer 3: Nurture the Middle (MOFU Strategy)

Use MOFU to build first-party databases and intent channels:

• Valuable gated content that solves real problems

• Email nurturing sequences

• Event marketing and webinars

• Direct relationship building without middlemen

Making the Case: 100 MOFU Leads vs. 100 Demo Requests

Given this framework, let's revisit our original question.

100 demo requests give you immediate pipeline and quarterly results. They're essential for proving marketing value and hitting short-term targets.

100 MOFU leads give you:

• A growing first-party database

• Future pipeline development

• Lower long-term CAC

• Reduced dependence on algorithm changes

• Direct communication channels

• Intent signals for timing outreach

The answer isn't either/or—it's both. But if forced to choose and you already have strong BOFU performance, the 100 MOFU leads become your competitive advantage.

The Path Forward: Embracing the Messy Middle

The digital landscape is changing rapidly. Privacy regulations are tightening, third-party cookies are disappearing, and algorithms become less predictable. Companies that build strong first-party relationships will have sustainable competitive advantages.

This doesn't mean abandoning bottom-funnel tactics—those remain crucial for immediate results. But it does mean investing in the messy middle with better content, clearer intent signals, and more sophisticated nurturing.

Key Takeaways:

• Only 5% of your TAM is in-market at any time

• First-party data becomes more valuable as privacy restrictions increase

• MOFU isn't broken—it was just executed poorly

• Balance immediate results (BOFU) with future pipeline (MOFU)

• Build direct relationships to reduce platform dependency

It's time to unlearn that BOFU is all there is. The companies that master the messy middle will own the future of B2B marketing.

Marketing is not about marketing, it’s about sales.

This may not always be the case for more significant enterprise deals with companies post-PMF, but the spirit of the insight remains unquestionable: selling matters.

Doing, figuring out what people buy, and building the product with that in mind (plus a beta version of the brand that works) beats expensive and expansive branding projects, especially before you even know if the market wants your product.

Marketing is not just about creating a memorable brand but also a risk-averse, profitable one.

After all, not all of us have the budget or the confidence of Jaguar to create a new memory imprint that disrupts legacy for the search for new buyers.

But let’s go back to B2B.

According to HockeyStack, it takes 266 touchpoints and 2.879 impressions to close a deal in 2024. This topic was hot, and tons of opposing views got people talking about the report from all angles.

Whether the data makes sense is irrelevant to this entry, but beyond the data it shows that marketers are under tremendous pressure to connect their actions to their results.

It kind of seems like we're the ones in charge of sales.

Shocking.

If you were traditionally a more brand-oriented marketer, now that you had fewer dollars, you probably had to justify your investments and show tangible revenue results beyond brand awareness or A+ copy. If you were a performance-oriented marketer, you had to find better ways to fine-tune your work, possibly exploring better creative and copy than you usually did.

In a way, both types of marketers had to explore each other's realms, recognizing the importance of "brand" and "performance" efforts (not one or the other).

The tension between performance vs. brand didn't matter half as much as actually being able to sell the product. Embracing brand with a b, not with a B, and focusing on tactical, marketing-driven initiatives directly impacting how prospects and customers view the company became the way forward.

Beyond the upper-lower case distinction, however, there is an important problem to consider when we think about brand and performance in B2B: Halfassing your creative or copy will no longer work (marketing got harder), and ignoring that you have to make money, not just awareness won't serve you either (Sales ➡ brand, not the other way around).

You must prove your marketing system works, and it translates to revenue.

So how can we do that? by being creative?

Almost.

Creativity Alone Won’t Save You

You know how you find the perfect copy, a beautiful creative, perfect targeting and execution, and ultimately, you get nothing but crickets?

B2B marketing is hard. Unfortunately, we were spoiled (post-pandemic tech boom) to think that creating products that startups would sell and buy from other startups was the norm.

But bubbles are always meant to burst. Bull markets, as many of us painfully came to learn, don’t last forever.

We had envious budgets (we see you Monday), too many products, and often the luxury to pay bank for apps we barely touched and people with fuzzy roles.

Joining the right communities, running “the playbooks,” and generally operating according to the status quo became less effective over time.

Best practices became an exercise of diminishing returns.

We did more and accomplished less.

VCs hated it.

The consequence? Focusing all our creative energy on finding the next playbook that could save us.

As Obaid puts it, however, B2B marketers have a limited set of ideas that don’t necessarily solve the problem of increasing efficiency. We love talking about creativity, but actually creating new experiments is a rare skill when being a copycat “apparently” helps us solve the problem.

What are we doing as marketers to work better with fewer resources?

Is marketing creativity leading to an authentic marketing system the missing ingredient to win? is it marketing effectiveness that translates into sales?

Is it both?

The Brand + Performance Romance

The fragility of our identities as performance or brand marketers became evident to everyone paying attention in the space. Over-indexing in a single vision of marketing and its function became a harmful mentality that pushed us, in many cases with tons of pain and regret, to accept that we need both yin and yang to create a whole functional process.

Silos became the genuine enemy.

Marketers had to accept that creating a product people want to buy matters as much as making a brand experience they can measure.

Econometrics became a trend, reconciling marketing’s impact on sales today and measuring its contribution to future sales in a less biased way (last-touch).

As with most cultural changes, many marketing professionals found a way to achieve their goals, but they paid a heavy price.

For those obsessed with brand and meaning, it meant doubling down on short-term sales acceleration, and for those obsessed with performance and data, it meant developing a sense of taste.

While these seem like superficial observations, there are genuine implications you probably had to endure personally.

As a brand marketer, you probably had to let go of a couple of designers to hire a paid specialist (or learn performance). As a performance marketer, you probably had to think of creative new experiments to meet your goals (lean into creativity and brand or hire a creative role).

Whatever your journey was, you probably learned that neither performance nor brand would save you.

In fact, the one thing that saves B2B marketing is sales.

Or, to be more specific, paving the way for sales to actually be able to make a call a decision maker will gladly take.

In the end, you’re really working in sales. It may not suck as much as the constant rejection BDRs face, but it isn’t a “creative” job either.

This perception of marketing as a different entity from sales must change.

Need some proof? Everyone knows of Jaguar, but without sales, you gotta make bold moves.

The Sales Marketer

I often joke that performance marketers are failed engineers and brand marketers are failed artists. But my joke has been conceptually wrong all along.

We're failed sales reps.

Not all of us, probably not you reading this post, but many marketers despise picking up the phone and calling to close a deal. Our worst experience probably was being an SDR or BDR and having to face rejection day in and day out.

Unfortunately, the pain of selling is precisely what we must endure to become better marketers.

Sure, we don't make the call or visit their offices, but we must undergo a metamorphosis and obsess over the entire process and the pain it takes to close an enterprise deal.

We have to learn that dealing with professionals requires being a professional rather than a creative superstar or a data nerd.

Focus on being a solid vendor first, then worry about marketing.

That may mean learning that the deal closes while playing golf, attending an F1 race, or at a concert. Plus, acknowledging that your fantastic brand doesn't matter if decision-makers don't find it helpful for their internal needs, even if your ads are beautiful and algorithmically clean.

It's time for marketers to learn to show up and ensure your tech product becomes the preferred choice to solve an organization's process. It is not just about being the go-to product for your key stakeholders but about learning to influence a complex web of opinions and bureaucratic decisions.

That simple and that complex.

How? By running 0 to 1 marketing experiments that pay off with minimal risk (this is where your creative energy must go). Once your experiments work and you find the real product-market fit, you'll see how fun and creative B2B marketing can be.

But, most importantly, as marketers we must learn to think beyond our marketing bubble and focus on showing up and doing the hard things first. That generally isn’t building the perfect attribution model, or a rebrand, but rather, convincing others to pay for your product.

Whether you are performance or brand marketer matters a lot less than helping your team close sales and do whatever it takes (brand + performance) to close bigger deals faster.

You’re the future sales of your company.

It is time to let go of our inner identity struggles as X or Y marketers, or as playbook A vs. playbook B fans. It’s time to adapt, and become relentless and professional about winning.

It’s a 0 to 1 game. Sold vs. not sold. And that, is also on your shoulders as a sales marketer.

Creativity alone won't save B2B marketing, but being creative about selling and showing up by doing the repetitive 0-1 experiments, will.

You’re neither a brand or performance marketer.

You’re a salesman. Act accordingly.

B2B is about building a case for an organization to buy your solution in a likely saturated market in 6 months. It's not easy and much harder to do if you don't even know how to run interviews to find what people value about your product or service.

Most marketers agree that talking to people who value the product (users, buyers, customers) can inform all your efforts. With user insights, you can write better copy that turns into clicks, design better creative more attuned to the category and problem, and find pain points, competitors, and benefits that can transform into keywords and ads.

So why is there so much friction when trying to run a few interviews? 

Why do we want to hack ourselves out of talking to our customers?

It may be because most marketers don't know how to speak with customers to extract valuable information. We can talk, sure, but fail to listen and translate stories into impact.

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Running efficient interviews in 4 steps

Step 0: Ensure you have buy-in from C-Level / VP-level execs. 

Complaining that research is an expensive and slow process that doesn't translate into actions is trending in B2B marketing. But more often than not, the inaction and the lack of use of research projects stem from the lack of commitment to implementing and updating products and processes based on the findings. 

Having no buy-in from decision-makers and doing research rarely yields any positive results. So, before you even start, make a case for the need to have conversations with your customers to improve your understanding of the problems you are solving. Sometimes, during this due diligence process, you may find assets or previous investigations that can provide more clarity (you may not even need to run interviews). At other times, you will find there are still some gaps you can fill by talking to customers candidly about their experience with your product. 

Whatever the case, getting top executives to join you in this exploratory journey to understand problems more accurately is also part of the job. Doing research is as much about the quality of the information as the delivery and the agency and persuasion you can embody. 

Your research is only as valuable as it is actionable. 

Note: If you don't have buy-in, try something else and skip the interviews. Save yourself the pain down the line.

Step 1: Understand the objectives. 

Once you have decision-makers support, you must ensure that the interview process's objectives are clear for you and your organization. You may face multiple conversations along these lines:

• "Can we include an NPS question to..."

• "Can we also ask about blockers that..."

• "Since we're doing the rebrand, could we test that..."

Given the perception of running interviews as a "slow" type of activity rather than an agile process, many departments and decision-makers will try to get you to include their priorities in the process. Politely decline. Your job is not to please everyone and interview someone to tell you their entire history with your product or category; your job is to understand a foundational problem (often a singular objective).

Identify what that primary objective is, and learn to focus. Once you do, include a couple of additional objectives you are confident can also be tackled and make sense to include in the conversation.

Note: You can suggest running other interview processes to solve different problems later. Training your organization around cherishing customer feedback via interviews is also your role as a researcher (a weird role) in a world of techies in love with numbers, not stories. 

Step 2: Ask the “right” questions. 

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Many people in the technology field believe they can answer questions simply by asking directly. For example, if you wanted to know the problems that led them to find your product, you would ask something like this: What were the top problems you were facing that led you to consider (Insert product)?

Question - Answer.

Much like a machine. Input - Output. 

While this is technically correct, you need to build rapport and trust with the person on the other end to unlock the highest-value information. That means you start the conversation at a category rather than a problem level. 

For example, suppose you worked for a cybersecurity SaaS. In that case, you may not want to start asking about "what cybersecurity problems you were facing when you bought our product," but rather something more general. 

Your initial questionnaire may look something like this:

• What does the internet mean to you?

• What impact does the internet have in your life?

  • Discuss work, personal, and social dimensions. 

• How did it get better? and worse?

• How safe is your data online?

• What is cybersecurity?

• When did you first learn about cybersecurity?

• How has it changed in the last couple of decades?

• What problems were you facing when you bought our product?

Having a more genuine conversation with the person you are interviewing is one of the top secrets to unlocking real, actionable insight. 

We are not machines. We need to warm up and feel like we are in a safe space before we open up. You may not need an hour-long conversation to get there, but honoring that we are connecting with another person makes a difference. It shows.

Note: Pay a lot of attention to the stories people share. They may be already answering your questions before you even ask them. While you can revisit and go a bit deeper, it can also be frustrating for them to repeat themselves.

Note 2: Leading questions are usually not great. Use them only as a last resort for particular questions if the conversation is going nowhere. 

Pro-tip: During the interview, act as if you know nothing about the space. You should be interested in learning how the interviewee sees the category and the problem (not confirm what you read on Reddit or in imaginary Personas). It's not about you think, or what you think they should answer. It's about why they think and act the way they do.

Pro-tip 2: You can find multiple "standardized" questionnaires in Google to run perfect interviews for various purposes. Look at those, but continually adapt your work to the objectives and needs. Research playbooks are an excellent place to start, but copying them might not yield the best results. More on this in step 4. 

Step 3: Share the questionnaire internally. Align stakeholders. 

This step is self-explanatory yet often forgotten. Remember that your research is only as valuable as it is actionable, meaning those who can take action must vouch for you. 

You can do this in two ways. 

1. Share the questionnaire openly with them, including an initial section explaining the objectives, purpose, outcomes, and general reasoning behind the questions.

2. Set up a meeting with all stakeholders and walk them through everything we mentioned above but in a real-time call or meeting. 

The main objective is to get them to sign off on your work. This will increase your chances of implementation once you finish and make it easier for them to support you in the implementation phase.

Note: Never share the questionnaire without supporting information/documentation. Remember, your job is to align them and get decision-makers to vouch for your project and its actionability (not to brainstorm new questions or updates).

Pro-tip: This is a moment to show true expertise and manage up. Own it. Stand your ground if you must, but also be open to updating sections if the quality of the suggestions exceeds the quality of your current questionnaire. You will also get extra points if you can tie the interview process to a KPI that matters to the organization, so do your best to do so.

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Step 4: Think and ask outside the box. Search for the unpredictable.

Anyone with experience in social sciences would tell you that, while predictable, humans are much more complex than we imagine. Even if you have the "right" questions, they might lead nowhere. In other cases, they may only provide standard knowledge-based information, rendering your research obsolete unless you push yourself to think beyond your comfort zone.

Don't be afraid to be a bit more creative. You may find emerging patterns from the conversations or particular stories that help you gain insight into the problem. You may also find that some of the best research findings may happen outside the "right" questions asked.

As a general rule of thumb, do your best to be genuinely interested in learning more about the experiences of those you are interviewing. Take your time, read and consume the content they consume before you meet them, try to learn about their world, and more importantly, discover what they think and do (not confirm what you already know).

The job is to find behavioral patterns and stories, not just actions. You're searching for stories and meaning (not just product features or positioning fine-tuning).

Finally, remember that just because you're in B2B doesn't mean you're interviewing a business. You're interviewing a real person who must watch out for the business's best interests. Act accordingly. Keep it human.

Final Pro-Tip: Customer, User, and Buyer interviews differ slightly in a B2B Context. Ensure you are targeting the right people and building a questionnaire that matches their relationship with your product.

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The term "brand" often leads to confusion, especially in B2B contexts. This confusion usually stems from the conflation of "Brand" (with a capital B) and "brand" (with a lowercase b), which, despite sounding similar, represent distinct concepts within the business landscape.

Brand - purpose/vision

The biggest mistake we see B2B Companies make: 

Investing in brand campaigns when they need a stronger Brand

Not investing anything in brand marketing & not building future customers

Over-investing in brand marketing relative to revenue/size of the company & not driving enough QoQ revenue. 

The Big "B" Brand

Brand with a capital "B" encompasses the holistic view of a company's brand. It's about more than just marketing; it includes every interaction and perception that shapes how customers and the public feel about a company. This includes:

• Mission, Purpose, BHAG (big hairy audacious goal)

• Customer Perceptions and Trust: How customers see and believe in your company.

• Emotional Connection: The feelings customers develop through their experiences with your brand.

• Company Interactions: Every touchpoint a customer or potential customer has with your business, whether through customer service, product quality, or online engagement.

The Big B "Brand" is an organization-wide ethos. It's not solely in the hands of the marketing team; it's influenced by everyone in the company, from the CEO to frontline employees.

The Small "b" brand

Conversely, a brand with a lowercase "b" refers to the marketing elements designed to influence and attract customers. These elements include:

• Creative / Visual Identity 

• Brand Campaigns: Targeted efforts to promote specific aspects of the brand.

• Visual Identity: Logos, color schemes, and general aesthetic guidelines.

• Web Design and Online Presence: How the brand presents itself digitally.

• Content and Social Media: The voice and substance of what is shared online.

• Video and Experiential Marketing: Engaging visual content and live interactions that enhance the brand experience.

The small b "brand" focuses on tactical, marketing-driven initiatives directly impacting how prospects and customers view the company.

The Intersection and Divergence

The differentiation between Brand and brand is crucial yet often overlooked, leading to the term "brand" being overused and misunderstood. Recognizing the distinction helps clarify strategies and roles within a business, ensuring that both Big B and Small B are effectively aligned to support the overarching business goals.

The two tweets above capture the difference between Brand and brand quite literally.

Small b Brand.

Jason is talking about brand - getting the word out, getting in front of potential customers, building affinity, and generating revenue. Brand (with small b) focuses on Faisal Siddiqui from a Creative Business Company called - Building Future Customers. Small b brand is all about getting mindshare and staying top of mind for prospective customers. This follows the 95/5 rule. 95% of your market is not in an active buying cycle right now. They are not feeling the severe pain that makes them go & look for solutions. They might be happy with the status quo, have built a workaround, or not have realized there was a better way. They will not buy your solution today, but they might in 3-6-12 months when external circumstances change and they come ‘in-market’.  Leverage brand campaigns to stay top of mind and build brand awareness & affinity towards your brand. The goal is not to have them ‘know you exist’ but tie to a specific use case/problem or buying opportunity (category entry point) 

Let's explore this from the P.O.V. of a crowded category like Project Management tools. 

This is what the PM tool market looks like:

Hundreds of PM tools are on the market, from bug trackers to MSFT Project to ClickUp / Asana Notion Basecamp Wrike Smartsheet, and dozens you have never heard of before.

So, how do you stand out in such a crowded category? You leverage brand.
When I said project management tools, you likely had one or four come to mind. What are those? Why were those?

For me, it's Clickup, Monday BaseCamp, and Trello. I am aware of others, but those have built up mental availability in my head and are tied to a specific buying context, aka mental availability.

Let's explore this further.

BaseCamp does not invest in traditional advertising, but the founders of BaseCamp / 37signals are prolific on Twitter and have extreme and polarizing opinions. They don’t need to invest in a 30-second brand spot - they are the brand. Their strong opinion on how software should be built and how work should be done also attracts people who believe in the same ethos - strengthening the Brand. Because I follow them on Twitter and read their P.O.V. quite often, and they talk about BaseCamp quite alot - I’ve come to associate them with project management tools. I am actively considering buying Basecamp next time we decide to roll out a project management tool.

Monday and Clickup are the opposite - they invest heavily in marketing and advertising. In fact, according to Monday’s S1 filing - they invest 90%+ in Sales and Marketing. Everyone remembers the point when Monday was everywhere you went. Youtube, OOH, Podcasts, Search, Social - everywhere. They constantly hammered the message of Monday being a project management tool. Similar was Clickup, which famously went with the All-in-One and Save One Day a Week message.

These products have developed mental availability by being prolific and staying in front of prospects. Everyone knows they are project management tools, and they will think of these when they think, ‘I need a project management tool.’ Research shows buyers often have 2-4 products already short-listed when they go to make a purchase.

An unrelated example is HotJar vs MS Clarity. Ask anyone which tool they recommend for heatmaps and recordings of user behavior - 99% of the time you will hear HotJar. Even though MS Clarity is free, it is arguably better in some ways. Hotjar has spent years talking about the product and the category that the 2 have become synonymous. MS Clarity on the other hand is a minor product within the MSFT umbrella - they probably have 1 engineer assigned to it (I am just making a point) and they don't even talk about it.

So how do you build mental availability and brand exactly? Not by spending 90% of your revenue on advertising. Very few companies can even afford to do that. But one mistake I see B2B marketers make when talking about brands is confusing the brand playbook of a $1B company with a sub $100M one. As a smaller company brand is built via content. A great example is this article you are reading. This is our agency branding.

Content doesn't have to mean ‘blog’; it can be Video, Audio, Written, Social, and distributed via social media and advertising. You can also layer in events, OOH, and other channels.

Brand (campaigns) are not a channel - they are a way of distributing a core message to a core audience via different means. 

• Events: Intercom World Tour, Profitwell Van

• Digital Advertising: Grammarly Youtube Ads

• Social: Fast was famous for its social. A current example of TripleWhale

• OOH: Segment, StatSig, Intercom

• Podcast: There are countless of them now, but podcasts tend to be more intimate. An excellent example of podcasts by VC firms

• Video Naturally leads to more storytelling because of the medium. Popular brand campaigns have been brand videos ( Zapier, Deel or Upwork)

• TV: Gong famously ran a localized ad during SuperBowl. Salesforce did what Salesforce does.

• Analyst Relations 

• Press Mentions & Press Relations

Note: Agencies and marketing services providers are a commoditized market, which is why brand (marketing) has become more critical, which is why we focused on brand (distinct visual identity, content and social from day 1).

Check out Standout Startup Brands for more on how tech companies approach brand marketing.

BRAND

Regarding things like Brand, we typically mean company values, positioning, messaging, and the intangibles of their product, support, service, sales, etc. These things are more complicated to cultivate and define actively but are shaped organically by each person's interaction with the company or product.

Obsessed by Emily Heyward is a book that helped me understand this. Emily co-founded Red Antler, the brand agency behind Casper, AllBirds, Chime, and Brandless. The idea of Brand is the company's identity that shapes its corporate strategy, GTM, hiring, team, organizational design, and every other decision.

When I talk about brand, what I’m actually talking about is what a business stands for, at its very core. - Emily Heyward

This is very distinct from the idea of Brand & brand marketing - the purpose of a business & its reason for existence is more than just ‘let get more mental availability’.

