B2B Growth Marketing Fundamentals: Strategy, Channels, Campaigns

  📍  Hello, my name is Shelly Marsland, and I am VP of marketing at HR. com. This webinar is part of a series of HR marketing community virtual events, and we're so excited about putting this community together for you. These events will help us marketing pros build our network, connect with our peers, learn how peers, our peers are becoming market leaders and learn new trends and technologies.

We're hoping to turn these sessions into roundtable  formats as we evolve through these, formats here, these sessions to give you a chance to connect face to face with fellow marketing professionals in the human capital space.  So please feel free to turn on your camera and put your comments and questions in the chat.

It is my pleasure to welcome back Nick Warner, Product Lead at Element Human. Nick spoke a few months ago about memorable marketing, and we are pleased to have him come back to share more of his insights.  Nick is a passionate marketer who loves understanding humans, technology, and strategy. His career began at very large and successful companies.

You may have heard of Target and Amazon. At these companies, he worked in marketing, product category management, and data roles. In 2020, he transitioned into the startup world. Since then, he's led marketing growth and data teams and been a one man marketing band. I'm sure we can all relate, at early stage startups.

His personal motto, think big, act small, change the world. Nick is going to talk about B2B growth marketing fundamentals, strategy, channels, and campaigns. Welcome Nick, take it away.  

Thanks, Shelly. So I'm excited to be here with you all today. And, again, thank you to HR. com for having me back. I'm really looking forward to diving in and let's keep our fingers crossed for no power outage snafus this morning, which is why I had to reschedule from last month. So  let's take a look at today's flight plan.  First thing up is to meet your flight crew, which is me. So hi, everyone. I'm Nick. And I think we covered that one. So, one down, we are off to a good start. Then we're going to get into an overview of what growth is to baseline on that, why it exists, which is going to set the stage for sculpting a strategy, making channel choices,  and then running campaigns that catalyze growth.

So this is an ambitious docket to cover in 20 or 30 minutes, and I doubt that we're all going to walk out of here experts as a result of the material.  Think of this more like a brisk jog through the park. It's not going to be enough to be the park's ecological expert,  but it's going to be enough to know the key components of the park and how they all work together at a high level.

My goal is to share things that I've learned and am learning as a marketer and operator, to provide practitioners with ways of thinking about and doing growth marketing,  And to provide non practitioners with scaffolding to better understand growth marketing and have better discussions internally with your friendly neighborhood marketers.

So within these sections, we're going to cover definitions store on the same page before I go deeper  steps to take to do revisit and polish your growth marketing  and frameworks to guide the way throughout the journey.  Okay. So let's dive in growth. What is growth?  The best definition I've heard is from Holly Chen.

Growth is an iterative and data driven approach to increasing acquisition. Retention and revenue  growth is closest to product and marketing and is a cross functional capability that is central to digital businesses.  And there's a ton of variety and where these roles and capabilities live inside of the chart.

Uh, the biggest distinction is either a centralized growth function, which tends to be less common or growth is embedded within the other functions, which tends to be more common.  And why does growth exist?  So unfortunately for all of us, consumers and users of products, the best one doesn't necessarily win, although it does help.

The biggest reason for that, in my view, is that value is a perception. It's a subjective judgment, especially in B2B.  Growth is a key part of the conduit between your business, which is on an island, and the mainland. Which is your market segment  buyer behavior is always changing a little bit faster than how companies are able to sell to them.

And there's been a lot of change in the recent past as  a quick shout out to cope at times. So, as a result, legacy revenue playbooks are getting dustier and more costly, seemingly by the day. Right now, many B2B companies out there are seeing their valuations compress pipeline velocity and that new revenue slow down.

Marketing teams are being asked to dramatically lower their CAC payback and still pick growth targets.  Maybe that's not you. Either way, having discipline around how your business grows is back in style. And I'd argue that that's an evergreen capability that's going to pay dividends in good times and in bad.

Okay, so narrowing the scope a little bit here for us. This is a categorization that I really like from MKT1,  showing where different areas and competencies fall into marketing sub functions.  And I don't want to get hung up on the semantics and various team structures, just a quick orient to the growth facet of things.

