The room to spend on paid media in most industries is finite. After a while, you always hit a ceiling on spend.

Similarly, if you’re creating content purely for SEO, you will hit a limit on how much traffic your content can drive.

It’s not that these plays are ineffective. They work and need to be implemented inside most companies.

But the real value to be created is when content and paid media to work hand in hand to target ideal customers to create demand.

This kind of marketing takes a true understanding of customers, a belief in the power of content and a willingness to invest paid media dollars to build a longer-term affinity within an industry.

In a paid social driven demand engine, content + paid is how you get to infinite distribution to scale revenue significantly faster.

Your competitors can’t just bid up where you’re investing like they can on finite, zero-sum channels like search because you’re never playing the same game.

It’s also how CAC comes down because the b...

Your best fit customers are significantly more valuable bad fit customer base. They are also more valuable than your overall customer base (including those who are a good fit).

That's why you need to tailor the following to your best fit customers:

• Product Roadmap
• Demand Gen
• Sales
• Content
• Onboarding

...and more

The more you focus on your best fit customers, the more you will build a differentiated position in the marketplace with super fans and power users.

Understanding the core drivers of Total Customer Value is critical to building the growth engine of any business.

Companies constantly under-estimate what a customer is truly worth by not capturing all the value acquiring a customer brings.

Common drivers:

1. Higher ACVs / Average Deal sizes
2. Increased Usage / Functionality which drives expansion revenue
3. Lower churn, higher retention and higher LTV
4. More upsells
5. More cross-sells
6. Increasing pricing
7. Driving more referrals with higher NPS / satisfaction
8. Better onboarding to increase conversion rates and usage

Correctly understanding Total Customer Value is the key to scaling sales and marketing. It tells you how much you can truly spend to acquire a customer.

The higher the total customer value, the more you can spend. The more you can spend, the more of the market you can capture.

The quickest way to measure the maturity of Marketing within an organization is to look at its core accountability metric.

In less mature organizations, Marketing teams report on leads generated, MQLs and even influenced pipeline as their ultimate accountability.

In more mature organizations, sourced pipeline and revenue are the ultimate accountability metrics.

A good way to figure out where on the continuum a company's marketing team sits is to ask what reporting they have.

If they have:

1. Connected marketing spend at the top of funnel to sourced pipeline and revenue
2. Analyzed ROI by channel, campaign, cohort
3. Established baselines for acceptable cost per lead by channel and campaign based on conversion to opportunity $ and pipeline

Then, they are on the more mature side of the spectrum.

If they haven’t, the organization likely needs a cultural transformation to shift revenue accountability from just sales to both marketing and sales.

LTV to CAC ratios are incredibly high in many B2B companies. Yet the same companies hold back on ramping up marketing spend.

If your LTV:CAC ratio is well above 3 (in many companies this number is north of 10) and your Payback Period is below 12 months, ramping up sales and marketing spend aggressively can create a tremendous amount of enterprise value.

Why hold back any spend when you'll recover your investment in less than a year and generate returns for 10+ years?

If your break-even point on marketing spend is at the 18-24 month mark and your LTV:CAC ratio is still above 10, then it's time to optimize and analyze what's working and where spend is being wasted. Once optimized, scale aggressively again.

If LTV:CAC is below 3 and Payback Period is north of 12 months, it's time to go back to product and customer feedback before you think about investing more into acquisition.

In honour of Tony Hsieh, who inspired me with his commitment to building a phenomenal culture, delivering exceptional customer experiences, and growing his local community with his time and resources.

Put servicing people at the heart of everything you do and you'll inevitably build something great.

Also, highly recommend you reading Delivering Happiness -- one of the best books on service ever written.

Your Price Point and Total Addressable Market play a huge role in how you Go-To-Market.

Large TAM, low price --> Take a 1 to Many approach, drive volume and focus on efficiency. Inbound should be at the core.

Small TAM, high price --> Be super customized and personalized in your marketing. ABM should be at the core.

Somewhere in between --> Mix both approaches for a happy medium.

This is why starting with your company's specifics is important. Don't just buy an ABM solution because you watched a video from a martech vendor.

Truly understand your business and figure out which approach best fits your reality.

Most companies focus on creating content for the funnel. This includes:

1. Awareness content to bring in more leads
2. Nurture content to turn more leads into MQLs or MQLs into SQLs.
3. Sales enablement content to close more MQLs

Very few companies focus on Authority content -- this is content that transcends the sales funnel. It has no interest in selling anything.

Its primary purpose is to serve the audience and market by giving them solutions to pain they are experiencing.

Authority content is not a "10 ways to do X" article. It is not a "Buyers guide for Y".

It is true thought leadership content that builds a connection with the audience because they can see how much you understand them.

Types of content that create this effect:

• Podcasts
• Educational videos
• Books
• Speaking

It's the hardest kind of content to create because the barrier to entry is deep expertise and empathy.

The companies that succeed at creating this content end up greasing all stages of the funnel any...

There is a direct correlation between how much you invest in content, your brand value and how much demand you create.

More content where you give value to your audience / ICP / TAM leads to more brand value being created with that audience / ICP / TAM which leads to more demand gen overall because more people search for your brand or choose your brand over others.

Show me company with a great demand gen engine and I guarantee the company has a significant content engine as well.

Simple concept, yet grossly underestimated by many companies.

Every business should aspire to be in the top left quadrant -- where Price is higher but Service Load is lower. This is when margins are the highest and can be reinvested into building an even better product and business.

This is why some of the biggest companies in the world are B2SMB SaaS companies. Shopify, Hubspot and Atlassian all fit in that quadrant.

It is also why Product-Led Growth companies with price points around $1K eventually end up trying to move upmarket and why B2B Enterprise companies try to lower their service load with better software that needs less customizations.

It is where the most value is created for the customer the fastest. There is more automation, better self-service, more transparency, better outcomes, better experience.

Win-win.