Linear or BaseCamp, or Intercom are great examples of this. Every choice the company makes, from its product (opinionated products about issue tracking, project management, or customer service) to its design choices on the website to product & how they communicate with the outside world, is driven by Brand.

To build a winning brand today, you must start with your customers and the problem you are solving for them. The brands that people love most are embedded within the business idea itself - Emily Heyward (Obsessed)

Brand and brand have become meaningless in conversations because we keep using them interchangeably. It does not help that when someone talks about brand, we start waving our hands around and talking about vibes, feelings, and ‘what customers say about us when we’re not in the room’ - a company can’t take vibes and make payroll with them, a marketing team can’t take vibes and shape them into a meaningful business outcome, and sales can’t sell vibes. When discussing the brand, our first instinct is to compare a 10M company with a 1B company or a B2B company with a B2C company like Nike.

B2C & B2B are fundamentally different, though. How I buy running shoes (lifestyle, aspirational, low risk) is very different than how business software is purchased (risk mitigation, multiple parameters, price, functionality). Brand or branding has room in B2B marketing. If in B2C we can differentiate 100% on brand (most DTC products are likely manufactured in the same factory in China, Vietnam or Bangladesh) in B2B brand, 10-20 % of the decision matrix. Credit to Ali Mansoor for shaping this idea.

How customers and prospects feel about the company is important. This isn’t to say ignore the brand, but not at the expense of the product.

If you look at *martech* aka marketing/sales tech companies like Drift, Clari, or any of the 11,000 vendors (yes, there are that many) you’ll notice a lot of them differentiate via ‘marketing/brand’ (small case b) but often this at the expense of actual product innovation. I call them ‘marketing first companies’ - their product might be mediocre or sometimes inferior but because they’re selling to marketers, they can create a halo effect around their product with good branding/marketing. Once you *actually* use the product, it's underwhelming & years behind the promises the marketing & sales make.

Compare that with Stripe and Shopify Intercom Notion - they are product-first companies. They think of the product first & the product itself creates a halo effect around the brand. Stripe is a payments company - probably the most boring industry in the world - it's a ‘backend’ tool’ that makes it easier for developers to collect, process & route payments. But they have an incredible Brand & branding (they also publish books under Stripe Press). Intercom was arguably the early pioneer in publishing great content & the new series is an excellent reminder of brand marketing that made Intercom an inspiration for so many. Shopify has both an inspirational message (Brand) & great branding. But what these companies have in common is they invest heavily in product & engineering, which is fundamental to their brand. They are not gimmicky or trying to ‘create new categories’ - they have strong product/engineering cultures that are the primary drivers of the org. The product is focused on solving a specific challenge for a specific set of people. Shopify wants to democratize commerce for everyone. Intercom wants to be the leader in customer support - this extreme focus on solving the core problem (and as you grow tangential problems around it) creates happy customers who cant help but talk about the thing.

Echoing Dave Kellog - “if you want to build a brand, go sell some software

Or, as Janessa said in the comments, “If you want to build a brand, solve hard and valuable problems for your customers."

When we say Brand, we can mean many different things, and each person uses it differently. Marketers don’t do themselves a favor either by calling one thing 10 other names. We say storytelling, narrative, strategic narrative, story, positioning, messaging, etc., but what we usually mean is the company's Brand.

Maybe it's time to go back to basics & focus on the company “Brand” when we mean the values, mission, why & brand campaigns when we mean ‘we want to build mental availability with potential customers.’ A company can't be successful without a Brand: positioning/messaging market segment on which they are focused. It is a beacon to potential customers & focuses the company's roadmap, marketing, sales, product, and engineering on solving a specific set of problems in a particular set of customers. Brand marketing, though, must start in the later stages of maturity. In the early days, the founder is doing brand marketing by talking to customers, talking about the vision & evangelizing the problem. As you mature & build a strong GTM motion - brand campaigns become essential to reach future customers. As you scale - brand campaigns become about defending your territory & business & reminding customers & prospects you exist.

BRAND, particularly positioning & messaging, is critical for the company's success. It's how you know what to build, for whom, the problems it solves, and how to find your ideal customer. It uses the customer's language to identify the problem/solution. It's a compelling reason why a prospect should buy from you. If you want to improve the performance of your Demand Generation campaigns, focus here. Too often companies want to start demand generation but they are not clear on their customer, their position in the market, or how they describe what they sell & the demand generation campaigns as a result, don't generate any meaningful results.

Brand marketing is a question of how much and when. Not every dollar invested in marketing is / should be expected to make an immediate return. Brand marketing is about when to invest, how much & when. Call it top of the funnel, call it brand marketing - the idea is to focus on *reaching* the right audience at a consistent frequency across many different channels to be ubiquitous (and connecting the *problem* to your *solution*) so when the customer experiences a problem - they mentally connect you to the solution (i.e., category entry points). Brand marketing is present across multiple channels to surround as much of the market as possible.

Brand marketing without sales activation doesn’t work. Sales activation without brand marketing means constantly increasing you CAC with the next customer you want to acquire.

While there is no hard & fast rule -  if you are < 100M, our revenue stacking playbook recommends investing 20% in always-on-brand campaigns (that is not measured in leads, SQLs, or Pipeline directly) or 80% in direct response/sales activation (which is tied to leads, S.Q.O.s & pipeline)

But before you spend a dime on Demand / Brand Marketing, make sure your brand is buttoned up and clear.

Thank you to Janessa for the feedback & helping me develop some of these thoughts better. Sebastian for the editing & proof reading & Alejandra for the amazing illustrations.

Risk matters

Marketers love being able to predict outcomes, whether it’s investing more in a particular channel, hiring an external agency to own a function, or restructuring the team to meet the targets. Once we have a clear plan and numbers to back it up, we can breathe. We feel confident we will hit the numbers every month.

This growth model/mindset can be boiled down to numbers in excel. We add funnel stages and conversion rates, and make sure we promise targets we can deliver. The job becomes to minimize risk and produce predictable outcomes, and as marketers we reduce complexity into % we can understand, alter, and scale. 

Out the window are the risky angles and emotions. JTBD, pain points, features and logic drive marketing efforts.

But, that comes at a cost. 

It's not like B2B SaaS marketers aren't aware of the iconic works of Ogilvy or the fact that Mad Men is more than a fictional series. It's more about the structural revenue systems we have created where our work is defined exclusively by moving the needle. Month over month we must hit the target, so we do what we think has higher chances of working (until it doesn’t). The pressure is unbearable, but with numbers risk becomes less crushing and uncertainty less , and investors love it!

Should they though? Is incremental data-driven marketing enough? Is there a limit to doing only what works to meet targets?

Previously we discussed the importance of brand and how data is ultimately not a reflection of your organization but of your past. Data matters, no one can say otherwise. But brand efforts without a direct or immediate response are also important and often overlooked because they fall outside what your data model says. Our colleagues from HockeyStack in this episode from their series Level Up, explore how B2B SaaS can never truly be differential or disruptive. We somewhat agree. Pushing for true originality is almost impossible in B2B. It is difficult for marketers to justify investments except those tied directly back to revenue. But if we never take risks, how can we push the boundaries? Are "media" plays the only alternative we can push for to justify investments outside the box?

We don't think so. 

Chaos and innovation go hand in hand. It is not a coincidence that some of the most brilliant minds in entrepreneurship and innovation publicly claim chaos as a determinant factor for their success. The marketing game of entrepreneurship, especially in B2B, is a more risk-averse and feature-based style of marketing. Ironically, this rigid version of avoiding taking risky chances might stifle growth and revenue— plus, whatever marketing strategy worked for X would not work for Y.

Embrace risk. That’s also the beauty of marketing. It requires you to be a statistician, and an artist. 

Once you are ready, remember people value publicity, and build marketing plans that allocate some budget to bold experiments. And, of course, adopt the following marketing plan views to build a solid foundation for your work. 

How to do a 𝙏𝙤𝙥-𝙙𝙤𝙬𝙣 𝙖𝙣𝙖𝙡𝙮𝙨𝙞𝙨 for your marketing plan

A top down analysis is all about taking your top goal (usually in sales) and cascade it down to find the leading indicators you should prioritize (pipeline, meetings, funnel metrics). In this part of the planning process you are looking for numbers & conversion rates all the way to closed won.

Note: These indicators might change given your company, the type of Go-to-market strategy you use, or simply the product you are marketing. Rather than having a one-size-fits-all approach, take the time to understand the top goal and the metrics that will help you determine how close (or how far) you are from meeting that goal.

1. Figure out the quarterly sales quota your sales team has. Beyond the obvious exercise of understanding what they are working with, also understand the way they are structured internally. The type of incentives they value, the culture and different types of people they have in their team. It’s not just about the quota, it's about aligning the team to achieve the goals.  

2. Identify all channels, efforts, and activities that are currently in place both in marketing and sales to meet yearly goals. Justifying a yearly plan means you have into consideration all of the different activities and experiments that are happening across revenue-generating functions of the business. This may vary depending on your organization and model (for example, in PLG models may not have sales but rather a CX department that has a massive impact on sales conversions)

3. Identify the pipeline coverage the business needs to hit that quota. Have a clear picture of the closed-won metric to be able to determine how much effort is required to meet pipeline coverage. So for example, if your close rate is 25%, you need 4x coverage.

4. Calculate your funnel metrics based on historical conversion rates. Analyze the conversion rates at each stage of your sales funnel, such as lead-to-opportunity or opportunity-to-customers. Use historical data to determine the average conversion rates for each stage.

5. Identify what are the levers that will help you drive internal organizational alignment: You are working with multiple teams of individuals, meaning you need to understand how each department works and how you can help them by having a clear plan. Talk to departamental leaders and see what their challenges are, how they interact with one another, and how to help them streamline operations. Ultimately, avoiding confrontation, or unhealthy interactions between sales, marketing and CX departments is a large portion of succeeding with this plan.

6. Determine how much pipeline marketing is going to contribute to that net-new revenue. Once again, this is unique for every company but ultimately what matters is that the entire organization agrees upon this number. Be sure to include a budget for experiments, aka moonshots.

How to do a 𝘽𝙤𝙩𝙩𝙤𝙢𝙨-𝙪𝙥 𝙖𝙣𝙖𝙡𝙮𝙨𝙞𝙨 for your marketing plan

Unlike the previous planning perspective, a bottoms-up approach starts by identifying what you think you can realistically produce (based on your budget and resources), and then scale that up to the top business goal (sales) to see how much you can support. This is usually when things get tricky for marketers, given that budgets might be tight while expectations are high.

To do so, follow these steps:

1. Calculate historical ROI of your marketing programs (how much pipeline can you generate for every dollar you invest). You may have to adjust ROI based on resource changes (new hires, new partnerships, etc.) and program changes. 

2. Plan your quarterly budget allocations for the year, taking into account seasonality. It seems obvious but sometimes marketers forget that a particular season is better than another. This is unique to each industry, so be sure to look at historical numbers of revenue by quarter before looking for external trends (these could be helpful, but internal data is more accurate).

3. Based on the budget, calculate how much pipeline you can generate per quarter. Be sure to take into consideration the sales cycles of your organization and how long it takes for a new customer to sign.. Also, be sure to add a little wiggle room so you’re not running too tight and adding too much pressure to your teams.

4. Take a look at the close rate again, and figure out how much sales you'll be able to support from the pipeline you generate.

5. Talk to your front-line workers and understand their perspective/performance: It’s easy to think that just looking at the data we can determine how much sales que support pipeline, but sometimes, the best information is hidden from datasets. Take the time to meet those who are in the trenches, closing on a daily basis, listen to their phone calls, check their approach to sales and be sure you become an ally. Ultimately, everyone is on the same boat, and you can identify missed opportunities simply by sharing a cup of coffee.

Using both approaches to build the perfect marketing plan

Once you finish both perspectives to come up with your yearly marketing plan there may be some discrepancies. You can easily find that you need to commit to a number that might not be possible, or that some of the best approaches to innovate and reach those numbers are not prioritized given their risk and uncertain potential. 

Instead, be ready to commit to "something in the middle", and be sure to include innovation and experimentation in your plan. And, before you present your marketing plan to the board be sure to:

1. Know your numbers and be ready to explain your assumptions clearly across the business. 

2. Know your teams and the ways in which they can be aligned to help you accomplish objectives. This plan is dependent on mobilizing the organization behind a common goal, you need to understand how to align people on that vision. (Plus, the board will love that you know not just the numbers but also how to rally your teams)

3. Know your opportunities to innovate and generate additional revenue that might not be possible to be calculated in this marketing plan.

4. Know your potential challenges and what you can do to overcome them (competitor’s initiatives, macroeconomic trends, new technologies, etc.) Beyond the plan, what matters is that you have a clear understanding of the system and the strategy to reach the end goal. 

5. Revisit and adjust your plan. Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth. Market dynamics change. it is essential to revisit your plan every quarter and figure out how to adjust

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• Minerva is hiring a Senior Growth Marketer who can take charge of their strategic growth endeavors. Be sure to check out their opening and apply if you are a match.

• Our colleague, Kim Solow is looking for her next Product Marketing Manager opportunity. She has over a decade of product marketing experience in SaaS, has worked with industry giants (Meta) and innovative late stage startups such as OneTrust and BetterCloud. Please reach out to her if you know of any opportunities.

Warning: The following piece is more relevant for earlier-stage tech companies. But we hope it's valuable for all marketers and sales associates.

Frankly, being a sales development representative (SDR) is horrible for the most part. You learn what it's like to face multiple rejections daily and what it takes to turn a relatively unknown person into a potential customer that an Account Executive (AE)  ends up closing. Despite how tough being on the sales frontline can be, improving sales frontline roles is a widely ignored problem because it’s easy to think that "you can always find another SDR". Plus, there is also this belief that "sharks" can handle the pressure.

Newsflash, you don't need to “stick it out”, you may just be in the wrong place.

Before we go any further, let's get some definitions out of the way. In most organizations, an SDR focuses on qualifying inbound leads, while a BDR's job is to prospect outbound leads. Same thing, different channel. Some may argue, different levels of complexity. 

Regardless, and for the sake of this essay, everything we will talk about from here onwards can apply to SDR (inbound) and BDR (outbound) teams. Or, if we get over marketing lingo, think of this as a reflection of the individuals that are your sales frontline, sending emails and calling daily to ensure your company grows (regardless of their title or where the opportunity comes from). When you’re a smaller organization, growth is the goal regardless of how.

SDRs/BDRs are your frontline, and that MATTERS.

My god, did we have nightmares working as SDRs. It seemed like, at any second, someone was either going to get fired because they did not meet their quota or they were going to break because they were actually killing it. It's rough. It requires relentless focus, lots of perseverance, being capable of pushing past permanent frustration and rejection. Plus, of course, actually helping the company find new customers. 

EZ.

There are entire YouTube channels dedicated to helping SDRs and BDRs push through the harsh realities of the job. Some videos teach you how to maximize productivity by building an abundant pipeline all the way from prospecting to calling to sequences and so on. Trent even goes a little deeper and shows you how he scheduled his day around the many tasks required to keep motivated. After all, it requires a mindset and understanding of your energy levels so that you can keep going no matter how hard it gets. It's a great video; check it out. It may help you. 

What most people ignore when thinking about SDR/BDR/Sales client-facing pipeline-nurturing jobs, is that it pushes individuals to praise a competitive rise-and-grind mentality. While it may seem like a great value to instill in your organization, it also comes with a cost: less creativity and perceptiveness. Who has time to be creative when they must constantly fill the pipeline and improve sales quotas? Who has time to collaborate with other areas to improve user understanding and product features when they have 50+ calls to do daily? 

Surrendering creativity and perceptiveness, however, may not be the best thing to do for long-term growth. Instead, working as an orchestrated marketing/sales team and valuing their feedback, learnings, and new perspectives works better. You can foster this healthy cultural environment by providing the right tools, support, independence, trust and collaboration. Or, you can ignore all that, raise the bar every time, promote ruthless competition, and hope they do not crack under enormous pressure. 

Doing it, though, it’s a lot harder than it seems. So together with our sponsors, RevenueHero, we wrote a couple of pointers you can incorporate into your sales teams to improve performance.

Three ways to improve the work of your frontline sales workers

1. Train your SDRs/BDRs for performance and comfort.

Let's be 100% honest here. Among the top most unpleasant experiences for a senior marketing leader is going through a qualification call with someone who doesn’t have the answers to critical questions. SDR roles and the qualification slow process make it harder for people to buy and also make the job less enjoyable. Regardless, it is a common practice to train newcomers to the sales department to be the frontline and "hustle" until a couple of opportunities happen. Sounds strange, but it works sometimes. 

Unfortunately for the brand, your team, your frontline sales newbie, and the decision maker he is pitching, the experience is far from satisfactory. It is not a coincidence that we find posts from multiple known brands like Hubspot, Nutshell, or Lusha that confirm being an SDR means facing rejection, pressure, and stress levels that break people. 

Some individuals are exceptionally great at being SDRs even if they’re new to the job. But, that is rare and it sets an unrealistic expectation for your sales teams. Just like some people are ok with the qualification process, but most might want to just talk to the AE and quickly figure out if the product solves their problems. 

Rather than following this route, be sure your sales teams have the right resources to learn everything they can about the product, previous sales wins, sales losses, and what it takes for them to succeed (based on historical data). This means having a documentation culture where collective growth rather than individual performance happens. Having this library of ideas, playbooks, emails, call scripts, etc., that yield the best results for your particular product is a gold mine that should be open to everyone facing clients daily. Plus, it helps your organization internally align with a shared source of truth.

Beyond information availability, also be sure to train your teams more individually to both teach and to get to know who they are. If you have an Account Executive-SDR/BDR structure, build an environment where they can openly share learnings and discuss potential improvements as well. While there appears to be no ultimate consensus on "Coopetition" (collaboration + competition) in a sales environment, building an internal culture that mixes both is intuitively superior. Working in a sales department where you can succeed at an individual level (perks, prices, etc.) while positively affecting the overall organization should be a priority.  If your sales frontline has the ability to close, you might also want to consider training them on that. This will also help your company simplify the sales internal process and help your prospects decide whether or not to buy your product. 

Now that you have optimized for performance with the proper training, cooperation, and figuring out what motivates them, think about comfort. Remember that these frontline workers are people with their own sets of skills and particularities. They are creative and can, for example, improve upon the copy you have written or your pitch. Let them be. Let them become the best version of an SDR each can become so that they grow into the role and improve their performance. 

Trying too hard to standardize your workforce only works if you work with robots. Humans, conversely, are complicated creatures that need to feel motivated to excel. We're not saying you should let people run their playbooks as they please or freestyle calls. It means you develop your sales frontline enough so they can confidently add their personal touch to every interaction in a way that aligns with the company's goals and boosts their ability to build relationships with potential customers. 

Caring for your sales team and ensuring your environment is healthy (avoiding longer hours and the grind mentality 24/7) and exciting (gamifying the experience, providing great perks, allowing them to be independent, etc.) will help them succeed. 

2. Accept that not everyone can sell, and not every product is worth selling

Not everyone is cut out for sales. It is a challenging route that some are naturally good at, some can learn and grow into, and some will dread every step of the way. Beyond how hard sales are, however, there is another reality that no one wants to admit but is common in tech industries: not every product out there is ready to be used by people.

Let's explore both of these ideas. 

In an economic landscape drastically shifting from venture capital and a game of fools to a camel startup mindset, what matters is adding value, not so much pursuing your passions. They can be one and the same; in fact, that's kind of what the contemporary work playbook is all about (this is an entirely different essay). But they aren't necessarily connected.

The economic bandwidth and flexibility that we had in the prosperous couple of decades where money was free (VC irresponsible investments to reckless startups just because it was possible) doesn't exist anymore. Instead, we are facing a new economic paradigm with: 

• Technologies we are incapable of fully understanding and controlling (AI and AGI) 

• A West vs. East cold-war revival (Ukraine-Russia/China-Taiwan)

• A need to understand and accept how the world is changing, given the rise of China as an economic superpower 

• Trade relations fracturing and dependencies shifting (BRICs)

• Climate crisis looming

• Post-pandemic debt

• And, our personal favorite and the most dangerous of all: permanent distraction.

With that context, who wants to go through a qualification call? Very few. 

Still, sales, whether inbound or outbound, do work, but they do because people who work in that field focus on the possibilities and opportunities of genuinely helping someone. How? By selling them a product, building relationships, and by personally loving the thrill of impacting the revenue targets for the organization and feeling validated. 

That is a rare skill. It requires relentless focus and hunger to prove to themselves (and to the world) that they can persuade people to solve their problems using a particular product. It requires understanding the obstacles, the benefits, the market, and the personal triggers that would help someone go for it despite it all. 

Can anyone do that? That's for you to answer, but it's unlikely. What you can control, however, is your capacity to build a system to find these people. A few things you can do are:

• Using psychological tests to match candidates with specific abilities that the role requires. We like this one in particular because it lists your strengths (helping you identify your strong areas and those you need to improve). It's free.

• Have potential new hires do a paid test to see their performance before hiring. This is true for most organizational roles, especially small orgs that can't afford to hire the wrong folks. 

• Hire people with experience and give a chance to those hungry for growth. Both are great hires. You just need to make sure they have a sales mindset.

• Have the right tools to help them succeed. This does not apply to most large orgs, but it's standard for smaller "scrappy" companies to see sales frontlines doing magic tricks to do research via free trials with multiple tools. The job is already hard enough. Please.

• Build a clear career path for your sales teams. We're all driven by future scenarios and the idea that we can improve and grow professionally. Build that and a transparent and accountable system that anyone can understand. Celebrate wins and inspire them. Motivation is a puzzle, but you can do things to make it more straightforward. 

• Build a marketing+sales process that improves success and reduces frustration. We will go into this next, but honestly, doing sales with an aligned team is 10x more effective and less frustrating. 

Now let's talk about broken products. Many apps are far from product-market fit, have fundamental flaws, or use confusing contracts to force people to continue paying as long as possible. The list of issues some products have that would make a rational person think this is not a functional product is massive. But still, in the golden era of free money and millennial subsidies (that no longer exists), it made sense to push riskier products. After all, that was the game as long as you had runway and a creative team that could make investors believe they would make it. Many did, many didn’t hop well. 

