Diary of a first-time CMO - My predictions
Hey B2B marketers
Here it is. Four years, $50m+ ARR and 200 pages later… My journey as a first-time CMO.
Covering the key learnings I've gathered in four years of leadership. This diary reveals the lessons that helped me scale Cognism from $3m to $50m ARR, build a team from 3 to 39, and transform our set-up from a classic lead gen function to a demand gen engine.
It’s my handbook for B2B marketers looking to thrive in leadership.
(especially if you’re as daunted as I was when I started out!)
My predictions
I’m going to put it down in writing:
I predict content marketing will experience a big shift over the coming years.
The expectations from this role will be a big departure from what they have been traditionally.
Old way: be a good writer that can conduct desk research and produce multiple articles (of varying lengths and formats), with some SEO optimisations.
New way: understand your audience deeply. Be capable of interviewing and working with subject matter experts consistently in order to provide your work with authority. Be as confident briefing in a storyboard for a video as you are writing an interactive pillar page.
This new breed of content marketer understands the requirement for different content types and formats. They are across all the content being produced and briefed for their audience and they are capable of building scalable and repeatable processes around all of this to enable their content engine to scale.
They operate like journalists, like producers, like content curators and top-class interviewers.
Finding this type of content profile in B2B marketing today is very hard. If you are a content marketer or a demand gen marketer that would like to specialise in content and can adopt this approach, you’re going to be in high demand!
