The best marketing leader marries both the art and science of marketing, the creative and the analytic. They also excel and demonstrate a proven track record in three distinct areas:

• Marketing leadership – the ability to generate buy-in and followership from peers, direct reports, and superiors.
• Marketing management – managing the marketing function and rhythm through the use of KPIs, OKRs, daily stand-ups, etc.
• Marketing ROI – at the end of the day, all the of the work and all of the skills above are important because they help drive ROI. Whether it's revenue, number of leads, a specific award or feature in a publication, strong leadership and management and leveraging of the art and science of marketing all serve that one purpose.

A key insight worth keeping in mind is that your company's marketing is only as good as your marketing team, so a strong marketing leader is one that will know how to form the best team by finding, attracting, developing, and retaining the right talent. With that core condition satisfied, proper ROI usually follows.

The answer is a good copywriter. But it doesn't stop there. There's five skill groups that need to be fulfilled.

1. It starts with the copywriter because they will take care of the most primordial aspect of marketing: addressing your audience's pain.
2. Then comes the growth hacker, the automation specialist.
3. Marketing and sales go hand-in-hand and that's where your product evangelist shines.
4. Number 3 is often confused with product marketing, which will be the fourth gap you'll try to fill. Potentially your first MBA hire, this person is all about the 5 Ps (and more).
5. Finally, the team leader. This one's last because oftentimes one of the previous four will organically grow into this position and you can find a new hire to fill their previous position.

OKRs help you stay on track with your larger company objectives while also keeping an eye on the day-to-day things and doing the right kind of projects that support the objectives. So it balances the short-term and the long-term. That means:

• The objective asks "why are you here? What's the reason you're doing marketing?"
• The key result is something that you can use to measure your progress against that objective during a quarter.
• Actions, or activities come below the key result. They answer "what are the things you're going to do to achieve that key result?

For example:

• Objective: Drive demand for your product and services.
• Key Result: 50 new marketing qualified leads that are handed to the sales team.
• Actions:
  • Execute ABM campaigns to two specific verticals with a clear ICP.
  • Optimize prospect lead nurture campaigns.
  • Improve channel attribution to drive optimization and accountability of the different owners of the different channels.

Brand awareness can be divided into the following categories:

• Brand recall: ensure that prospects you marketed to months prior will remember your brand once they encounter the challenge you solve
• Brand recognition: refers to the concept of demarcation, that’s where logos and jingles come in to identify your brand and also drive brand recall later on
• Brand dominance: achieved when you dominate the niche market you carved for yourself – it’s the highest level of brand awareness.
• Brand trust: is the most important for b2b SaaS because you need the least friction possible to drive buy-in and trust is a big part of that

Inbound assumes the audience is doing a lot of the work, but in the case of a new product category or a market where customers haven’t put a name on their problem or even realized that they have a need, outbound (e.g. Account-based marketing) becomes necessary to drive brand awareness.

Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) can be calculated a few different ways based on the goal. For financial forecasting and valuation purposes, CAC as a profitability number should be all-inclusive. On the other hand, for the purposes of strategic and tactical marketing management, CAC might not include salaries and instead focus on discretionary spend.

Knowing what your CAC number really means is important to help make better sense of other numbers like Months to Recover CAC (MRC) and Lifetime Value (LTV).

LTV relies on your churn assumptions, which can often be overestimated if not careful. The resulting inflated projections can be detrimental to both your strategy and forecasting with investors.

You don’t need a sophisticated tech stack, you can start with a simple manual spreadsheet (like a bowler chart) then create automated dashboards as you scale:

• Start small – pick 10–15 of the most important metrics
• Tracking both leading and lagging indicators – the full ‘story’ is only told when they’re looked at together
• Input numbers on a weekly basis
• Use absolute numbers, try to avoid percentages
• Use raw numbers – limit the number of formulas to calculate things
• Define every metric – be accurate and precise in your language. Explain the source, the time of day that numbers are collected, etc. 

The exact metrics you track will depend on your organization’s goals. Generally, when you’re building your dashboard from scratch, you want to include a few leading and lagging indicator metrics that span the buyer’s journey from top to bottom. Here are some examples:

• Top of funnel metrics: number of website visitors or sessions, content or landing page with the most organic entrances, etc.
• Middle of funnel metrics: i.e. number of MQLs & SQLs, number of demo requests, source data for new opportunities
• Bottom of funnel metrics: i.e. influenced revenue by channel, customer acquisition cost (CAC) by channel, revenue by deal type (new business, up-sell), etc.

Before you get to product-market fit, you need to test your go to market hypotheses. Here's a 5-step framework to help you execute quick GTM tests:

1. Pick an audience. Who’s your product for? Envision a persona who has a problem. A job to be done so to speak. Some kind of pain. Maybe they are in a specific industry, or have certain titles. 
2. Create a value proposition to address the job to be done. What’s it for? Ideally you can make a promise, and create some compelling content that answers questions that someone with this challenge might have. Why should your prospects change?
3. Get a case study or a quote from an existing customer. If you don’t, you might not be ready to do this experiment in this market, as you don’t have enough to offer. You need to be able to answer the questions for your prospects: “Why should I change with you?” and “How can you help me?”
4. Figure out where they hang out. Where are they? See if you can find at least 100 of the people in your target audience. In B2B we like to use LinkedIn. It’s the best list service out there because it’s up-to-date, has enough information to use in targeting and filtering, is “pay as you go”, and can be paired with various tools to automate outreach.
5. Test your thesis with simple outreach messages. These can be LinkedIn InMail, organic connect requests, emails or even facebook or LinkedIn Ads. Make sure to track the data of what people click on, look at and respond to. Your goal is to get meetings or at least content interaction to learn from their reactions.

You should be able to run one experiment like this at least per month, and possible more often when you get good at it.

Content marketing shouldn’t be complicated. In fact, it’s pretty simple. Start by simply answering the questions your prospects have. 

Then, make sure you’re following the basic rules for B2B content:

1. Know its purpose (What's the goal of this piece of content? Inform? Help someone level up?)
2. Speak to a specific problem and person (Who is the person asking the question? What is their level of awareness?)
3. Display expertise (Become the trusted guide. Speak their language. Show that you know the industry)
4. Help people (Show up and help people do their job better – whether through a template, framework or FAQ)

In this episode, we're answering the questions:

• Why do CMOs get fired more than any other leadership role in the C-suite? 
• What are the pitfalls for marketing leaders joining growing software companies? 
• What are some of the indicators for long term success in the role?