  All right, so let's talk sculpting strategy.  So strategy is something that I see confused all the time. And before we get into how to sculpt a growth marketing strategy, you're going to need to understand what I mean when I say strategy.  So let's pretend this tree here is a business.  The strategy is the roots.

Planning is the trunk and the branches.  And execution are the leaves.  So the strategy comes first. The plan then emerges from that strategy. And execution follows the plan.  The strategy is a set of choices that position you on a playing field of your choosing  in a way that you have a higher likelihood of achieving success.

So strategy is choices.  Now there are five key choices in creating a strategy, whether it be for a business, a department, a team, a birthday party, or romantic evening. And on the right here, I've cooked up a little example using DuckDB, now, which is a product and company that I'm a big fan of just to illustrate.

So choice number one,  what's the ultimate aim? What's the reason for existing?  Choice number two,  which market segments, categories, locations, customers, et cetera. Will you allocate your resources towards  choice number three? What's going to allow you to win on the playing field that you chose  and choice number four, what needs to be in place, you know, skills, assets, systems, et cetera, to deliver.

And then choice number five,  what management systems are going to be needed to attain and retain those capabilities.

Okay, so back to growth for a second here, there are four ways to drive growth for business.  Here is the current market.  Way number 1 is to grow the pie.  Way number 2 is to get more of the same pie, which I think a lot of us marketers on here are probably intimately familiar with that one.  Way number three is to get more from your slice of pie.  And way number four is to eat your slice more efficiently.  So these are the core levers that drive growth. And it's very likely that all of these could be in play for your business.  The trick is choosing what to focus on and all of the above isn't a good strategy.  So to figure out which of these is going to be the best route, you're going to need to figure out what is it that you've got at your disposal.

So building your growth marketing strategy often starts by understanding your product and marketing strategy and then contextualizing to growth marketing.  Whether you have those in your pocket or not,  here are three steps to building a growth marketing strategy in sequential order.  So first, we've got product and market research.

This is stuff like your audience, your Sam and Tam, ICPs, segmentation, the ecosystem that you're operating in, the alternatives landscape, alternative ways to solve the problem that is, and your positioning, packaging, messaging.  Then we've got the selling motion and business model.  This is our pricing, monetization, customer journey.

Our company's operating model, how we allocate resources, and are you sales product or partner led when going to the market?  And then last, but definitely not least, the company advantages stack, generalizing, these are your sources of power. I highly recommend Hamilton Helmer's work if you want to get deep into that concept, but for now, with a marketing lens,  this is your credibility, which is your trust story, unique point of view, your reach.

the capability, subject matter, expertise, partners, data and information that you have and convenience, the distribution, the friction and costs present for buyers and the solution awareness in the market segment.  Okay, so  once you've got those components together, you can assemble a strategy and I'm going to double click quickly into each 1 of these just to illustrate how to find those components within your business.

So again, we've got the example components here on the left and on the right. Here's some example questions to ask to uncover the strategy components.  So for example, is there another audience who could benefit from your product? Have you segmented your core audience into various wants and needs and related psychographics?

What would help them be better at their job and do better work at the same time?  Then  same format here. We've got the selling motion and business model. Here are some example questions to ask under this bucket. So are there win win partnerships to exploit in your ecosystem?  Does your go to market motion fit with your audience and ecosystem?

How much economic value are customers left with after they pay you?  And how or where else can you be distributing your product? And  then we've got the company advantages stack.  Example questions to ask here are, do you have a noteworthy story or publicity generating asset?  What unique expertise, knowledge, or data do you have?

What's something that would make buyers trust you more or default to you in a certain market category?  And what would create a self reinforcing loop for your business?  you commonly refer to as a growth flywheel. So these three different areas are distinct endeavors, but they are not mutually exclusive as you move through them, you should see overlap.

think of them kind of like overlapping circles, like a Venn diagram. And if you don't see the overlap, you you've got problems or multiple problems. So  once you've covered the strategy components, you can go back and answer those five questions, I think with, you know, with  precision or confidence and build a strategy. Then  there are three components to  operationalizing that foundational strategy works, the strategy on its own. It's not going to do much for us.  So three components, we've got the audience. That's that's our, who the channels that's are aware and then campaigns. That's a, how.  We're going to go deeper into channels and campaigns in this deck.

