AMA: Spotify Associate Director, Growth Marketing, Joann Guo on Demand Generation Strategy

Before going into strategy setting, it’s important to align and joint plan with your fellow counterparts in sales, business, product, analytics, operations, PR, and other marketing functions, etc. to establish the topline business target for the year (or quarter). If your team is not currently involved in this cross planning process, I would advocate to be part of it. From there, identify the key products rollout and timing. This helps to develop the key marketing moments and activations needed to contribute toward business goals. Once your marketing plan is in a good spot, you can then walkthrough with your external stakeholders or vendors.

Typically, most campaigns can fall into one of the two buckets: awareness or performance. We need to create campaigns that have a balance of brand and performance as we can’t have brand work that doesn’t perform and performance work that doesn’t elevate your brand. Your campaign should have brand expertise as well as showcasing your product offerings in solving your customer’s challenges. * Brand campaigns are meant to create demand through inspirational content * Performance campaigns are meant to capture that demand by converting the audience The type of campaign prioritized depends on your business KPIs and brand saturation. If your brand/product has fairly low awareness, it is important to build a full funnel approach balancing both types of campaigns to drive awareness, consideration and conversion across your marketing funnel.

The key is having fluid strategy because things are constantly in flux (ie. business priority shift and budget reduction due to macroeconomic conditions). Hence, it’s always important to set clear OKRs (objective & key results) that the team can be accountable for. It’s important to use these as the north star metrics and communicate pacing and progress made across stakeholders and teams. For example, we run always-on performance first paid campaigns. The key metric we use to measure the effectiveness of our marketing investment is LTV/CAC. We update this metric every 6 months and use it to determine budget allocation across markets and channels.

For ad-hoc campaigns, we typically would either repeat and iterate if it’s performing well or kill it if it’s not. Even if it’s not performing well, we would take that learning to inform future campaign strategy or other workstreams. Typically, we monitor performance throughout the campaign flight to make optimization. For example, we recently launched a lead gen campaign driving customers to book a call with a rep upon qualifying. Because users may not be familiar with our products, we launched a standalone page to provide overview and a separate form page so we can integrate the scheduling tool using another platform. One week post launch, the data shows that there was a huge drop-off from the first landing page to the form page itself. We had to make an immediate decision to reduce the steps in the user journey and drive users to the form page directly. After updating the backend user logic and content on the form page, we made the change and saw a significant uplift in form submission conversion. However, there isn’t too much increase in the number of calls scheduled. For this campaign, our recommendation would be to kill it but we plan to repurpose the integration we have done and benchmarks collected to inform an upcoming market expansion GTM approach.

This one is slightly tricky but a good rule of thumb is getting primary stakeholders’ inputs as early as possible, especially for things that need resourcing from other teams and anything that involves technical implementation. Throughout the planning process, this is where you can pinpoint the members for the working team. It’s also important to identify one primary PoC from each functional area to avoid having too many cooks in the kitchen. From there, establish a clear RACI (responsible, accountable, consulted, informed) as you kick off the workstream to better set expectations. For example, the person who is ‘responsible’ will be the main decision maker while keeping everyone else informed on progress. This can be sent in the form of a weekly email update.

For B2B marketing, customer testimonials play a critical role if you are looking to drive awareness and consideration of your product or services. Testimonials can be in the format of video, case study or simply quotes and reviews. Having testimonials across different markets and multiple industries helps establish an immediate connection with prospects during their discovery process. Though keep in mind, this certainly is not the only thing we should rely on but as a complementary messaging as you are trying to establish product market-fit.