The Power of Full Funnel Marketing on Revenue Growth

“Full funnel marketing” isn’t just a buzzword — it’s a radical approach that can grow your revenue sustainably, keep customers happy, reduce retention, and positively transform your relationship with prospects. 

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This article will cover the basics of the full funnel marketing approach, the four demand actions that fuel the funnel, and what investing in full-funnel optimization can do for your business. 

What do we mean by “full funnel”? 

Full funnel means serving the buyer at all lifecycle stages of the funnel — from pre-brand awareness and engagement through to customer retention and growth. In other words, full-funnel means not neglecting one area or another just because:

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• It seems to be fine/working without effort/support
• It doesn’t seem necessary or needed
• Your other efforts in the funnel are doing fine without it

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While shaped like a funnel, the growth efforts you do — whether in marketing, in sales, in customer success, etc. — act more like a web of influence with full-funnel marketing. 

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Here are two examples of full-funnel marketing strategies:

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1. You engage deeper with your customers through advocacy programs and paid media marketing. This involves creating high-quality organic mid-funnel content and referral support.

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2. You gather both quantitative and qualitative data as a prospect converts to a customer. This helps you refine your top-of-funnel ICP understanding and targeting, identify key accounts to either pursue (with new customers) or grow (with existing customers) with high traction, and build more tailored post-purchase onboarding and education programs for greater retention.

The four demand engine actions that fuel the funnel

Demand generation and growth often gets the misconception that it’s just “capturing demand” for a company … aka, lead generation. But there’s a reason intelligent B2B brands evolved from the marketing focus of just “lead generation” to demand generation and overall funnel growth marketing — it’s so much more than just capturing leads.

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Demand generation breaks down into four core actions that support revenue growth across the funnel:

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1. Creating demand
2. Capturing demand
3. Accelerating demand
4. Growing demand

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Creating demand

Whether your category already exists or you’re building the category, creating awareness of the problem your market has is vital to selling a solution. 

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Capturing demand

This is the point at which you’ve garnered enough intrigue from your market for them to engage in a meaningful way to move that interest from “unknown” to “known.” In other words, you’ve captured some data that proves these captured prospects are interested. This could be through website traffic, making contact with a salesperson, or taking an action like joining your email list.

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Accelerating demand

This is when you invest in marketing to prospective leads and engaging with them. The aim is to deepen their connection to your brand and its ability to serve their needs and goals, converting a passive soft interest into a higher intent that could lead to a sale.

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Growing demand

Marketing isn’t done once you secure a sale! This step involves investing in things like post-purchase nurturing to onboard customers, advocacy programs, and key account identification for growth. 

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These stages come together to create this marketing and sales funnel:

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Why are all four stages required for success?

Because brands often neglect demand creation 

Without creating new demand, your audience's existing intent to buy/awareness is finite. You’ll hit the wall trying to capture interest and prospects out of a pool of buyers that is not being expanded on.

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The brand that creates demand wins. As your competition in the field grows, if you aren’t driving the in-market knowledge, education, and awareness around your market’s problem/solution, you will become one of many. As one of many, there is no loyalty or connective tissue between your brand and the needs of your buyer. Good luck trying to capture that unloyal buyer base.

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But just investing in thought leadership and creating demand isn’t the solution to your funnel and revenue growth alone. More robust demand capture and acceleration programs, in partnership with sales, are the biggest driver toward your new revenue goals. 

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The businesses that win with both high potential buyer capture and conversion to customers are the ones that invest in dynamic, personalized, and thoughtful experiences for those prospects across the first 2/3rds of the typical funnel.

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This means leveraging insights and data intelligently to make sure each touchpoint/engagement with that person is relevant and adds value to them. This engagement must align with the person’s demographics, primary pain points, and where they see value. 

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Because sales and marketing must be aligned

If every lead you get contact info on is shot over the fence to sales without any prioritizations, you’re not putting your customers first and likely losing potential sales because of it.

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Intelligently combining nurture programs, leveraging lead scoring mechanisms, and bridging the collaboration gap between marketing and sales initiatives can create a better buyer experience while also providing warmer, more qualified prospects that do go to sales.

Because post-purchase marketing is vital for customer retention 

For the longest time, the marketing funnel ended at conversion. Eventually, more and more people recognized that support for engaging and helping post-purchase adoption of the solution was critical to reducing customer churn.

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At Matter Made, we push our clients to think even more. A winning area for B2B business (especially SaaS) is when you push beyond your competitors by:

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1. Having little to no churn rate.
2. Having a high-growth customer rate.

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You can achieve these milestones by investing in key account identification and growth.

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But this, too, doesn’t happen in a silo. A full-funnel cohesion of experience, messaging, and customer-centricity in marketing efforts is essential. Marketing with your customer base is one of the most powerful revenue sources — whether that’s in high-quality referrals, key account expansion, advocacy programs, etc. Businesses with strong recurring revenue are those that have figured out how to not just nullify churn rate, but multiply account investment with their solution. 

