B2B SaaS companies have been running the same lead generation marketing strategy for over a decade now—create a gated piece of content, collect low intent leads, and have your sales team follow up. This practice may have been necessary 10 years ago, but with the advancement in how buyers consume content and increasingly tight privacy laws, smart marketing teams are challenging the status quo and transitioning to more modern practices. In this episode, Chris dives into how Refine Labs has been ab...
Feb 20, 2022•43 min
The goal of B2B paid social ads should be to communicate a single idea to your audience, not to move them from "who is this company" to demo. Companies waste millions of dollars every year by spending their budget on ads that fail to produce meaningful results because they don't tell the right story. In this episode, Chris gets super tactical on how to run effective campaigns that play to your greater strategy of telling your brand story, including: How to craft your messaging Tips for setting u...
Feb 18, 2022•53 min
Capturing demand works hand in hand with generating demand, but it’s something that companies often overlook. When you’ve created enough demand that a customer is ready to buy, that buying process needs the best experience possible if you want them to move to closed-won. In this episode, Chris goes back to basics and talks about what to do after you've generated enough demand to move a prospect into your pipeline.
Feb 16, 2022•1 hr 30 min
In this episode, we pulled together some of the greatest hits of our talks on The Attribution Mirage. We start with an early episode of Demand Gen Live where we began experimenting with required open text fields comparing where customers said they found us and what software was telling us. After the explanation of the initial experiment and results, we skip forward several months where we share 20 real-life examples comparing software vs self-reported attribution. Finally, we end the episode by ...
Feb 13, 2022•24 min
Most B2B companies know how to do sales. Most of them do not, however, know how to run a modern marketing strategy designed for creating demand, capturing demand, and funnel optimization. Companies are still running the same go-to-market strategy they were running in 2011 by pumping up MQLs and other vanity metrics that require more sales headcount with less results. In this episode, Chris talks through the strategy Refine Labs uses to help companies fix their go-to-market plan, starting with ma...
Feb 11, 2022•1 hr 12 min
Winning in dark social requires a well-executed content strategy. Part of executing a content strategy successfully means that it's scalable. But scaling content efficiently is something that most companies fail to do. That's where stacking growth comes into play. It's at the foundation of dark social because it's what allows you to distribute your content across multiple platforms with minimal additional effort. In this episode, Chris outlines how we win on dark social by stacking growth intern...
Feb 09, 2022•1 hr 19 min
Events in 2022 play a totally different role than they did even a few years ago. Gone are the days of having to spend huge chunks of your marketing budget to build trade show booths that generate little return and sponsoring overpriced industry events. Your audience is digital and your event strategy needs to be aligned closely with your digital goals. In this episode, Chris talks about how you can use in-person micro-events to create amazing experiences, all while fueling your larger digital gr...
Feb 06, 2022•19 min
The term demand gen gets thrown around a lot. A lot of companies claim to be running demand gen programs, but when you take a deeper look it’s still a traditional lead gen program. In this episode, Chris does a deep dive on what is demand gen, what is lead gen, how do they differ, and how the strategy has to change to run a true demand gen model.
Feb 04, 2022•53 min
Should SDRs report to marketing or sales? This is an age-old debate. But it's asking the wrong question. It doesn't matter which team the SDR reports to if they're doing the same, low-efficiency role. The real question is what is the future job function of the SDR and does that new functionality align with marketing or sales? In this episode, Chris talks about how he believes the role will evolve over the next several years to be more efficient and produce better results.
Feb 02, 2022•1 hr 27 min
How do you attract top talent to work for you? Is organic social a waste of time in B2B? What's the best way to leverage a company LinkedIn account? Chris is answering all these questions (and more) in this grab bag of marketing and business questions we sourced from Quora and Reddit.
Jan 30, 2022•22 min
Everybody loves metrics. They let us know when we're doing good and when we need to do better. The problem is, marketing teams have adopted certain metrics as their KPIs that don't do either one of those things. In fact, more often than not, when we drive those metrics we generally make our entire revenue team less efficient. In this episode, Chris talks about the 5 metrics that you should be aligning your revenue teams around in order to make the most efficient use of your sales and marketing d...
