Upscale 5.0 - Marketing Leads

The session will bring together marketing leads from the rest of the cohort to discuss scaling a marketing team, prioritising scarce resources, marketing strategies at scale and scaling as a marketing leader - as well as create a community of marketing leads for you to network with.

Scale Coaches:

Will McInnes - CMO, Brandwatch

Session Takeaways:

Scaling and building out your Marketing team
Frameworks and strategies for scaling as a Marketing Lead
Tips on prioritising limited resources
Understand peer challenges and approaches that you can tailor to your situation
A network of Marketing Leads to support you as you scale

> SESSION NOTES

SCALING AS A MARKETING LEAD

Will McInnes, Brandwatch

Context

Brandwatch is a platform for digital consumer intelligence that allows you to tap into live consumer opinions. Vizia brings digital insights to life. Qriously is a mobile survey platform that allows you to ask up to 2 billion people at a time and makes it easier to reach people who are usually hard to get a hold of. BuzzSumo is a self-serve product, brilliant for content marketing inspiration.

Brandwatch also merged with competitor Crimson Hexagon. If your business is thinking about merging with another, Will is happy for you to contact him about it.

Part 1: Reflections and regrets as a CMO

Not building demand gen sooner

Brandwatch has always been a strong content marketing organisation. The brand driven marketing strategy prioritises inbound over outbound but while building on what is already working and solving problems that presented themselves, they realised clients hadn’t ever heard of Brandwatch. This meant there was work needed to be more credible and known - but led to a running out of a pipeline. If Will could go back, he would have also implemented a more data driven strategy to go after companies that would be the right fit, in parallel with the inbound, earlier in their journey - something for B2B companies to consider in the marketing strategy.

Not maximising the website opportunity

The website could have been used to interact with potential clients more but the digital team was not pushed to trial it more. Instead, they would have to request to be sent a demo which slows everything down. Ensure your website is meeting the demands of customers and maximising your traffic.

Allowing Marketing Ops to sit in central Ops team

The people who look at the data in the Marketing Team sat within the Ops team which created a bottleneck to get the data quickly. Each scenario will be different for each team, but it is beneficial from CMOs/Heads of Marketing to have people in the team directly feeding you with insights.

Not enforcing SLAs harder and more continuously

Lots of MQLs were just building up. Work with the team to establish a process for processing outstanding MQLs.

Allowed digital spend to cheat

So much comes in through the web and organically so does the marketing budget actually generate ROI? Not convinced there is value for money but attribution is complicated. Be honest with yourself about how digital spend is actually impacting your lead generation.

Not cultivating enough ‘game changing’ stuff

Nothing too groundbreaking has been done, of course they’ve done interesting things and taken some risks but mainly bread and butter B2B marketing. As marketers, give your team space to work on things that can be outside of their day-to-day - high impact pieces of marketing.

Not institutionalised customer and sales proximity

Guilty of being a little removed from the frontline. Not been as close to customers as they could have been. In a scaleup, think about how you can get your marketers and sales team working together in pairs to be closer to each other. (The Amazon ‘empty chair’ is the customer’ analogy).

Part 2: Wins

Working in NYC

Having started the role in NYC, one thing that is clear is how much bigger the American’s think when they see things working. Not only is the US one of the biggest and fastest growth and expansion opportunities, their growth mindset in marketing is one that we can take lots from.

Finding your ying

Finding your counterpart who you can work well with on the data side while you focus on the strategy. Or, more importantly, someone you trust in your marketing or sales team who can work on the areas that you aren’t as strong on.

Building brand

Brand marketing done well is the best ROI and it’s cheap to do. Think about how you can build your brand while implementing your marketing strategy.

Design DNA

Design is strong at Brandwatch. Having design in house and in the team has been brilliant as you have control over the whole customer experience. Work with your design resource to develop a clear end-to-end design experience.

Repeatedly driving for ‘world class’

As a CMO or Head of Marketing, it’s your job and responsibility to continuously push your team to drive for world class. Setting that bar for your team will enable them to achieve more as a marketing team.

Seeing product marketing as extra strategic

Extremely important bridge between product and marketing teams

CRO and growth teams

Growth teams are the future of marketing. It’s all about finding data points to back up assumptions of user behaviour. If you have the resources, create a cross-functional team to work on problems in your sales/marketing process, who will arrive at different outcomes to a standard marketing team.

Being stubborn about metrics

Don’t ever apologize or back down, you have to push to get what you are asking for. People will always expand the metric criteria to try and water them down - stand strong on the metrics that you need to measure.

Treating the board like peers

If you go into conversations with them more like that, it changes the tone and dynamic. They will have good and bad ideas, it’s not always yes but sometimes ‘it might not’.

What does a CMO do?

“Create the conditions for sustainable growth towards the mission. And make it happen.”

Instead of zooming in all the time, zoom out and look at the broader picture

BREAKOUT DISCUSSIONS

How do you prioritise limited resources in a scaling marketing function?

Finding the right people can be difficult especially when you need these resources to help expand and grow your business further
Taking time to find the right person is better than hiring someone who isn’t quite the right fit and having to let them go a few months later
Using data and experience to focus on certain areas

How do you balance long term marketing strategy development vs the need for short term results? How are you adapting your marketing strategies/team for COVID-19?

Short term quick wins can be used to achieve the same goals
Prime to survive - know what your post covid existence will be and continue to work towards that
Think about how you can use the crisis to your advantage
Still work towards those long term strategies, bring in new third parties and partners
Use opportunity to get better deals due to cuts in budget
Use it as an opportunity to attract talent, could be a good time to hire if you are able to

RESOURCE LIST:

Podcasts:

Upscale 5.0 - Marketing Leads

> SESSION NOTES

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