Today’s marketing teams are in a state of pandemonium from the top down.
Don’t believe me? Consider this.
Chief marketing officer (CMO) turnover is higher than ever; 62 percent of companies replace their CMOs with someone from outside the company. Even more alarming, the tenure of CMOs working for the biggest brands in the U.S. fell for the first time in a decade. In 2014, the median CMO tenure was 35.5 months. By 2015, it was 26.5 months.
There is so much confusion around the best way to scale a digital program. Couple that with the intense pressure for marketers to prove results, and top marketers are dropping like flies.
Think about your peers. How many are changing jobs? How many are burning out or resigning?
Marketing teams need leaders who can rise to the challenges of today’s digital world, advocate internally, and demonstrate real business value. So we assembled a panel of marketing leaders to help you meet these challenges.
Here, our team of marketing leaders explain their approaches to social media and content marketing, including tips for demonstrating the value of their efforts to internal stakeholders. They also share the advice to lead a successful marketing team.
Our marketing leadership panel includes:
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Jason Miller Group Manager, Content Marketing, LinkedIn Marketing Solutions @jasonmillerca |
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Hillary Byers Settle Director of Marketing at Insightpool @hmbyers |
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Kyle Lacy Vice President of Marketing, OpenView @kyleplacy |
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Anthony Kennada VP of Marketing, Gainsight @akennada |
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Trevor Lynn CMO, Social Tables @TrevorHLynn |
How do you prove the ROI of social media?
ROI is the marketing holy grail. Research shows that businesses across the board are investing more budget into social media marketing, despite continuing to express frustration around measuring its ROI. Learn how our panel of marketing leaders approach social media and quantify its value to internal stakeholders.
Jason Miller
Group Manager, Content Marketing, LinkedIn Marketing Solutions
@jasonmillerca
If you are still having trouble quantifying your social media marketing efforts in 2016, then you are doing it wrong. Track everything, test everything, fuel your content and demand gen with remarkable content and amplify it with social.
Don’t just run social campaigns, make every campaign social. Social should be integrated into everything the marketing team does. Once you get there, tie it back to KPIs, MQLs, pipeline, and revenue. The technology and platforms to do all of this are here now, there’s no more excuses.
Hillary Byers Settle
Director of Marketing at Insightpool
@hmbyers
Insightpool has been asked this question over and over as we are in the social media marketing space. Brands want to understand how to quantify their efforts from an ROI perspective, but it’s not as easy as brands want it to be. We talk with them about not only their ROI efforts but their ROO (return on objective).
The brands we work with care about their brand, communities and voice in general. Social helps them amplify it. This is where the ROI/ROO conversation starts: What is the goal of the campaign you are working on? Is it to build brand awareness around a product launch, engage customers or garner UGC from your communities?
It’s all about figuring out your end goal.
Kyle Lacy
Vice President of Marketing, OpenView
@kyleplacy
Social media is a very different animal for OpenView, a venture capital firm. We view social media as a two part channel – culture and sharing. Social is used to distribute the content we publish on a daily basis at OpenView Labs. It is also used to show the internal workings of the firm. This includes our events, the people and the companies. Everything that makes OpenView, OpenView.
Anthony Kennada
VP of Marketing, Gainsight
@akennada
Part of what motivates us at Gainsight is wearing two hats as marketers — driving pipeline for our sales teams, but also, helping to build the framework of a new category in Customer Success.
We do this by producing a significant amount of content and events (live and digital) that have nothing to do with our products, but rather, best practices associated with the industry. We think social has a big part of the distribution and measurement of the conversation around Customer Success online.
We’ll look at things like the cumulative conversation online around “Customer Success” as a brand term — a slide that will often appear in exec / board slides.
Trevor Lynn
CMO, Social Tables
@TrevorHLynn
We use social media for content distribution, online community building and paid advertising. We’ve found that the right CTA can drive a lot of leads for a lower than average cost. Building your nurture database via paid content downloads or app installs on social media can be very cost effective. Social Media is also great for awareness and demand creation. Using marketing attribution to see the impact down funnel and assisted conversion gives us confidence to continue investing in social media.
How do you know if a piece of content is successful?
Brands are distributing more content on more channels. But few are actually able to rise above the noise. We asked our panel of marketing leaders to explain how they evaluate the impact of their organization’s content marketing efforts. Learn which metrics they use to test, identify, and replicate content marketing success.