How can you ask a sales frontline worker to push an undesired product and expect great results? Does every product deserve to be sold? Are SDRs machine-like workers expected to ignore these realities and continue grinding daily?

These are rhetorical. 

3. ABM is a mindset, not a tool. Use it. 

The debate around ABM is confusing. Some think it’s a platform, some think it’s a way to do marketing, some think it’s both. Instead of solving that enigma, let’s consider ABM marketing that happens in an organized way that focuses on accounts rather than individuals. 

Above is a graph that explains how the RevenueHero team runs its ABM playbook internally without purchasing an ABM tool. To them, ABM is a mindset and a way to make sure everyone is aligned in the organization to accomplish the best results possible. 

As you can see, there are multiple dimensions at play. First and foremost, a clear ICP becomes the backbone of the Hubspot list RH uses to reach out to its prospects. Using tools and multiple channels, they connect this information with their website to push for conversion or deanonymize IPs that are then plugged back to the Hubspot list. This process is iterative and permanent, enriched via Apollo.io to ensure that company and contact details are clean and extensive.

The most important win, however, is that sales frontlines can have meaningful conversations with prospects already somewhat familiar with RH. 

Regardless of the source (Direct, organic, social, and so on), once the SDR reaches out to the person on the other end to pitch RH, there is an apparent brand halo effect at play that makes their job a lot easier. Rather than saying, "Hey, you don't know us, but we're a competitor of X, and we want to offer you a better solution," they can share a narrative that resonates with the ICP because they have already "seen them." 

On top of that, there are three things RH does to maximize sales frontline effectiveness that you should start considering as well:

• Sales frontlines sit on the sales department on paper, but marketing owns messaging: One of the things that RH does a bit differently than other companies is that sales work is interdepartmental. While they follow the overall principles of the sales department and are responsible for sales, whatever they say and how they add their own personal spice to the conversations is part of the marketing dept responsibilities. 
  
  This way of managing sales allows them to have more control over what exactly is being pitched, the way it is being communicated, and, more importantly, it connects back to their marketing efforts. This allows RH to try out a new benefit or feature via LinkedIn ads for a particular quarter while doubling down on the effort via SDR interactions. This connection between sales and marketing brings us to their ABM playbook's second and critical aspect. 
  

• Marketing and sales share the same pipeline and objectives. We know this may not work for larger orgs, but a single sales and marketing pipeline can significantly simplify your life and growth if you are in the early stages. Sometimes marketing and sales like to work more independently because individual success (from the marketing and sales leaders) is a priority, and no one wants to lose their job. In smaller companies, say $1 to $3Mn ARR that doesn't matter as much as you would think. You are either on the same page, or you could jump ship. 

  
  This radical alignment gives sales frontlines more clarity on the objectives and what is perceived as an internal win. They can also be research associates that inform back on sales and marketing whatever they find insightful when interacting with customers. 

  
  Your company will have more than enough time to specialize and develop departmental objectives once it has more runway. But, if you are in a very competitive niche, finding PMF or just starting, less but with more focus is better for everyone. 

  
  This alignment may not work for all products and teams, but it’s essential for RevenueHero. Part of their core strategy is to use their own product to instantly qualify and book meetings with the right sales rep. In a way, they see alignment as part of the cultural byproduct required to ensure their efforts are successful.  
  

• Measure performance like your growth depends on it. Even though there is a single pipeline and objectives are shared, you must still track activities. In fact, campaign performance and SDR outreach need to be monitored and shared constantly. 

  
  For example, if a particular SDR finds an angle that rarely fails (an objection with a quick counter-argument that helps them close), they should inform marketing so they can explore building a campaign around that. In the case of marketing, once you find a particular campaign that is a clear winner, SDRs must also be informed because it may be easier to build rapport and find bridges with potential customers. 
  
  Communication between both areas while thoroughly measuring all activities is the key to unlocking success. A single pipeline and objectives when you’re small simplifies work. But making sure information is accurate and shared among teams is the thing that would help your sales frontline teams shine. 
  

• Celebrate sales frontline wins. Always. It's a hard job, we already talked about that, but it's much more challenging if the wins go unnoticed. Please remember to share the spotlight with every success from your sales dev team. No matter how big or small. Their motivation always needs to be as high as possible, and in many cases, internal visibility and genuine appreciation are the secret ingredients (not just the financial perks).

Bonus* what else can you do to increase chances of success for your frontline sales workers? (most applicable to small orgs)

• Don't get caught up in sales vs marketing. When you're small, sales and marketing are better off working together because they are both responsible for the organization's growth. You know you nailed this when either sales or marketing start doing something differently without telling the other dept, and red flags start popping. 

• Forget about attribution. Larger companies need to figure out exactly what is working and why. That way, you can determine internal budgets and investments. If you're small, attribution is less important than being aligned. 

• Stop chasing shiny objects. This is a rule for life, but in sales in particular, it's crucial to have both short and long-term perspectives. Don't just kill initiatives because you found a new playbook. Instead, have an experimental mindset and double down on what works. Be patient, and also move fast to test your ideas.

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Community Plugs

• Yasmin Morrison is looking for a Demand Gen Manager for their marketing team. If you have experience owning demand at a startup, message her at yasmin@resoundconsulting.com

• The team at Linear is also hiring. Check out this tweet by Cristina Cordova for more info about the roles (Marketing Lead + Content Marketing Manager).

• Cerby is hiring a Head of Marketing to start in Q3. To learn more about the opening, please check out this document.

Editors Note

Long time no see. Today we have a guest post by Nate from TenSpeed. There are a lot of conversations about SEO changing because of LLMs. I refuse to call them Artificial intelligence because Large Language Models don’t intuitively know what the words mean. They are spitting out words. True Artificial Intelligence is when machines fully understand & comprehend what they say. 

Meaning of intelligence a side - LLMs are reshaping industries, but SEO is still important & a big driver for many businesses. Below, Nate writes about SEO & getting the most out of it. 

Getting the most out of your organic traffic each month

If you talk to any decent demand gen or performance marketing person, you’ll typically understand that some part of their playbook or process includes improving conversion rates. 

They optimize landing pages, A/B test alternative messaging and imagery, and even modify the offers or signup flow if necessary. 

Now think about how your conversations typically go with folks responsible for content marketing and/or SEO. A lot of times, you’ll hear more about traffic, rankings, impressions, and social metrics. Non-paid channels, organic search in particular, have the ability to drive large volumes of leads, pipeline, and revenue, yet the efforts tend to stop once the traffic has made it to the site. Why?

The biggest driver with this is the “on to the next one” mentality that takes shape in a lot of content & SEO roles. You’re trying to build the next piece of content or rank for the next query, always building and building and building.  

Ultimately, the result is a lot of missed opportunities to translate organic traffic into audience growth, leads, and revenue. So, I’ve put together some of my recommendations and learnings from leading all acquisition efforts (paid & non-paid) for Sprout Social to help you get the most out of your organic traffic each month.

Sizing up the opportunity

First, I like to use a thought exercise to help people appreciate just how much opportunity is being missed every single month. Here are a few examples that might fit your situation.

• If you receive about 1,000 organic visits per month, this is similar to an average packed-out high school basketball game. 

• If you receive about 30,000 organic visits per month, this is similar to the low-end average of MLB game attendance.  

• If you receive more than 80,000 organic visits per month, this is similar to NFL or Rose Bowl game attendance.

• If you receive 150,000+ organic visits per month, this is similar to attendance at major festivals like Lollapalooza or Coachella.

Take the one that is closest to your monthly traffic numbers and imagine yourself being there, looking around at the crowd of people. Now, imagine they are all there to read your content, check out your product, and do whatever else you hope people will do on your website. 

Would you be satisfied with less than 1% of the traffic doing something and the rest leaving without anything? Or would you be working hard to capitalize on that massive amount of interest and getting as much as possible from it?

What to do 

I’m not advocating for trying to convert them all because that isn’t the point of content and SEO, but there are more things to do than just get them to sign up and buy. Here are 5 ways to get more value from your monthly organic traffic.

• Additional resources:
  Organic traffic can lead to a lot of one-and-done visits. They land on your site, read the page they are on, and then leave. Being thoughtful about internal linking, additional resource CTAs, and even embedded content like podcasts and videos can help draw visitors into more of your resources.

• Retargeting:
  Similarly, running retargeting campaigns can help you put additional content and resources in front of folks who didn’t stick around long enough to understand everything you have to offer. Don’t measure the success purely on leads and revenue and make sure that you have some campaigns that are focused on putting more of your best content in front of them.

• Build your audience:
  You worked hard to get organic traffic to your website, so why not go a step further and build your own audience? Allowing people to subscribe to your newsletter, podcast, social channels, or YouTube channel can ensure that you stay in front of them and increase your future distribution.

• Survey/Feedback:
  I know for a fact that if you were in a stadium full of people interested in your company, you’d be making some effort to collect feedback from them. So why not do that on your website? You can ask what types of content they are looking for, lead them to a larger survey you are building, ask for product feedback, and so many other types of valuable information for your company.

• Alternative CTAs:
  No matter how much we want everyone to follow the neat little funnel we drew on a whiteboard, the reality is that people want and need to research and evaluate in different ways. If you have a free trial, consider testing a demo request CTA in places where the free trial CTA isn’t working (and vice versa). You can also test other things, like SDRs answering questions via live chat. Just because the traffic isn’t jumping on your primary offer doesn’t mean they won’t engage another way. 

Maintaining focus on business impact

At the end of the day, a lot of this boils down to keeping a focus on business impact and not vanity metrics. It’s great to get traffic and build the brand, but organic traffic is nothing more than just traffic if it isn’t somehow leading toward additional engagement, audience growth, or conversions. 

If you are desensitized to how many people are visiting your site every month, take a moment to visualize all of those people in one place and then work through some of the ways that you can balance your approach and harness the full potential of your organic traffic to help your company grow.

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Marketing is neither art nor science. It’s a culmination of both, with different strategies and playbooks that work across different markets. What works for B2B enterprise may not work in B2C retail, for example. That’s why it’s especially dangerous to have strong preconceptions.

Today’s article is all about questioning your biases. Think back to when you first broke into B2B marketing. What are some things that you believed to be true back then? And how has your belief system evolved over time as you gained experience?

Our team at 42 Slash recently spoke with Tara Robertson, Head of Demand Generation at Chili Piper, about how they have had to rethink their entire marketing strategy as they decided to move upmarket to cater to enterprise customers. After a heartfelt discussion, we realized that not only should marketers take a moment to question their bias every now and then, but that they also need an organized framework for doing so.

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Biases, preconceptions, and you

“I’m tired of being what everyone else has made me,” I said. “I want to be myself.”

“Don’t be a child.”

I looked up, startled and angry, though of course there was nothing to see. “What?”

“You are what your creators and experiences have made you, like every other being in this universe. Accept that and be done; I tire of your whining.”

N. K. Jemisin is one of my favorite fantasy fiction authors of all time. Her book, “The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms,” was the first adult fantasy novel that I read after slowly graduating from my time with young adult fantasy. The book was original, featured a unique plot, and challenged many preconceptions that western communities have about people of color.

So, naturally, when I found Jemisin writing about the whitewashing of medieval history on her blog post about Game of Thrones, I knew I had to take heed. 

The need for diversity

In case you’ve been following the world of fantasy fiction as closely as I have, you may have noticed a certain controversy about there being no people of color in the “A Song of Ice and Fire” books by George R. R. Martin surfacing time and again on Twitter. It began with a simple enough question — for a novel that features large-scale battles between dragons and the undead, is it really that implausible to include women in empowering leading roles and people of color existing alongside white men in a medieval-inspired timeline?

A shockingly large number of people apparently didn’t think so. They replied with comments like, “Things were just like that back then.” However, that statement is wildly untrue. Historical records, including texts, illustrations, and archaeological findings suggest that medieval Europe, the geographical location that the books are loosely based on, was a lot more diverse than most modern narratives suggest. Europe had extensive connections with the Islamic world, Africa, and Asia through both war and trade.

Dealing with bias

Why am I talking about all this? Because knowingly or unknowingly, we all have our biases. But when those biases are challenged, we have two choices. We can react with apprehension and fear, riling against anything and anyone who dares question our belief systems. Or, in the interest of survivability, we can adapt. We can learn from our biases and question what we have been taught. 

I found myself thinking back to all of this after replaying in my head the conversation with Tara, Head of Demand Generation at Chili Piper. What biases and assumptions have I made myself susceptible to during my career as a content marketer? And is it time that I started questioning them? 

Adapting for survivability

Founded in 2016, Chili Piper is an automation platform that helps you streamline the entire B2B appointment scheduling process. Its range of products starting from sales coaching to lead generation have one simple goal, to help sales teams book more meetings with prospective clients. In the years that Chili Piper has been in business, they have catered mostly to B2B businesses in the small-to-mid-size range and focused particularly on IT companies. 

However, with the decision to move upmarket, things have changed a lot. Chili Piper is now expanding to target enterprise customers who are being pitched by almost every other platform in the market, making it difficult to stand out on the basis of inbound lead generation alone. That means often leading with an outbound-first approach. It also means rethinking their long-standing stance on some controversial topics in the marketing industry — such as gated content, or MQLs.

Does it still work?

Marketing Qualified Leads, or MQLs, are accounts that have been deemed by your marketing team to be more likely to convert to sales in the near future. They’re usually qualified based on behavioral indicators like web pages visited, resources downloaded, or other interactions across company touchpoints.

Tara explained that Chili Piper has always stayed away from using MQLs internally as a defining metric, because they found them unnecessary in the shorter sales cycles that typically come with targeting small to mid-sized businesses. As a result, Chili Piper has also been against gated content, which is the primary method for scoring leads based on this method. But with the decision to bring more enterprise customers into the fold, “things have changed.”

“Even gated content is not completely off the table,” she said, explaining that as the marketing team works to wrap their heads around this shift, they’ve been exploring several tactics that they’ve previously stayed away from, such as having a strong outbound marketing motion and scoring accounts based on their level of engagement across different stages. With the sales cycle becoming more drawn out, it makes sense to have some kind of scoring factor to determine whether the marketing team is moving in the right direction with a particular prospect.

But, it’s also important to be holistic about how you qualify and score leads. Traditionally, marketing teams would work in silos and pass off a lead to their sales counterparts the second it crossed a certain scoring threshold. This would open them up to a slippery slope of questionable practices, like tweaking the score as they see fit to hit their quarterly goal of MQLs. 

Marketing is human

In the end, we need to realize that marketing is built around human connections, which is why you can’t afford to get so buried in automation workflows and vanity metrics that you fail to see the bigger picture. It’s also why blanket statements like how a certain marketing tactic is “dead” are usually far from accurate — because they don’t factor in the random and unpredictable nature of human behavior, which doesn’t necessarily follow steady patterns. 

In fact, startups that end up surviving this cutthroat market do so because they’re quick on their feet and open to adapting for the sake of survivability. From NVIDIA to Adobe, there’s no shortage of examples in the tech industry where a company found massive success after pivoting their go-to-market strategy based on the industry’s needs. The task of finding product-market fit isn’t an easy one, which is why startups must shift gears multiple times throughout their life cycles before they find that sweet spot.

Pivot for success

In the case of NVIDIA, their name used to be synonymous with video games and video editing because the chips that they manufactured were essential for both. But today, with the AI boom that’s followed in the wake of ChatGPT, NVIDIA’s valuation has reached $1 trillion. That’s all thanks to their new H100 and A100 series of machine learning GPUs, used by the likes of OpenAI and Stable Diffusion. 

When Adobe’s revenue dropped 20% in the wake of the 2008 recession, the management team decided that there had to be a better way to deal with the situation than just go through another round of layoffs. That’s when they drew inspiration from Salesforce and launched Adobe Creative Cloud, essentially pivoting the entire product line to a software-as-a-service model. By 2013, Creative Cloud had far surpassed the company’s growth expectations with over 700,000 paid subscribers across the world.

Thinking back to our conversation with Tara, it’s not hard to see how some of the long-standing ethos that have ensured Chili Piper’s success with SMBs may not necessarily apply to enterprises. When selling to larger organizations with multiple decision-makers across various departments, you will inevitably face a more drawn out sales cycle as you work to get approval from every stakeholder within the client account. 

This requires incrementally educating your prospects about the benefits of using your product over time, rather than trying to set up a sales call at the very first touchpoint. It also requires a mindset shift towards more outbound relationships than inbound, because personalization is a crucial part of enterprise sales. That’s why they’re choosing to adapt.

A framework for innovation

B2B companies spend thousands of dollars a year on creativity training. But the traditional approach, which usually involves some variation of company-mandated brainstorming sessions, doesn't contribute to a lot of divergent thinking. 

That’s because, depending on the company culture, most executives define creativity as something that conforms to their idea of what creative thinking looks like. They look for indicators like past performance, or selectively entertain ideas that mesh with their existing values. This, in turn, reduces transparency and encourages employees to think within the box, instead of fostering true innovation.

Angus Fletcher is the Professor of Story Science at a leading academic think tank called Project Narrative. He recently collaborated with the University of Chicago Booth School, U.S. Special Operations, and businesses ranging from Fortune 50 companies to Silicon Valley startups, to explore a new model for encouraging creativity, called counterfactual thinking. The team found that the solution was to promote the idea of anomalous thinking and protect the privacy of employees when sharing new ideas. They created a few exercises to do just that, here’s how they work:

• In the first exercise, each team member anonymously writes down an idea they like but are afraid to admit to the group. The answers are then shared while maintaining anonymity. Everyone takes two minutes to imagine that they like each idea and silently plans a way to incorporate it into the workspace. This exercise empowers subjective bias, encourages teams to appreciate nonconformity, and primes the brain to value anomalies. 

• In the second exercise, team members imagine a new competitor in their market, identify a highly unusual feature about that competitor, and then envision themselves as that competitor. The focus is to determine what this anomalous feature allows them to do in the market. This exercise activates non-logical and mostly non-conscious regions of the brain, which often leads to unexpected insights and epiphanies.

• In the third exercise, instead of selecting the 'best' ideas from any brainstorming session, each idea is ranked based on creativity and potential for innovation. The current operational environment is then assessed in terms of stability and certainty. The selection of the idea to pursue depends on the environmental assessment. For example, in highly stable and certain environments, less creative but more innovative ideas are prioritized. In contrast, in unstable and uncertain environments, highly creative ideas, even those seen as long shots, are preferred.

The goal of these exercises is simple. They encourage deviation from the traditional model of creative thinking to encourage more radical ways of finding and approving new ideas. While it’s impossible to eliminate bias from the human mind, the most innovative organizations usually find a way to acknowledge the bias within their workforce and make it as transparent and diverse as possible.

Overall, this is simply a more structured presentation of what Tara’s team is doing over at Chili Piper. Every once in a while, marketing teams should take a moment to question their biases and rethink what they have learned to appreciate as universal truths as marketers. And, where innovation is the goal, it’s important to treat creativity as a team effort and encourage collaboration while tearing down silos. 

B2B marketing is too generic. It’s time to make a change. What will you be doing in the upcoming days to promote new ideas within your marketing department?

Refer a friend

Illustrations by Alejandra Céspedes - Be sure to connect with her on LinkedIn / follow her on Instagram.

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A few months back, we had the privilege of meeting with Marissa Homère  to discuss marketing, brand, and leadership, among many topics. I first noticed the Dare to Lead book by Brene Brown on her shelf, and from that moment on, I knew this conversation would be thought-provoking.

One of Marissa's most illuminating comments was that "brand happens whether you invest in it or not." As an anthropologist working in marketing, I found her assessment quite powerful. For a while, we had been thinking about brand as an inevitable business reality, but we needed clarity to take a stab at it and put it into words. Talking to Marissa helped us do just that.

This essay is the result of our kind and thoughtful conversation, and we hope to do justice to Marissa's wisdom as to why investing in ads that give you goosebumps (the one that have a brand and a soul) is more necessary than ever. 

What is a brand anyway?

A brand is not a logo, it is not an ad, and it is not a typeface (to mention a few examples). A brand is an idea represented in a product, the meaning of such a product, the values it stands for, and the purpose behind it in relation to similar solutions. Whenever brands succeed, they exceed the product and can move from one category to the next because they are not products but cultural objects (like Nintendo or Listerine). 

In marketing and many B2B communities, the brand appears to be an afterthought. We believe the right way to grow a business is to experiment and find product-market fit before investing in the brand. If it fails, we can move to the following product, the next experiment and the next app. But what if we had the chance to do things differently? To try to find significance, cultural insight, and resonance beyond product market fit?

Brand happens whether you invest in it or not.

As we mentioned, it is an easy mistake to think of a brand as the logo and image you put on top of a highly engaging product. We built an entire lean mythology around digital products prioritizing speed over quality, pushing us to move fast, compete for attention, and ship trash as long as we get it right in the next iteration.  

Some B2B brand outliers are exceptional. They can be funny, colorful, and different, or well-produced and have an impact. What makes them stand out, however, is that thousands of daily ads competing for attention don't stop them from striving to be original and memorable. A quality that differentiates them from a crowded space, looking for playbooks and hacks into the consumer's mind while ignoring the importance of branding and great advertising.

It is not a coincidence that the global SaaS market is projected to grow from USD 251.17 billion in 2022 to USD 883.34 billion by 2029, exhibiting a CAGR of 19.7% during the forecast period. Building products is easier than ever (with the rise of no-code and AI), and the essence of work is shifting so quickly that grabbing a piece of the pie seems like a piece of cake. Except, it isn't a game of products but a game of meaning and identities. 

We see products left and right, from B2C to corporate, that aren't fully functional, without a clear value proposition, and are exclusively transactional. Marketers build funnels, lead magnets, and ads with lazy creatives and brand insights as long as speed, filling the pipeline, and monetizing happens. But what happened to paying attention to the customer and building a product that doesn't just solve problems but connects with their worldview? We, marketers, myself included, decided to ignore it because the power of data and quick experimentation clouded our judgment. We forgot that branding is undeniable and permanent, and, as Marissa mentioned, it happens whether you invest in it or not.  