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Note: Check out Matter Made’s case studies to see how Matter Made has maximized full funnel marketing tactics for clients, from helping to create that demand, to account-based marketing.

What investing in full-funnel optimization looks like

To give you an idea of what it might look like if you were weak in just one area of the funnel compared to competitors, here is a year-over-year look at three companies: 

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In the first month or so, the growth difference doesn’t seem like much. But when you pull out to one or two years, you can see that you and your competitors have a painful gap. In many cases, this gap can’t be overcome once that time has passed, and that’s where you see many B2B SaaS brands fall out of the market.

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Remember: these data points are only giving examples of weaknesses in one area of the funnel. Imagine if you only focused on mid-funnel demand capture and not investing in creation or growth?!

Three steps you can take now that you know the importance of full-funnel optimization

Step 1. Assess if you’re doing all four demand actions

This doesn’t need to be scientific, but step back to review if you’re doing all four actions to serve the full funnel. Grade your efforts using this scale:

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• Little to not at all
• Somewhat
• A good amount
• A lot

Step 2. Prioritize areas of the funnel you need to improve on

From what you may have identified, likely starting with any you marked as “little to not at all” or “somewhat,” order the priorities of the areas you need to focus on as a business.

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If you need to do more in multiple areas, you’ll find that you’ll probably prioritize top to bottom on the funnel. For example, if you are not doing much to accelerate or grow demand, you’ll want to prioritize accelerating marketing efforts over growing. 

Step 3. Identify how to fill those demand gaps

Do you have the internal resources to support where you’re underserving? Do you need to outsource?

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Work on mapping out what you have in skill or ability, and then where you should outsource. Some skills are super critical to have in-house — for example, your brand/content expert. Some skills can be outsourced with greater success — for example, demand generation programming. 

Master your full-funnel marketing

Investing in optimizing your full-funnel marketing will boost your revenue short-term and long-term. It’s a no-brainer if you’re chasing sustainable growth and customer satisfaction. 

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If tackling full funnel optimization for your company immediately leaves you unsure on where to start or overwhelmed by the effort and time/energy/resources required to do it, reach out to us here at Matter Made. We're made up of a team of fire-breathing funnel marketing experts that are deploying game-changing growth tactics on the daily for our clients.

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Let us do the same for you. 

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Monique Olan, Director of Demand Generation

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6 Essentials for Running a Paid Media Campaign for a SAAS Company

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As of 2021, people made 45.41 billion monthly searches on Google, 13.34 billion monthly searches on Youtube, and 11.74 billion monthly searches on Facebook. Social media is its own beast — there are currently 4.59 billion people using it. 

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Standing out online is tough in 2022. The competition is fierce, and viewers are fairly selective about the content they consume. 

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That's where paid media campaigns come in. Running one allows your SaaS business to stake a claim on a small corner of sites like Google, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, and more. 

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But running a paid media campaign isn't as simple as buying ad space and running a few ads thrown together in an afternoon. So, to help you take your SaaS media campaigns to the next level, this article will cover the six essentials you need.

1. Determining Your Purpose

"Why?" isn't just a philosophical question designed to help you find meaning in an uncertain world. Knowing what you aim to achieve and why you want to achieve it is vital for developing a strong paid media campaign strategy. Think of it this way: how are you supposed to map out the path to your destination if you don't know where it is?

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We recommend considering the big picture and choosing one goal you'd like to achieve with your media campaign. Here are some suggestions to get you thinking:

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Awareness-based goals: 

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• Increase brand awareness
• Reach a new target market 
• Increase paid website traffic 

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Conversion-based goals: 

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• Increase sales 
• Improve Marketing Return on Investment (MROI)
• Increase customer retention

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Now, break this big goal into several smaller objectives. Objectives are milestones that help you know when you're on track to reach your goal. The best objectives are SMART ones, meaning they are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. 

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You can use this template to create a SMART objective: "by (time), we will increase (metric) by (x) using (strategies)." For example: "by the end of November, we will increase free trial sign-ups by 15% using Paid-Per-Click (PPC) Facebook ads."

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Aim for 2-4 objectives as a general rule. Too many, and you'll find it hard to focus on them. Too few, and they won't show your progress towards your goal accurately. 

2. Understanding your ICP

Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) is a detailed description of the traits of your dream customer. Your ICP covers:

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• Firmographic and demographic attributes. Firmographic traits include a business's industry, size, location, structure, and performance. Demographic traits include an individual's gender, profession, income, age, and family structure. 
• Environmental attributes. These include the economic, technological, and social forces influencing your ideal customer's purchasing decisions.
• Behavioral attributes. This is how the lead behaves on your website, with salespeople, and on social media, and how the lead shows interest in your offerings. 

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Here's a sample template from PropellerCRM to give you an idea of how these attributes come together in an ICP:

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It's worth investing time and funds into conducting market research with customers to develop your ICP. You want to really understand them — their pain points, motivations, challenges, goals, and what influences their purchasing decisions. 