Jan 28, 2022•39 min
It's that time of year for a lot of companies, annual planning. The time when everyone is excited about the possibilities that the new year brings. But along with that excitement, comes high expectations—many times unrealistic. Those expectations often drive decisions that end up falling short of where you want to be at quarter-end. In this episode, Chris talks about the 5 biggest mistakes that he sees companies making when they address annual planning and how they should address them now....
Jan 26, 2022•1 hr 17 min
It’s not uncommon for marketers and business leaders to hear the methodologies we talk about at Refine Labs and immediately dismiss them as “ineffective”, “clickbait”, or a number of other things. But the reality is, companies only fail to succeed with our methodologies when they continue to measure marketing with the same vanity metrics that have been pushed by MarTech vendors since 2010. When you stop measuring success by the quantity of MQLs and start measuring the quality of the leads that c...
Jan 22, 2022•21 min
Leveling up a marketing strategy that performs starts with looking at what isn't working currently. A lot of companies want to add, add, add; but the current isn't optimized to work yet. Before you decide to add an advocacy program on LinkedIn, or any other organic marketing strategy, go back into where you are spending your money and see where it can be cut or reallocated to work better. In this episode, Chris talks about how to evaluate what's working, what isn't, and how to move forward....
Jan 19, 2022•52 min
A few weeks ago we asked, "If you could wave a magic wand and get the answer to any marketing question right now, what would you ask?" We received a lot of great questions that led to some really good conversations. So...We did it again. But this time we're switching it up a bit. Refine Labs has been growing exponentially ever since the beginning. - We're onboarding some of the best B2B brands out there weekly - The culture is amazing (employee quote) - And new employees are joining at a record ...
Jan 16, 2022•19 min
The days of marketers shoveling as many leads as possible to sales are long gone. The old rules that applied before social media, communities, and third-party content distribution platforms were mature no longer apply. You can't expect a piece of software to be able to give you an accurate map of the buyer journey anymore, because the buyer's journey is happening in places that be tracked by software. But shifting from lead gen to demand gen comes with a lot of questions—What is the strategy beh...
Jan 14, 2022•1 hr 5 min
Imagine knowing the biggest trends in the industry before they happened. Imagine the advantage you would have over the competition. Every year we make predictions on what the biggest changes in B2B marketing will be and we've got a pretty good track record. But before we do that, we're going back to January 2021 to see which of last year's predictions came true. PLUS: If you tuned in last week, we told you we were going to read 20 self-reported attribution results and the corresponding software ...
Jan 12, 2022•1 hr 10 min
Creating demand is not sharing a link to your ebook on LinkedIn. Capturing demand is not collecting an email after teasing a prospect just enough to get them to fork it over. Demand creation is showing up every day to provide valuable content to your industry with no strings attached. Your goal is to create so much demand for your product that the prospect comes to you and gives you their contact info with the expectation that you will call them. Unfortunately, most companies opt to skip the dem...
Jan 09, 2022•53 min
For the past three years, Chris and Gaetano have gotten together to discuss the current state of demand generation. It's back for 2022 and in this episode, they are weighing in on the strategies and tactics to help your marketing skyrocket and which ones have a better chance of imploding. Whether you're a fast-paced start-up or an established enterprise brand, this is an episode you don't want to miss.
Jan 07, 2022•53 min
Tis the season for resolutions. And if you're looking to get that promotion or seriously level up your marketing in 2022, this episode is a must-listen. We're talking about the 5 tenets (or rules, or pillars, or whatever you want to call it) that every B2B marketing team needs to follow to be successful this year. These are undeniable truths. Listen, implement, and crush your 2022 marketing resolutions. Speaking of resolutions, we made our own this year and that was to bring you a new podcast ho...
