Marketing teams often mistake demand programs for campaign strategy. A true campaign strategy is a higher-level "canvas" that orchestrates all efforts—reputation, demand creation, and enablement—against a specific audience, ensuring a consistent customer experience rather than disjointed tactical execution.
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A more effective mental model than PLG vs. SLG is analyzing which activities create new demand versus which ones harvest existing demand. Both sales and product can serve either function. Creating demand is always the harder, more critical challenge for any revenue engine.
ABM often fails because it's treated as a siloed marketing initiative. To be effective, it must be an "Account-Based Experience" (ABX) where marketing, sales, and operations are fully integrated to create a seamless, unified journey for the entire target account.
Most businesses mistakenly focus their marketing strategy solely on growth (lead generation). A complete strategy must also encompass brand strategy (messaging, positioning) and customer experience strategy (retention, referrals) to create a sustainable system.
Instead of siloing brand and demand, view them as a unified function on a spectrum. The only difference is the scale of the audience, from mass market (brand) to a targeted market (demand). This reframes the relationship and encourages integrated thinking rather than creating separate camps.
Before defining segments or campaigns, leadership must align on a "North Star": the desired market position, revenue goals, and any reputational gaps. This high-level agreement prevents downstream misalignment and ensures all functions are working toward the same concrete business outcomes.
The conflict between brand building and demand generation is unproductive. The most effective approach treats them as a single, integrated outreach strategy. This ensures consistent, relevant messaging that builds trust over the long term, preventing user drop-off from disjointed experiences.
Effective demand generation is a barbell, requiring strong top-of-funnel brand investment to create awareness and great bottom-of-funnel product marketing to convert interest. Viewing performance marketing as a standalone function and funding it in isolation is like "throwing money at a problem but not solving it."
Don't judge channels like Facebook Ads or direct mail in isolation. True marketing success comes from a 'marketing mix' where multiple touchpoints—like yard signs, retargeting ads, and wrapped trucks—work together to create a compounding effect that builds brand recognition and momentum.
Instead of operating within the confines of a marketing department, marketers should adopt the mindset of the CEO. This means focusing on how to change the customer's mind to achieve the company's ultimate goals, rather than getting bogged down in departmental tactics. This approach leads to more influential and strategic work.
Many brands mistake individual blogs or videos for thought leadership. True strategic thought leadership is a long-term campaign built on a single, robust "big idea." It must be applied across the entire funnel—brand, demand gen, and sales enablement—not just treated as a top-of-funnel brand activity.