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Then, you should catalog your findings in an ICP template that your whole marketing team can access. Giving everyone access will ensure your customers stay top of mind for every marketing project.

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When you design your paid media campaign, use your ICP to answer questions like:

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• How will the ideal customer react to this ad?
• Does this ad touch on an ideal customer's pain points or motivations?
• What could we change about this ad to better attract ideal customers?

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That should keep you on track. 

3. Reaching your ideal customers

Now, you know who your ideal customers are. But what platforms do they use? After all, if your ideal customers don't use TikTok, you won't have any success running TikTok ads!

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Ask your customers which platforms they use and try to understand how they use them. What content do they regularly engage with? What types of conversations do they have with others? What content niches are they interested in? These are all crucial things to know. 

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More generally, we see certain audience trends on social media platforms. According to data from GWI, the three most common reasons people use social media is to keep in touch with loved ones, fill spare time, and read news stories. 

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Here are the favored social media platforms of females globally:

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• Age 16-24: Instagram (24.2% use it)
• Age 25-34: Instagram (18.2% use it)
• Age 35-44: WhatsApp (15.7% use it)
• Age 45-54: WhatsApp (17.6% use it)
• Age 55-64:  WhatsApp (21.0% use it)

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Here are the favored social media platforms of males globally:

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• Age 16-24: Instagram (22.8% use it)
• Age 25-34: Facebook (16.4% use it)
• Age 35-44: Facebook (18.0% use it)
• Age 45-54: WhatsApp (19.3% use it)
• Age 55-64: WhatsApp (22.5% use it)

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And here is what people like to do on each platform:

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4. Generating Qualified Leads 

Keeping your ideal customers top of mind is one thing, but actually reaching them is another. 

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SaaS marketers tend to think of paid ad campaigns at a high level. They think about the message, success metrics, overall strategy, and the work that went into creating an ad. Customers and leads don't view ads in the same way. Things like the background color, the phrasing of the CTA, or how the person in the ad is smiling tend to attract their attention. 

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Thinking like a SaaS marketer isn't a bad thing. But try to see your ads from a customer's perspective as well. Consider these elements:

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• Tone. Is it friendly, conversational, fun, sassy, professional, formal, etc.? 
• Colors. Is your ad bright, dull, overwhelming, underwhelming, etc. Are the colors complimentary? Do you use warm or cool colors? 
• The Call To Action (CTA). Are you using soft selling or hard selling? 
• Messaging. Does your ad have a double meaning? Is the message clear? Are there any implications? 
• Imagery. What tone does the imagery portray? How will viewers feel when they view the images?
• Creativity. Is your ad unique? What is striking or innovative about it?

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Aside from the contents of your ad itself, you should also consider these two elements:

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1. The type of ad. Video, in-feed, sponsored influencer post, text-based, paid search results, etc. 
2. On-screen placement. Where does it appear on the viewer's screen — in the center, on the side, on the bottom, etc.?

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Mastering ad types and ad placement will take time. You might want to run some A/B tests to see what your audience reacts best to. 

5. Refining & Consistently Conjuring Lead Generation

This essential activity — monitoring your campaign — must be performed periodically. We recommend doing a daily, weekly, and monthly check-in. 

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Daily, you should look for major deviations in how people respond to your ads. This will help you catch any errors and act quickly to rectify them. 

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Weekly, you should look at how your progress compares to previous weeks. Sudden drops in your metrics can indicate that your strategy isn't working, and you need to try a fresh approach. 

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Monthly, you should look for industry trends that won't be fully visible daily or weekly. Things like a drop in results around certain events or a spike in results around the launch of a product. 

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We recommend you use these metrics to evaluate your paid ad campaigns:

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• Impressions. How many people have seen your ad. 
• Clicks. How many people clicked the ad.
• Impressions vs. clicks (also called your "Click-Through Rate" or "CTR"). What percentage of people click your ads after viewing them.
• Cost Per Click (CPC). How much each click costs.
• Cost Per Acquisition (CPA). How much each sale costs.
• Return on Advertising Spend (ROAS). Your total campaign cost subtracted from your total campaign revenue. 

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Other metrics like your relevancy score on Facebook and your quality score on Google Adwords can measure how relevant your ads are to your target audience. 

6. Reevaluation of SAAS Marketing Funnel

Finally, you need to map out your sales funnel so you know how customers are getting from viewing your ad to finally purchasing your offering. 

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Your sales funnel plays a major role in paid advertising campaigns, informing things like the pages you link in CTAs, what points you touch on to get customers' attention, and what direction you push ad leads in. With over 17,000 SaaS businesses in the U.S. and 2,000 SaaS businesses in the U.K alone, you really want to be on top of these things so you can stand out. 

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SaaS sales funnels are working documents. You'll need to continuously update your sales funnel so you stay up to date with any shifts in customer behavior, internal shifts in your marketing, or external shifts in the market. An out-of-date sales funnel threatens the success of your marketing — you'd be basing today's ad on last year's facts. 