And this is a continuous process,  whereas the strategy, once you set it should be able to persist over time.  These are constantly in flux.  So monitor and calibrate continuously  and a framework to help us as we set sail, think in terms of probabilities and making bets marketing like human behavior generally is a complex adaptive system and good marketing done repeatedly over enough time is going to increase the likelihood of success.

Okay, so let's get into channels making channel choices.

So different channels are going to work for different audiences, different markets, products, and companies. That's why before picking our channels, we need to design a strategy that's going to fit with our audience, our market, our product, and our company.  Making channel choices are all about selecting the right places to play  and then assessing the right places to stay.

So let's cover the selection process first.  So there are five key inputs to choosing the right channels. And the first three here should look familiar,  got the fit with the audience in the market,  the fit with the selling and go to market motion  and the fit with the company advantages.  Then you need to add in two more,  got the efficiency of that channel.

So that's the quality of the effort, the volume and scalability  and the coverage of that channel coverage of your market segment, the audience and the buyer journey.  So assessing the right places to play  ends up being more qualitative  Then it is quantitative.  And in the past, I've been tempted to lean more into the quantitative analysis when selecting channels.

And I would not recommend that. It's generally a lot of low fidelity information and a bunch of effort. And like my camp counselor used to say, Nick, you never know until you try it  at this point, so pulling this selection process together. There are five steps to figuring out where you want to be playing your channels game.

And the first one is to list out all the possible channels and sub channels. That sounds like busy work. I promise it's not, it's worth it. And there's a bunch of resources out there online. They're going to get you 95 to 100 percent of the way there.  Then you want to do that qualitative fit analysis  on top of that.

You do want to layer in a bit of the quantitative analysis to support and buttress and challenge the qualitative insights that you're seeing. And I think all of us, or at least almost all of us aren't starting our businesses today. So we do have some of that quantitative information that can help inform at least directionally support or disagree with what we're seeing qualitatively,  then this point you want to consider. Can you actually do it? Make sure that it is feasible or could be feasible, you know, with a short with a short step.  And then lastly, be optimistic and plan for success, but be ruthless. More often, our instinct is to try to do too many things than it is to do too few.

So assessing the right places that you want to stay  is more quantitative than it is qualitative.  So, let's get into that.

And so at this point,  we're now into the channel modeling world, and no matter how you model it, it's going to be wrong. The goal for any channel modeling should be usefulness, not accuracy or prescription.  And you've got multiple tools in your toolbox, and you should be using all of them.  So lots of attribution models that I've seen, I'd categorize as not useful and misleading.

It's false  precision at scale. It really depends on how you use them.  Marketing mix models tend to be more useful by default, but often lack the precision that we want as growth marketers and operators. So in addition to those two, you should be using experimentation to prove out incrementality  from your marketing mix modeling  and observation, observation of your marketing and your customer journey.

The anecdotes should support the data. If they don't, don't trust either until you resolve that  so we can have a full day session just on this stuff. But let's not do that.  In any event, my general advice here is don't have one model that rules small and take any models that you do use with the appropriate grains of salt.

All right. So for our purposes, here's a framework that we can use when we're building out our channels.  So we've got a little pipeline here. The first stage is the ideas, this is the catalog of channels that you've got  the on deck circle. These are channels that you're, you're getting ready to or could be ready to very quickly move into.  And testing, you're now active in these channels. You're learning and iterating on an  initial strategy or tactic.  Then building up, so you're starting, you're starting to marshal more resources towards building on a successful test, you're developing channel strategies and tactics.  And then committing or committed to already.

These are now a mainstay in your channels. They're operating well and driving results efficiently.  So any channels in these later 3 stages can get the doubling down treatment, which is a special category where you've got promising indicators and there's room for, or maybe need for expansion.  And then conversely, and in these 3 stages can get the not working yet treatment where things get put on the shelf due to a variety of factors.

