As much as you wish it was, marketing is not a math equation. It's not even a science. And thinking it is, is an outdated idea that you need to unlearn ASAP. Marketing is an art. And the fact that comes along with that truth is that everything you do can't be measured with hard quantitative data. The real results come when you look deep into the qualitative data that helps you understand your customers. In this episode, we dive into what you need to do to unlearn the old and how to measure what really matters.

Marketers are lying to themselves and their sales teams. They complain when sales can't seem to close their MQLs into won opportunities, but let's face it, the leads don't close because they're anything but qualified. It's the reason sales have such disdain for marketing. Instead of trying to flood sales with as many email addresses as you can, you should be trying to filter them the highest intent leads out there—the 1% that are ready to buy. We're talking about demand generation in dark social.  But how do you measure that? How do you know it's working? In this episode, Chris talks with Ray Rike about how to optimize for high intent leads and the metrics that will tell you if you're doing it properly.

The best marketing in the world right now is being done behind closed doors. By people that don't work for the brand. And don't benefit from referring it. I'm talking about communities. And the top-tier marketers are cultivating groups of die-hard fans, not by pitching products, but by offering access to subject matter expertise. But building a community isn't as simple as creating a Facebook group or slack channel. So what are the keys to getting a strong community off the ground? Today Chris is talking to Dave Gerhardt, founder of the DGMG community. Together they will compare and answer questions about how they were able to build two of the strongest communities in B2B.

Buyers in 2021 and beyond want less involvement from a salesperson when doing product research. When buyers want to do most of the buying before talking to sales, it becomes a marketing-owned journey. And that is precisely why there has never been a better time to be a B2B marketer! In today's episode, Chris talks about what the top 1% of marketers are doing, why they're going to be on the same pay level as top salespeople, and what you need to do to get there. 

Register to join us live for the Demand Gen Live: Expert Series with Dave Gerhardt, Nov 4 @ 9:00 AM EST: https://bit.ly/3CtJrU7

Talking to customers is one of the most under-utilized opportunities that marketers take advantage of. The learnings from talking to a single customer will change the way you do content creation. Do it at scale and you'll change the trajectory of your organization. But how do you get started? The easiest way—leverage the teams within your org that already talk to customers (like customer success) and piggyback off those meetings. You'll be glad you did!

Register to join us live for the Demand Gen Live: Expert Series with Dave Gerhardt, Nov 4 @ 9:00 AM EST: https://bit.ly/3CtJrU7

Unpopular opinion—Marketing's job isn't to give sales a bunch of leads for them to call on. Marketing's job is to sell at scale and pull in high intent buyers to request demos for sales to close. But how do you do that if you're KPIs are all based on generating low-intent leads from gated content downloads? In this episode, Chris talks about the current state of B2B marketing and how broken it is. He discusses lead gen status quo, why it always fails, and how to generate real, high intent inbound leads.

Register to join us live for the Demand Gen Live: Expert Series with Dave Gerhardt, Nov 4 @ 9:00 AM EST: https://bit.ly/3CtJrU7

TikTok. It's no longer a platform to "keep an eye on". It's here to stay and has been the fastest growing social media platform, globally, over the last several years. But is it the right platform for you as a B2B SaaS company? Maybe, maybe not. In this episode, Chris talks about why Refine Labs is diving into TikTok as a brand and encouraging employees to do so as well. 

You have an arsenal of marketing talent inside your organization. The question is, are you encouraging them to build their brand, or are you suppressing them? I'm talking about personal brands on LinkedIn and most companies are doing the latter. If you're worried about employees building a brand for themselves will cause them to leave, then you're not creating a culture that encourages them to stay. Having employees create personal brands is one of the best (and fastest) ways you can build authority in your industry. In this episode, Chris talks to Kerry-Ann Stimpson, host of "The Internal Marketing Podcast" about the importance of leveraging employee knowledge and branding for your company's benefit. 

Chris joins Daniel Murray to talk about Dark Social, how it was discovered, and how marketing teams need to get off the attribution hamster wheel if they want to succeed in the new world of social media, communities, word of mouth, and everything that isn’t (falsely) measured by your attribution software.

What is the most overlooked part of demand generation? Think about all the metrics you're measuring. All the channels you're covering. All the ad budget you're spending. Think about the number of leads you're collecting.   Now ask yourself this: Do you check to see if anyone is actually consuming your message? If your answer is "No", then how do you know if you're effectively communicating with your buyers?   That my friends is the most overlooked thing in demand gen programs. In today's episode, we're diving into how to start making this a key part of your demand gen process.  

As always, we're taking live questions from the audience. You can join us weekly, every Tuesday night @ 7:30 PM EST on Demand Gen Live to ask your questions: https://bit.ly/2ZahXUE.