Conclusion

The SaaS industry is expected to grow at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 25.89% from 2022 to 2028. Naturally, the competition between SaaS brands is fierce, and you need to be on top of your marketing if you want to stand out. 

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Paid media campaigns can help you reach your marketing goals. And to master them, you need these six things:

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1. A purpose
2. An understanding of your ICP
3. A way to reach your ideal customers
4. Ads that generate quality leads
5. Daily, weekly, and monthly metric monitoring sessions
6. Continuous re-evaluation of your sales funnel 

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Kat Bowen, Performance Marketing Manager

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How To Build a PLG Funnel Your Sales Team Can Use

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Is your sales team still using traditional selling strategies? Are they chasing cold leads in hopes of closing a sale before prospects experience the value of your product? 

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A sales-first approach is how companies focus on Marketing-Qualified Leads (MQLs). But research shows that only 2% of MQLs convert to paying users. 

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Traditional outreach isn’t the best use of your team’s time. It’s inefficient, expensive, results in dismal closing rates, and demotivates your reps. On top of this, most prospects aren’t ready to speak to sales about your product since they haven’t even tried it yet. 

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Instead, the solution is to create a Product-Led Growth (PLG) funnel where sales reps target Product-Qualified Leads (PQLs) — leads that convert up to 15x better than MQLs.

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You'll learn how to build a PQL funnel in this article. 

Data infrastructure: key for tracking PQLs at scale

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To identify your PQLs and provide qualified leads to your sales team, you need to capture relevant data and define what a PQL is for your company. 

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First comes your tech stack. You’ll need: 

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• Software to capture and store product usage data.
• A CRM for PQL management and analysis. 
• Tools for recording and understanding product interactions. 

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These are the absolute basics, but there are many other platforms you can use to improve your PLG processes:

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When your data stack is ready, it’s time to define your PQL criteria. Most companies define PQLs based on firmographics and usage data, but adding traditional MQL scoring is possible if you want to refine your funnel and optimize your product marketing. 

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Your PQL scoring and criteria will be unique to your product, but they’ll fall under three major categories: 

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• Customer fit. Here, you’ll analyze a user’s firmographics against your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). Metrics include their industry, location, company size, and role.

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• Product usage. Usage is every action (or lack of action) a user takes. Actions can signal how much value a user is getting. Metrics include usage frequency, features accessed, and usage velocity. Since product usage data is usually very high volume, select specific key conversion indicators and group your data accordingly. You can build out product ‘scores’ similar to behavioral scoring with your more traditional marketing activities. Make sure to regularly test accuracy of your defined ‘high intent’ product usage behavior to increase conversion. 

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• Quota usage. This can be anything from an increase of number of seats or users by organization to getting close to a limit on API calls or data storage. Driving continued product usage and building triggers for sales teams when limited quota is near can result in shorter deal cycles on average.

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• Buying intent. Intent is the final piece and signals that a user is ready to buy. Metrics include pricing page visits, interactions with Bottom Of The Funnel (BOFU) content, and quickly approaching usage limits. 

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You want to be strict with your PQL criteria rather than have sales waste their time with the "spaghetti at the wall" approach of cold outreach. You want your team to know what to address for a prospect to upgrade to a customer. 

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How to build a PLG funnel for your sales team

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A sales-centric PLG marketing funnel needs to highlight leads that are ready for interaction. 

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Here’s how: 

Step 1. Fix your mindset and define MQLs vs. PQLs for your business

For most companies, MQLs are the predominant lead type that sales reps receive. But with a PLG approach, you must focus on product-related interactions rather than marketing interactions.

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Examples of product-related interactions include: 

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• Invitations
• Message sent
• Projects started
• Data uploads
• Notification interactions

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It will depend on your product, but usage criteria always revolve around the main features users can access. Some marketing-centric criteria are still relevant for PQLs, though. For example, viewing a pricing page, help docs, or content related to your product — especially if viewed after a user signs up. 

Step 2. Merge your PQLs and MQLs into a comprehensive account view

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Next, you’ll need somewhere to view the status of your leads. Not everyone will immediately become a PQL, so it’s still crucial to highlight MQLs that may be ready for the next step. 

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Depending on your CRM, you may be able to view this data with some additional development, or you may need a different platform. Either way, the main information you’ll want to see includes: 

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• Whether the lead has engaged with your product
• Overall ratings for MQL, PQL, and firmographic criteria
• Specific criteria that a lead has met

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Merging your PQLs and MQLs into a rolled-up Account (PQA) view in your CRM gives your sales and marketing teams a comprehensive way to understand intent beyond the individual level. Stitching product usage intent signals with marketing behavior gives you the full picture. 

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Step 3. Assign PQLs to sales reps

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The final step is to have a smooth process for PQL assignment. If you have a small team, you can do this manually, but it’s a good idea to use automation to assign leads if you want your system to scale well.

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Alternatively, you can pre-assign leads to reps and set up notifications when a lead is ready for contact. 