So create measurements and guardrails for each of these stages.  And then revisit them on a predetermined cadence. For me, I found that quarterly works really well, but do whatever makes sense and works for you.  And a quick word of advice from the mathematician, Donald Knuth,  give your ideas, bets, and initiatives time to work or not work.

Change things, change too much too early, and you're going to be stuck managing the trees and missing the forest.  Which brings me to a few more do's and don'ts in this process.  So  do plan and invest as if it's going to be successful.  Don't throw things at the wall and see what sticks.  Do you have clear hypotheses and intentions for each stage and channel?

Don't refuse to revisit something because it didn't work at one point in the past.  Do things because it makes sense for your business and your customers.  Don't do things because other companies are doing them.  Do calibrate actions and assessment to the role that that channel should play.  And don't assess every channel on the same metric.

Alright, so pulling those two things together, playing and staying in the right places, an analogy that really works for me is thinking about your channels like a team. And I've been watching basketball lately, so I'm gonna run with that. so let's say you've got a team of all little guys. They all dribble and shoot three pointers.

Even if they're all really good,  You're still going to lose most of the time.  You need a balanced team and a variety of capabilities to win.  And I've never seen one channel that's going to be able to do everything for you all the time.  So figure out which channels are your goal scorers, which are going to be your passers, which can do both.

Maybe you need good defense to protect your castle with, maybe you need more good offense to invade other castles with.  Here are three broad pillars that you can think about as you construct and deploy your channel's roster. You're going to need to be able to do these things well enough to win in the market segment.

First pillar for us is the information war.  This is ideas, ways of thinking, creating, framing, and claiming problems. Your story, your point of view, your strategic narrative.  Second one is the air war.  This is awareness, reach, education, problem and solution evangelism, relationship building, and consistency at scale.

And then the  last one is the ground war. This is accessibility, engagement, action. You're putting dollars in the bank now. You're driving urgency, capturing attention, intent, and demand.  So what I see most often, especially with startups and smaller companies, is that they're fighting the ground war almost exclusively.

And  in many of those cases, that makes a lot of sense.  But over time, it's not enough to win in the market segment.  So what ends up happening is they get stuck there and they keep trying to fight more ground wars better and faster symptoms that look like growth is hard and it's getting harder. Your acquisition is plateauing.

Your CAC is going up faster than CLV.  Your selling motion gets bloated. Deal cycles stay long or get longer. Your ICP contact qualified opportunity rate is 5 percent or less.  Those are all indicators that you're in a trench warfare situation and you're throwing more resources into the trench, which is going to be inefficient, but ultimately that makes you vulnerable.

So the right mix of these competencies is going to depend on the game that you're playing and the capabilities that you have internally,  and you don't need to be world class at all three,  but if you want to build a championship level team. You're going to need to be competent in all three.  Okay, so at this point, you've got a strategy, you know how to construct your channels roster and you know where you're going to be playing and how to figure out where you want to be staying.

But how can you drive growth using the strategy in the channels?  So campaigns are one big way and are a fantastic litmus test for any go to market organization.  So let's talk about running campaigns.  First thing is what the heck is a campaign?  There are a lot of different terms with similar definitions.

A lot of time, I think it's tomato, tomato. but let's get clear on what I mean when I say campaign here.  So first for us is a generally accepted definition of what a B2B marketing campaign is.  It's an organized effort to connect with customers.  It spans multiple channels, content types, stages, et cetera, and it's time bound and tied to an objective or problem set.

Then a couple of my own additions to the generally accepted one.  The campaign originates with a thematic idea that you want to drive in the market.  It flows from your strategy and channel selection, not the other way around, not something separate or random.  And it involves both fuel and engine,  which fuel and engine  takes me to one of my favorite frameworks.

This is from MKT1 again.  An efficient marketing machine needs  both fuel and engine.  Fuel is needed for the engine to work, but it's next to useless on its own. These are some examples of fuel here. There are many more  engine is the fun part, at least from my perspective. And this is typically what growth marketers are living.

