From individual contributors to CMOs, everyone working in marketing today faces the same underlying challenge: The Marketing Landscape is changing, and it’s changing fast.
The rise of smartphones, messaging, video streaming, artificial intelligence (AI), and a host of other innovations has led to a total transformation in the way people search for and purchase products. As a result, the traditional marketing playbook is quickly becoming obsolete.
If today’s marketers want to achieve success in the long-term, they need to adapt. Over the past decade, marketers have gotten too comfortable using the same three channels: blogging, email, and social. And while these channels, when used properly, can still drive results, a lot of marketing teams are seeing diminishing returns. This had led many teams, including our own marketing team here at Drift, to ask the question: What’s next?
That was the driving question behind the creation of this book. And instead of trying to answer that question ourselves, we turned to some of the world’s most influential and well-respected marketing leaders from companies like Slack, LinkedIn, Okta, and Vimeo. The result is a collection of expert insights and best practices that you can incorporate into your own marketing efforts.
From brand building, to hiring, to using video more effectively, inside this book you’ll find advice for bringing every aspect of your marketing operation into the modern era. And hopefully, some of what you read here will help nudge you outside of your marketing comfort zone.
Thanks for reading.
The Drift Marketing Team
What we’re seeing is an evolution in how a brand shows up in the world to now include every touchpoint that somebody might have with a company. Everything from what it looks like to show up in a physical office space to interacting with sales or speaking with customer support.
Every company has a blog and a podcast. Every company is making videos. Every company is spending money on AdWords, Facebook ads, and retargeting. And on top of that, there are hundreds (if not thousands) of competitors in every industry leaving more options for your potential customers than ever before.
If you own a market with your brand, then the revenue will come. Because people want to buy from people they like. They don’t want to buy because they got a discount. And they might initially buy for a discount, but they will always pay more if they like you. And if your brand can tell that story and a Google Ad [is] where [you] can get them in, you have to have both.
It doesn’t matter whether your objective is to mold a professional services business on your own or to build a small venture that employs others who believe in your mission. Designing a unique and distinct category niche is the biggest step that any entrepreneur — whether she is going it alone or leading others — can take towards successfully carving out territory in the minds of the audience she wants to attract.
After many years of helping startups define their brands, here’s what I believe the four P’s of successful brand building are:
Being true to your values is critical, but you need to choose those values. At Slack, we wanted to be human, empathetic, courteous and even funny. These values worked because they reflected who we really were and we made sure to stay true to them. You have to act like that, you have to be like that. I want a brand that I can have a connection with, and that starts with authenticity.
We realized that as we had grown to over 800 people, if you asked 20 people around the company, “Tell me about Okta,” you would likely get 20 great but very different answers. We spent something like five or six months generating 700 pages of interview transcripts with employees, with customers, with partners, trying to understand that story. We then had to distill that down into something that everybody could speak to in the same way. It was really very helpful for us.
Especially in the early days, turning away sales is difficult. But no amount of cash can make up for selling to the wrong customers.
In any business relationship it’s critical to be clear and consistent about your values and your vision, to know who you are and what you stand for, and to bring that “Big Idea” and conviction into the relationship.
After a startup establishes product market fit, scaling 
…when you look at the percent of revenue that comes from direct vs partners, based on data from the World Trade Organization (WTO) about all the revenue floating around the planet, it’s really 75:25 from partners versus from direct. The vast majority of revenue comes from affiliates, influencers, brand-to-brand relationships.
People who have huge budgets get great experiences. And that’s because sellers know that when you walk into that kind of shop, they predict that your fit is very high, and that you have the means, and so they are investing the time of those awesome salespeople — relationship managers — on you, because they know that about you.
1. Set up a framework for your organization.
The biggest mistake I see is not thinking through the goals of the launch itself. Each type of program launch – from an ebook campaign to a customer advocacy program – can serve a variety of goals. Without articulating the aim of each program, you lose the needed direction for the campaign and won’t know if the campaign was a success.
Stick to first principles, because if your employees actually care about your mission and if your customers are going to buy your products regardless of whether or not their budget is big or small, you’re in a good spot.
First, when it comes to marketing, it’s hard to have long-term plans, and it’s difficult to map out all the moving parts ahead of time. It’s important to stay responsive to what’s going on in sales, the market, and the world as a whole for your strategies to succeed. For this reason, it’s critical to stay agile.
I don’t know that hiring somebody out of school with a marketing degree is super helpful, to be honest, at least for the way I think about marketing.
One thing that has become abundantly clear to me as I’ve worked my way up the corporate ladder is that hiring a talented team is the key to success as a senior executive. Some of the most successful CEOs I know would argue this is their BEST skill. If a founder or CEO has an amazing vision but can’t hire a team to execute on that vision, he/she will fail.