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Whenever you assign a lead or it becomes ready for contact, you must provide your reps with insights about the prospect. This information should include: 

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• The features a user interacts with most
• The most active users and product champions for enterprise accounts
• The type of upgrade an account will most likely need (e.g., more seats or premium features)

What a PLG funnel looks like

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A PLG marketing funnel is much like the traditional sales funnel, except the product plays a significant role in moving prospects down the funnel. 

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Here's how a PLG approach works in a typical sales funnel: 

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• Awareness. You'll share content and score your leads through typical MQL criteria at this stage. 

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• Interest. Awareness and interest are relatively similar in that consuming content is a prospect's primary focus. But you can move prospects into the interest stage when they consume a certain amount or type of content. 

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• Consideration. A prospect reaches this stage when they've signed up for a trial or freemium version of your product. 

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• Intent. If users engage substantially with your product during a trial, they'll quickly progress to this stage. Once here, you can gauge intent through the features a prospect uses and product-related content they consume. If they meet your PQL criteria, you can move them to the next stage. 

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• Evaluation. Once a user meets your PQL and firmographic criteria, you can pass them to your sales team. Now armed with product usage information, your rep's job is to find the perfect solution for the account and show how upgrading will benefit their business. 

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• Purchase and post-sale. The power of a PLG marketing funnel doesn't end once a user becomes a paying customer. You can assess product use and recommend extra features or cross-sell complementary products that are helpful to your customers. 

The four different PLG sales funnels

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While most PLG sales funnels follow the general structure above, there are differences in when and how reps interact with prospects. There are generally four different approaches:

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• The self-serve funnel. Self-serve funnels give full autonomy to users. Users control how and when they move down the funnel while engaging with the product and your company's marketing. 

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• The sales-assisted funnel. This funnel is the simplest way for PLG companies to improve revenue. You bring users into the funnel with content and free trials, monitor their product usage, and then send in a rep to get the prospect over the line if they hit your PQL and firmographic criteria. 

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• The bottom-up funnel. This funnel is for active enterprise accounts (PQAs), so you'll need to analyze product usage for many users before moving an account down the funnel. 

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• The ABM funnel. ABM funnels also focus on enterprise accounts, except reps play a bigger role in moving accounts down the funnel. The main difference is that you'll need a concrete plan for educating stakeholders and convincing them to try your product. 

How to use product signals to build outreach for SDRs, nurture programs, and in-app campaigns 

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Product signals are vital for moving users down your PLG funnel. You can also use them for retargeting and nurturing campaigns when you feel a prospect is losing interest or as signals for SDRs to contact a customer. 

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You can trigger outreach tasks for SDRs using certain product signals. For example: 

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• When customers are trying to use features that aren't available.
• When active customers reach the end of a free trial.
• When users reach freemium account limits. 

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Other signals can trigger automated lead nurturing. For example:

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• Upon signing up, you target users with content relevant to their firmographics — for example, "X ways enterprise users can make the most out of product XYZ."

• You run re-engagement campaigns for prospects who haven't used your product for x number of days.

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Finally, you can target other signals with in-app prompts. For example: 

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• You can prompt users to schedule a call with an SDR if they try to access a premium feature. 

• You can notify inactive users that they're not making the most of the product and prompt them to complete a task. 

• You can offer feature suggestions based on previous product usage. 

What a PLG funnel can do for your sales team

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A PLG funnel streamlines the sales process for your team. It also highlights the most engaged prospects to target, leading to increased conversions and faster sales cycles. So sales reps can spend more time selling and problem-solving rather than educating prospects. 

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Want to make the switch to product-led growth but don't have the time to implement it? 

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At Matter Made, we help B2B tech companies reach unicorn status through tailored product-led growth and RevOps programs.

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Join Dropbox, Loom, and our other success stories by scheduling a chat with us today!

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Ren Fischer, Director of Demand Generation

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Marketing Operations (MOPs) can be a person, department, or agency responsible for planning and managing marketing campaigns and optimizing them to boost revenue and company performance. 

MOPs handle activities like setting up new conversions, integrating with a new Customer Data Platform (CDP) or enrichment tool, overseeing paid media campaigns, etc. In SaaS enterprises and other major organizations, MOPs handle marketing analytics, funnel reporting, ensuring compliance with company goals, and allocating resources to optimize performance based on Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that are directly connected to revenue. 

MOPs concentrate on higher-level strategic tasks while marketers are in the trenches handling most of the tactical marketing work.

Here’s more detail on what MOPs do in 2022:

The Importance of Marketing Ops in a SaaS Company

Marketing teams have unprecedented access to data that helps them understand their target audiences, judge the effectiveness of individual advertisements, track campaign results, and calculate Marketing ROI (MROI). Marketers can also use past data to create campaigns and messages tailored to customer needs — an approach that's highly efficient.

