Marketing funnel has changed for good—here’s how digital marketing teams need to change
So you’ve grown into a reasonably sized software as a service company with a steadily growing revenue stream coming in through digital marketing and you have started spending money to grow brand awareness (read my earlier piece on that here). You have also changed your digital marketing strategy to go along with this phase of growth.
But as management thinker Clayton Christensen would say: your strategy is not what you say it is. How you allocate your resources—time, money, and energy—is where reality meets boardroom plans. People are the most precious resources companies have and in this piece, I’ll talk about how we created a structure for our digital marketing teams to sell across the world.
Before we dive into all that, it’s important for us to get some basics out of the way.
Marketing ties into the all powerful “funnel.” Most marketers already know this. But for the uninitiated, the funnel is the path people take from being made aware of a product to purchasing it and then retained. As shown in the picture below, the traditional marketing funnel has evolved from companies finding customers and running mass media campaigns to generate awareness and interest to customers finding companies through search and other means.
In other words, the role of marketing in B2B SaaS has evolved from being responsible to create awareness and interest to now going a couple of steps deeper in the funnel to become a demand center that’s good at inbound marketing.
This means now, more and more, we have teams enabling us with content and campaign ideas that can then be used to create awareness, ensure that the product makes it to the consideration set of a prospective buyer, and assist with purchase or sign-up, enabling the user to be informed in any part of the marketing funnel.
The digital marketing team works its magic around the distribution of content to the right audience, piquing interest with the right influencers and buying committees, and passing on the lead at the right time to the sales development representatives (SDRs) for them to start sizing the opportunity—before further passing it on to the sales teams for a more meaningful discussion.
Now that we have the basics in place, let’s look at how we’ve geared our teams to come to deal with our growing ambitions and the broader shift in B2B marketing.
Structuring the team
In 2015, I started with a team of about a dozen people. Cut to the present: we have a team of over 35 talented digital marketers and data scientists. Lead generation was earlier the mandate of the digital marketing team alone but now we work with pretty much every other department in the company.
Team then: The team then were a dozen campaign managers who managed search and display campaigns really well. Their objectives and key result areas (OKRs) were closely tied to lead generation.
Team now: My team now comprises campaign managers who go way beyond managing search and display campaigns. Every geo is led by a regional lead who is responsible for overall leads across multiple products. They are helped by campaign managers focusing on specific products across geos.
While the overarching goal for the lead and the campaign managers is still generating leads, it is the executional focus that changes. Campaign managers track platform metrics (impressions, clicks, conversion rates, and so on) whereas the leads have the mandate to keep a check on the budget spend and the payback of the region, along with the responsibility of adding channels in the marketing mix.
Apart from a regionally focused team, my team also includes a team of SEO experts who specialize in products rather than have a geo focus. Their job is to work with content teams focused on various segments—IT, Sales, and CX, to be precise. Simply put, their responsibility is to improve keyword rankings in search engine result pages. That is where the science of understanding Google algorithms mixes well with the art of communicating to the user in the most suitable format and size.
While these are the two larger teams who keep the leads rolling, there is also a growth team which looks at newer avenues and opportunities to unearth lead-generation potential.
We are a central marketing team, and that comes with the responsibility of catering to multiple teams. The sales team needs leads, and hence the regional structure. The segment marketing team works with the SEO team in particular to ensure that the awesome content that they create ranks high and, when searched, gives a user experience that matches the intent. The leads need to be followed up with the SDRs and the sales teams lower down the funnel to ensure we tweak our digital campaigns for a better RoI.
Now, we also need to make sense of the digital footprint from our campaigns on the internet. This is important for us to continuously improve the digital marketing engine. Our teams of data scientists and analysts help decode all that happens in the user’s digital journey. In my next piece, I’ll talk about how we make sense of different marketing channels and the metrics we track to make our digital marketing engine even more effective.
