Diary of a first-time CMO - On-demand, ungated, free content
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!)
On-demand, ungated, free content
Forget the funnel. Forget all you’ve learned in B2B marketing school. And forget anything you’ve been told by big analysts and tech firms.
Once you can leave this mindset behind, you unlock the keys to starting to truly stack growth.
The old way of building an email nurture:
- Map out the buying funnel.
- Serve content across a time series of emails that cover each stage of the buying funnel.
- Expect that you will convert at the end of the nurture because you have taken the buyer across each funnel stage.
Top tip:
No one opens an email and thinks, yes great, I am in the MOFU stage and this content really aligns to that. I’ll keep my eye open for my BOFU email in one week, when I am certain I’ll then be ready to buy!
Instead, there’s a new way to do things:
- Send sequenced emails, but aligned with reality.
Most people will miss most of the emails in the sequence, or only one email actually piques their interest that day to engage and click.
Therefore every email should be a delivery mechanism for an always-on resource that can be consumed by the reader whenever it suits them.
You want to give your audience the freedom to decide which content they consume.
Here is an example of an on-demand email nurture landing page that we run at Cognism.
Okay, so now what about campaigns?
These used to be gated content initiatives, usually containing an e-book that ran for six weeks after months of planning.
Why?
Because that is how we had been taught to do marketing. You don’t see jobs for ‘always on marketers’, you see jobs for ‘campaign marketers’.
BUT...
What if you served your best content all the time? Ungated, friction-free. Activated in multiple channels and continually adapted and refreshed as the frequency and data dictated…
Who is to say that during the six weeks you run your ‘campaign’, that your prospect is going to be in the market?
It’s much better not to leave this up to chance, trying to catch them at the right time.
Instead, continually be adding value so the moment they move in the market (yes that’s right, they move themselves), you are top of mind.
The final one I included in my post was the idea of always on events.
I haven’t seen this done yet in B2B and it’s still on my radar as something I would like to try out at Cognism, one for the next book and for 2023!