For us to jump beyond product and rediscover the power of brands, we need to let go of some preconceived notions. Here, we discuss them, and we hope you are open to reconsidering what your product and brand mean in a more competitive space than ever before. 

Essential beliefs we must reconsider when thinking about brands

A brand is a combination of images.

Let's not beat a dead horse. As mentioned above, brands transcend space, time, and product and become stories and values we share with others. They are fluid, can shape their physical representation (product), and become part of our daily lives and identity. 

Slack is a strong brand that worked for the fast-moving startup ecosystem because it cracked two contradictory but important values for entrepreneurs: playing hard and working hard. It simplified communication, harmonized projects, and simultaneously allowed you to add gifs, funny emojis of the CEO smiling, and random pics of your cat. It became a product that added value to our daily lives, shaped the work culture in the startup era, and was not a total bore to use. 

Not every SaaS can be Slack. But if you are thorough and perhaps a bit lucky, your brand can transcend the product and become part of something bigger than you can imagine. Striving to deeply shape culture is a much more powerful goal than finding product-market-fit.

Building brand equity requires a budget. 

Another of the most common false beliefs marketers defend is that you can invest in brand development later. It is easier to wait for the right time in terms of attention and finances to do that rebrand, invest in that video, or host that event. The problem: you are always making an impression and building a brand. 

Waiting for the right time to invest in the brand makes no sense because we constantly build symbolic relationships with people and products. We know what type of shoes we want, what kind of software we find helpful, and which is unusable but somehow essential.

From the very inception of your product to your first marketing campaigns, every email, every ad, every landing page, and touchpoint can make a difference. It may take more time, but doing so would allow you to improve everything you say about your product to your customers and internally. You might need to slow down and be more thoughtful instead of shipping fast into the void of attention-seeking products and users with very little attention to give. You may even have to go upwards and renegotiate with C-level execs what can be accomplished, how, and when. 

It will be terrifying, but ultimately, and if you are lucky, your user might notice you are doing things differently. There will be an impact. Even if it cannot be accurately attributed, it will position your brand and that symbolic relationship as one that deserves attention rather than another product that ships trash and wants to jailbreak its way into your pocket. 

We don't need a budget to care. We need to take a couple of extra minutes to ensure what we do adds value to that person on the other side of the screen.

Can you get away with paying little attention to brand development and equity? Of course, until a certain point. Just because you can, however, doesn't mean you should. Your brand is your reputation, perception, memory, and stories people share about your product's contribution to their lives. In a world where we hear horror stories about the summoning of the apocalypse, the intangible and the unmeasurable matter more than ever. 

You don't need a budget to build a brand. You have to care enough to embed value into every touchpoint.

A brand is external, not internal. 

Marketers and sales reps are like cats and dogs (and not the good kind that gets along) more often than we think. We often hear the typical "your leads are worthless" discourse or the "they just don't know how to close" counter-argument. In reality, none of these declarations matter much because a product's objective is to solve problems in a valuable way for the end user (no matter the department).

Much of our internal work with our clients boils down to ensuring their house is in order before they are ready to grow. Sometimes it means going deep into marketing and sales operations and connecting the systems, teams, and shared language between multiple internal departments. Surprisingly (or not so much if you do marketing operations work), organizations can grow significantly without establishing clear synergies between their internal departments. It’s helpful to remember that tools don't build a house; people do, and the more clarity on the brand, the vision and the values behind it, the easier it is to make sure everyone is on the same page. 

Brands are not just about external transactions. They are also the story your employees tell their colleagues, their families and friends. If you have no idea what you stand for but just the category or the audience of your product you will limit your organization’s growth by default. 

Before you can figure out the fuel you are using for your engine and how to optimize it, you must ensure people aren't working in silos and know the product and the brand they work for. The customer wants a single unified brand experience that is valuable (brand), meaning your internal team needs alignment regarding KPIs and vision.

Data is not a reflection of your organization, but of your past. 

We learn to believe in data above all things. We follow a religious-like mindset where we measure everything to justify its value. We are marketers, but that also means we are researchers and scientists, and we care about controlling the outcome of our efforts and the revenue we create (as we should). But sometimes, the unmeasurable somehow takes over and proves that there is something wishy-washy, relative, and scary beyond the numbers called culture. 

Cultural resonance is a thing. Whether we like it or not, as rational marketers that believe in numbers and results, some campaigns and brands have a much more noticeable impact. It is not a coincidence that Adidas is stuck with tons of shoes from Ye since their partnership ended. We are not saying Ye's behavior was in any way positive. Nonetheless, cultural symbols such as Ye show us that brands are more than objects. They are ideas. 

We don't just buy products that solve our problems, pain points, or JTBD. We buy because purchasing something is one of the very few individual decisions we can still fully control regarding our identity and what we believe in. Unfortunately, many of these marketing equation elements can't be quantified. But fortunately for those marketers that are curious and open, having access to these stories about your product can help you plan how to use your data to take your company to the moon. 

Data tells you what already happened, and data models give you potential scenarios about what could happen (sometimes, people even build data models to prove a point to investors rather than to predict what could happen accurately). Stories, however, are something else entirely. No one can tell you your story isn't yours, and even if everyone loved this or that product, if you had a bad experience, you will believe it's awful and tell your friends and colleagues. But your experience and the brand's story will also shine if it's good.  

Stories allow you to move beyond revenue to empathy and compassion. Although uncomfortable to talk about, write about, and admit, this shift from transactional to caring and compassionate relationships can take your marketing to the next level. Instead of considering products such as Descript as apps that can help us edit videos faster, we can go from usage to meaning. What if we talked about the mid-level manager that started her podcast, edited on Descript, published it on LinkedIn, and landed her dream job? Would that be more meaningful, relatable, and ultimately a better brand play for the app? Probably. Plus, the more stories you have, the better you can map your audience and build funnels that are helpful and valuable.

We are data lovers. With all the available information and how accessible it is to build marketing campaigns, it's almost impossible to find someone who isn't. Growth, nevertheless, is about more than numbers.  

Does your brand advertising make you feel goosebumps? It could if you wanted. It could if you used each touchpoint as a privilege and every ad as an opportunity to provide value or spark curiosity. You may not build an identity around your brand, or hack culture like iconic brands do. But, surely, you will stand out from a noisy world where everyone wants to grab attention, but very few do the work to deserve it. 

Illustrations by Alejandra Céspedes - Be sure to connect with her on LinkedIn / follow her on Instagram.

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It seems PLG is a relatively intuitive process, but it is pretty complex once you consider how the entire marketing infrastructure, operations, and teams must adapt to serve the customers. To better understand the process and turn product usage into pipeline, we met with Minami Rojas, Head of Growth at Endgame. After a candid and insightful conversation, we learned that one of the most simple yet ignored ways to improve PLG is to put ourselves in the shoes of our users.

Note: Before you continue reading, we know this is an oversimplified version of PLG systems. Depending on your product, customer, vertical, etc., there is much more complexity and nuances to consider. 

PLG is about providing value, not about being pushy… 

Digital marketing traditionally has had a role of filling a healthy pipeline for sales teams. The warmer the leads, the easier it was to close. To do so, marketers followed a set of patterns that included gating content, capturing emails, and qualifying leads (among many others), to ensure only the people who were ready to buy could talk to a sales rep. This was done to both - make the best user of sellers time & also ensure product/ prospect fit.

This paradigm still holds today if you sell to particular segments/types of users. But in the PLG world, however, a couple of essential things push this structure a bit to let the users be at the center and control what and how they want to buy digital products. How did this happen? There are plenty of reasons, but here are a couple of fundamental changes to keep in mind to understand PLG:

1. IT departments are no longer in control: having a great product is just an element of the equation. Other areas (Customer service, Marketing, Sales, etc.) in a much more mature tech market with many options are gaining more traction and agency within organizations. 

2. Building a company that sells to other YCombinator/startup-like companies is absolutely possible: People in these markets, with tons of experience buying/building products online, are tired of having to talk to sales. They want to “try” and “do” things by themselves rather than going through a long process before being able to buy the product.

In a PLG scenario, given that no “traditional sales teams” can “convince” you to buy the product, there has to be an incentive built within the product to let users try to upgrade from your basic plan. Sure, everything leads to an upgrade, but instead of stopping you from using the product, the pricing experience becomes an informational section to determine whether or not upgrading is worth it .

Product teams in this scenario have multiple challenges, but primarily there are a couple of tensions/contradictions they must address:

1. Building a good but not a great product: Building a good enough product to solve a concrete problem while simultaneously ensuring it is not so great that no one ever wants to upgrade to a paid plan. This is where Evernote found its demise. Their free plan was so generous that no one ever felt the need to upgrade.

2. Thoughtful tracking, not surveillance: Building a way to track and understand signals (behavior / product events) from several types of users to make sure they upgrade to a paid plan without becoming unwanted emails in their inbox.

And now, let us show you a couple of PLG scenarios:

Hypothetical SMB case study: Audiograms.

Rana just joined the marketing team at a small local shop in Toronto. Her first task is to help repurpose old podcasts into audiograms. She has some experience in video editing and has played around a bit with audio in the past, but audiograms are a new challenge for her. 

First, she gives it a try using the Adobe suite. Sure you can create audiograms, but after spending a couple of hours creating the initial template, she realizes there must be a more straightforward way to do them. She does some research and arrives at multiple video editor SaaS solutions with affordable pricing for the organization. Naturally, she creates a couple of free accounts and tries them out. 

Option A: Frustration without fulfilling JTBD (bad PLG)

Rana finds a promising option after spending some time on Google checking the category and searching for solutions to her problem. Rana creates a "Free account" with her corporate credentials and adds the video as well as a couple of templates the design team created for the audiogram. She is gladly surprised that the app automatically makes the captions. 

Once she is ready to export, however, something terrible happens.

"To export, please upgrade to our paid plan here."

"What a waste of time." She thinks and moves forward to another option.

A couple of days later, she goes back to check her email and finds a message from the same company, inviting her to log back in to finish her project. They even offer a "limited time" package where for a dollar, she can export up to 10 audiograms per month. 

It is almost tempting, but unfortunately, given that she has already figured out how to solve the problem with another tool, she skips the offer. Not only that but the following week after receiving more emails, she decides she has to either unsubscribe from these messages, close the account or move the messages to the spam folder.

Not a great experience for Rana. And definitely a missed opportunity for the app that could have allowed her to download a "trial audiogram" for free on her initial experience.

Why is this a bad PLG experience?

As we discussed on our podcast with Emily Kramer, one of the most critical actions a good PLG motion must allow users to accomplish is to show it solves the use case. In this case, Rana isn't looking for an online app to do audiograms; in reality, she is looking for a way to save time and get the audiogram ready to be posted. 

Blocking her from downloading the audiogram made the app's value unclear.

Rana cannot get her job done; she can potentially see it as an option, but unfortunately, in a crowded category where your competitors allow free exports, this is not competitive nor functional. It becomes worse once her email gets flooded with messages inviting her to use the app again - she already found an alternative solution; why would she find these comms valuable?

Once your product leads the interaction and potential purchases with users, the focus on sales shifts from a "gated" mindset (limiting audiogram exports) to a "useful but limited" scenario (possibly allowing exports with a watermark or only having three free exports per month, etc.) 

Instead of Rana having the possibility or time to talk to sales and possibly receive a free export, she went through a negative experience where it was clear the company did not understand her JTBD. 

Option B: Frustration in volume but fulfilling JTBD (Better PLG)

Rana already knows this "trick" that forces her to purchase before exporting. This time, she only looks at options that allow her to export the audiogram (even if she has to work a bit harder by adding the captions or tweaking the design). 

She finds three solutions. Then, she filters them by the number of exports available. Finally, she finds the most promising solution, and just as before, she creates a free account, adds all assets, makes sure everything looks perfect, and exports. 

Unlike in the bad PLG scenario, Rana can export the audiogram and quickly notice how much time she would save using this app rather than going at it manually. She goes back and finds that in the premium app packages, she can both export more videos + improve the quality of the export from 720 to 1080. 

Later that week, she shows the final product to the team, and after a couple of light adjustments, they love it. Rana then explains there is a limitation in terms of volume, so the team decides to buy the basic package to make sure they can create enough audiograms at the speed they require while helping Rana save time. 

A couple of weeks later, the audiograms are a massive success. Contrary to the unwanted emails from the first audiogram app she tried, she receives a message from this company inviting her to purchase the premium package with more features and unlimited downloads. She talks to her team about potentially buying the plan, and given the great results, and the price, they decide to move forward and purchase the premium plan at a reasonable price (30 dollars per month). Not only that but apparently, she is getting a fabulous tote bag they will send for "free" to her home in Boston.

Why is it good PLG

1. Rana had a specific use case she could achieve using this app. She was not doing market research on the capabilities of audiogram apps or exploring how difficult it was. Instead, she needed to create an audiogram quickly, and the app solved that issue. The time to value was accelerated, and the experience was positive.
   
   There is thought from the product team behind what people need to do in the app. Unlike in the first scenario, export limitations happened after being able to experience everything the app could do. In other words, the people behind the product thought about Rana and built a flow that feels ad-hoc and timely (yet limited).
   

2. Instead of having a negative experience finding out how the app blocked her from achieving what she needed (previous option), this app helped her feel "surprised" with great additional features. Finding out the captions could be created automatically and that when upgrading to a premium plan, you get a physical tote bag are small details that go a long way. The experience becomes more memorable and enjoyable.
   

3. The emails the company sent Rana after using the app were timely and helped her move forward on her journey to become a paid user. It was not spammy, pushy, or unhelpful. Instead, it helped her visualize how using this new tool daily would improve her workflow.
   

In conclusion, the experience with the second app was successful because it allowed the company, through their PLG motion, to build a good experience (not a great one) while thoughtfully interacting with Rana (instead of sending her unwanted emails).

PLG is a different game. 

As we already discussed in our PLG: One-Act Play in Three Scenes essay, there are five PLG principles that are crucial to succeed:

• Data capturing that is sorted and works.

• Properly identified growth loops.

• Experimental mindset.

• Openness.

• Embracing a startup-like philosophy (check out the full essay in the link above if you want to learn more).

Whether or not your org sells a 30 dollar per month product or a higher ticket type of product (think corporate longer sales cycles higher ACV), the equation remains the same in PLG - the product leads. This means your sales team probably is nonexistent, and even if it exists, the role has evolved from leading sales to ensuring the product experience is flawless.

Be sure you understand how to build a product that isn't great while thoughtfully tracking user behavior to help them accomplish their goals. Your product succeeds insofar as your users succeed with it. 

Your users are the story's heroes; your product gives them wings (and they are even better in the paid plans). 

Illustrations by Alejandra Céspedes - Be sure to connect with her on LinkedIn / follow her on Instagram.

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If you want to succeed in the new era of content marketing, the first step is to accept a painful truth: the playbook everyone has been using for more than a decade is inadequate for addressing the needs of today. 

Sure, some of the tried-and-true strategies and tactics that gave rise to content marketing’s dominance over the last few years will remain. SEO and email are far from dead, too. But the game has changed tremendously. 

What’s changed: 

• The tyranny of platform algorithms: 

We are at a different moment of the internet where winning with great content is more complex and we must deliver value with zero-click content. Amazing content falls through the cracks and becomes forgotten given the tyranny of platform mechanics (paying to reach your audience) and how they are a fundamental component of the platform business. It is no surprise the biggest online brands want to keep you on their platforms, not send you to the source.

• The inevitable death of third-party cookie data: 

More and more people are becoming aware of the power of data. They are exhausted of irrelevant (and relevant) ads popping everywhere and are excited about keeping their information private from third parties. In other words, we must rely on good ol’ marketing fundamentals to create thoughtful messages that resonate with our audience and drive them closer to our product.

• The creator economy and decentralization of the web

An influencer with a great idea, a good cell phone, and an understanding of social media/culture/trends can easily beat traditional advertising. This is the so-called creator economy, destabilizing and decentralizing how the internet was initially structured. Brands no longer need to stand out from the crowd by beating competitors, but they also need to consider all the magnetic content creators are putting out there. 

Earn attention

Acknowledge that your ability to generate and capture demand is predicated on something many marketers don’t truly understand: awareness. 

The average person consumes roughly 10 hours of media a day. If you believe for one second they’ll waste any of their precious time listening to your unsolicited sales pitch, you’re fooling yourself. 

Sure, sometimes you’ll get lucky and catch a buyer at the exact moment they realize they have a problem that needs solving and be able to woo them into being a customer. But 95% of the time they don’t care — about you, your services, or your product — and have learned to simply ignore your advances. 

To win the business of modern customers you must first figure out how to earn their attention and win their trust. 

Create predictability

When your brand is competing against other brands, major media outlets, and TikTokers for attention, know your enemy: Random acts of content. 

Random acts of content rarely form into a cohesive story and have little to no impact on a target audience’s perception of a brand. To be effective, content needs to be carefully constructed to support the overall brand objectives and be delivered with strategic regularity so that it maintains its relevance.

This failure to see the forest (the strategy) for the trees doesn’t just cause your brand to blend in. It prevents you from delivering results for the business. 

Content atomization has helped content marketers achieve this level of sophistication for more than a decade. You might know it as content repurposing but it’s much more strategic than just molding existing content into different formats. In fact, it’s a process older than content marketing itself. 

Tactical Clinic: Franchises and broadcast programming strategy

Media companies are familiar with the art of earning attention and creating predictability (they have done so for a century, if not more). By understanding how to earn attention in a predictable system (think about your favorite series when you were a kid and how you waited in front of the TV for the next episode), media companies built a system for growth. 

Tactical steps to emulate franchises' success:

1. Become predictable: Coming back to your favorite TV show example, one of the best things about waiting for a new episode was that you had a pretty clear idea of what to expect. If you were an Alf type of person, you knew exactly what the basic premises of the show were and how cats would never be given any significant airtime. 

2. Build for the long-run: As marketers we love to build campaigns and experiments hoping to move the needle as fast as possible. Franchises, on the other hand, are a slow process that requires buy-in from several internal teams as well as a clear understanding of your audiences. The advantage of building for the long run, however, is the fact that you can polish your product consistently, simplify the content production process for your team, and build intuitive connections between your audience and your brand. 

3. Own your audience: Attention is scarce and noise is everywhere. That’s why building your first-party audience dataset, owning content distribution and engagement are crucial to escape from the random-posting rat race. Check out some conversion rate stats here + example of single session visitors) and some broadcast programming strategies you can execute to keep customers in your orbit.

Why should you franchise?

• To build a loyal audience for whatever product you are putting out there. Consuming your products becomes part of the identity and cultural footprint they bring to their work, like the Apple type of person who has no idea why they love their Mac but will never be open to working on a PC. 

• To better understand different types of audiences and can create shows that combine cultural patterns people already love. 

• To leverage your media products and amplify their reach and resonance across multiple audiences. 

• To gain clarity about what your content stands for and how it becomes meaningful for people. 

• To streamline product creation processes (it is easier to create the same thing and iterate until you nail it, than trying smaller campaigns/experiments, and having to start from scratch every time). 

Note: We found this article about how to scale your content team you might also find helpful. 

Adopt a product mindset

Forget the “marketing” part and acknowledge yet another truth: Your content is a product.

Many will object, saying that the company's product is the product. But while this is certainly true, don’t get lost in this arbitrary paradox and instead understand the purpose of this shift in mindset, which is to accept that customers don’t convert in their first session nor do they make a purchase decision after consuming a single piece of content. 

What’s more is that this mindset radically reshapes how we think about and approach content marketing. 

We break free from our transactional mindset and recognize all the potential benefits of prioritizing relationships over traffic. We embrace the idea that we must design a content strategy that genuinely engages our audience, helps people build meaningful connections between their work and community, and—more importantly—keeps potential buyers in our orbit. 

Reverse engineer distribution

It behooves you to forget the most favorite of all marketing concepts: the funnel. 

The marketing funnel might be a useful construct when communicating with one another about the customer journey. But it doesn’t do diddly squat to help you develop the kind of strategy required today. For that you’ll need to map your audience’s cultural cartography—their topics of interests, their sources of influence, and their media habits. 

It’s only after you’ve plotted out their whereabouts and deeply understand what connects them that you can leave a breadcrumb trail to your brand and whatever it is you want to sell them.  

Tactical Clinic: Reverse engineering distribution to win.

Traditional distribution is broken given platforms want to keep you on their platform, competition is fierce, and attention is scarce. However, there is a more intuitive way to think about the digital influence you can embrace (The Orb Framework + cultural cartography).

How to reverse engineer media products that works. 

Step 1: Have a straightforward brand narrative. Understand your audiences, the type of communication they value, and what your brand wants to be known for in such circles. Then, be sure you say the right things, the right way.

Step 2: Understand your audiences and where they hang out. To do so, be sure to adopt the Orb framework and identify the three types of relationships you can have with your audience:

1. Owned relationships: the type of relationships you control (e.g., your Website). Your customers are here.

2. Rented relationships: The type of relationships mediated by a third-party network (e.g., Twitter). Your fans are here.

3. Borrowed relationships: The ones you do not control at all, in other words, what others say about you. Your audience is here.

Once you know the type of content that works for each relationship, you can prioritize how to create your media products; we suggest using tools like SparkToro to build upon the natural influence in any given orb. The key is to listen to your audience, where they are, what they need from your brand (your brand values and communication), and what they value (what they discuss, trends, problems, etc.).

Combining an understanding of your audiences with clear cultural cartography can build highly resonating products that naturally stand out. 

Step 3: Following the steps above would naturally drive you to find a way to work backward and identify what your brand needs to do to be present in these virtual spaces.

For example, if you identify a particular Slack channel with certain types of subjects and people whom you would love to influence, build a media product that you believe will organically align with whatever is already present in such space. 