MOPs' mission in a SaaS company is to:

• Optimize the returns on marketing data and technology investments
• Coordinate marketing efforts to boost revenue
• Guide the marketing team toward initiatives with the best potential ROI

MOPs are important because they handle:

Investments and Integrations in MarTech

A new MarTech tool is born every five seconds, or at least it seems that way in 2022. With more options to choose from than ever before, marketing teams evaluate tools based on several factors: 

• Does it integrate with my current CRM?
• Does it integrate with my product? 
• How steep is this tool's learning curve? 
• How long will it take until this tool becomes an asset? 

MOPs help answer these questions and make the new fields and connections necessary to fold new tools into the tech stack happen without disrupting current processes. 

Planning Key Results and Projects

Data-driven insights help MOPs guide marketing initiatives and campaigns that match the company's strategic goals. These insights also help MOPs design holistic, high-level strategies, as they reflect the latest data on consumer behaviors and preferences. 

Process Optimization  

MOPs are generally responsible for managing and optimizing marketing-related procedures. This optimization involves tinkering with marketing and sales processes, adopting lead-scoring and other activities to monitor lead quality, RevOps, simplifying reporting and other feedback systems, and building automations where appropriate. 

Reporting and Data Enrichment

MOPs manage marketing data, report the outcomes of campaigns and initiatives, and provide data-driven insights to boost revenue and inform strategic plans for the future. 

MOPs may also enrich data by combining information from many sources to provide better insights about target groups, prospects, clients, and the overall effectiveness of marketing initiatives. 

The Direction of Marketing Activities in 2022

As marketing tech stacks become increasingly complicated, marketing operations teams go from a luxury to a necessity. 

Without MOPs, an organization can burn hours, dollars, and sanity trying to achieve hyper-growth goals at a snail’s pace. Knowing that your ad spend is tied to reliable conversions, automating the booking experience for your site’s demo requesters, routing leads to the sales team in real-time, etc., helps you to work smarter and hit bigger goals.

MOPs matter for marketing in 2022. 

If you’d like to take your marketing to the next level, contact Matter Made and ask what we can do for your business.

There's no question that a successful marketing campaign requires careful planning and organization. But all too often, the day-to-day tasks of executing a marketing plan fall onto the marketing team itself. Unfortunately, this can be a recipe for disaster since it's difficult for one or even two people to do everything themselves. 

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That's where a marketing project manager comes in. A good project manager can take the weight off your shoulders, ensuring that your campaigns are planned and executed smoothly and on time.

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This article will cover what a marketing project manager is, what they do, and how they can take your marketing efforts to the next level. 

What is a marketing project manager?

In any organization, big or small, there are always projects underway. And for these projects to be successful, someone must manage them appropriately. That's where a marketing project manager comes in. A marketing project manager is responsible for planning, executing, and delivering marketing projects. 

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A marketing project manager takes on tasks like developing project plans and timelines and coordinating with different teams and stakeholders. 

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A marketing project manager wears many hats and plays a vital role in ensuring that projects are completed on time and within budget. Depending on your team, your marketing project manager might handle everything from campaign planning to pressing "publish" on social media posts. Nothing under the "marketing" umbrella is out of scope for a marketing project manager.

The importance of a marketing project manager

A marketing project manager is a crucial player on any marketing team. They ensure that marketing projects are completed on time, within budget, and to the client's satisfaction.

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A marketing project manager is, as you might imagine, an expert in project management. They can also lead your team through the different phases of a project:

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• Initiation. In the initiation phase, the project manager works with the client  and the team to define the scope and objectives of the project. 

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• Planning. Project managers develop a detailed action plan during the planning phase. This action plan includes timelines, budgets, and resources. 

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• Execution. The execution phase is when the actual work of the project is completed. 

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• Monitoring. The monitoring phase is when the project manager checks in on your team's progress and makes sure that everything is on track. 

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• Project close. Finally, in the close phase, the project manager ties up loose ends and ensures the client is happy with the final product. 

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A successful marketing project manager can also address any problems, issues, or challenges that arise during a project. 

Key responsibilities of a project manager on a marketing team

A project manager on a marketing team is responsible for coordinating the team's efforts and ensuring that all deadlines are met. In addition, the project manager may be responsible for creating and presenting marketing plans to clients or upper management. Other key responsibilities include budgeting and forecasting, as well as overseeing the implementation of marketing campaigns. 

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To succeed in this role, a project manager must communicate effectively with clients and team members and have strong organizational and time management skills. Above all else, they must be able to adapt to changes quickly and efficiently to keep the project on track.

What are some typical projects a marketing project manager may be in charge of?

A marketing project manager is responsible for planning, executing, and delivering marketing initiatives. Their workday may include tasks like developing and managing budgets, scheduling and conducting market research, overseeing the creation of marketing materials, coordinating promotional activities, and measuring the effectiveness of marketing campaigns. 

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In addition to these day-to-day responsibilities, a marketing project manager may also be responsible for developing long-term strategies and planning for new product launches or brand awareness initiatives. Some marketing project managers also work with clients. 

What skills or tools does a marketing project manager need to be successful?

