Joann Guo

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This depends on your product stage and goals. If your product is relatively new and has yet to achieve product-market fit, it is crucial to invest heavily in building awareness and generating demand. Paid channels (if budget allows), such as paid search and social, are often faster to scale and can have more direct impact in generating lower funnel conversions. For B2B, it is essential to prioritize lead quality alongside quantity. Monitoring metrics like LTV:CAC (customer lifetime value to customer acquisition cost) is often a solid indicator to measure the efficiency of your paid marketing efforts. In addition to paid, it’s important to strike a balance by simultaneously developing owned channels, such content marketing and SEO, while continuously doing AB testing to optimize the full user journey will help boost conversions. On the other hand, if you already have sufficient demand, directing investment towards engagement and retention becomes crucial. Tactics such as personalized email journeys, upsell and cross-sell campaigns to increase repeat purchases and improve customer loyalty become more crucial for long term business growth. Again, growth marketing is an iterative and agile process which require continuous testing and learning.

Let's start by setting clear and specific goals that align with the broader objectives of your business. Think about what you want to achieve, whether it's reaching a certain number of new customers or generating a specific amount of revenue. Once you have these goals in place, it's time to establish key performance indicators (KPIs) that will help you keep track of how each area is performing. For example, you can use the return on ad spend (ROAS) or LTV:CAC metrics to see how well your paid investments are paying off. It will show you the return you're getting in relation to the money you're spending on advertising. Website conversion rate is another metric to monitor which tells you the percentage of visitors who are actually taking action, like making a purchase or filling out a form. When it comes to your email campaigns, keeping an eye on the click-through rate (CTR) and click-to-open-rate (CTOR) will give you insights into how relevant your email contents are and how many people are clicking on the links you provide. And of course, don't forget about your social media presence. Tracking the growth of your followers and analyzing social listening across different platforms will help gauge brand awareness and may provide valuable insights to improve the product. By setting these specific KPIs for each area, you'll be able to measure and evaluate how well your marketing initiatives are performing. This way, you can make informed decisions and fine-tune your growth strategy to achieve the best results for your business.

Always maintain a sense of curiosity and diligently monitor key metrics throughout your business, including customer growth in different markets, segments, and verticals. Pay close attention to funnel conversion metrics to identify where customers may be dropping off. Understanding the various factors influencing each metric is crucial for uncovering potential opportunities for growth. For example, we have observed a significant influx of mobile traffic that is negatively impacting our activation rate. Upon further investigation, we discovered that these visitors show a genuine interest in converting. However, certain features are unavailable on desktop which prevents them from activating. This situation presents an opportunity for us to create a more mobile-friendly approach that redirects this traffic to a personalized landing page, offering concise education and incentives to encourage them to switch to desktop for activation. Additionally, it opens up the opportunity to collaborating with the product team internally to prioritize the development of a mobile web experience that will enhance user satisfaction and provide a seamless journey for these individuals.

It's really important to understand what's behind your specific performance numbers and figure out if there's an opportunity to pinpoint and improve those factors directly. If your website is indeed one of the key drivers, it's worth investigating why it's not converting. Is there something off in your messaging or is there something on the page itself that's creating friction and stopping users from converting? We can tackle these issues by making it easier for users to find relevant content and by improving the user experience. It's also totally normal to see a majority of your traffic drop off, especially in the B2B world. As a growth marketer, your goal is to strike a balance between bringing in a good quantity of traffic and ensuring its quality.