Again, some examples of engine stuff.  So often us marketers value what's easily measured instead of measuring what's valuable. An engine is much easier to measure. So usually we do much more of that stuff, sometimes at the expense of or without the necessary fuel.  Great marketing machines need both.  And questioning whether you've got a fuel problem or an engine problem is a really nice way to triangulate why actions you want to take.

Okay, so  let's talk about running campaigns.

Another favorite framework of mine from my old boss, Jeff B.  This is a great framework to use when you're thinking about your campaigns.  Which one of these does your audience need more? Can you do both at the same time?   Campaigns fall into one or more of these categories.  Performance,  product,  brand,  and category.

This is like tending a garden with different vegetables. They're all healthy for you. They're all kind of related, but they are different.  So the mix and match is going to vary.  Each category of campaign serves different objectives.  And eventually, you're going to need all these plants to grow.  Alright, so on the right here, we've got a diagram of a typical campaign's life stages.

And on the left here, we've  Five steps to running campaigns that are going to add more value than activity for your business.  Step number one, run campaigns. Surprisingly, this is the one that most of us miss.  Actually run them, build campaigns in your operating process.  Step number two, plan as far out as you think you can and then go a little bit farther.

Step number three, cut, cut and cut. Cut ideas, channels, tactics, messages, etc. Until it feels like you've cut a little bit too much.  It is easy to add more later.  Step number four, use premortems to make better decisions, get buy in, and orchestrate your efforts.  And then step number five, monitor your inputs and outputs rigorously and be decisive when you see a strong signal.

Okay. So pulling things together, kind of, sort of here. I love this quote from Dave Kellogg, which stands in striking opposition to the hustle harder growth hacking subculture that I see out and about sometimes.  The strategy should be simple. The plan, tactics, and execution are not.  So one of my favorite ways to hit multiple birds with one shot is to create value loops. sometimes these are called programs, I'm not sure if there's a difference. Maybe someone who's here with us can, educate me and all of us on that. But for example, here you create a lot of events series. It's got a theme is targeted towards a segment of your audience or a segment of the problem that you solve.

You can then use that live event series and repurpose it as a podcast,  as a newsletter.  Perhaps you have a community and that can be a fantastic community engagement and cornerstone. it can be great scaffolding to start a community if that's something that you want to do.  It can be great partner and ecosystem marketing.

Sorry about the spacing on that.   It's a fantastic vehicle for customer and case study marketing.  It's fantastic for organic and paid social fodder.  Forgive the spacing there.  And it's really good for website content. Lots of lots of options there.  And then last but not least, it's an excellent forcing function for market research and making sure that you stay connected to what's going on and what really matters with your audience and the problems that they have and in your market segment.

Okay. So wrapping up here, if you don't remember anything from this session,  go listen to and read these resources.  And then take a screenshot of the device that I'm about to give to my past, present, and future self.  Do the work to find and create opportunities. And when you have a pitch that you like, take a swing, a big one.

The same thinking that brought the problem is unlikely to solve the problem. So invert the problem, work backwards, and think wrong.  And then don't lead with your product, lead them to your product.  All right. So that's all I have. Thank you for being here with me. And again, thank you to HR. com for having me back.

I've really enjoyed sharing some of the things that I've learned and am learning, and hopefully I've equipped you with ideas, ways of thinking about and doing growth marketing that you're going to find useful in your business.  Now, I'd love to get into some questions, comments, discussion topics that you all have.  And it looks like we have a question here.

Um, from Sean. Do you recommend any 3rd party resources that are popular in tech right now?  That is a good question, Sean. So I think,  depending on what you're after, those 3rd party resources, if you're after marketing and growth marketing stuff,  I'll leave it to what I've got on the slide here. and perhaps if you're looking for something else, Perhaps you can chime back in and and let me know.

Yeah, there's a certain area you're looking for sean  I have a question. How do you how do you reduce friction? So you're getting the page views and there's some friction. How do you work, especially if you're working with other teams? That can help you with that what how do you go about it? What kind of statistics do you, go to the other team,  for example,  and get some help on on the friction?