Successful marketing project managers are skilled multitaskers who can juggle multiple projects while keeping an eye on the details. They must possess strong communication and organizational skills to keep everyone on the team informed and on track. 

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Additionally, they need to understand various marketing channels to ensure that each campaign is executed correctly. These channels range from social media to email marketing to traditional media channels like newspapers and radio.

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Finally, to be successful, a marketing project manager must be an effective leader who can motivate and inspire others to reach their full potential. 

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Typical skills you would expect to see in a marketing project manager job listing include:

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• The ability to analyze marketing data
• Time management
• Research 
• Leadership
• Task delegation
• The ability to give feedback
• Client management 
• Detail orientation 

Conclusion 

A dedicated project manager is an essential part of any marketing team. They ensure that projects are completed on time and within budget. They also play a critical role in communicating with stakeholders and ensuring that all team members work towards the same goal. 

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To be successful, a marketing project manager needs strong communication skills, organizational skills, and experience with various marketing tools. 

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If you'd like to learn more about marketing so you can become a marketing project manager yourself, check out our free resources. They'll put you on the right path right away. 

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Jennay Wangen, Project Manager

What is Revenue Operations?

The holistic approach of Revenue Operations is to eliminate silos within organizations to improve their efficiency, make the most of their systems, and ultimately enable their sales teams to scale.

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A revenue operations (RevOps) team can help a company design and implement a variety of things for a business including strategic services, campaign operations, as well as full migrations plus system implementations. RevOps seamlessly marries marketing and sales ops to operationalize the funnel by giving businesses a single source of truth and optimizing processes to continue the ability to scale. For those of you using HubSpot, start here to see the automations you need to fully empower your RevOps processes.

The 3 HubSpot Automations You Need

Notify your sales team of incoming prospects

Keeping your sales team notified of inbound leads is crucial when it comes to funneling prospects into your buyer's journey. By setting up a simple HubSpot workflow to notify your sales team of form submissions, you reduce the risk of letting leads leak out of your funnel. 

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Plus, if your company utilizes an internal messaging system (for example Slack), HubSpot has tons of integrations to set up additional notification channels. Check out this example below:

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1. Above: the workflow triggers when a prospect fills out a form. You can specify by form or by page to further segment your form fills to the proper pipelines.
2. After this form-fill action, you have the ability to set up an internal email notification to notify the proper contacts of these inbound prospects.
3. If your firm has a messaging platform such as Slack, HubSpot hosts the capability to push notifications directly to your sales reps' DM’s, as well.
4. NOTE: HubSpot does a brilliant job of calling out errors or incomplete items too (as seen above in ‘changes needed’) which works as an extra set of QA
5. BONUS: You can pre-qualify leads before routing with a retroactive HubSpot lead scoring model

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Automatically create deals from qualified prospects

Using paid media as our next use case example, learn how you can use automation to auto-create deals for your sales team within specific pipelines. Ultimately, this reduces the need for your reps to manually input initial details.

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1. Above: the workflow triggers when a prospect fills out a paid media-specific form.
2. After this form-fill action, the workflow waits 5 minutes and then automatically creates a deal with the associated company within the paid pipeline.
3. From here, HubSpot reduces the effort of your sales ops and properly places leads into the correct pipelines.

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Use forms and workflows to route qualified leads

Continuing with our paid media example, this workflow shows how you can qualify leads to route them to the right point of contact within your organization. For example, a paid agency may qualify their prospects using a form field inquiring about their monthly spend. From there, they have the ability to route their prospects based on that form fill and get them to the right person to nurture the deal. Here’s an example of how this type of automation works:

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1. Above: the workflow triggers when a prospect fills out the paid media form and specifies their monthly paid spend.
2. After this action, HubSpot captures their spend data to tag them down the right pipe within this workflow.
3. In this example, depending on the spending threshold, the leads can be routed to the proper representative based on this scoring data.

Conclusion: 

Don’t waste precious revenue due to a leaky funnel. Instead, start looking through the eyes of RevOps on how you can implement and optimize your automation processes. By delicately balancing the addition of force and the removal of friction from your processes, you can fully enable your teams to grow efficiently. Stop missing out on the full potential of your automation, see how RevOps can help you patch your leaks!

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Adam Kaminski, HubSpot Specialist

In this conversation with VP of Growth Marketing at Terminus, Auseh Britt, talks about demand gen marketing strategies. Today, you’ll hear about the marketing organization at Terminus, traditional demand gen versus ABM, how Terminus prioritizes budgeting, strategic accounts, and broad market coverage, ABM marketing campaigns, pulling intent data for campaigns, how to rally everyone behind a strategy, and some of the common mistakes and misconceptions about ABM.

Starting her career in Civil Engineering, and working for the Department of Transportation, Auseh realized that she enjoyed the project management aspect of the industry. She soon pivoted to marketing roles at InterContinental Hotels, Teleflora, Business.com, Bloomberg, Questex, Logi Analytics, and Terminus. Auseh holds a BSc in Civil Engineering from the University of Florida and an MBA in Marketing from Carnegie Mellon University - Tepper School of Business.