TLDR: Listen to your audience, identify your relationship with them, build products they would organically value, and communicate to them with a straightforward and unique brand narrative.

Respect the medium

You can’t just expand into new types of content and call yourself a media company. Not without comprehending the most fundamental of all media theories: The medium is the message. 

What this means is that each medium is received and perceived differently by our audience. As such, each medium has its own set of rules that, when applied, deliver the intended message more effectively. 

The abundance of boring podcasts, forgettable events, and other poorly thought out attempts to expand beyond written content practically proves marketers have yet to respect the rules of each medium. 

This is not to say we need to become experts in every facet of media or attain a PhD in media theory. Not at all. You should at the very least ask yourself if the medium of choice is the best way to convey the message and carefully consider how the medium can enhance or detract from it. 

Above all, be human

The marketing funnel is extremely helpful because it allows us marketers to track the efficiency of our endeavors without having to fully immerse ourselves in the messy, complicated, human qualities of sharing stories that turn into dollars. 

But still, we are human. And the ritual of optimizing the lead magnet, landing page, email, purchase sequence, has already run its course. 

People need content beyond the rational; they need to laugh, feel connected, and be part of a community, and they also need to be entertained. 

The We don’t need no education mantra, is as relevant today as it was back then. Traditional funnel marketing strategies that disregard the human qualities of audiences are less and less effective every day because in fact no one cares about your product. They care however about what they can do and what they become once they buy it. 

Steve Jobs did not start the iPhone keynote by saying, "check out all these great things our product does" instead, he talked about our habits and devices and allowed us to imagine what we could become with a different type of technology.

Map out the emotional landscape of your audiences, and try to understand their life moments and what they care about. Then, think about what you can do to create world-class content that would resonate with their lives and help you connect your brand and product. 

Traditional content marketing is a distribution function of your main product to a particular audience. On the other hand, media content marketing is a set of highly resonating content products that are helpful/entertaining for your audience.  

Traditional content marketing is about sharing what you do; media content marketing is about embedding your brand into the life your audiences already have (beyond just thinking about your product and how it helps them).

Human content goes beyond the funnel metaphor and focuses on understanding demand, audience, and mediums.

Tactical Clinic: Building a media machine.

A critical issue whenever a media machine is in the works is finding a way to justify how such investment makes sense. We all know that attribution is the contemporary marketing dilemma, and thinking about a media machine is an additional effort when budgets are getting smaller. Even so, the ultimate truth remains: The amount of demand you create is limited by the amount of attention you have.

So how do you build a media machine?

Step 1: Rethink your indicators. It is common in marketing teams, particularly content teams, to see indicators such as # of followers given the utmost importance. This is an important indicator, but it is only a result of a well-executed media engine.

As a rule of thumb, give more weight to leading indicators (are you on track to reach a goal) than to lagging indicators (the actual goal). Understanding the process and ensuring it is organized and scaled predictably will ultimately reap more benefits than reaching your 10k subscribers goal.

Likewise, rethink what the indicators even mean. For example, the frequency of visits to your site might mean readiness to buy. If you know that and identify which media products are more frequently consumed, you can build a revenue layer activity on top.

Step 2: Learn to measure your media efforts. There are many ways to measure what you are doing regarding media. However, the best formula we have found is as follows: your brand search volume, brand mentions, and org traffic compared to others. 

Another option is to embrace the Disney model. This schematic shows the synergy of their properties — with everything flowing from the films. Media is not just a supporting area to a primary product but a unique and valuable product with a symbiotic relationship with the entire brand’s ecosystem.

Step 3: Let go of share of voice; think about revenue. This last one is pretty self-explanatory. Instead of thinking exclusively of how much attention you are grabbing, understand how that attention is connected directly with revenue. 

It is not about building a famous brand online but about adding value to the right people in the right places online so that they connect your product’s brand with your media products. 

Always remember who’s king

If you want to navigate the new era of content marketing and whatever paradigm shifts force us to unlearn what we’ve learned again, never forget where this all started: A 1996 essay written by Bill Gates. 

"Content is where I expect much of the real money will be made on the Internet, just as it was in broadcasting.

The television revolution that began half a century ago spawned a number of industries, including the manufacturing of TV sets, but the long-term winners were those who used the medium to deliver information and entertainment.

When it comes to an interactive network such as the Internet, the definition of "content" becomes very wide. For example, computer software is a form of content-an extremely important one, and the one that for Microsoft will remain by far the most important.

But the broad opportunities for most companies involve supplying information or entertainment. No company is too small to participate."

Content is everywhere. Content is always present. From a media lens, content will allow you to access your potential customers in a much more creative and engaging way than simply focusing on educating them and making sure they are aware of your product.

Brands need much more than “awareness” to win in today’s media world. It is time to rethink our audience's basic informational and entertainment needs. Sometimes, your audience might need that SEO-driven solution for a particular problem/keyword. But, sometimes, they might need to see that meme or hear that entertaining podcast to cool off after a long work day. 

When was the last time you shared a boring article? Or a bland video? Probably never.

Attention is the currency, and your job is to grab it at all costs. Educate, entertain, and, most importantly, care more about your audience — and the rest will follow.

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Our friend Prashanth is looking for his next role. He has:
- 13 years of experience in #b2bmarketing.
- 11 years of experience driving Product, Content & Customer Marketing for a $1B engineering software product. And,
- He is a strong believer that great B2B marketing in today's attention economy (Hello TikTok!) should rely on storytelling & innovative tactics/execution.

If you are hiring in the US, and he is a match please be sure to reach out to him.

Madmen's days of all-nighters, heavy drinking, smoking cigars and coming up with game-changer last minute slogans like "it's toasted" seem far gone when we think about digital marketing today. We are in a different moment where we have data points to back up our bets and make the best calls possible to ensure our solution resonates with the right customer at the right time. 

Initially, many thought of marketing as an artistic, risky, and uncertain activity (literally something for mad men and women). Today, we find ourselves in a systematic, organized, and nearly scientifically predictable space. We no longer need to run massive research initiatives to ensure our product works, but rather, we do iterative, incremental changes to ensure we hit the right nail. 

We do so to the point that we have found ourselves in this imaginary binary: we are either data-driven (and ignore qualitative contextual information) or brand-driven (missing data-driven patterns and data). But, as we have mentioned in several previous essays, this dichotomy is false, dangerous, and ultimately a damaging belief for anyone trying to improve their marketing programs and formation as marketers.

After discussing with Adrienne Barnes her perspective on marketing, the importance of mixed-method research, and how performance and qualitative info complement each other, we realized there are very few resources to help you become a well-rounded marketer. And so, in this piece, we will share some of the marketing fundamentals we believe you need to better understand marketing and some resources you can check out to level up your marketing blindspots.

Digital Marketing fundamentals

To be a good digital marketer in a hyper-connected world, you need to master three fundamental skills:

1. Figuring out who your buyer is: No matter what your industry is, understanding your buyer and their problems will allow you to improve the product, so it solves their problems, as well as refine how you communicate your solution to your audience. 

2. Deeply understanding your product/solution: The best marketers have a clear understanding of what their product is, its features, limitations, value proposition, and the triggers that lead people to purchase. You are not just "marketing" the product; you need to empathize with your customers and their problems/use cases.

3. Understanding your market: Beyond the product, you must understand the other players in your industry. This will allow you to figure out how to differentiate your product, how to improve your offer, how to better select your ideal customer, and some ways/channels to connect your offer with your customers' needs.

That's it. It seems simple, but in reality, it does unfold into a myriad of additional skills that take a long time to master. 

To figure out who your buyer is, you need to master the following:

• User research skills: Whether quantitative or qualitative, you must be able to investigate who these people truly are and how to translate them into your marketing strategy. This skill is transversal, and it overlaps with product and market understanding, but regardless of where it sits in the organization, what matters is that you take the time to understand customers deeply.

• Channels / online behavior: Beyond the user research skills, you also need to understand where and how they spend time online. Once you do, you can set up a system that allows you to understand their actions in relation to your product and how they translate into revenue-connected signals. 

• Tracking and measuring: This connects with our previous point, but beyond the channel, you must also understand where they are in the funnel (multi-channel), how they move from one stage to the next, what leads them to buy, etc. This involves CRM systems, automation, and being close to the product team to understand updates being released, among many other activities.

To deeply understand the product, you must push beyond traditional marketing disciplines and learn from other areas:

• UX/UI research & design: understanding how product teams iterate their development process is an essential skill marketers (well-rounded marketers) can develop. This will help you discover customer problems you can communicate later on and how they evolve from an idea to a feature. It does not mean you need to become an expert in UX or UI, but you must have the capacity to translate their world to the user and, likewise, to communicate user insights back to the product team.

• Product development: You don't need to become a product manager or an actual developer to excel at marketing a product. But, having a clear understanding of how the product development processes work (execution and sequencing) and what it takes to add or deprecate features will help you improve the marketing activities around the product. 

• Your experience with the product: Yes, believe it or not, it is possible to find marketers who sell a product they have never even tried. We are not saying you have to be 100% proficient and know the product inside-out, but experiencing the solution and emulating the JTBD it solves does not hurt your marketing activities.   

Finally, deeply understanding your market means you are curious about your category, competing products, and solutions. This means being on the lookout for trends, new features, and products, paying attention to your competitor's marketing strategies, and understanding where you stand in relation to the rest of the players. If you have difficulty understanding where you stand in the market, try abstract exercises, such as imagining your brand at a category party. Now guess who the DJ is, who is hitting the dancefloor, who is sitting quietly at the corner, etc.  

Now that we have gone over the fundamentals, let's talk about the two types of marketing profiles that are more predominant today. 

Data-driven marketer

The data-driven marketer or the post-internet boom marketer is a person that understands how to articulate technologies to generate revenue. We all know someone who figured out how the internet worked early on and made lots of money. Their income came from positioning a keyword, selling ads, or creating a funnel with a magnetic product. Whatever it was, these dataists often lacked traditional marketing training and, instead, understood how technologies and algorithms worked in a new dimension... the online world. 

Note: Performance marketing is not exclusively digital. But, having several digital data points you can track sure simplifies the job. 

Today, data marketers make a living because they understand how a particular digital machine works. They know how brands can build systems that improve efficiency and generate positive outcomes, and they create playbooks and patterns to minimize the effort required to successfully drive revenue. 

In a time where our reality is so deeply intertwined with our digital existence, like in Paprika when it comes to dreams, this is a mighty feat. 

They are the whisperers responsible for the success of all applications and software we use to manage our digital lives. From the social sphere (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc.), our professional sphere (LinkedIn, Teams, Slack, etc.), our safety sphere (1password, LastPass, etc.) to pretty much any dimension you can imagine. 

If you are part of this segment, chances are you dominate the technical, tactical, and strategic ways to build digital artifacts that generate revenue. However, you may lack some of the abilities and context that more traditionally trained marketers have under their belts. 

To become a little more balanced and learn how to incorporate qualitative insight into your data-driven mindset, we recommend you check out the following resources:

Resources to learn more about brand marketing.

• How to build a big brand on a small budget.

• This great thread on brand frameworks.

• The perilous mythology of brand marketing for digital products.

• This article on how to build a breakout brand.

• This great thread about community-led companies.

• This is Marketing by Seth Godin -  This book provides an overview of what marketing is from a cultural perspective.

• Contagious by Jonah Berger - Here you will learn what are some of the principles of virality, and how you can implement them in your marketing strategies.

• Dollars and Sense by Dan Ariely - In this book you will learn how we misthink money with countless validated scientific psychological experiments.

• Talking to Humans by Giff Constable - This is an intro to UX book. You will not become an expert at talking to your customers, but it will help you understand what to do to improve your current process.

• The Laws of Human Nature by Robert Greene - The author explores historical patterns that allow him to understand how humans behave. As a data marketer, this will help you identify how contextual factors can massively impact your experiments.

Brand-driven marketer

The brand-driven marketer is the one that probably watches mad men, probably spends an insane amount of time trying to come up with a fresh concept, and looks at numbers as a consequence of insightful marketing campaigns. They are probably trained in marketing and advertising and have had to read Lipovetsky, Bauman, and even the much simpler yet insightful Seth Godin at some point in their careers. They probably feel more comfortable at B2C marketing agencies and are avid hunters of trends, new series, concepts, and lenses to understand their reality. 

Among the many skills they have developed, the most crucial one is perhaps a stellar understanding of cultural patterns. They are great at talking to people, running interviews, crafting surveys, and seeing what the common ideas upon which the product can build an empire.

A decade ago, they probably found inspiration in the Liquid Modernity concept, and today they probably find The Burnout Society Byung-Chul Han paradigm a bit more appealing. Even if they aren't super fond of philosophy, they still have accumulated significant psychological and anthropological insight that allows them to create successful campaigns that drive revenue. 

It is their responsibility to deeply understand what is going on beyond data in their consumer mind. To find the values, myths, and stories around products that make consumers more inclined to prefer brand A over brand B. Ultimately, their job is to understand the zeitgeist of a particular category and user and figure out a bridge to trigger purchase behavior.

They also, particularly at the executive level, own a particular KPI and probably have to obsessively track it. However, their expertise usually lies outside the digital machine mechanisms that data-driven marketers have mastered, and they pride themselves on understanding culture rather than data. Often, they are the architects behind marketing strategies. Providing context and basic understanding upon which all other marketing department areas build and win a particular market. 

In digital marketing terms, or from a more B2B SaaS perspective, they are the ones who deeply understand the ICP, the purchase triggers for the product, and the main stories that deeply resonate and become profitable for the company.

They guard the brand and its meaning and representation. Their obsession is to make sure everything the brand displays across all touchpoints with potential users is connected to the brand concept.

If you fall into this category, you may want to learn a bit more about data-driven concepts.

Resources to learn more about data marketing. 

• This thread on Facebook Ads

• Complete guide to get started with Facebook Ads.

• This video on cohort analysis.

• The scaling data framework.

• This article on why most analytics efforts fail.

• How Microsoft crushed Slack

• Cookies are crumbling

• This thread on product thinking.

• Incremental ads testing at Netflix.

• This thread on marketing mix modeling.

• The PPC thermometer.

• How to build a marketing machine.

• The attribution stack.

• How Superhuman built an engine to find product/market fit.

Other reads anyone in marketing must definitely check out

• This newsletter with a great collection of strategy pieces.

• The law of brand vs. performance marketing.

• This article on how to hire a revenue ops team.

• The three tools Netflix used to build its world-class brand.

• If SaaS products sell themselves, why do we need sales?

• This piece on media mix modeling.
  

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Product-led growth is one of the most predominant go-to-market strategies software companies are embracing now. And yet, it is in its infancy. 

We recently had the chance to discuss this subject with Vic Davis, SVP, Customer Experience at Inflection.io, and we learned so much about the past, the present, and the possible futures of PLG that the best way to write this piece is in chronological order. But before we go into that, let's start at the fundamentals... what exactly is a product-led growth motion?

Play 1: PLG - The product at the core. 

Some claim Blake Bartlett initially coined the PLG concept in this insightful LinkedIn post.  What was essentially fascinating in that article was the idea that product-market fit is insufficient (at least as it was understood by most back then) unless the product grows like a weed.

Bartlett continues developing his idea and clarifies that what he means by that is that the product must sell itself and naturally fit the environment. While this concept is not particularly innovative or essentially different from what others were doing even before this was published (AKA Atlassian), it does crystalize the idea that products must lead sales. Not marketing, not sales, just the product.  

PLG spaces and companies have matured since then. And today, we can think of PLG as the ideological shift of pairing growth (revenue) with the product and its ability to provide value to users, with little friction. 

This go-to-market motion requires a cultural shift from departmental divisions to orchestrated company focus on leveraging product as a primary growth engine. That means that in addition to having a dedicated marketing team building a pipeline, a sales team calling leads non-stop, or a CX team listening to users' problems, PLG is a cross-functional approach that forces teams to over deliver value with their product. 

If you are a user, you love this seamless experience. You sign up, you usually get to try the product for some time, or you get a free-forever version, or you may even pay a small fee because the value you receive feels massive (this last option is much less common). You could finally skip purchasing expensive software products, only to discover that the experience was clunky while using them. In this scenario, products work well and deliver value quickly because that perceived usefulness will naturally lead us, the users, to become additional sales associates. 

Back then, however, it took a lot of work for PLG teams to move away from sales-led or marketing-led models to develop a cohesive organizational structure. The usual revenue tech stack included a CRM that worked based on the number of users per database (too expensive for PLG). Plus, a marketing automation platform that honestly was not the primary value driver in PLG motions (you want to get the value directly in-product / not via email).

On top of that, to access product activity data, you had to reach out to specific teams internally. And, to action on customer activity data, you had to talk to entirely different areas of your company. So how are you supposed to run a PLG company if there is no single view of the customer?

Play 2: Functional PLG

Having the end-user as the new center of gravity deeply affects how companies, particularly marketing teams, function. Currently, we have a traditional funnel-like untouchable model (or a flywheel that is essentially the same but in a circle), that is built upon technologies and organizational models that have hardly been challenged in the last couple of decades. To do marketing you need a CRM and an automation platform, and you need marketing teams (market openers) and sales teams (market closers) to make sure your company grows. We know this is a reductionist way to think about the complexities of sales, marketing and growth, but, whether we like it or not, these are the fundamentals upon which we have built an entire set of companies. PLG, under these principles, however, is at best, functional.

As mentioned by Inflection.io, there are new pillars when it comes to thinking about products in a PLG model:

Pillar 1: Data warehouses - Unlike when people used CRMs as the central user activity repository, in a PLG model, where you have large numbers of non-paying users, this model becomes obsolete. Data warehouses that are shared by the entire organization (product, marketing, sales, etc.) are becoming the new single source of truth that allows companies to make the best decisions. 

Pillar 2: Product activity data - Today, we use insights platforms to better understand customers' product activity. However, they are add-ons to a system built around a traditional organization that works in silos (not in a PLG-orchestrated model). In a functional PLG motion, this product activity data becomes key to turning users into advocates by over-delivering value through user experience. The more product activity data you have, the easier it is to improve the user-product relationship.

Pillar 3: Horizontal growth - Being in a traditional organization with siloed objectives doesn't work in PLG. Everything you do must be focused on understanding how people use your freemium product and the routes they must follow to buy your premium product. There doesn't need to be a dedicated marketing team creating MQLs, and a sales team closing SQLs regularly. Instead, the funnel disappears, and growth becomes a symbiotic task in which everyone in the company is ultimately responsible for nurturing users into loving and publicly recommending your product.

Once we come to understand that product-led growth requires a different cultural and technical system to run efficiently, we can see how it changes the way we think about marketing and growth in general. 

Yet, as we claimed at the beginning, given the software and cultural infrastructures upon which we build companies, PLG remains at best, functional. In a PLG model the following gets redefined:

• Use a CRM as your core data store: Not because you do not track users, but because you have so many users that the economics don’t add up (CRMs charge per number of users and free users in PLG motions make it unsustainable). Data warehouses are the better solution.

• Think of marketing, sales, customer service, and growth as different teams: In a PLG motion cross-functional growth teams lead the way. Your job is to make sure the product delivers enough value to all users, and then to identify the signals that tell you which users can upgrade their plan and do everything to help them make that decision. 

• Think that there is such a thing as a professional PLG marketer: This remains a relatively young and unexplored space. At this point most marketers and salespeople will openly recognize that user-centric, service-centric models are great, and therefore PLG becomes the intuitive model to go after. However, the cultural and technological jump to get there takes time. 

Remember that PLG is still in its infancy. As Elena Verna, Interim Head of Growth at Amplitude, mentioned on her LinkedIn, leveraging several growth motions in parallel with PLG is vital. Just because you are doing PLG doesn't mean you forget about all the benefits of other growth motions. 

Finally, remember that many people in PLG companies will come from a more traditional organizational mythology that will require them to adjust to this new paradigm. As discussed with Vic, many people who come to PLG organizations probably used to work in traditional sales/marketing roles and are just making the jump. Leverage that. 

No traditional salesperson could dislike calling a user who already loves the product. 

Play 3: Integrated PLG

Imagine a world in which your internal teams no longer exist, nor the traditional platforms that we are so familiar with in marketing and sales. Instead, you have a PLG tech stack that does not require signal capturing add-on technologies, and a work culture that streamlines value delivery to users as the main growth lever. What does that even look like?

Here are some ideas:

1. Data capturing is 100% sorted: This means that users´actions are properly logged into a data system. More importantly, it means there is an internal consensus in terms of event tracking and that this information is available to all teams in the organization in real time.

2. Properly identified growth loops: You know exactly how many people are using your product and what features they are using the most, when trialists have reached meaningful adoption of your product and are ready for conversion to paid,  and what are the golden-paths users travel to achieve value realization. Whatever your loop is, what matters is that you understand exactly how the behaviors are connected with the product, and how those signals translate into propensity to buy or expand. 

3. Experimental mindset: PLG, just like in traditional platform economic models, heavily relies on experimentation and iteration. It is in this capacity for organizations to quickly run experiments and determine what works that you can beat your competitors. But, before you can run successful experiments, it is crucial to make sure that the systems you have in place are flawless. 

4. Openness: As we already mentioned, PLG is not simply a new strategy to grow, it is a complex cultural shift that requires buy-in from multiple areas and professions. It is crucial to have an open culture where all insights are shared between departments to make sure all efforts are aligned and are ultimately represented in terms of value for the users using your product. 

5. Embracing a startup-like mindset: Eric Ries mentions in The Lean Startup Guide that “A startup is a human institution designed to create a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty.” Running a PLG model that is fully integrated and efficient requires a paradigm shift where teams research, experiment, test and iterate quickly given the feedback loops given by actual user behavior hoping for virality as a key growth component.

Note: Virality cannot be engineered, but by enabling and making the most out of the feedback loops you track via product usage you can definitely improve your chances of success because you know what is valuable. And, you can push it to all your users quickly.  

PLG is a bit scary because it requires more than just buying a tool or changing a keyword. But, in a world where no one knows what is going to strike a chord with the end users, a more fluid and experimental vision of the product is essential for companies that wish to thrive in a highly competitive space. 