Jason Miller
Group Manager, Content Marketing, LinkedIn Marketing Solutions
@jasonmillerca
We measure impact through a combination of a marketing automation platform, CRM, Google Analytics, and our own data. The first three are really all you need to quantify your digital marketing efforts and turn marketing from a cost center into a revenue driver. We look at inquires, new names, marketing qualified leads, sales accepted leads, pipeline, and of course closed revenue, cross selling, upselling; basically how our content impacts and influences the entire customer journey.
I consider a piece of content to be impactful if it answers a prospects question better than the competition and if it plays a role in accelerating the customer journey to close revenue.
Hillary Byers Settle
Director of Marketing at Insightpool
@hmbyers
There are a few ways we measure content success. Of course the lead conversion points: downloads of an ebook, CTAs in a blog posts, or tracking links. More so, we like to use snippets of the content and test it to segmented audiences on social media. We get real-time responses to see what people care about and enjoy engaging with at that moment.
Kyle Lacy
Vice President of Marketing, OpenView
@kyleplacy
Overall, we focus on engagement metrics because we are a heavy brand play in the world of venture capital. Our core metrics for content success are primary persona email subscribers, time on site, unique users, read rates for our email newsletter, and engaged prospect companies.
Anthony Kennada
VP of Marketing, Gainsight
@akennada
Engagement data matters — how many downloads or views per asset/campaign. We’ll also ask the “who” question since having moved to the account based model of operations. How many clicks or downloads came from one of our named accounts? Which channels are most effective?
Ultimately, what matters is pipeline. I want to know how content has performed by either:
- Acquiring net new names into our marketable database, and/or
- Influencing an existing pipeline account already in flight.
As we’ve become more sophisticated with our reporting, engagement is good, but dollars validate the investment in that content effort.
Trevor Lynn
CMO, Social Tables
@TrevorHLynn
We tie content back to revenue. We look at the cost per lead and expected revenue per lead. Our team ships quarterly anchor content that drives MQLs and then our team nurtures them to more bottom of the funnel activity like free trials and demos. It’s important for us to see the percent of content downloads that move to trials or demos because those have a very high likelihood to become customers.
What’s the best leadership advice for marketing executives?
Anthony Crestodina describes the marketing industry as “creative, analytical, and friendly.” As such, we’re all willing to share lessons from our own experiences — whether they are triumphs, setbacks, or surprises.
We asked our panel of marketing leaders to share the best piece of advice they’ve ever received (or learned the hard way). Check out their top leadership lessons below, and learn the impact on their approach to managing a marketing team.
Jason Miller
Group Manager, Content Marketing, LinkedIn Marketing Solutions
@jasonmillerca
“Rules are important, but they’re temporary and they’re always supposed to be changed.” – Johnny Lydon
The world of B2B had been boring for way too long and I wanted to shake things up a bit. The traditional rules of B2B needed some revising by digital marketers with fresh ideas and that’s what I encouraged my team to do. We did the exact opposite of what everyone else was doing and in many ways we still do and that’s where we find success.
Hillary Byers Settle
Director of Marketing at Insightpool
@hmbyers
My best leaderships was actually advice that I received early in my career when I was a very junior publicist. An intern messed something up and when I was confronted about it, I said it was the interns fault. My mentor at the time said, “If you manage someone, you have to manage their mistakes and take ownership as your own as I take ownership of your mistakes and my manager takes ownership of mine.” It was such an eye opening experience for me as a young professional. That who you manage is your responsibility - when they succeed and fail.
Kyle Lacy
Vice President of Marketing, OpenView
@kyleplacy
At OpenView, we value the idea of continuous rapid improvement. It is a hard thing to do. Constantly changing and reevaluating your strategy. It takes a strong leader and someone who is keenly aware of the unit economics that drive the business. It has impacted my team both positively and negatively. I believe we are better team for the focus but it has taken awhile to learn how to function in an agile way.
Anthony Kennada
VP of Marketing, Gainsight
@akennada
“Hire to your weaknesses” is a mantra that I’ve tried to live by. Reflecting on my time at Gainsight, I’ll admit that, left to my own devices, I’ll spend more time thinking about big picture ideas and strategies rather than the nuts and bolts of pipeline. Put another way, on any given day you’ll find me in PowerPoint more often than Excel. Hiring a great demand gen lieutenant to balance my skill set has been one of the best decisions of my career.
Trevor Lynn
CMO, Social Tables
@TrevorHLynn
I gravitate toward the phrase, “What got you here, won’t get you there.” The positive is that our team is constantly making changes. The negative is sometimes you make the wrong change or the rollout goes poorly. Our team is growing our goal 15% month-over-month and you can’t keep up with that speed unless you’re making changes to what is working today.
Want more inspiration and advice for your marketing team? Check out our list of 365 Marketing Quotes to Keep You Fired Up All Year Long.