Jan 05, 2022•1 hr 27 min
If you had a magic wand that could answer any marketing question you have right now, what would you ask? That's what we asked on the Refine Labs LinkedIn page last week. And while we don't have a magic wand, we do get access to a whole lot of B2B marketing insights in the work that we do. So, in this episode, we're setting out to answer LinkedIn's toughest marketing questions, asked directly from marketers like you.
Jan 02, 2022•22 min
The major difference in between B2B and B2C marketing is that in B2C marketing owns the buyer journey. There is no sales team to close deals and for that reason, marketing has to create content that gets the buyer from initial view to check out. As a B2B marketer, it's time to start thinking more like B2C. When you do, you will start shifting your entire strategy. You'll no longer measure your efforts on the volume of leads you can generate for sales, but the quality and ease that sales have in ...
Dec 29, 2021•56 min
Refine Labs is widely known throughout the B2B SaaS space as being an innovator. At this point, most people know our views on current marketing "best practices". What people don't know (and what we get asked often) is about the origins of Refine Labs. How were the strategies we implement first discovered? How are we consistently attracting top talent? How did we go about building one of the best company cultures out there (if we don't say so ourselves)? In this episode, Megan sits down with Chri...
Dec 26, 2021•1 hr 29 min
Investing in a marketing strategy that reflects what customers actually want from your marketing team is playing the long game. Too many marketing teams are incentivized to play the short game by quickly capturing contact information from people who aren't ready to buy. Instead, you need to put a plan in place to incentivize your team to help you build a long-term demand engine, willingly. In this episode, Chris talks about marketing strategy, how he built a culture that rewards employees for do...
Dec 24, 2021•22 min
If you’re looking at your year-end ad effectiveness right now and coming to the conclusion that LinkedIn isn’t right for you, consider this. There are two reasons why it doesn't work. 1) You are witnessing the attribution mirage. If you are seeing LinkedIn engagement grow, people are sharing, commenting, showing up to events, etc. LinkedIn is working. The problem isn't the platform, it's that attribution software doesn't track its effectiveness unless someone clicks a link to come to your homepa...
Dec 22, 2021•1 hr 8 min
Most companies have a marketing team in place to execute a winning marketing strategy. If marketing isn't working it's probably not the team. It's more likely the strategy that has been implemented. And it's not your fault. Martech vendors and analyst firms have been dishing out the Kool-Aid for the past 10 years. The problem is, we need a strategy for 2022, not 2012. In this episode, Chris outlines the path to getting unstuck from outdated strategies, how to create a new strategy with customers...
Dec 17, 2021•53 min
There is a huge problem in how companies are approaching content creation and distribution right now. The ratio of marketing dollars spent on creation vs distribution is killing campaign effectiveness. Marketing teams are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars every month to distribute terrible content that nobody wants to see. In this episode, Chris talks about a better way to think about your content creation and distribution budget going into 2022 (and it may surprise you). We're also talk...
Dec 15, 2021•1 hr 31 min
A lot of marketers spend their entire career in the same industry. Not because they want to, but because it’s where they've gained experience and contacts. But there’s a secret weapon that anyone can use to not only cross industries, but help you dominate in your current industry. In this episode, Chris talks about the most important tool(s) he used in his career across several industries to create demand and win big with marketing.
Dec 12, 2021•29 min
Technology has trained us to think that everything can be perfectly measured and tied back to revenue. But the reality is, in so many cases it can't. And for that reason, not every metric needs, or should be, attached to revenue. Now, that doesn't mean they're not meaningful or contribute to revenue down the line, it's just not the most appropriate way to measure its effectiveness. In this episode, Chris dives into the revenue question, as well as addresses how executives can get better results ...
Dec 10, 2021•43 min
Creating content is easy. Creating good content that drives results, that's hard. But with the right framework in place, it doesn't have to be. In this episode, Chris breaks down the 5-step framework we use at Refine Labs to create a content system that allows us to grow rapidly with zero outbound sales effort.
Dec 08, 2021•1 hr 35 min