Would you rather buy the premium version of a product you already enjoy using? Or talking to sales to figure out what the deal is with a product? Chances are, the solution that figures out how to provide value first, will win.

Flawless PLG implementation is nothing else than a startup-like ethos joining a B2B market. We’re not saying you have to aim to build the next unicorn, but, the days where value is simply transactional are counted.

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About Inflection.io

Inflection.io is the first B2B growth automation platform built for product-led companies to drive more revenue, accelerate product usage, and speed up onboarding and value realization. To see Inflection in action, visit our interactive product tour here!

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Illustrations by Alejandra Céspedes.

Imagine having a life where you are interrupted 10.000 times daily while trying to do what you want. Chances are, you will do your best to minimize interruptions as much as possible and pay attention only to those interruptions that seem to be genuinely beneficial. Everything else would probably be ignored, forgotten, and avoided. That is because in a world where the need for hyper-performance is so prevalent, being interrupted is not something we look forward to.

Advertisers today, digital or traditional , face the dilemma of competing for their audience's attention. We, the viewers,  are exposed to 6 to 10k ads daily, and our brains naturally do their best to keep us sane by filtering out the unnecessary. If we could remember all 10K of them, we would probably never sleep again.

Or at least I know I would not!

I have two different sets of ad blockers running whenever I use chrome, and my primary browser is Brave, the Ad-free solution to remain focused on an attention-thirsty red ocean. And still, even with doing my best to train my digital algorithms to know as little as possible about me, sometimes, I do end up buying cool stuff I find via ads. 

You might think, "sure, but it was a t-shirt, not a SaaS product," and yes, you are somewhat right. But, in our fully-immersive digital environment, all brands struggle to grab people's attention regardless of their category. So, whether your product is a swimsuit (B2C) or a B2B SaaS product with a much longer sales cycle, the goal is to genuinely add value and/or solve a problem with a well-placed, well-targeted Ad that stands out and is memorable enough. Not to add additional noise.

Yet, for some reason, many B2B marketers (myself included) often forget that we compete for ‘attention and meaning’ - not just in our product's category but from all over the internet.

It is almost as if we stopped ourselves from allowing our B2B brands to compete in terms of Ads and creativity with B2C categories. So, we tell ourselves repeatedly that given the essence of B2B, we must highlight the pain points and problems our ICP’s have, and we obsessively track MQLs and SQLs.

Instead of creating bolder Ads with solid aesthetic value, we go for smaller experiments like A/B testing on background color or CTA color, that are easy to test and execute. We follow the fail-fast, learn-fast mantra, and in the end, we compare our metrics with our previous month and the industry standards. 

We prioritize incremental lifts and we avoid risk (by doing what is safe, what we think “works”).

Not that any of that is wrong.

But, in a world where you are presented with hundreds if not thousands of possible things you should buy, simply iterating cookie cutter Ads and trying to find quick wins might not be enough for us anymore. You need to make bigger and bolder bets.

Standing out From the Crowd

Adding a dash of creative inspiration to your marketing campaigns helps your brand stand out in the ad-free cookieless world that is only getting more restrictive of ads. Creative inspiration can be in any form whether it is innovating your channels of distribution, attribution models, copy, ad creatives, or overall appeal, so the idea is targeting to win a market instead of just a single ICP.

One of the first things we must remember as marketers, especially in the B2B space, is that our ICPs consume all kinds of ads, not just B2B ads. That means we are facing a digital consumer looking at advertisements that borrow concepts from a more aspirational vertical (B2C).

In such a scenario, just highlighting the benefits of your product or the pain points they are experiencing might not be enough. Especially if all your competitors are doing precisely the same thing. 

The digital consumer today has already faced:

• Ads that exploit most psychological tips and tricks to influence purchase

• Millions of click-bait messaging and CTAs

• SPAM

• Lookalike ads with similar offers

• On rare occasions, an ad that is moving and memorable

• On rare occasions, an ad that genuinely solves a problem they have with an offer that makes sense for them

Given that we know this is the zeitgeist of the digital experience, it is a maxim for marketers to go beyond what is comfortable into a riskier unknown, artistic territory. 

How Creative Ads can be Memorable 

Art and advertising have been linked for centuries. They feed one another to a point where the difference between them is almost inextricable. We find genuinely moving art that inspires products and products that are so inspiring they are closer to art than anything else. 

Advertising used to be where some of the brightest minds dared to dream crazy campaigns for brands that were brave enough to embrace them. The 1984 Apple Ad on the superbowl, heavily criticized for not showing the actual product, was a major success. Apple sales topped $150m in the 100 days following the debut of "1984", not a bad feat considering they were the underdog at the time. 

I am currently writing this on a Mac computer. If that ad hadn't worked (because it did not show the product), this would probably be an IBM computer. But it did. 

Another famous example of advertising that dares to go beyond the limits of the product itself is the "Just do it" motto. Almost everyone instantly recognizes those three words, associating them with a brand that is more of a global movement than anything else. A brand that takes a stance against injustice and inequity, and ultimately, a brand that managed to become hardwired into our brains. 

As Robert Goldman, co-author of "Nike Culture: The Sign of the Swoosh," mentions, Nike is "an emblem of individuality, in an age where individuality has become rampant." 

Nike does not sell shoes - it sells identity. And it does so because it navigates the intersection between art and advertising. 

It is a brand that pushes meaning across its ads.  

It is not just a brand; it is a cultural movement.

And yet, your brand isn’t Nike, and this is B2B SaaS not shoes (so please take everything you see here with a grain of salt). 

42s Process of Ideation – a B2B Creative’s Journey

What came first, the chicken or the egg an apt adage for ad concept development to ad execution. Design and creative process, you may ask from any creative, is never a linear process. It’s not as easy as going from A ─> B. Suppose we iterate the whole process on paper. In that case, it looks like these loops of interconnected mid-point in the journey, where there are many K’s, C’S, F’s, and Z’s before we finally develop a solid ad design, and even then, the idea can be shot down if your client does not like it.

And that happens—a lot. 

But if we ever unloop the string and try to create a linear pattern, just for simplification and explanation, then it all begins with the art of storytelling.

The Art of Storytelling – Looking at the Bigger Picture:

The essential starting point of any conceptual development is understanding the brand image or how the product/service is represented and inferred by the market. At this step, as creative strategists, we harness the power and wisdom of our inner child –where we let our imagination go wild, explore and make connections. The Genesis. The moment where binaries do not yet exist and where there are no right/wrong, good or bad ideas.  

We start with empathy. And we do this by exploring our client company's website, social media presence, and review sites. The purpose is to capture the brand DNA and understand the picture it creates in the ICP's mind.

Even when selling to B2B, marketing is a human-centric process, and we believe that people can be influenced, provoked, or engaged through their emotions. So, we anchor our creative approach to tap into their primordial instincts, whether we are talking about their pain points, the product's benefits, or any other angle. 

A business is not a monolithic structure; it is a group of people trying to make the best decisions at any given time to gain profit.  

And, even when we think our ads are working exclusively for rational reasons, we know we can influence people to execute an action (click or book a demo) with an excellent offer or a subject of interest that appeals to their beliefs.

Questions we ask ourselves in this creative process.

• What makes you stop? What stands out?

• What's the emotional trigger of this product?

• Would we buy/book/click it?

• Why do we believe in it? 

Brand Identity and Imagery

We believe that any good brand should be considered and explored as a place – by this, we mean that marketing your brand should give your viewer/customer a sense of atmosphere in which they can develop an emotional sensibility. So, all the elements of your marketing mix, i.e., the materials, colours, typography, graphic language, product shots, landing page, elements, text, and scale of the image, should create a sense of place or association in your ICP's mind.

There are numerous frameworks out there that can steer your creative ships. Still, for us, the simplistic framework, developed by Peter Zumthor, an architect by profession, works best when we are in the ideation process and looking at the bigger picture.

To give you an idea of how this ideation process starts, think of a meaningful place in your childhood. Once you have it, try to remember the following characteristics:

1. The Body of Architecture: The materials and their ratio compared to others.

2. The Sound of Space. Echos, acoustics, noises.

3. The Temperature of Space: The sensation of temperature.

4. Surrounding Objects: The things that people keep around them.

5. The Movement in the place: Your movement in space.

Repeat the exercise with your client's website, brand, and general assets. Remember that no idea, connection, analogy, metaphor, or thought is bad in the creative process. There are only said and unsaid ideas!  

Reading between the lines.

Understanding the actual wordings, i.e., the text used on the website can clue you in the sense of the brand. This can give creatives a good idea of how to develop a banner or landing page that can create a more meaningful impact, not just betting on exploring ICP pain points.

Creating a direct meaning, for instance, just hinting at resolving pain points, can be dull and, therefore, forgetful to your ICP. Building an emotional association leads to a lasting affiliation for the viewer, even in the B2B sphere. Yes, it is more complex than selling a piece of jewelry or a pen, but Cartier did not build its brand image by selling to its consumer's pain points. Instead, they trade with the emotional hook of luxury by projecting high-end value through their adverts to the customers.

Similarly, a B2B SaaS logistic company is not just selling software that provides logistic services to its customers but is selling a journey/adventure/consistency to its consumers.

Synthesizing – Pulling back   

The final critical step of ideation is zooming back into focus. Once we have explored the bigger picture, drawing back can be difficult for a creative, but it is necessary. In this step, you pull back and rationalize to consider your target audience – who they are, where they come from, and their cultural norms.  

You also need to understand the purpose of why you are creating the ad, which could be getting a signup, subscribing to a newsletter, signing up for a demo, or even making a purchase. It would be best if you also considered where in the funnel your customer is to adjust your ads specs accordingly.  

A mood board can help get inspiration from the work of other creatives from all art world spheres. This gets creative juices going and allows us to create meaningful work that can create an emotional hook for the audience. 

And there you  go Folks!

That's how we explore the known and the unknown to create an idea/ad/concept/memory that forces your audience to pause and reflect on your message. Because in this era of limited attention span, a pause in scroll can make or break a marketing campaign. 

How informational ads can be aspirational

Here are some examples of ads that we believe can be both informational and aspirational:

Creativity beyond Metrics 

Samuel Brealey, in his fantastic blog, demonstrated that the most successful ads are the ones that work for a specific market, not for a particular individual. He explores this idea that marketing has become an engineering process of iteration and measurement, while in reality, we probably need to think more about the market. 

Thinking about the market means, as we have said earlier, moving beyond ICPs pain points and product offers to see the overarching picture the market dictates. In other words, it is about taking a step back from the micro (ICP focused), and paying a bit more attention to what culturally resonates with people in your market. And, once you are there, have a powerful enough ad that stands out from the crowd. 

If your Ad lacks any artistic/creative weight, something that deeply resonates with the culture of a particular market, chances are you will go unnoticed. Being unnoticed means, you do not build the correct brand associations for those who are not "in-market" now but will be, and it also means you lack salience in the minds of those who need a solution like yours but have no idea what product to purchase. 

Basically your ad becomes noise. Another image to ignore across screens. 

What ends up mattering, in the end, is getting people to stop scrolling. To stop and actually try to think about what you are trying to communicate. Ads work, ultimately, because their "cultural imprinting" potential is met.

Paid programs are hard to manage. CPC can go up in no time, LTV can be reduced in a slow global economy, but creative ways to deliver your brand to your market might have a long-lasting effect beyond the screen. 

So how do you merge creativity  into your overall marketing campaigns?

✅ Be creative about the content you deliver. For example, if everyone is talking about pain points and features, try a different approach. 

✅ Be creative about generating demand by focusing on more prominent market-driven ads rather than niche ICP specifics.

✅ Use a clear and differential creative, copy, caption, and CTA across all channels. 

✅ Stop using the generally successful corporate Memphis aesthetics. Everyone is doing it, which means it becomes less valuable over time.

Final Thoughts!

So Let's do a quick recap , buyers do not buy products based solely on reason (the entire behavioral psychology field has proven so over the years) but also on memory and emotion. This is as true in B2C as it is in B2B. We are selling to a person, but we are also selling to communities that push and pull market dynamics on a daily basis.

We are not saying you must go full Duchamp and create a statement about how something is artistic/creative beyond the realm of traditions. But what matters is that we think of our role as marketers beyond the weekly metrics into long-term, market-driven and cultural logic. 

Stop focusing exclusively on solving problems and try to focus on creating meaning. Move beyond iterating with similar Ads that worked before to taking controlled risks with messaging and creatives that resonate at a deeper level. And more importantly, let go of the myth that personalization is the ultimate key to sales. Sure, everyone loves the sound of their name and feeling unique when being offered something, but in the end, campaigns that touch a symbolic fiber that truly resonates at a deeper cultural level are still worth striving for. 

Be brave ! 

Your brand will thank you for it.

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A little while ago when the tidal wave of bad news broke for the tech industry, I started writing a little piece…which grew into a bigger one…which became the article you’re about to read. I’ve had to rewrite the intro a few times as things have changed. The situation is fluid. 

At this point, we’ve seen layoffs, hiring freezes, a VC pullback, and a lot of talk about “free cash flow.” There’s been doomsaying and glass-half-full-ing. Depending on what publications you read, you might think that the economy is either in better shape than it looks or headed toward a cataclysmic disaster.

I think it’s safe to say that the correction we’re living through is real, that it’s still in motion, and that we’re in for a bit of a ride.

I have faith that things will be OK. The world needs technology in good times and bad. There are many important problems left to solve.  

But I think we can be honest with ourselves and say that our industry has gotten a little overheated and indulgent. We flew close to the sun. 

Corrections are scary, but they’re also great times to get things right. Because let’s face it. Tech marketers have gotten some things wrong. 

I’ve done it. You’ve done it. It’s OK. May the person who has not sinned cast the first stone. 

We can and must do better. But before we can heal, we need to take our medicine.

So I’m going to name 11 ways I think tech marketing has gone wrong, and offer my hopes for how we get back on track again.

Wrong 1: Making growth the most important thing. 

Have you ever worshipped at the altar of Hypergrowth? Bowed to the gods of Blitzscaling? I have. But deep down, those words always made me queasy. Well, it turns out that dumping gasoline on growth without being mindful of business fundamentals probably wasn’t such a great idea. 

Marketers need to shift our language and our tactics to focus less on acquiring customers at breakneck speed and more on building sustainable, healthy businesses. There’s a whole lot to that, and I’ll say more about that as this piece progresses. But the first thing we need to do is change our mindset and help our colleagues change along with us.

Wrong 2: Buying customers via artificially low pricing

Over the past five years, you could have gotten a screaming deal on everything from software to housing to glasses, meal kits, razors, juicers, mattresses, and car rides, all sold to you at a huge loss by a VC-funded startup hoping to win your business.  

But when you massively discount your product, you’re not winning customers, you’re buying them. 

At this point, maybe you’re thinking that marketers don’t price products and thus don’t deserve to be called out for this. 

I would argue that regardless of who makes the call, pricing a product is an act of marketing. (Witness the second of the four Ps.) 

And if you choose to discount your price, that’s a form of marketing spend. As in, dollars, deducted from the marketing budget. Mind-blowing, I know. That’s how the CPG world has operated since the dawn of time. 

I’m going to make a bold statement here and say that if pricing decisions are marketing, then marketers can belly up to the bar and get in on them. 

We can work harder to understand the value our products create (...or don’t create), and what they are worth in the eye of the buyer. 

We can study the psychology of pricing, get familiar with behavioral economics, and evaluate the impact of pricing models. 

We can survey the competition and look for innovative pricing models that might work for us. 

Then, we can show up with informed opinions about what things should cost. Even better, we can come up with methods of winning customers that don’t involve bribery.

Wrong 3: Making startups the ICP

We’ve reached a point where the world has a lot of startups that sell software to startups that sell software to startups.

(I confess that at moments, this phenomenon has caused me existential anguish. I’ve been in meta-scenarios so bizarre that I’ve wondered if I’m living in a simulation. If you want to hear about them, you’ll need to buy me at least two beers.)

If you work in this industry and you have a pulse, you know that lean times are coming to SaaSland. That’s gonna hurt.

We all talk about crossing the chasm, but if we’re honest with ourselves, the majority of our buyers are early adopters.

If you find yourself stuck selling in to companies learning the words “free cash flow” for the first time, I have good news. There's a great big world out there filled with people who don't work in Silicon Valley but could really use some help solving problems.

We marketers should look into unexplored industries, geographies, and use cases. There are a lot of them.

Early markets are great for showing momentum, but in a world where we care about business fundamentals, we’re going to need customers we can win and hang on to. That means finding ways to reach more people and offer more value. 

We can be the tip of the spear.

Wrong 4: Reacting to the competition instead of working for originality

The first job of any marketing effort is to be noticed. Being noticed requires standing out. Blending in is the opposite of standing out. 

I know these are simple and obvious points, but many marketers either miss them entirely, kid themselves into thinking their not-at-all distinctive marketing is actually different, or…I’ll just stop there.

We have lazy-walked into a reality where tech companies look and sound and market the same, from our company names to our branded hoodies to our UI patterns to our ebook titles. That’s a big problem that leaves marketers especially vulnerable. 

It’s not that hard to hire a decent freelancer or two, show them competitors’ websites, and have them start making stuff, right? Maybe your company doesn’t need a marketing function at all? 

If our job is merely to make OK-enough stuff that looks tech-company-ish, then outsourcing the entirety of marketing might be a pretty good idea. 

The most successful marketers in the world know that our highest calling is to make the companies we work for easy to see, find, and buy, and hard to forget. And the best way to do that is to be different. 

Just look around you at your buyer’s context and your competition, and do something unexpected. It’s not that hard. 

Wrong 5: Making investors more important than customers

Have you ever witnessed a marketing team that sweats investor presentations more than major product launches? I have. 

Marketers live in a world choked with perverse incentives. We get pats on the head because we put the billboard on the boss’s commute. We get our budgets renewed because we spent them last year.

When we have investors who’ve given us millions of dollars, we want them to be happy. That’s very normal. But investors aren’t customers. Even expert category veterans don’t know your business like you do. And it’s definitely not their job to approve your marketing. 

If they want to offer advice and guidance, you should listen. If they want you to show your progress, you should show it. But not at the expense of creating value for customers.

The best investors know this, by the way. 

Wrong 6: Making incrementally better features the biggest point of difference. 

"Hey, we do the same thing as somebody else, just a little bit better" is not a winning marketing message. 

We ship tech products made by product people and engineers who care a lot about features. There are a lot of them (most likely including the CEO), and very few of us. The gravitational force pulling us toward incrementalist messaging is strong.

We have to push back. Our industry (and our buyers) are growing up. Tech stacks are thick, and attention spans are thin. Products are becoming entrenched. Cognitive and budgetary switching costs are growing higher.

In a world where we need to win, retain, and grow profitable customers, we need our products to be seen as indispensable and a joy to use. That requires reaching people on a deeper level.

Be more than a marginally better feature set. 

Wrong 7: Using mumbly, jargony messaging. 

Tell me if you’ve heard this one before. A deeply knowledgable, visionary technologist strikes out on his own, builds a product, and finds a market among similarly technical experts similar to himself. 

Traction is strong, and everything is going great. Investors take notice. A funding round happens, and now it’s time to scale.

The CEO hires a sales team and stomps the gas. And then…not much happens. The company discovers that once they venture outside of their super-technical fanbase, nobody’s interested. 

People don’t understand what the product does or why it matters. There’s no sense of urgency. Opportunities and deals aren’t happening. Revenue stays flat, and investors get worried.

Every tech company that wants to go upmarket or expand horizontally will eventually need to impress people who don’t understand what they do. 

That requires a simple, relevant narrative, and a strong, clear, business case. If your pitch is choked with jargon, you will accomplish none of those things. 

The most successful companies make a strong case in plain English while demonstrating the power and expertise underlying their product. This isn’t easy to do, but it’s incredibly worthwhile.

And yes, it’s marketing’s job to do it. 

Wrong 8: Engaging in magical thinking about market math. 

OK, you’ve done some research and uncovered a massive swath of humanity that collectively spends eleventy billion dollars on the kind of things you sell. Wonderful. 

The only problem is that upon closer examination, you might learn that 99.9% of those dollars are already being spent happily. And that changing to another provider is a massive pain. And that 99.8% of those people have no clue who you are. 

Markets move much more slowly than marketers' brains do. They change along curves and trajectories that play out over time, and it’s our job to influence those trajectories.

I’ve seen a lot of people kid themselves about the basic facts like the size of their market and their ability to penetrate it. 

A factoid that says X dollars are spent on your product category doesn’t mean much. If a category is established, a much better question is what percentage of buyers change products every year, and of that smaller group, how many can you reasonably hope to win based on your ability to reach them?

Beyond that, conversion rates tend to be fairly predictable. Only so many leads become opportunities, and only so many opportunities become buyers. We do ourselves no favors by projecting that we’ll blow away industry benchmarks around this stuff. 

Wrong 9: Creating categories that don't need to exist. 

I know, I know. We all read that book everybody was talking about a few years ago and said, “Yes! I want to be a pirate!”. 

Or maybe you didn’t. In which case, I salute you. 

If you missed it, the idea is that you come up with a new moniker for whatever it is your product does, call it a new category, write a dramatic story about why it's earth-shatteringly important, run a bunch of PR stunts, and then throw a big, expensive event that blasts your category on the global map and positions your business as its “King.”

Or, in other words, you make yourself into Salesforce in 1999.

It’s an attractive idea. A lot of people have tried. Some have succeeded (...sorta?).

I think that even the writers of that category book would say that creating a category is really, really hard. Also highly expensive and tremendously risky. 

What the writers of that book probably wouldn’t say is that they are part of the Category Creation Industrial Complex, a large and very profitable sector filled with analysts, consultants, and review sites who sell category creation to companies while simultaneously working like rabid dogs to convince everyone else that new categories actually exist. 

Just think about it for a second. There’s a direct correlation between the number of categories and Gartner’s revenue potential. 

