I’m super honored and excited to have been on the Stacking Growth podcast with Sidney Waterfall and Sam Kuehnle!
Great conversation about:
– How to assess Marketing performance
– Strategies to implement a modern demand gen strategy
– How to present results to the Board and C-Suite
– Rollout planning
– Experimentation tactics
– LinkedIn and Facebook paid & organic strategies
– And more!
Give it a listen and tag someone that might like it 😊
Link in comments below
Marketers should always have some of their time and budget dedicated to experimentation. Here are some ideas for ways to experiment:
>> Change the company size parameters
>> Broaden the countries or languages you target
>> Go after a different industry
>> Try new job titles
Either include them in your existing ad campaigns or break it out separately with job title specific messaging.
>> Test new messaging and see if it resonates better with your audience.
You can use organic or paid social to do this, you can change website copy, or you can use a tool like Wynter to get feedback behind the scenes.
>> Work with a partner to test a joint solution with a few prospects.
>> Test a new channel for organic or paid and see the engagement you get.
These are just a handful of examples to get your brain thinking.
What other experiments have you tried? What have been some of your most successful experiments?
My wife made a “glossary for non-Marketing folks” & sent it to my family after I shared a Marketing podcast I was on.
She’s a Soil Scientist so I’m amazed at how accurate her jargon decryption is!
Here’s what she sent: 🔥🤯
-ICP = ideal customer profile
-CAC = cost of acquiring customer
-pipeline = sales/marketing pipeline from potential customer (lead) to sales-identified great fit (opportunity) to closed-won (customer chose Zingtree!)
-OKRs = objectives & key results (to define goals/track outcomes)
-keywords = company selected words/phrases for paid search ads (ex. Someone types “customer support software” into Google, & if it’s a Zingtree keyword phrase, the algorithm may show an ad based on the bid settings ($))
-demand gen = creating awareness/demand for your product & the problem it solves for customers
-demand capture = getting potential customers into the sales pipeline of your specific brand/solution
Pretty impressive for someone not in Marketing, right?!
I guess we’ve talked about my job a lot 😅
You should use this when teaching your family what you do!
The 2 best things people can do to advance their careers:
1. Crush it in your current job
2. Post consistently on LinkedIn or Twitter
Great quantitative results are what hiring managers care about A LOT.
Posting regularly is vital to building your personal brand, and it brings awareness to the company you work for.
Now you have a simple career plan:
– Crush it
– Post on social
Agree/disagree?
Feeling overwhelmed with projects? Don’t know what to prioritize?
Use the Effort to Impact Matrix.
Cut or deprioritize the high-effort, low-impact projects.
Prioritize the low-effort, high-impact projects.
Decide what’s next btwn the major projects & incremental work. Probably choose major projects, but your situation might be different if you have some mid-level effort and impact projects.
Have you used this before? How has it helped you?
Haven’t tried it? Does it already give you some ideas for what to deprioritize & others to focus on?
And yes, I drew the matrix this morning 😅
Big news: I’m starting a new adventure!
I’ll announce the new company I’m joining on Monday. It’s even cooler than the outdoor walking desk I’ve built! (I’ll post about this hobby project tomorrow)
Although it’s difficult to leave behind the great people and plans of Zingtree, I’m thrilled to take on this new exciting opportunity.
During my time at Zingtree, I saw significant progress across the entire company & especially in Marketing. I’m thankful to have been a part of this growth. A few highlights:
-Pipeline & ARR growth
-Move to a modern demand gen approach
-Rework of the company positioning & messaging
-Rebrand & new visual identity
Collaborating with all of my colleagues at Zingtree was incredibly enjoyable. I’ll miss you all!
I’m grateful to Juan Jaysingh & David Apple for bringing me on board initially & upholding the culture that I appreciated being a part of.
I’m excited to witness how Zingtree will continue to grow to new heights!
Stay tuned for updates on my new journey! And I’ll continue to build in public with practical strategies & tactics 🙂
My second invention: a customizable blog post generation product using generative AI 🤖
And I made it fully automated end-to-end (from prompting to publishing).
-Take in a long list of relevant prompts (or generate them for you)
-Add any relevant context to bolster the prompts (optionally automated through an API)
-Generate articles using OpenAI’s API
-Auto-publish or auto-schedule to your website blog & also save them locally
-All of the API parameters are customizable, so you don’t get stock answers like ChatGPT, Jasper, etc.
I’ve started using it myself on a consumer-facing product website, and it works like magic.
If you’re interested in using it at the company you work for, reach out to me ($10K+ annual contract).
And yes, I’ve been working on hobby projects in the two weeks I took before starting the new job 🙂
Ever struggled to know who should handle what components on a project? 🤔 If yes, then try a RACI matrix 🙌
RACI = Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, & Informed
R – Responsible: the person responsible for completing a project & actually doing most of the work
A – Accountable: the person ultimately accountable for the success or failure of a task or project.
They make sure that everything is on track & that the project is completed within the allotted time, budget, & scope.
C – Consulted: the people consulted for their expertise or input. Think of them for feedback and guidance.
I – Informed: the people who should be informed about the progress or completion of the project
Using a RACI matrix can help your team avoid confusion & overlap in roles, improve communication and collaboration, & ultimately lead to more effective processes. 🚀
When I started at HST Pathways, I found RACIs especially helpful to get aligned with the team on our Quarterly Detailed Marketing Roadmap, hiring, etc.
Have you used a RACI matrix?
Have any similar responsibility frameworks you like to use?
We recently found ~25 pixels on our website not in use 😮
Easy way to improve your SEO: check yours & delete these suckers!
As you likely know, each pixel slows down your website a little more, so removing these can speed up your site and improve your SEO & your user experience.
For sites that are old / have been through many Marketing teams, the pixels likely get left after someone tried an experiment but didn’t remove it.
Clean-up time! 🧹
Hot take 🌶️: Today’s cutting-edge Marketing teams use AI through APIs rather than merely relying on point-and-click SaaS AI tools.
All the current SaaS generative AI tools I’ve seen are too limited because so much has to be manually done. A human copying and pasting a similar task repeatedly are a time waste. Also, you can’t auto-post something to Google Docs or WordPress or take in a CSV of multiple prompts you want to work on.
Hopefully these SaaS tools will change and enable better workflows, integrations, and APIs (without charging $50K+).
Until then, write simple Python scripts to automate the work…
And if you can’t do this, ask an engineer at work to spend a couple of hours/week helping you. They probably want to use the AI tools anyway!