GTM Live

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.

Dark Social is the difficult to measure areas where companies are creating demand for their category, brand, and product every single day. Brands that everyone knows and loves are built here, not through MQL generation. And let there be no confusion—the highest performing marketing teams in 2021 and beyond are winning by crushing their Dark Social strategy. Once you change how you measure marketing, what you optimize for, and how you think about attribution it opens up an incredible amount of opportunities for what B2B companies can do, that nobody is doing right now. When you stop trying to optimize to generate MQLs at the cheapest possible price, your mindset will change to educating the industry on how you do things and how it impacts them. When your prospects get continuous value out of your content, without an SDR beating down their door, they will continue to come back time after time—And eventually, when they're ready to buy, you'll win that opportunity.

In this episode, Chris dives in on how to change your mindset on LinkedIn ads to get better returns. If you want to be successful with LinkedIn ads you need to shift your mindset. It’s time to leave 2011 marketing tactics behind and stop optimizing your paid LinkedIn ad spend for MQLs. Instead, optimize your ads to increase the reach of your organic content. Use ads to help build your organic machine so you can reach a massive audience and be top of mind when they are ready to buy, instead of when you want them to buy. We also dive into how to optimize your pipeline for high intent lead handoffs to sales and answer questions from the best B2B marketers in the game.

“Capturing intent data is the only way to get intent.” - Marketing teams everywhere^ It’s not true and it’s time to accept it. Chris sat down with Jake Dunlap to discuss how the industry relies on intent data that is flawed, solely for the purpose of creating a metric—even if it's sabotaging their success. In this episode, you'll learn about the three levels of intent and how to optimize your marketing to create real intent, rather than capturing assumed intent. 

Marketing teams that start planning for 2022 now are the ones that are going to win in Q1. Teams that wait until December, or even early January, are the ones that are going to be scrambling and end Q1 in the hole. In this expert series of State of Demand Gen, Chris welcomes Dave Gerhardt to discuss their top three tips for developing a Q1 2022 marketing plan now. They dive into seasonality, marketing agility, testing new ideas and channels, and the necessities for a successful Q1.

Chris Walker and Megan Bowen brought the Demand Gen Live community back last night to discuss a couple agenda items in addition to a live Q&A. On the agenda:    - How product-led growth companies should be thinking about enterprise demand  - The Blended Funnel: why it’s hard to see it’s time to change your strategy. Chris answered follow-up questions in regards to the agenda items in addition to questions about how to tell when a channel is not working vs. the person managing the channel is not managing it well, and how to manage the over-reliance on attribution data. Don't miss our event with Dave Gerhardt, Chief Brand Officer at Drift, tomorrow October 7th at 12pm EDT. We'll be covering our top 3 recommendations for your 2022 strategy. Register here to attend live.