The unvarnished truth is that a G2 landing page or analyst quadrangle doesn't make a category. An excessive, over-fussed marketing event doesn't make a category. 

Huge masses of people naming a type of thing and buying that thing make a category. It’s an organic process that takes years. Occasionally, a company comes around and drives a new category.

That is very hard to pull off. And it is definitely not the only strategy available to you, and probably not even a good one in a world where marketing budgets are going to be smaller and monitored more carefully. 

Think it through. 

Wrong 10: Fiddly, overcomplicated GTM teams and tech stacks. 

Shoot me for saying it, but do we really need 27 disparate pieces of technology to run a marketing team?

We have allowed ourselves to become the proverbial man with a hammer who thinks everything is a nail. We make software, believe in software, and think more software is an excellent idea. 

Perhaps we should slow our roll, just a little, and ask ourselves what we really need to efficiently deliver the outcomes we’re hired to create. 

But I also think there’s some deeper reflection to do. 

One of the most alarming realizations I ever had was when it dawned on me that many of the ideas I held as fundamental truths of marketing were actually takeaways from Marketo ebooks published in 2007. 

We have allowed the language of martech to seep into our consciousnesses. We have given the software we use the power to dictate what we do.

If you learn to do your job from someone trying to sell you something, you’re not going to get objective best practices. 

We need to be thinkers, strategists, and problem-solvers first and software operators second. 

Wrong 11: Targeting ourselves out of business 

This is a tricky one.

Tech products get traction in the market by focusing on smaller groups of people. We go narrow and deep, obsess over our customers, and (hopefully) create products people love.

Those people tell friends, our market expands, and tech businesses grow. 

Spurred on by our martech overlords, marketers have also absorbed the gospel of going narrow and deep. We get very specific and clinical about precisely who the ICP is, how we’ll reach them and what we’ll say. 

That’s not a terrible idea. If we reach out with messages that feel relevant, people will be more likely to listen.

But…in most cases, marketing’s job is to scale the product. And if the product has captured a large part of a tiny market, that means marketing needs to make the market bigger. And if marketing has to expand the market, then targeting just a small sliver of the market is a bad idea.

If you’re reading this, you’re probably a marketer, which means it's your job to scale your company’s business. You’re not going to find a lot more customers without making a lot of people aware of your product. 

Go wide. Be loud. Find ways to expand your reach. A lot of research has shown that buyers are much more heterogeneous than marketers think.

It might very well be that your notions about who your ICP is or isn’t are the very thing that’s holding you back.

Less wronging, more righting  

That’s pretty much it. My list of thoughts and hopes on what we can do better and how we might get started. I realize that I’m scratching the surface on a lot of these points, and I’ll try to get more specific and actionable in my blog/newsletter, usefulheresy.com

I do want to reiterate a point that I put on the Useful Heresy about page. My writing is full of opinions and exhortations. My tone has an edge. When you hear and read that, you’re hearing the sound of my thoughts and sense of humor. 

I want to consistently and constantly own up to the fact that I don’t know everything, make mistakes, and am capable of getting things wrong. My goal is not to insist that I am always right and bend the world to my vision. I’m trying to figure out what I think and share those thoughts with other people, in the hope of helping them figure out what they think. If you strongly disagree with something I write, and in so doing get better at advocating for your point of view, I think that’s fantastic. 

There are as many ways to do marketing right as there are to do it wrong. My wish for myself and for anyone reading this is that we can all move away from things that don’t serve us and closer to the path of realizing our truest intentions and becoming our best selves.

Good luck.

Jon

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On another note, our friends at inflection.io are hosting a fantastic event on The Future of B2B Marketing Automation on August 2nd, 2022, at 9 am PDT. Please check it out and consider signing up to learn more about the challenges of marketers in the PLG era.

Illustrations by Alejandra Céspedes.

In marketing, finding a catchy name to explain what you are executing in your marketing campaigns is almost as important as the action itself. Having a "cool" way to explain how you shifted your focus from "A" to "B" and how that is working for your marketing campaigns seems to be what matters.

You define your objective, do something, test if it works, and if it does, you share it and claim it as your success. And, if you post it on LinkedIn and it somehow "resonates," it becomes a "thing" marketers can discuss and either support or challenge.

The problem with this process is that we are drowning in playbooks, experiments, guides, tricks, tips, hacks, etc., that claim to be the appropriate and certain way to do X, Y, and Z but lack the context, and depth marketing campaigns require to work correctly.

In other words, we are surrounded by an incommensurate amount of noise that makes it harder for us to step back and think about what is essential for our marketing strategies. We are surrounded by information and yet we are starved for meaning and knowledge.

Even though most professional marketers understand marketing is not about certainty, but about minimizing risks and maximizing your chances of success, what tends to be popular in social networks are words and concepts that "pop", bridge gaps, and are shiny. We are told to ignore the shiny object syndrome while, in the end, some of us are ironically eager to find the next big thing to discuss, embrace, or challenge.

We are eager to find the hack that would lead to success, when in reality there are no shortcuts in marketing.

Daily, the nature of marketing as an ever-evolving uncertain and complex profession seems to become more evident. And yet, we let ourselves be distracted by new terms and acronyms every couple of months. 

And, this time, the latest distraction is Dark social.

What is Dark Social?

Dark social emerges as a natural response to being unable to measure everything.

Initially coined by Alexis Madrigal in this article in The Atlantic, it refers to all information that can't be attributed to a particular action online. Either because it is digital word of mouth that surpasses analytics, or because in an increasingly cookieless world, more people care about their privacy than a decade ago.

Dark social is a way to acknowledge that not everything can be measured in a click-driven world - a relatively bland concept considering that most experienced marketers know that attribution is one of the most challenging aspects of marketing.

Why is Dark Social a distraction?

Marketing appears to be a space where trends work cyclically. From the self-served PLG movement to the sales-assisted way, from going all-in on brand and ignoring performance to doing the exact opposite a couple of years later, it seems, as marketers, we do not know what we are doing half the time. 

Suppose you explain marketing functions to outsiders. To some, it may appear we are constantly running like headless chickens trying to deliver and prove to ourselves and the world that positive numbers are possible. We try to do anything we believe will show we are accomplishing our goals, often losing sight of what matters and what needs to happen to transform visions into reality.

In this marketing context, dark social is just the acknowledgment that marketers cannot measure everything. But other than that, it is not novel, groundbreaking, innovative, or conceptually solid enough to be taken seriously as part of a marketing strategy. 

While there is a lot of digital behavior that can't be measured, that does not mean that a new marketing realm suddenly appeared. You should not waste your time thinking about "what to do to develop a dark social strategy" nor believe you are missing something in your marketing strategy if you are not jumping into this "new" trend.

It is a distraction. A sexy distraction with a name similar to "dark matter" (the energy you can't see, but it's powerful and present) that minimizes the rigorous qualitative and quantitative efforts marketers exert to accomplish their goals.

Beyond the distraction, Dark Social is still meaningful

Dark social itself holds little to no value. Most people who work in marketing understand not everything can be measured flawlessly in a funnel. There will always be external factors that influence behavior and drive people to buy that you cannot track.

What matters, however, is the fact that traditional attribution marketers that tend to be laser-focused on measuring everything are facing one of marketing's harshest truths.

"Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half." - John Wanamaker

ROI cannot entirely reflect marketing activities - and in a hyperconnected paradigm click-based attribution spoiled us and we need to wake up. As marketers, our job is not to attribute and understand precisely how to spend every dollar but to know how to maximize our chances of success in a probabilistic system.

Dark social conversations are essential, not because dark social is new or a "new strategy" for marketers, but rather because it elevates the conversation. It allows us to view marketing beyond an exclusively logical omnipresent ubiquitous understanding of digital behavior to a less tangible, cultural vision of it.

Dark social matters because it brings to light to marketers that context and providing an experience worth sharing might just be as important as ranking for the right keyword.

How to use Dark Social for your Marketing Strategy

If you are seriously considering implementing Dark Social for your marketing strategy, you must start by forgetting about dark social. 

Go beyond what dark social means to the tactical actions needed to leverage the untraceable to your advantage. In other words, dark social is irrelevant when viewed as a new marketing dimension (mainly because it is not new) - but it gains value as a set of actions that prioritize memorable experiences that people want to share with others. 

You may not be familiar with the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, an Austrian-British philosopher who worked primarily in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language. 

When we think about marketing as a discipline and language, it seems that meaning-as-use is exceptionally relevant. Unlike in many other spaces, marketers love talking about what they do, and in doing so, they add meaning and coin new terms faster than in most disciplines. Meaning and value emerge simply as a reflection of experiments and recycling old "terms" with new names. So even if we hate never-ending processes or regurgitating old concepts with new words (information that can't be attributed = dark socials), what matters is that marketers are doing things differently, trying to adapt offers to an unpredictable digital world with fewer cookies than ever.

In that sense, discussing dark funnels becomes relevant because marketers are beginning to do something regarding this untraceable information. Wittgenstein puts it this way "speaking a language is part of an activity, or of a form of life." And, today, being a marketer means you need to talk about this whether you like it or not.

It is at this precise point, in the fact we are having this conversation and reading/writing this article, that dark social gains value.

Dark social marketing strategies are mostly fluff, but recognizing there are lots of data points marketers cannot measure and still have an impact on our marketing campaigns is not only valuable but crucial in a privacy-first new reality. 

To leverage the importance and the actions that go beyond dark social, start by accepting several marketing principles that are uncomfortable.

1. Attribution is not 100% accurate, nor should it be (it would be creepy, not to mention massively illegal).
   

2. Great marketers make great decisions even if they are not 100% sure of them; moreover, the result is not necessarily a reflection of the quality of the decision. It is a probability game, there is always chaos and unpredictability in marketing.
   "What makes a decision great is not that it has a great out/come. A great decision is the result of a good process, and that process must include an attempt to accurately represent your own state of knowledge. That state of knowledge, in turn, is some variation of "I'm not sure".

3. Focus on adding value instead of trying "playbooks" or “new dark social tactics” to grow - your lagging indicators (results from customer behavior) are not nearly as important as what you need to do to ensure your customers and potential customers enjoy interacting with your brand and product (leading indicators - customer actions). Great products and experiences are messages we love sharing because they make us look good - social currency and practical value are real and not always traceable.
   

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I talked about the concept of time horizons on the podcast with Eric Stockton (VP Demand Gen @ SharpSpring / Constant Contact). If your time horizon is 6-12 months / you need to drive revenue now & you'll focus more on the short-term direct response marketing. If your time horizon is 24 mo - you have the space to build a brand & simply let people know you exist without having them take action.

Salesforce can run an ad about Team Earth at the Super Bowl (and hire a Hollywood mega star) because they are the market leaders & they have enough of a brand in the CRM & B2B Software space to build goodwill via aspirational messages. For a "Series A" startup struggling to find customers - this scenario probably will not work. This is a similar idea to what we discussed in our Media vs. Content essay.

You have to ''earn'' the right to build a brand in some ways. More so in the personal brand space where every Ali Mohammad & Irfan writes Twitter threads that are recycled Twitter threads that don't reflect actual knowledge or expertise. I am writing these opinions now because (in some ways) after working in B2B marketing for the past decade+ I have some strong opinions on how it should be done. I talk about personal branding & more in this great chat with Phil & Jon on the wonderful Humans of MarTech podcast.

Quick favour - we would love to understand what you enjoy about 42/ and what we can do better. Mind filling out this quick survey? It takes 30 seconds.

Note: Before you read this article it might be good to start with our Brand vs. Performance piece right here. To be fair, the ideas and framework you will find below emerged due to how inaccurate it is to separate marketing modalities (brand, product, performance) to push growth.

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In a hyper-connected economy that saturates us with stimuli and ads across screens, "proper" marketing is more than a brand vs. product vs. performance decision. We have many things to pay attention to, and it is more challenging than ever to stand out.

According to Seth Godin:

"The two scarce elements of our economy are trust and attention.

Trust is scarce because it's not a simple instinct and it's incredibly fragile, disappearing often in the face of greed, shortcuts or ignorance.

And attention is scarce because it doesn't scale. We can't do more than one thing at a time, and the number of organizations and ideas that are competing for our attention grows daily."

As we mentioned in previous essays - as marketers we need to learn to think in bets and experiment. There are no absolute answers, no playbooks, no rules, no guidelines. What we have instead as an ever changing crowded market and a consumer with infinite problems and limited attention. Our job is to connect our product or service with that particular problem the user is looking to solve at the right price point with at least friction as possible.

So when we think about marketers getting hooked on a single modality of marketing, we know something is off. 

Here, we will discuss a different way to think about marketing as a whole. A different lens that we think helps marketers better understand what needs to get done to market products and close sales.  

This is an attempt to understand and dissect marketing campaigns without falling into the demand vs. product vs. brand trap. But, keep in mind that it is not the ultimate answer nor the framework you should adopt for your marketing campaigns unless it makes sense to you and your organization. 

But first, let's dissect a campaign that we think crushed it.

Coinbase and the Superbowl

You are watching one of the most important sporting events of all time, and suddenly a weird QR code that looks just like that awesome The Office episode starts bouncing on screen. What do you do, probably scan it right?

That is exactly what Coinbase did. At the right moment, with the right format. 

Had they done that three years ago, no one would have scanned the code (it was not part of our daily habits until the pandemic had us scanning QR codes everywhere). Had they done another traditional Superbowl ad, they probably would not have created such a powerful brand play - nor would it have been possible to get so many downloads (their site actually crashed).

Massive win. And yet, it only took a couple of days for them to ruin the trust gained by claiming the idea was born in-house (when apparently, it was not).

Sure, this is still a fantastic marketing and sales exercise, and probably many of the newly acquired users will never even learn about the idea of not being born in-house (nor would they care). Coinbase won. And the reason behind it is that the ad got millions of eyeballs, QR scans, and trust-building mental associations. 

Cryptocurrencies are still a mystery for many of us. We do not understand what they are, how to use them, or why they even hold value (not like we understand fiat currencies either - but that is a discussion for another essay). The Superbowl ad allowed Coinbase to creatively cross the tech adoption chasm, acquire users, gain attention, and build trust in this shady, quite techy, and niche-oriented territory. 

Would a fake shady company advertise in the Superbowl? - Obviously not. And so, Coinbase's colossal win is to connect symbolic meaning and trust to their brand while simultaneously capturing attention like never before. In other words, it is a move any well-rounded marketer would be proud of (by combining performance, product, and brand).

But how exactly did they accomplish such a fantastic campaign?

To understand what Coinbase accomplished with this campaign, we have created a framework that tracks trust and attention. We did so because we firmly believe that instead of thinking about the marketing modalities and tactical actions, it makes more sense to think about the product, the category, the people exposed to your marketing campaign, and the trust and attention needed to succeed. 

In the case of Coinbase, they indeed had the attention and trust of innovators and early adopters. But convincing the tech adoption majorities and laggards to use Coinbase probably was not as easy. In that context, creating a Superbowl ad that increases the amount of attention they receive from later stages in the tech adoption curve makes a lot of sense and builds a trustworthy brand in a space where trust is an issue (crypto beyond early adopters).

In other words, it allows them to move from a low trust low attention quadrant to a low trust high attention quadrant. And, after having millions of people scanning a QR and experiencing the quality and functionality of the product, hopefully, some of that attention can be translated into using the product, trust and word-of-mouth. Quite a feat considering it is crypto.

It was a brilliant move and perhaps, one of the most creative examples we will see of marketing creativity (floating QR) and performance (QR that drives signups) being orchestrated. 

Thinking about this example using an attention/trust framework lets us have more strategic clarity as to why it worked and how you can combine all marketing dimensions to achieve a particular objective. That is why we have decided to dive a little deeper and explain the model. 

The Trust-Attention Campaign Model.

Good marketers are aware of the latest playbooks and execute them well. Great marketers know playbooks are useless and use them as the starting point to develop creative and analytical ways to understand their role and how to accomplish the goals required from their marketing campaigns.

Before we continue, a couple of quick notes: 

1. attention is an immediate tactical effort that pushes brands to the top of mind and tip of tongue. Trust is a slow symbolic construct that takes time, effort, and a clear, meaningful code in the consumer's mind. That means that the "attention axis" is volatile, fast, and dynamic, while trust is solid, deep, and complex. It is crucial to consider this because you can build trust by capturing attention. Still, if the attention tactic you use does not resonate with your audience, you can damage your reputation - which, as we mentioned, is a slow and challenging thing to build, and taking risks by being noticed is not always the right thing to do.
   

2. This framework is a lot more useful if you understand your brand's positioning within the category, the audience you are trying to reach, and the objective of the campaign. Marketing to an innovator is different from marketing to a laggard. Likewise, if you are the category leader, you may try other strategies than a new competitor. And finally, if you are more worried about metrics to show your investors, perhaps attention-driven tactics make more sense than slow trust-building campaigns.
   
   It all depends, but understanding the balance between trust and attention lets you map creative campaigns that orchestrate performance and brand.
   

3. It also helps if you know how trusted and how much attention your brand currently captures. Brands are not located or “positioned” in the quadrants of this model, but it is different to run campaigns if many people trust you than if you are new in your category. Your starting point in terms of trust and attention allows you to understand how trusted and recognized your brand is, and how to produce campaigns to move forward. 

Having said all of that, let's take a look at each quadrant in depth. 

Cheap zone:

This quadrant generally promotes marketing campaigns that focus on small efforts and quick wins. In this area, the product you are trying to market is probably not well-known, nor does it have enough users or interactions to have a solid reputation. This zone is the most common initial scenario for brands positioning a new product in a crowded category and looking to grow their sales.

The cheap zone is where using "quick-wins," "playbooks," and short-term thinking is natural because there is little risk. You are launching the product, and probably the focus rather than increasing your ARR is to fully understand the experience your user has with your product and how to improve it to solve their problems - and hopefully differentiate yourself from your competitors (The PMM modality).

Yet, you may have to drive quick results and show positive metrics. We get it, that is the startup world and the way it works is through positive KPIs. But, keep in mind that churn rates are real and even if your CAC is low and it shows positive metrics your LTV is also fundamental for growth. It is much cheaper to keep a user than to acquire one. And providing a marvelous experience and creating a memorable brand might just be what you need to do beyond quick result-driven campaigns.

This zone is an initial stage that several SaaS will probably face, but it is also a place they should move out of as soon as possible. Having low trust (not enough users to validate your product or talk about it) and low attention (few channels and messages) will probably mean your growth will be slow. And, if we have learned anything from working with startups, speed is crucial for survival. 

Another industry that tends to run its marketing campaigns in this quadrant is the telecommunications industry, where most clients are ready to switch providers simply due to pricing. If you ask ten people what they think of their telco provider, they either have nothing to say or hate it. It is no coincidence that terrible customer service leads to a lack of trust and differentiation (all competitors seem to do the same thing, poorly).

Danger zone:

This is a dangerous zone because you capture lots of attention, but your product and category are still not in the high trust area. An excellent example of a campaign in this quadrant Superbowl ad by Coinbase. They created a bold ad that received lots of attention and conversions. It was a risky move given the audience in relation to the tech adoption curve (early and late majority and laggards) and the low trust the overall crypto industry is facing, especially during a bearish season. 

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This area requires bold moves and creative and symbolic messages that capture attention (a scarce resource) and build and reposition your brand's semiotic representation. 

Think of it as the area where inceptions are possible—the moment where you can take advantage of the attention you are capturing to become famous. The challenge is to be creative and different enough to be noticed and deliver an experience with the product that lives up to your manufactured hype. 

An example of doing this well is "This is yoga" by LuluLemon. A radically different campaign set them apart from other yoga brands by connecting their product with genuine cultural insight. This campaign worked because LuluLemon matched the attention received with a fantastic and trustworthy experience. In the end, they quickly moved from the danger zone to a comfortable low attention, high trust quadrant. Once they had captured enough attention and built trust, it was time to ease up a little bit in controversial campaigns and deliver a trustworthy experience.

Other campaigns that fall in this quadrant are the infamous "Think Different" Apple campaign, pushing a brand only innovators and early adopters trusted into a more mainstream domain via disruptive attention-seeking messaging. 

As you can probably tell, this quadrant seems to work well as long as you have clarity of the insight and cultural/semiotic impact you want to push forward. Creativity, a bold bet, and understanding the proper channels and messaging to deliver your message works quite well. 

It is crucial to remember that this is the dangerous quadrant for a reason. If you launch a campaign in this quadrant wrong, you may face the wrath of having lots of attention in a way that does not align with the values required to build trust and connection. 

Pressure zone:

The pressure zone is an area that is hard to handle because you escalate attention even though there is already trust associated with your brand. In other words, brands that produce campaigns in this quadrant are usually in the comfort zone and want to increase market share or salience. The next natural step is to create a more visible campaign and capture attention without sacrificing the trust that is already associated with your product. 

Sometimes, brands can jump from the cheap zone to the danger zone and later to the pressure zone; however, it is more common to move to the comfort zone after the danger zone. The reason behind it is that you can pull a cheeky campaign once. But still, if you are a smaller brand or if your product is in a saturated category, chances are you will not be able to continue capturing attention in the long run. In other words, even though the campaign you launched increased visibility and trust, it is far more likely for your brand to fall into a comfort zone area than continue being in the eye of the storm.

As we already quoted, attention is a scarce resource. And, the moment brands do something to stand out, competitors are simply going to try to reclaim their place within the category aggressively. 

An example of a poorly run pressure zone campaign was Pepsi's infamous Kendall Jenner ad in 2017. It was controversial because it captured lots of attention just by how out of tune it was with the nature of protests and authority. Although Pepsi probably just wanted to build more trust by pushing a controversial message of union (in this case, the police and protestors), they took a risk by moving from the comfort quadrant to the pressure zone as laggards in their category (behind Coke) without genuine insight that resonated with the audience they targeted. 

On the other hand, a well-done ad that elevates a brand to the pressure zone is the Salesforce 2022 Superbowl ad. Salesforce is already a category leader and a massive brand for business platforms. Pushing an ad into the Superbowl takes them out of their comfort zone (where they are positioned and lead), and it allows them to reach new audiences beyond their usual users, and simultaneously enables them to sow a powerful message: "Cause the new frontier. It ain't rocket science. It's right here."