Yeah, that's a good question.  So. I'll, I'll talk about the website, which is, I think you're, you're referencing Shelly, but happy to expand into other areas.  I think, I think it really starts with the customer, and being, being able to step inside of their shoes. Or perhaps you're at a larger scale and, and you can do some testing.

And I think there's some cool tools out there that will allow you to test the user experience. Wynter is, is one that comes to mind, where folks can go through and you get feedback on that. Sometimes it's just like,  you can send it over to, you know, someone like, my wife, who happens to be a great  market research subject.

Um, it's the one that doesn't have the context and you're like, Hey,  do you understand what is going on on this page. and like, does it make sense to you what to do next? So that's that's 1 and I think that stuff is is super helpful, especially if you've lost that fresh perspective, and you've been in there for a while, finding someone who does have that fresh perspective  and then.  Like friction is like, how much are you asking people to do, make it as easy for them as possible. So even with stuff like CTAs or like potential options, things they could do when they land on the page, I'm a big fan of  give them one thing to do.

Give them one decision to make. we all have a lot of things to do and a lot of decisions that we make every day. if you give people too many decisions, it's, like, you know what, like, I don't want to spend the time to figure out which of these decisions do I need to make. So I'm not going to sit here and  make a rational decision about all of them.

so give them one thing to do.  Make it super clear. What do you, what is the most, you know, what is the best next step  for the person that's at that stage in the experience?  And  then I think just minimizing like, what are the amount of clicks? How many different pages are they going to have to go to to get what they're looking for?

And some of that can be done up front. Some of that can, you can look at it, on the back end and say, okay, hey, this is the most common journey that we're seeing.  And this is, and they're going towards the thing we want them to do. And  to do that, they've got to fill out nine form fields,  five different clicks, and they have to load three different pages.

Like, how can we get that to as few as possible?  And, so I think that that's,  that's another one.  Thank you. And, so Sean replied, to clarify, I guess I mean, third party resources  could be used for campaigns or getting a brand voice out there. I hope that makes sense.  Yeah, yeah, Sean, it does. I don't have a, I don't have a great answer to that question.

I think that at least, at least for me, but I think a lot of us in,  B2B are trying to figure that out, as things are  getting more social, and in, again, especially in B2B, people trust their peers,  they trust vendors a lot less. And so often with, you know, there's so many communities out there, there's Slack groups, there's, you know, social media, a lot of times people will just see stuff on there, like, you know, what tools are you using,  what's working for you, and so,  I think that we're trying to figure that out.

I  think influencers slash, you know, creators are a really, really interesting space., I don't have a great playbook on how to use that in B2B. I think that, I would say  if I had to answer, I'd say  find a micro niche. And find partners that want to work with either on a paid basis or an organic basis, and try to find those win wins.

so I think that kind of blending the,  hopefully talking my way into something useful here, but blending the influencer and partner space. And that partner space can be, can be other companies, it could be individuals, it could be communities that you can help out with. and so figuring out maybe some of those more creative ways of  hey, how can,  if we were to work together and either put on a webinar or  we start to co, you know, co create content or just share things that it's coming from the other side, or perhaps it's more of a sales thing, you know, you're lobbing over referrals, you know, whatever it is  trying to find those win wins, because I think that a lot of us out there, are yeah.

Yeah, that sounds great, right? Someone came to me and they're like, Hey, this is an easy win win, like, for sure. there's a bunch of solutions that are, I think, in the adjacent spaces to us.  and so it's a, it's a win win, and, it is not a zero sum game.  So, yeah, hopefully that was useful, Sean. and happy to go deeper on that if, if you got more questions or, or I missed  it.

Steph, well, I don't think I see any other questions, but, I want to thank you, Nick, for your great presentation on B2B growth marketing fundamentals and I appreciate you taking the time to help share your knowledge with the community  Hope to see you see you again soon Yeah, this was a blast.

Shelley. Have a great day everyone And I hope you'll meet us for at 1 p. m. Eastern where  we're going to have a webinar On AI's role in today's marketing with Kathy Phillips from the Marketing Artificial Intelligence Institute. That was a mouthful.  All right. Have a fabulous day, everyone. Take care. Bye.