Having been in tech/SaaS marketing for 8 years I have worn many hats and used a variety of strategies and tactics to build marketing campaigns and support my sales team to build pipeline and grow the business. As I reflect on the different areas I realize that these 5 are the most distinct and all have different aspects that make me love my work. If you are just starting your career in marketing, or are planning your progression and what areas you want to get experience in next, hopefully, this will be useful to you. Of course, depending on the size of the organization and the scope of the role, most marketers will be doing some work in all of these areas. So let’s dig into it!
Content Marketing
What is it?
Most B2B marketers won’t be dancing on TikTok or Instagram, but there is still a wide range of useful content to get in front of your target audience. This could be whitepapers, ebooks, videos, presentations, webinars, case studies, podcasts, and blog posts. All of these assets support your funnel and allow prospects to learn more about the problems you solve and your solution as they consider your product more deeply.
What do I enjoy?
What I enjoy about content marketing is that you need to really understand your customer, what their pain points are, what considerations or concerns they might have, and what they are looking for in a solution. You also need to develop thought leadership content that attracts people before they even know what your solution is, you don’t want to be shoving a sales pitch down their throat the first time they are exposed to you. It is a great challenge to come up with really good content that allows you to attract customers and gently lead them to the conclusion that you can help them.
Example:
My favorite piece of content that I have produced was a research report based on a survey of over 400 IT leaders across APAC. The report gave IT service providers (my target audience at the time) insights into their customer’s thinking, what they were investing in, what support they sought from IT service providers, where they thought improvements or new offerings could be made and more. This was a new challenge for me to develop as we had to design the survey to get the data we needed, and then make key insights that were valuable to the readers from that. The end result was a completely original report that the readers wouldn’t be able to get from other sources.
Channel Marketing
What is it?
In the tech world, the ecosystem of partners, alliances, and resellers is complex. But ideally, these partnerships are to everyone’s benefit. The solution providers get more exposure to new customers, and the customers get access to complimentary solutions that help their businesses. Channel marketing at its best can bring to light synergies and deepen the impact you can have on your customers. This is often in the form of co-branded campaigns, joint events, and event content developed together that shows why if someone is using one of your solutions, they will get even more benefits from integrating a partner solution.
What do I enjoy?
Channel marketing allows you to get out of your bubble and see the bigger picture from your customer’s point of view. Every organization has a tech stack where they are using many different solutions for different parts of their business and sometimes it’s easy to become ultra-focused on your own product and forget there’s a wider world out there. I also love that you get to work with fellow marketers from other organizations, collaborating and learning from each other can be really refreshing and give you new ideas for other areas of your marketing.
Example:
I participated in a joint marketing program by Microsoft and a group of resellers as an advisor. This program was great because although everyone was offering Microsoft solutions and in competition with each other, the collaboration, teamwork, and pooled resources made the ROI better for everyone than if they had done things on their own. We were also able to experiment with new tactics like influencer marketing that we wouldn’t likely have done otherwise.
Digital Marketing
What is it?
Digital marketing didn’t start at the beginning of the internet revolution but has gradually evolved as free-to-use platforms like Google search and Facebook needed to bring in revenue and the sheer number of users made it possible for business of all kinds to get their ads in front of their target demographics. With the amount of time most people spend in front of screens these days, it is essential for businesses to utilize these platforms
What do I enjoy?
The bottom line with digital is that everything is measurable, you can see exactly what is working and what isn’t. It takes some work to set things up correctly, but when done right you can see all your metrics at a very granular level. It’s also easy to pivot and split test digitally, and you can optimize your campaigns easily as you go. With offline ads, it’s almost impossible to measure the impact and it takes much longer to make any changes.
Example:
In a previous role, I was working on a new product launch and leading the entire paid ad strategy and execution. I decided to try a new platform I’d never used before, Reddit, in addition to the standard LinkedIn and Google campaigns. This turned out to be the best-performing platform and really demonstrated to me how important it is to keep testing and trying new things.
Event Marketing
What is it?
This one is self-explanatory, but in B2B marketing, events can run from small workshops and training sessions, webinars, big exhibitions and conferences, executive roundtables, hosting customers at sporting events, and anything else you can imagine.
What do I enjoy?
For me the best part about events is getting to know your customers, I’m not in meetings with customers every day, so events are really a chance for me to get to know my target audience better. I can then bring that knowledge and understanding back to help shape my other marketing campaigns. It’s also fun to be creative with events and make them memorable for the attendees.
Example:
The biggest event I have run was a 2-day conference with over 500 attendees and 20 sponsors. I was in charge of the full spectrum, from the planning and pitching to sponsors, to logistics/venue/food, arranging the content and track sessions, driving registrations, and everything in between. It ended up a huge success and led to an even bigger event in the following years for the first time in our region.
Field Marketing
What is it?
Field marketing can mean different things depending on the organization, but in my past two roles, it has meant I’m the mini CMO for my region. I’m in charge of the marketing strategy, budget, plan, and execution for everything. Depending on the team structure there are other people supporting you either in the region or often at a global office with product marketing, operations, analytics, etc. But the field marketer is the person who needs to localize the marketing strategy and coordinate with the other teams.
What do I enjoy?
As a field marketer it is vital to work hand-in-hand with the sales team, marketing and sales depend on each other for success. I enjoy this because I can see my direct impact on pipeline generation and new customers and really know that I am helping to grow the business. I also enjoy aligning my marketing strategy with the GTM plan and making sure all of the marketing activities I’m doing are working together.
Example:
At the end of one year, we had a huge shift in direction from a global level on what types of customers we were going to go after. It meant a lot of changes in all aspects of our marketing strategy and the need to be perfectly in line with who the sales team wanted to target. But by working closely with them and adjusting our plans we were able to bring in even better results than the previous year.
So that’s very briefly what I enjoy about these 5 areas of B2B marketing and how they contribute to me looking forward to work every day. There are so many areas and things I didn’t touch on in this article, but that’s why I enjoy marketing so much, there’s a huge variety in the work I do. I think it’s important to be a well-balanced marketer with experience in many areas, but deeper expertise in some. And I look forward to continuing to grow my expertise as time goes on!