If you work in demand generation (or any form of marketing), and you aren't a good product marketer then you can't and won’t be a good demand gen marketer. I know that is a very committed statement, and I will get into the why, but I want you to think back to your favorite marketers, and think about their characteristics.

Marketers should be the most knowledgeable about the product they sell.

For my argument, I am going to break down 4 essential elements of product marketing, including product, audience, messaging, and promotion.

Hope you enjoy the episode. Like, subscribe, and share!

Product-market fit is the primary issue as to why early-stage startups fail.

There are three levels to understanding product-market fit.

1. Understanding who cares

2. Understanding what they care about (1st level pain point)

3. Understanding why they care that (2nd level pain point)

Your product should solve the 1st level pain point and your messaging should speak to your 2nd level pain point.

In this episode, I give you my thoughts on the 3 levels of product-market fit.

Where are my marketing ops people at?

You know what my least favorite thing to waste my time on when you are running demand generation campaigns? 

Making sure attribution is set up properly.

Making sure data is where it is suppose to be.

Making sure data is being tracked properly.

This is why I would double down on marketing operations.

Because how do you know you're growing in the right direction if you don't have clean data, attribution, and proper marketing automation processes in place?

Invest in your people. 

Invest in the processes.

Invest in the right tools.

In this episode, I go over why I would double down on marketing operations early.

Invest in your people.  —> hire someone to be in charge of your marketing operations, automation, and data early, and make sure that they understand demand generation at at least a surface level because this person can ensure that we are spending money and time in the right areas.

Invest in the processes/tools. —> build out your processes so that they will scale as you scale. You don’t want to have built out a large marketing automation system that is going to have to be replaced in 2-3 years.

You will end up losing historical data, unable to use historical data, and wasting a lot of time in the process.

Demand Generation combines both demand capture and demand creation.

Two very different strategies apply to different ideas and tactics.

Demand capturing occurs when there is already a demand for your product type or your product category.

Demand creation occurs when people have a general problem, but they are unsure what the solution to that problem may be (generally speaking, of course).

In today's episode, I go over the difference between the two and go over examples of companies that more than likely had to overcome the process of creating demand in order to scale.

Hope you enjoy the episode. Like, subscribe, and join the 5MDG family.

Traditionally, we are being tasked to generate 1,000 MQLs, because 10% of those MQLs will turn into SQLs, and then 25% of those will turn in opportunities, and then 20% of those will turn into opportunities.

We are wasting everyone's time, educating nobody on what we do, and frankly, making marketing less fun.

In this episode, I walk you through how I would think about generating brand awareness as an Early Stage Startup.

Novel ideas? No way, there are marketers that have been telling you this day-in and day-out.

Do I need to repeat myself? Probably, but that's why we are doing this podcast. Educate as many people as we can. Test as much as we can. And work to make marketing more fun and effective.

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On This Week in SEO, we talk metrics. We all know that there are metrics that are important, but what are the ones that you should align your goals with? Liam talks about what metrics you should measure, how you work towards determining these metrics, and why testing is so important. Hope you enjoy!

Topic #1: METRICS

METRIC DEPENDS ON THE END GOAL

 - Affiliate site: If the end goals is ad impressions, traffic & revenue should be the metrics

 - SaaS: if you are driving qualified leads, pipeline should be the metric

 - eCommerce: if you are selling, revenue is the metric (or influenced sales)

WHY PIPELINE SHOULD BE YOUR SAAS METRIC

 - There is a dollar amount attributed - qualified leads are great, but they don’t have a dollar value, and therefore can’t determine ROI

 - They are DEFINITELY qualified leads

 - You can simply determine ROI

DON’T COMPLICATE THINGS

When you throw too many metrics into the mix, you are potentially causing several issues:

 - Overanalyzing the data, and...

 - Improperly attributing successes

Topic #2: HOW TO WORK TOWARDS METRIC

DETERMINE TOP SOURCES OF SUCCESS

 - Which portions of the website generate the highest volume of traffic and conversions, what is the behavior flow of those portions of the website, what does a typical buyer’s journey look like

FIND CONSISTENT NEEDS OF TARGET AUDIENCE

 - What do your prospects ALWAYS talk to your sales team about?

ANALYZE COMPETITOR CONTENT STRATEGIES

 - What are they doing that is working? 

 - What is the goal of those campaigns? 

 - How are they taking users and turning them into customers?

DEVELOP STRATEGY TOWARDS THAT GOAL

 - How do you take the whole picture and turn it into a strategy?

 - How do you get your team bought in?

 - How do you get your users to buy into what you are selling?

Topic #3: TEST. TEST. TEST.

ITS OKAY TO FAIL

The only way for you to actually get to the point of knowing what drives revenue or change, and what does not. SOOOO test away.

Is anyone else extremely frustrated over SERP features changing every week? Me too. In this episode of This Week in SEO, I go over why I am frustrated with featured snippets, and what you can do in response to these frustrations.

We also go over:

1. The Overcrowding Effect and its connection to featured snippets and Google as a whole
2. Consistent Testing that Google does in the SERPs that frustrate the living heck out of me
3. Keeping SEO Simple

Thank you for giving this episode a listen. Please rate, subscribe, like, etc.

In this episode of This Week in SEO with Liam Barnes, we discuss a well-known fact (my opinion) that SEO is not and never will die. There is a common misconception about Google's current changes in the SERPs and whether or not SEO is still worth its investment.

Well, I am here to tell you, and hopefully convince you, that it very much is. I also go over some more un-traditional search engines that we typically don't think about (hint: social media websites).

Please like and subscribe, as well as comment on what you liked and disliked about the episode!

In this episode of This Week in SEO with Liam Barnes, we discuss the impact of the terrible trends in SEO that cause us to write content that sucks.

We discuss how NLP and the new passage indexation news is going to continue to push forward terrible content creation in the SEO community.

Liam dives deeper into the terrible "trends" of content creation in SEO, why these trends have come to be, and how you can avoid them.

The final topic is around how the process of content creation should be.

Please like and subscribe, as well as comment on what you liked and disliked about the episode!

This Week in SEO (Archive) - Get to know Liam Barnes, SEO Innovation Manager at Directive as he explores the world of Google algorithm changes and BERT.

There have been a lot of algorithm changes in 2020, but luckily, some big stuff in the world of Google came out this week (in SEO - sorry, I had to).

Liam discusses the impact of BERT (there is none) and passage indexation (there is only a little bit of an impact). He also dives into a potential change to the search marketing landscape with Google being sued by the judicial department.

Please like and subscribe, as well as comment on what you liked and disliked about the episode!