The Life-Long Customer

"Customer-led growth is not a term that I coined. It's the idea. As a business, we've got metrics that we're trying to measure and goals we're trying to hit, but they're always around our goals as a business. It's like trying to sell a product or get a subscription that those milestones that we measure do not speak to customer value. We focus on jobs that need to be done: framework, understanding our customer needs, and having empathy for what problems they're trying to solve—then understanding the customer journey, what they're doing, thinking, and feeling, and how they're measuring.

That will come if we provide value to our customers and prospects at each of those stages. It's about putting our metrics secondary. Of course, we're still measuring that. We still need to drive revenue and MQL and all of that, but it's secondary to how our customers measure success at those stages."

- Jennifer Vogel, VP of Marketing, Voxpopme

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"The concept of the dark funnel (or dark social ) has been around for a decade. We're all doing these things and doing these ourselves and not understand that that's what it's called. Dark social is just about places where people are interacting and engaging, and your attribution software cannot directly correlate those results.

It's a combination of things. It's content promotion places, like podcasting. There's not always a direct correlation to your attribution software, but it's one of the top places people consume information today. 

These other social channels can also be considered dark social. Think about LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter. Those are influencing people to take action too. I do it all the time. I go to Google right away after I see something on social or listen to a podcast and maybe convert there. They do not see that, and they're just seeing that it's Google or direct.

There's some misalignment with the attribution software, how and where people buy or consume information. People are doing these things, but they don't think about monitoring it or figuring it out.

I have to give a shout-out to Chris Walker of Refine Labs. If you're any marketer listening, you've probably come across his content. He's put it on the map for modern marketers or people growing up in this kind of social media space and how marketing is changing. That's what it's all about, and that's where B2B buyers are now.

We all have different ways of communicating, interacting, and learning about products and services. That's the significant change, and it's a challenge that companies are facing too because marketers want to do these things, and sometimes leadership or the Board is just not understanding it either."

- Todd Kunsman, Director of Marketing, EveryoneSocial

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“One of the most critical pieces is to audit your existing team for their capabilities, and frankly, for their weaknesses and any gaps you may have within your team in terms of experience and expertise. The first thing to do is to understand what you're working with.

The other thing you need to do is audit the tools you have available to you in the marketing team, your marketing stack, and how that integrates with sales. My view is success comes on the heels of a great partnership between sales and marketing. It would help if you made sure that not only are you having the conversations and you're consistent on what you're saying about the company and when you say it, but also that your systems support that integration.

The third thing I'm thinking about is how you're reporting on marketing. 

The last essential thing is understanding the role of marketing in your company. You need to understand the dynamics that come with that to effectively make shifts and changes in the company's direction, the direction of marketing, and how that plays together.”

- Melissa Blanken, Chief Marketing Officer, GridPoint

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“My passion and what I focus on is what I call Evidence-Based Marketing. We need to be focused on metrics that confirm our marketing campaigns, activities, designs, color choices, font choices, brand personas, and these fluffier squishier marketing concepts. We want to make sure that they have an effect and that effect can be measured.

When I was a lot younger in my career, and I was promoting, "Look at all of the leads we've gotten. We've got all these top-of-funnel leads, and look how good we're doing." I was patting myself on the back. The Chief Financial Officer turns to me and says, "Billy, nobody gets paid in leads. You get paid in dollars. Do you like dollars, or do you like leads?" That stuck with me.

It was a critical learning moment for me: that idea of nobody getting paid in leads. You could transpose that to say; nobody gets paid in the number of logos or brochures you produce, and people get paid in dollars.

Everything marketing does, from brand awareness to identity, marketing campaigns to demand, and lead generation, is still crucial. Still, they have to be measured to be effective so that they can translate into dollars or whatever is the thing that is most important for you and your organization. 

Every campaign that we do, every marketing activity, every spend that we make needs to demonstrate how we are moving the needle. What's the evidence that this is effective?”

- Billy Cripe, VP of Marketing, CIBO

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"We're seeing a lot of organizations think differently about the data they're collecting as they are looking to hybrid. It's an excellent way for organizations to reach broader audiences, collect more data on their audiences, and create more content to accelerate wherever they are in the customer journey.

We can create or capture those behavioral metrics and the trends that we're seeing across the client base. We can recommend and provide some tangible metrics regarding how they compare to some of the other events that we're seeing. That's powerful. It helps us advise our client base about what they should be expecting, especially as we go into hybrid.

There's always a qualitative component to it where there may be a couple of caveats and what might look different. It helps gauge what good looks like for engagement, what you expect, and how you use that to optimize and raise the bar on your events.”

- Ashleigh Cook, SVP of Marketing, RainFocus

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“One plus one equals three is the secret sauce of partnerships and partner marketing. Anytime you put together two great minds, you bring the best of the best together - that can be a super powerful force. ”

- Nicole Rogers, Matterport

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“It's not an easy task. When it comes to software development, it starts with the product and your engineering team. Those are the folks that are building the essential features. That's your first stakeholder.

Your second stakeholder will most likely be your sales and or customer success team because those are often in the front line talking to the customers who are eventually going to be using that product.

Then there's the marketing team.

Product marketing lives in the middle of all of the various stakeholders. To set up a successful product marketing strategy, a team and a plan, you need to speak to those stakeholders. You need to identify those common objectives that all three departments sometimes want to achieve together and figure out when it comes to their key metrics of success. What can you do from a product marketing standpoint that kind of funnels up to that larger objective? That's on a larger scale of how you want to think about product marketing.”

- Aika Zikibayeva, Partner Marketing Manager, Cockroach Labs

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"It's essential to understand who your audience is and what they know.

Our CEO told me 'People tell me that our content is excellent. I'm sure it is because they're telling me that, but I don't get it.' I said, ‘But you know all of it already; you're not the target audience.' He said, 'Good point.'

In our industry, there’s no place to get this kind of information so we think it’s incredibly valuable to educate people."

- Clarissa Horowitz, VP of Marketing, Treasury Prime

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What makes a good copywriting and how does it help strengthen your brand?

Our guest, Liz Strikwerda, Content Marketing Strategist at Swipeclock, answers this question and more in our podcast episode today! 

“Good digital copywriting gets right to the point. This is for your reader; and for Google and other search engines. If you're writing a blog post, for example, you want to jump right in and say what it's about. Everyone is busy and people have short attention spans. Make sure you use a lot of headings and lists to make your content scannable. In addition–even if your target customer has a high level of education–you want to write to an eighth-grade reading level. It doesn't matter what their background is, your audience wants things to be digestible.

It's also essential to understand your industry and target customers. There is no substitute for in-depth research. You can’t explain how your product or service can solve their problems unless you know what their problems are, so spend as much time learning as writing. It’s time well spent.

- Liz Strikwerda, Content Marketing Strategist, Swipeclock

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What are the key factors to consider when building your marketing team? Is it purely expertise and experience? Does a newcomer in the industry have a chance? 

Our guest for today, Tyler Shields, Chief Marketing Officer at JupiterOne answers this question and more.

"I think the net-net is giving people accountability and responsibility. As long as you can guide them in the correct direction to achieve what needs to be achieved, you provide them with that accountability. If they're the right type of person, they take it, and they own it. They want to succeed.

I don't want to dictate to my employees, 'Do this every day here.' I don't want to tell you every morning, 'Here are the four things I want to get done every day.' That's not how I operate. 

I found that people respect that. And I think driving respect within your organization is key."

- Tyler Shields, Chief Marketing Officer, JupiterOne

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