#179: Growth | How to Be Great at Marketing Without Being a Subject Matter Expert with Kevin White, Head of Marketing at Common Room
Sep 26, 2024
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Kevin White, Head of Marketing at Common Room, shares his wealth of knowledge in customer intelligence. He discusses how marketers can thrive without being subject matter experts by understanding customer needs. The conversation highlights the power of signal-based marketing to transform the buyer’s journey and the importance of authentic influencer collaborations. Kevin also offers strategies for managing marketing with limited resources and elevating content creation to drive engagement and conversions.
Marketers can excel without being subject matter experts by actively engaging with customers to uncover their needs and refine campaigns.
Signal-based marketing transforms the buyer’s journey by utilizing various digital interactions to tailor outreach and optimize marketing strategies.
Transitioning from an advisor to a leadership role is facilitated by aligning one's experiences with the company's mission and market position.
Deep dives
Leveraging Calendly for Enhanced Lead Conversion
Using Calendly on a website can significantly improve lead conversion and sales handoff processes. By integrating Calendly, B2B marketing teams can engage leads at their peak interest, allowing potential customers to book meetings directly through web forms. This immediate access eliminates the common back-and-forth follow-up process, known to slow down engagement. Successful examples include Smith.ai, which saw a 26% increase in bookings, and Katalon, which tripled its conversion rates using Calendly's capabilities.
Common Room's Role in Customer Intelligence
Common Room functions as a customer intelligence platform designed to enhance marketing team effectiveness. It achieves this by capturing a variety of buying signals from across the internet, helping to identify both the individual and account behind these signals. This prioritization allows marketing teams to act swiftly and efficiently, streamlining their outreach and engagement efforts. With a lean marketing team and hundreds of notable customers, including well-known brands like Notion and Figma, Common Room positions itself as a critical tool for modern marketing strategies.
Navigating Career Transitions in Marketing
Transitioning from a marketing advisor to a leadership role often involves leveraging previous experiences to identify the best-fit company. For instance, after advising multiple startups, the speaker recognized Common Room as a company with both appealing products and a strong market position, leading to a successful transition to head of marketing. Understanding the market, product, and the audience is crucial for developing effective marketing strategies. This transition highlights the value of finding a company whose mission resonates with personal professional experiences.
Understanding Your Audience When You're Not an Expert
Marketers often face challenges when selling to audiences outside their expertise, such as software developers or cybersecurity professionals. To tackle this, one effective strategy is to engage directly with customers, asking insightful questions that unveil their needs and experiences. By utilizing customer feedback as a resource for positioning and messaging, marketers can craft more relatable and impactful campaigns. Collaborating with subject matter experts within the company can also provide valuable insights and complement marketing efforts, ensuring that the messaging resonates with the target audience.
The Shift Towards Signal-Based Marketing
Signal-based marketing is increasingly vital in the rapidly evolving landscape of buyer behavior, which emphasizes the need for marketers to adapt. By utilizing various signals like website interactions and social media engagement, teams can identify potential buyers and tailor outreach accordingly. This method expands the traditional marketing funnel, enabling marketers to act on insights derived from a broader spectrum of engagement data. As privacy concerns grow and cookies phase out, understanding and leveraging these signals becomes paramount for effective lead generation and maintaining competitive advantage.
In this episode, Dave is joined by Kevin White, Head of Marketing at Common Room, a leading customer intelligence platform for go-to-market teams. Kevin shares insights from his experience helping teams capture and act on digital breadcrumbs to optimize their marketing and sales efforts.
Dave and Kevin cover:
How to be a good marketer even when you're not the Subject Matter Expert
Signal-based marketing and how it is transforming the buyer’s journey by focusing on the right actions instead of just clicks
B2B influencer marketing plays that work
Timestamps
(00:00) - - Intro to Kevin
(06:42) - - How to Be Good At Marketing When You're Not a Subject Matter Expert
(09:20) - - Why You Should Stay Close to Your Customer
(16:39) - - How to Manage a Marketing Team with Limited Resources
(18:58) - - Eliminating Ineffective Marketing Efforts to Drive Real Results
(25:00) - - Signups and Demos Boost From LinkedIn
(26:06) - - How to Attribute ROI in Multi-Platform Marketing
(30:16) - - Creating Authentic and Valuable Content
(34:55) - - Generating Pipeline with Economic Buyer Signals
(36:36) - - Increasing Digital Touchpoints
(40:34) - - How To Maximize Actionability, Volume, and Conversion Rate