Openness to me means being curious and listening to different perspectives and ideas. It’s about embracing not knowing, and seeking context whenever I join a meeting or a project to understand the different angles and inputs that can inform my decisions. I tend to be a pretty fast-paced thinker and decision maker, so I remind myself not to close out options too quickly.
During the recruiting process, the internal comms team should already be involved in what that experience looks and feels like—everything from the emails you get from the hiring manager or the recruiter to what kind of paperwork you get before you come in. You want candidates to experience a consistent brand from the very beginning, whether you hire them or not.
Break down all of your marketing channels, landing pages, and content along the following two dimensions: traffic and conversion rate. Then, categorize them all into one of four quadrants:
I’ve logged over 300 miles in running races over 8 years, and just in this past year started to see some small improvements in my 5ks and half marathons. Suddenly, I started asking, “How much faster could I run a half marathon? Could I translate these improvements to longer distances?
This past June we released the results of a survey of more than 500 marketing leaders covering marketing metrics, demand gen channel strategy and its effectiveness, tech stack, organizational structure and more. The respondents ranged from seed to growth stage executives, but the vast majority were expansion stage software leaders.
The strategic and operational downside of closed ecosystems is that
I think content marketing isn’t going to be whitepapers and blog posts for very much longer.
We are in a constant battle for attention. In today’s always-on world, the average human now loses focus within eight seconds (meaning we now have a shorter attention span than a goldfish). This translates to faster drop-off rates for videos. So, if you don’t capture your audience’s attention in that first few seconds, you’ve lost your chance with a potential customer. Higher engagement is also important for making sure your videos get seen in the first place since Facebook and other platforms use engagement to prioritize videos in their feed.
Branding is important no matter the marketing channel. Many features for branding your YouTube channel are free and should be taken full advantage of. Customizing the background of your channel, showcasing your other social networks and creating a custom header are just a few of the many ways to brand your presence on YouTube.
Metrics like impressions, play rate, and viewer engagement are table-stakes in most video platforms these days. And as such, they’re typically the first stop on your list when it comes to analyzing the success of a video.
Drift follows an approach to marketing unlike any other company’s, opening up a window—through a stream of videos, podcasts, and social posts—into the real lives of its employees, customers, and extended community members. Recently, I summed up Drift’s approach in a tweet:
Today’s marketer needs to be smarter to cut through the noise and to establish relevance and interest amongst real potential buyers. Entertaining or inspirational content can be a great way to get their attention, but it’s time to move past the high-level brand video and get serious about targeting your message to distinct audience segments. It’s called ‘narrowcasting’ your content, and it’s the key to boosting audience engagement and conversion.
The consumer is in control. They have connected devices, mobile technology in their hands at all times, they’re throwing off a lot of data, they expect their experiences are going to be relevant and frictionless, and so forth. People aren’t willing to wait even a second right now.
…most B2B marketers measure success in terms of the number of leads generated. This gives them a false sense of accomplishment. Why? Because the number of leads has nothing to do with lead quality or pipeline velocity.
If we build great products our objective should be to get users to use our great products and to then support them in that journey. And that is not a marketing journey that starts with a form on a website that leads to a content download that leads to a barrage of emails. As a marketer, my job isn’t as much about marketing as it is about teaching and enabling.
Because so many businesses now leverage the convenience and speed of on-site live chat to help customers, adding a chatbot to enhance that personalized experience is often a no-brainer. Website chatbots can carry out a lot of different functions:
With the [conversational marketing] now, you have the ability to set appointments with people. You can have the bot. It becomes a bot. My bot, for example, might say, ‘Hey! Are you spending money on paid advertising?’ So Neil gave me that idea. They click yes, then it might say, ‘How much are you spending in a month?’ Then we give them like five bubbles and it talks about the budget. If their budget is less than let’s say $10,000 a month, it filters them over and it says okay, they’re not a fit for single grain but it might push over to one of our referral partners. Then anybody that is qualified, the counter automatically shows up for the account executive. It shows the calendar, and you can book a meeting directly within there. That way, you basically have an inbound sales development representative for you, qualifying these leads for you. It starts to become a revenue generating kind of tool for you.
The B2B marketing paradigm that we all grew up with was built for quantity, not quality and speed. It was built in a world where vendors have all the control, not buyers. The common B2B buying experience was defined by gates, forms and slow hand-offs between funnel stages. We already know that this approach leads to a slow (and crappy) experience for both buyers and sellers. And it only makes sense that marketing automation providers push this paradigm because they use the number of contacts in a customer’s database as their economic engine.
Traditional B2B marketing and sales tools were built for a world that no longer exists. They were designed with companies in mind, not customers. The focus was on capturing as many leads as possible, not providing people with the best experience possible.