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Episode Outline

[00:30] Auseh’s career path

[02:40] Marketing organization at Terminus

[04:25] Traditional demand gen versus ABM

[07:53] Splitting budgets between traditional demand gen and ABM

[10:19] Tying budget to customer lifetime value

[11:44] The split between strategic accounts versus broader market coverage

[13:40] The target market personas

[17:18] Campaign alignment between marketing and sales

[22:08] The mechanics of pulling intent data for campaigns

[23:39] Common mistakes and misconceptions about ABM

[26:59] Rallying everyone behind a strategy

[29:05] Auseh’s advice

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Connect with Auseh 

LinkedIn

Website

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Connect with Korina and Holly

LinkedIn - Korina Edwards, Matter Made

Twitter - Korina Edwards

Matter Made Website

Matter Made Growing Unicorns YouTube Channel

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LinkedIn - Holly Chen, ExponentialX

Twitter - Holly Chen

ExponentialX Website

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In this conversation with Matt Young, CEO at UserVoice, he talks about retention and product.

Today, you’ll hear about finding the a-ha moment, the customer journey, Matt’s top of mind thoughts around retention and product, the greater noise-to-signal in the industry today, the main problems Matt sees in companies doing user research, when and how to re-evaluate and recalibrate your value proposition, and the future of UserVoice.

As a leader in SaaS, product management, and product management, Matt has been challenging what it means to deliver great SaaS products for over 20 years. Prior to his current role as CEO of UserVoice, he served as VP of Engineering and President of UserVoice, as VP and CTO at Vodori, and as a Senior Analyst at Duke University. Since 2020, Matt has been a Product School Featured Speaker. Matt holds a BSc in Computer Science from Syracuse University and an MSc in Computer Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

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Episode Outline

[01:20] What’s most top of mind for Matt around retention and product?

[02:21] The a-ha moment and the customer journey

[05:35] Today’s greater noise-to-signal

[07:37] Re-evaluating and recalibrating on your value proposition

[09:27] Primary problems in companies’ user research

[12:13] UserVoice today and in the future

[14:48] Matt’s influential people

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Matt’s Mentors

All the people he has wronged along the way.

Rahul Vohra

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Connect with Matt

LinkedIn

Website

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Connect with Matter Made 

Website

LinkedIn (Matter Made)

LinkedIn (Elias Rubel, CEO, Matter Made)

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In this conversation with VP of Marketing at WorkRamp, Jack Foster, she talks about growth and marketing. Today, you’ll hear about Jack’s first 6 months at WorkRamp, finding the balance between quick wins and long-term strategy, what she looks for during the interview process, how she structures teams, time-management and prioritisation, marketing sources, establishing team relationships, and her thoughts on marketing ops, analytics, reporting, and attribution.

Prior to joining WorkRamp, Jack spent her career leading B2B Marketing teams. She has served in roles in companies including Momentive, CATechnology, ARCserve, and Lever.

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Episode Outline

[00:27] Jack’s background

[02:11] The first 6 months

[05:00] Larger teams vs hyper growth mode

[06:48] The first 90 to 180 days

[08:21] Balancing quick wins and long-term strategies

[10:09] Jack’s interview process

[12:50] Some more quick wins

[15:00] Structuring the team

[17:14] Building a marketing team mental model

[18:28] Marketing ops and analytics

[20:01] Brand design, reporting

[21:18] Goal Setting

[22:29] Attribution

[23:41] A baseline percent source for marketing

[25:01] Is direct traffic counted as part of marketing?

[26:43] Establishing team relationships

[29:18] How does Jack manage her time?

[30:58] The role of marketing

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Connect with Jack

LinkedIn

Website

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Connect with Korina and Holly

LinkedIn - Korina Edwards, Matter Made

Twitter - Korina Edwards

Matter Made Website

Matter Made Growing Unicorns YouTube Channel

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LinkedIn - Holly Chen, ExponentialX

Twitter - Holly Chen

ExponentialX Website

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In this conversation with Will Hicklen, Chief Growth Officer of EasyWorkForce, he talks about growth. Today, you’ll hear about the evolving Chief Growth Officer role, Will’s key principles, things that get Will excited about EasyWorkForce, emerging people marketplaces, and the ways that Will keeps himself sane and energized.

Will is a strategic growth specialist, a performance-driven innovator, HR tech expert, leader, and coach. Will holds a BA in Economics from Miami University.

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Episode Outline

[01:00] The Chief Growth Officer role

[04:01] Will’s key principles

[09:05] Digital people marketplaces

[12:06] What has Will excited?

[14:16] How does Will keep himself sane?

[17:32] Matt’s inspirational people

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Inspirational People

Matt’s dad

Joe Costello

Gary Trainor

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Connect with Will

LinkedIn

Website

Twitter

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Connect with Matter Made 

LinkedIn (Elias Rubel, CEO, Matter Made)

LinkedIn (Matter Made)

Website