In a marketing landscape that is constantly evolving, professionals need to continuously improve their skills to stay relevant and continue progressing in their careers. Luckily, whether your goal is to outperform your OKRs, upskill to secure a promotion, or support your team in their career development, there’s likely to be an online marketing course that can help you. But how can you decide which of the options out there is the best fit for your particular needs?

To help you avoid wasting your time and money on a course that isn’t right for you, we’ve summarized the key factors to consider to help you choose your next marketing course.

Key Factors to Consider

1. Alignment With Your Career and Business Goals 

What’s the main goal you’re working towards in your career right now? 

If you’re a mid-level marketer, you likely want to target courses that help you get to the next level in your career. For instance, strategic marketing or digital transformation courses can help you gr...

How To SaaS is a management consulting firm focused on helping SaaS companies thrive through marketing and demand generation. We’re looking for an experienced freelance content writer to support our internal marketing team and help us grow our social media presence. 

If you have 2+ years of experience creating high-quality content at speed and helping to scale a business’s social media profile, we’d love to hear from you. 

This role is:

• Full-time
• Contract — 3-month initial contract, with the potential to extend
• Remote

Who you need to be:

• You’re a strong writer and have produced a variety of content types for both B2B and B2C audiences. This should include blog posts, landing pages, one-pagers, whitepapers and templates.
• You’re a fast worker. We’re looking for someone who can produce a new content asset every day, without compromising on quality and attention to detail.
• You’ve worked on several business social media accounts. This should include writing and scheduling
...

The inherent value of investing in different forms of demand generation is determined by 2 major factors: the recurring value + the shareability of the asset.

In order, here are the biggest avenues available and why:

1. Product, by default, is the highest / most valuable form of demand gen. This can be in the form of free trials, sandboxes or even free tools that bring back prospects and customers over and over because they need to use the tool to get the value they need.
2. Thought leadership is content that actually distinguishes you in the marketplace. Books, podcasts, video content especially. There is a recurring / residual value to this work because it pays dividends like an annuity long after the asset has been created.
3. Events, even though they get a bad rap, can be powerful ways to generate demand, especially in enterprise markets. The only challenge with events is the amount of ongoing coordination and investment required to generate value.
4. Paid media, despite receiving...

When you analyze the GTM spend of most companies, you find that they are over-leveraged in the channels that everyone knows about / can easily access. Things like SEO, Paid Search, Organic Social are complete red oceans with insane amounts of competition for attention.

On the flip side, those same companies have ignored some of the most profitable channels because they're less cool and less talked about. This is especially true for companies with larger deal sizes and smaller TAMs.

Some examples:

1) Relationship-Building: Trying to build deep relationships with your market off-line. This can be through small get togethers, dinners, in-person events and also casual activities that build connection.

2) Gifting: Sending close customers, prospects and partners gifts for big holidays (e.g. Christmas) or notable life events (wedding, birth of a child, promotion) etc.

3) Direct-Mail: Leveraging direct-mail as a very core part of your GTM motion and overall marketing spend. This channel...

In a Traffic First world, all that matters is ranking for certain keywords and hoping that Google serves up that content when someone with intent searches for the term.

The problem with this approach in the new world is that there is little affinity with your brand or product and there is no real relationship with the people that encounter your brand. For example, how many times have you searched for something on Google, found the answer on a website, only to never go back to that website ever again?

In an Audience First world, the opposite is true. We focus on delivering as much value to the market as possible. Over time, this builds affinity and loyalty with followers and fans who are far more likely to be retained over time.

In the former, you are constantly on the hamster wheel of chasing more traffic in a red ocean, competing with others for position to try and land traffic that doesn't care that much about you anyways.

In the latter, you are building enterprise value in the...

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen companies with 90%+ Gross Margins but 3 year CAC Payback Periods that destroy those margins. Gross Margins are one of the most misrepresented metrics inside B2B companies.

Gross Margin is viewed as Revenue less Cost of Goods Sold. In software, the cost of goods sold are marginal (discounts, affiliate fees etc.) that are directly connected to the sale of a product.

With this kind of a calculation, Gross Margins looks to be 80-90%+ in most cases. 

While this is “financially” accurate, it completely misses the mark on the actual cost of that revenue. It specifically misses variable costs like paid media spend or even sales spend that are essential to acquiring the revenue.

This is why seemingly great companies with great gross margins on paper keep needing to raise capital / go out of business.

The way to fix this: constantly look at Gross Margins with CAC factored in as an additional lens to understand the cash flow viability + what is wo...

Every so often, I find myself advising a company that is committed to making a specific tactic work (events, ABM, SEO etc.).

They’re so committed to the tactic, that they’ve made it the focus of their limited resources: time, money, people, technology. 

However, in a lot of these cases, the company has not done the earlier (and critical) step of looking at all the possible ways to allocate their limited resources and prioritizing the right area to channel those resources.

Yes, SEO works. Yes, ABM works. Yes, Partner Networks work. In fact, all of it works.

In a lot of these companies, the problem statement is defined as: “How to make X work?” 

The right problem statement is: “What is the best way to allocate our resources to drive the most amount of growth, pipeline and revenue?”

This is how you shift away from being married to the solution, and instead, being married to solving the problem.

The better you do this, the more likely you are to think like a true business leader a...

Building a following on social networks is the play every company seems to be running right now. In general, trying to win markets in red oceans is infinitely more difficult. Everyone wants to grow their LinkedIn followers or YouTube subscribers.

While this strategy is fine, it’s important to remember that the best “social networks” are those that you have a unique edge / reach / influence over. The greater the influence, the bigger your moat.

Here’s a true list of “networks” you want to invest into from least to most important:

1. Viewers — people who see and consume your content

2. Subscribers — people who actually subscribe / follow you and want see more of you

3. Fans — the most engaged subscribers, often first to watch and listen to anything you put out there

4. Partners — people who help promote / connect / evangelize you with more fans and customers

5. Customers — people who actually buy and the best type of network

This is why Lifecycle and Customer Marketing is more ...

Most companies waste a big portion of their marketing budget by allocating Marketing spend equally between Best-Fit and Bad-Fit customers.

Your Best-Fit Customers will make up the bulk of the revenue you generate:

-They have higher conversion rates and lower payback periods

-They are more likely to expand their accounts

-They churn at a much lower rate

Conversely, your Bad-Fit Customers:

-Have significantly lower conversion rates and sky high payback periods

-Are resistant to expansion, cross-sell and upsell

-Churn much faster, often in the first year

This disparity needs to be reflected in how marketing budgets are allocated.

The key is to dig into your customer data to understand who your best-fit customers are and then allocate the bulk of your marketing budget to acquire more of those customers.

The better you allocate your budget to best-fit customers, the faster you'll grow and the more impact marketing will make.

Hiring a CMO is one of the few extremely high revenue-impacting decisions a company can make. Yet many companies make a mistake when hiring a CMO. Getting this hire wrong is costly and impacts all areas of the business.

The challenge is that every business is different, and so is the expertise required from the CMO. Your unique business context needs to play a significant role in determining what to look for in a CMO. Too many businesses hire a CMO who would be a perfect fit for someone else’s business, not theirs.

For example, if your product has a low ACV, you need a more inbound-focused (paid ads, SEO etc.) CMO. If you sell a more enterprise B2B product, you need a CMO who understands ABM and partnering with sales teams.

Understanding this distinction is the difference between a successful CMO hire and one you have to replace in less than 18 months.