Even though it seems weird, almost disconnected from their category and their brand, it does a fantastic job repositioning the brand as the "real" brand connected with businesses and the planet's health. Not only that, but it also manages to make fun of the metaverse and the space race, concepts that are impossible for most of us to envision given our limited human time perception abilities. 

Salesforce is already a titan. But, by doing ads like this, it starts to enter the mainstream culture, and it positions itself as the brand that is here, on earth, to build trust, and help businesses. Not a lousy inception. 

Comfort zone:

This is where category leaders and emblematic brands gravitate and produce their campaigns. These brands have gone above and beyond to demonstrate to their users that their brand means something and that you cannot go wrong by buying from them. And, most of their campaigns accurately reflect that.

In the tech world, brands such as Microsoft produce campaigns in this quadrant, or SaaS brands such as Hubspot or Salesforce tend to be here. The beauty of being a brand with campaigns in this quadrant is that you are universally accepted. No one will be upset in a large company if you buy Office 365; people will probably embrace it and accept it because the Microsoft brand means something (trust). If, however, you purchase Slack in a corporate environment, you may have to explain to a couple of people why you decided to go for Slack vs. Teams.

In the startup world, Slack dominates because consumers of Slack (including the campaigns) are innovators and early adopters. But, in the corporate world, Microsoft wins because of its reputation and trust and the campaigns they deploy to build upon that. 

When your brand is trusted and does not need to capture attention to survive, it means that you have already achieved salience (you are recognized), significance (you are meaningful), and differentiation (you are unique). Therefore, your campaigns can be less aggressive or attention-seeking because you are looking to maintain trust, not build it from scratch. 

Chances are if you are a B2B SaaS brand, this is the aspirational zone rather than the actual place where your brand can develop campaigns or position itself. With a few exceptions of tech brands that fully dominate verticals (think Google, Amazon, Facebook), B2B SaaS brands should envision this quadrant as the ideal rather than the real. This is the monopoly quadrant, where brands are healthy, and campaigns seek to maintain psychological and cultural dominance. Your brand almost surpasses your product, to the point you could come up with a different product, and people would still buy it (think Nintendo).

Let's forget about the brand vs. performance question. Honestly, as fellow marketers, it is time we start asking ourselves the real questions:

• What does my audience need to learn about my product and buy it, and how do I get there?

• How much trust do I need to build for my ICP to buy my product and how do I get there? 

Once we know that, we can develop campaigns that match our attention and trust objectives and allow us to align the mechanics/data required to run a successful campaign with the cultural and psychological insight needed to develop a powerful brand. 

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Illustrations by Alejandra Céspedes.

As a crucial branch of a business, marketing appears not to have a single meaning or function. For example, suppose we look for a definition of marketing in the Cambridge Dictionary. On their site, we find that marketing is "the business activity that involves finding out what customers want, using that information to design products and services, and selling them effectively." That sounds about right, right? And yet, if we ask marketers what marketing is, there is no single definition or consensus. In the end, from what we have learned in the space over decades we think there are basically three main verticals to understand marketing; brand, product, and performance. 

Twitter is crowded with those who defend and idealize brand exercises, those who think data is all that matters, and those who consistently iterate the product and turn it into gold. And, none of them are 100% correct.

The bottom line is that all three definitions and marketing modalities make a lot of sense because marketing is:

• Partially a branding exercise that allows products to become symbols and carry meaning beyond function.

• A data-driven probabilistic exercise that drives revenue and pushes growth. 

• The connection between users and products; the more a product solves users' needs, the more it will be "marketable."

And yet, it appears that if you spend more than 30 mins on Twitter or LinkedIn, you will find tons of marketers that hold their ground and believe the only way to do "proper marketing" is their way. You will come across arguments and marketers that claim they spent zero dollars on brand (which is not truly accurate because paid marketing is also brand marketing) , and many others will tell you that brand is the only way to sell. 

In the end, it is almost as if marketers had forgotten the essence and meaning of marketing we mentioned above:

1. Finding out what customers want.

2. Using that information to design products and services.

3. Selling them effectively.

We are here to shed some light and move beyond the singular marketing approach. We do so because we firmly believe instead of defending a unique perspective, the next level of marketers understand marketing as a system that combines meaning, usability, and data.

A false dichotomy: Brand vs. Performance.

If you have been in the marketing space for a while, chances are you have moved along this spectrum. 

As explained by Janessa Lantz on her Medium (thanks for the shoutout :)), hiring marketers is difficult because they seem to fall into three complementary categories that are often perceived as disconnected.

If you are a marketer, you are either an expert at: 

• Understanding cultural nuances.

• Understanding behavior and product. 

• Or at data-driven performance tactics.

While this is quite true when hiring (believe us, we know it isn't easy), it can also be limiting to see it through that lense. 

Deep down, we believe a fantastic marketer understands the combination of meaning, usability, and data is crucial. A good marketer probably specializes in one or two subcategories. A mediocre one probably fights all over Twitter or LinkedIn to defend the modality they think is more important.

Even though most marketers specialize in a single modality, the true beauty of marketing is understanding and executing an integrated campaign where brand, product, and performance are perfectly balanced. So balanced Thanos would be proud.

Think of a product that invests exclusively in a single modality of marketing. Indeed something will happen, and some sales will occur (as long as you have a team that knows what they are doing). And now, think about deploying a marketing strategy that orchestrates all three marketing modalities in sync. 

Will the product be more successful? Will you end up diluting your focus and messing up? Will you sell more? Will you sell less?

Honestly, in a hypothetical way, it makes sense to think that the risks will decrease simply by diversifying the marketing efforts. Chances are, if you do many activities that can help your product sell more, your product will sell more than exclusively focusing on a single one.  

While we understand this is not always the case, and sometimes a laser focus marketing modality works, what matters about this imaginary example is the idea that this dichotomy is false. You probably need to use all of these marketing dimensions to market your product correctly. And, even if you focus on a single one because it just works for your product, niche, and ICP, once you want to cross the chasm and attract more buyers, you may have to deploy strategies to cover all other marketing dimensions.

That is why, if you focus exclusively on a single marketing modality it may simply not be enough (your competitors may be looking at the bigger picture).

As written by Michael Lorenzos in his substack, this division between performance and brand (the ones that are more distanced in the spectrum) is "a false dichotomy because it's not supported by your audience. People buy from brands, and performance advertising is one of the marketing activities that enable a brand to reach and engage with their audience."

That makes a lot of sense. No marketer should care if one or the other (or the third modality we already mentioned) is the "right" one. What should matter is what people are actually getting out of your product (symbolically and through features), and how your organization is reaching and capturing as much information as possible to improve the overall strategy. 

To put it another way, what matters is focusing on creating an internal organizational culture in which you get in front of users, and where user data is analyzed and mixed with cultural and psychological insight. 

Selling and marketing are incredibly complex and unpredictable. You need a data system that informs your team on what is working and what is not, iterations to make your product memorable and dazzling, and cultural and psychological insight to become a salient, meaningful, and significant brand.

The brand vs. performance dichotomy is just a superficial discussion that conceals a much more crucial question. Instead of asking ourselves as marketers, "should I do brand or performance?" we should probably focus on the following question:

"What does my audience need to learn about my product and potentially want to buy it. And, what triggers the purchase and how do I get there?"

Or, to put it another way:

"How much trust do I need to build for my ICP to buy my product and how do I get there?" 

Once we shift the tactical marketing decision-making process from a "what should I do to sell" to a "how do I develop trust and affinity," all modalities intertwine and make more sense. It is almost as if we took a step back and visualized that good marketing is about aligning socio-cultural insight across a universe of processes in relation to the audience. Not exclusively about driving revenue, or storytelling to become different, or mindless iterations with features your ICP does not value (beware of the "startup" mentality cult).

Performance allows you to track direct response, but it also allows you to become top of mind once your audience begins to look for a solution to the problems you solve. And the brand is the insightful human component that differentiates your brand and generates value beyond the product. To market effectively, you need both. (Not to mention a product that works).

"Optimally, the Brand function should sit within the Performance Marketing team and be guided by a unified measurement model. Again: there is no "opposite" approach to Performance marketing. All marketing should be informed by performance measurement."

Marketing is much more complex than going all-in in a single direction. 

As marketers we need to learn to think in bets and experiment. There are no absolute answers, no playbooks, no rules, no guidelines. What we have instead as an ever changing crowded market and a consumer with infinite problems and limited attention.

Our job is to connect our product or service with that particular problem the user is looking to solve at the right price point with the least friction as possible.

Beware of Gurus, beware of magic playbooks and formulas. Instead, obsess about your user´s problems (intellectual and emotional), creating a product that solves those problems, and a performance engine that drives growth. 

We created a framework to think about marketing modalities differently. Coming soon!

Editors not: In Pakistan & generally Islam we have this concept of ‘Niyaat’ which loosely translates into intent. It’s used in varying ways & contexts. Once when I was fasting during Ramzan I eat a few bites of food without realizing I was fasting. I dont remember who (probably my mom) said something to the effect of ‘its ok, if you niyaat was clean (meaning you didn’t actually concisously mean to eat during fasting) it does not count.

Todays essay reminded me of that. Intent is something we throw around in societal, business, legal & multiple contexts. Did you ‘intend’ to do that or was that an accident? Really what is intent & can it be even captured. Is it a split second decision we make consciously to ‘do’ something or is it more pre-programmed sub-conscious things that we don’t actively think about?


In the B2B context - does viewing a G2 page count as intent? Or for that matter how do we even ‘know’ when there’s intent to buy new software? its the promised magic moment - prospect ‘intends’ to buy a software & vendors can capitalize on it. But does it actually work as promised?
Our intent with this essay is to provide context on intent data. If you want to dig in deeper I had a great chat with Tukan (founder @LeadSift) right after their acquisition by IDG about intent & selling LeadSift & what’s next.

"I know half the money I spend on advertising is wasted. I just don't know which half." - Joseph Wannamaker

The SaaS B2B marketing playbooks have evolved much more than most marketers feel comfortable with over the last couple of years. At first, it seemed that focusing on outbound playbooks with aggressive campaigns was key. After that, we noticed a massive adoption of inbound tactics that marketers considered were key to increase revenue. And, eventually, in a WWW crowded by me-too content, it seems it is slowly heading back to the outbound spectrum.

In this complicated marketing/sales world intent data has become a controversial topic that seems to be crucial for some organizations, and not so useful for others. Some claim it is key to increase their conversion rates, while others do not really see what the big deal is and why it contributes to the potential closing of new clients. 

Of course, we lean more towards the latter. But before we discuss why,  let us start at the beginning. What does intent even mean?

The first three definitions we find are the following if we look at the Cambridge dictionary. 

• Giving all your attention to something.

• The fact that you want and plan to do something.

• Something that you intend or intended to do

All in all, we can tell that the meaning of intent is closer to the second and third definitions in this context (B2B Saas). So it is clearly something that you probably thought about doing, but not something you will necessarily do. 

If we dig a little deeper, we even come across the "intention economy" concept. A concept developed by Doc Searls in which he claims the following:

"The Intention Economy grows around buyers, not sellers. It leverages the simple fact that buyers are the first source of money, and that they come ready-made. You don't need advertising to make them."

It makes sense. Even if you are not familiar with Searls work, you probably came across Seth Godin's Permission Marketing or some other concept that repositions the users/buyers at the center. We have user-centered design, buyer personas, journeys, JTBD, and all sorts of methodologies that focus on the understanding that leveraging users' problems and providing solutions makes more sense than pushing sales tactics to people who are not interested. 

But even if we understand all of that and go back to thinking about intent, more specifically intent data (first, second and third-party data), there is an evident gap between what intent data claims it is and what intent actually does. 

Now, if we look at what intent data means online, we find a myriad of martech companies that claim with their information, you will be able to capture more consumers into buying your product. The promise of having a way to truly understand the digital footprint of potential buyers and knowing when to reach out, just when they need your solution. Quite a statement, particularly considering that "intent," which is much closer to "intention" (something that you intend or intended to do), has little if no connection whatsoever with the actual effectiveness of any Go-to-Market strategy. 

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Googling intent data again, but this time we adding quotation marks, we come across an informative piece that states that:

"Intelligent marketers are grappling with the issues of intent, context, content, conversation and closure. Let's stop stereotyping the customer, let's look beyond the typical segmentation techniques. The fact of the matter is that there is no one data set that can ideally describe who we are and what we want. It will always be multi-layered. Going forward, to get to the real intent and hence address a genuine need for customers, marketers will have to marry first party (transaction data), second party (partner data) and third-party data."

Finally, we arrive at something much more analytical, and that makes more sense to even begin to understand what intent data is and how it works (without the fluff).

As Sangani argues, the truth is that there is no data set that can 100% describe who we are and what we want. But, of course, no intent platform or data intelligence platform will advertise that. In fact, they may promote the opposite. We will not name any names, but really, a value proposition that claims purchase behavior is predictable with thousands of data points might at best be a tiny bit better than random. 

Even the more sober intent data brands out there claim that with third-party intent data, you will be able to increase your sales simply because you understand the context around the accounts you are targeting. 

What do we mean by context? Is it that the company received funding? Is it that they are hiring a new DemandGen specialist? Is it a comment on a Slack channel or Quora? Technically, it is. And sure, understanding more about the company and the accounts you are targeting can increase your chances of closing. However, even if you know what is going on around your ICPs the truth is that it still remains a game of probability. You still have to guess the right moment to contact them, the right pitch, and the right offer. It is not random because you have more information to leverage, but then again, in any well executed marketing / sales strategy this is just a basic component to drive demand. 

We are not saying it does not work. In a way, it does help and contribute to your marketing/sales efforts. In fact, it has worked for many marketers, and brilliant people are working to make this as accurate as possible. But, the fact remains that even if you have all the intent data (which is usually thought of as third-party intent data), the most exact source of information to capture intent is your first-party data.

And sure, we have all heard the story in which Target figured out a teen pregnancy before the father of said teenager found out. Yes, Amazon recommendations are helpful sometimes, just like Spotify suggestions actually turn out to be good. But, that does not mean that all retargeting ads are perfect for you, nor do they pop up at the right moment when you actually have an intention to buy. In fact, one of the companies with the most information about media consumption habits, Netflix, has publicly recognized that even with an insurmountable amount of data, gut decisions still rule in the era of Big Data. 

So how do we even begin to think about intent data? 

Intent data is often perceived as a third-party solution that allows you to access company-based information. With this information, you will have more clarity on who you should target in your marketing efforts and when. 

In other words, it is third-party intent data that provides behavioral signals for your revenue teams to act upon and improve their close rates.. 

But, as we have experienced intent data in our journey as marketers, we think that before uncovering what it means, we need to understand what it does. 

These are some of the hidden truths of intent third-party platforms.

1. Platforms that work in intent data provide approximate information given that the tracking is done at a company-based level. In other words, it is not possible to know 100% if the person who makes the ultimate decision to buy your product was the one that accessed the site, article, podcast, or whatever resource it has been tagged as an intent signal. 

2. Even if the right person was precisely the one who had the intended behavior you are looking for, it might also be the case that they have no idea who you are or what your product does. Imagine that someone from X company wants to hire a RevOps agency. They might go online, read a couple of articles, even listen to some podcasts or participate in Slack channels to learn more about the subject. Yet, they may be utterly oblivious to 42 Agency, what we do, and why we could help. It does not matter if we sell precisely what they need; the fact remains that they are still pretty cold in the leads spectrum, and even with all the signals available, they still have to figure out why 42 Agency is the right partner for them. 

3. Inbound leads are those who took the time to slowly understand and learn more about your brand and your category, meaning they may be a warm lead. Outbound leads can be cold leads that just fit into a demographic and digital level with the kind of ICP your company is looking for. But, intent leads are neither warm nor cold; they are just an estimated guess based on available digital footprints that may or may not allow you to improve your sales processes. Intent leads are, at best, slightly warmer than cold leads. 

We are not satanizing intent data; in fact, it has worked quite well for some colleagues. But, just for a better understanding, we think it is fair to understand their limitations.

Now that we got some of that context, let's talk a bit more about first-party data.

First-party intent data

First-party data is the information your website visitors share with you and allow you to track. Just the fact that these individuals have directly interacted with your brand should be a sign that it is a piece of precious information to be used wisely.

Please remember that this is information that is a fact, not an approximate, not a statistical model, an actual action you can track and hopefully capitalize. 

And, also keep in mind that just because someone gave you their email does not mean they are a warm lead. 

So can you use first-party data to capture intent information and improve your overall marketing strategy?

• Use 1st party data to reposition gated content as intent capturing: One of the main problems about MQLs for many marketers is that they are not convinced of the importance of MQLs acquired through gated content.But isn't that what marketing is about? And isn't this whole debate just completely irrelevant? In the end what matters is capturing intent. And, if 1st party data allows you to do that with higher accuracy, why not do it? 
  
  We like to think of gated high-quality content as a sign of intent, then the whole MQL value shifts. MQLs are not just people who need to go through a funnel to convert, but they can also be individuals and organizations with demonstrated direct intent signals you can, later on, pass to your sales teams. For example, if John downloaded an ebook from your site in exchange for his email, it does not mean he is ready to buy. But, his organization, perhaps even John himself, has demonstrated a clear interest in your brand and what you are doing (aka - first-party intent). Iterating on this process, providing more quality content to capture more information and influence several decision-makers in the organization seems to be overlooked. But it is a gold mine waiting to be mined. 

• Use it to reposition MQLs as sales leads to intent leads: Hear us out. A common issue for most organizations orchestrating the marketing-sales operations is the amount of "bad quality leads" that sales teams reach out to. It is common to hear complaints about MQLs who just aren't ready to buy. But, instead of treating these MQLs as warm leads, think of them as an additional intent data point, sometimes even an intent lead, that connects with a much bigger universe of intent. For example, if you happen to know that Mary checked out your site and joined your webinar, perhaps the next natural step is not to call her and try to close. Instead, focus on understanding who she is in her organization.

• Use it to do reverse IP lookup and know who is actually checking out your site. This is another significant action you can take to build a universe of intent around first-party data. If you happen to know the exact IP address, you can figure out who the person on the other end is and why they would be interested in your product. The more information you have, the better chances you have of understanding their problem and how to actually reach out so that your product tackles a specific pain point. Even use the LinkedIn pixel that tells you more information about her to build an intent data set that provides business intelligence for your sales teams. 

Third-party intent data

To understand third-party intent data, we must understand third-party cookies first. 

Third-party cookies are text files with small pieces of data that are essentially used by ad networks to understand your behavior and track you. So, for example, how does Google know it should show me an ad for a couch I was browsing for on Wayfair? Simple. Google shows me the ad because Wayfair has Google ad cookies (3rd party cookies that have followed me from other sites and aren't created by Wayfair). Those cookies that track me around are third-party cookies.

Now there's third-party intent. Third-party intent is when Bombora or an intent vendor reaches out to marketers and says, "Hey, this company called 42 Agency might be interested in buying a CRM because they're reading up on CRMs on some sites and forums, etc." 

Although it is not 100% clear what or how intent platforms do their work (it is their know-how, of course, it is not publicly available), the important thing is that we can sell that info to help marketers win accounts. 

We think intent platforms probably do some IP / cookie lookup to identify companies that match your sales strategy (they discover that this IP / browser reading these articles on "CRM" belong to x company/person). 

They probably know I am reading about CRMs because they have third-party cookies on publisher/industry sites - i.e., trade publications. Or, they have a data co-op they own or partner with many websites to share data. 

Now, suppose I am a CRM marketer, and I know that someone from 42 Agency is actively looking to buy a CRM. As a company that sells CRM, I can "activate" that data by using it in ads, finding the decision-maker that will ultimately purchase the CRM, or doing some geo-fenced ads or billboards (or whatever you think will help you win that account).

So, to summarize, third-party intent platforms use third-party cookies to create behavioral databases that help marketers "activate" intent. And, if you activate that data correctly, your closing rates can improve just because you have more context and information on the potential buyer.

Now that we explored how that actually works, here are a couple of ways in which you can activate third-party intent data in your marketing strategies.

• Create outbound campaigns using the data: Third-party intent data allows you to quickly pitch individuals with behavioral patterns of interest in your product. However, to do this correctly, try to find a prominent motif to act upon. Not doing so might backfire. Have you seen those ads you do not care about at all? Well, try not to be that marketer with your product.
  
  Another critical aspect of running a good outbound campaign is identifying the person within the account who potentially calls the shots and can purchase the product. That does not mean you cannot build momentum around the entire account. You probably should (decision-makers are influenced by their teams). It is recommended to go a step further and translate broad intent information to laser-focused tactics and communications.
  
  

• Create custom audiences: The data you obtain from intent providers will allow you to create custom audiences to advertise your product. We recommend you try to build them up in a way that demonstrates an actual effort to understand their needs. It is impossible to know what a specific person likes through third-party intent data (because, you know, privacy). Still, it is possible to write a copy that speaks to psychometric traits for a particular vertical.  

Although there is no single way to create custom audiences, it is generally best to experiment with multiple audiences and messages. In the end, third-party intent data is a probability game where you use a database from a third party that you cannot accurately understand. Quick iterations to take advantage of third-party data might help you learn more about your audience and what actually works for them. 

Conclusion

Intent data works for some, but it is also overrated. Understanding your potential customers' data points in an organized and thoughtful manner allows you to build account lists that are more effective than others. That much is true. But, it does not mean that you have more certainty just because you have more information. 

Marketing is all about probability, iteration, experiments, and consistency. Even with all the information in the world, you will not have certainty. 

Attribution is not 100% measurable, not even in the hyperconnected reality we live in today. 

And, just remember that third-party intent will never equate to all of the robust information you can acquire by simply digging a little deeper into first-party info. 

Intent data is an intention, not an action. And marketing is about people doing things, not meaning to do things. 

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