The Marketing Share

One of the big draws to working at an early stage startup is getting to build the marketing function from ground zero. However, the challenges are also significant. Competition is high, awareness is low, and winning often depends on a few good moves and the right focus. In this installment of our Marketing Leader Series, we speak with Mike Harmon, a 4X founding-level marketer at venture-backed com...

This February 2024, Google (and Yahoo) will be implementing changes that affect email deliverability, especially to personal accounts. While B2B users won't be quite as impacted, these changes are good indicators of how large email providers continue to work to reduce spam. To help marketing leaders understand the impact of these changes on outbound marketing and how best practices should be...

Managing a department requires more than broad functional or technical knowledge. You also need to convey intangible qualities such as leadership, authority, and influence. These often get described as “having executive presence.” However, what does this term really mean and how do you know if you have it? If you don't, how can you work to improve your executive presence? This episode’s guest...

Few leaders would argue the value of having a strong brand. Yet for CMOs, tying brand investment to performance has always been a challenge.  We have used measures like aided and unaided awareness, but these can feel soft and at odds with the ground level priorities of an organization. Plus, many companies with low overall awareness have strong businesses, especially in niche markets. So, how can...

Branding is usually an understood and accepted marketing objective at the C-level. At the same time, demand metrics such as pipeline performance and funnel optimization are what most marketing leaders are measured against. Can marketing do both? Should they, especially if the company is earlier stage? In this first of two episodes on brand and demand, we speak with Beth Hunsicker Parker, founder o...

Building out your team is one of the most important things you’ll do as a marketing leader. Recruiters – whether internal or external – play a key role in the hiring process because of their direct involvement in finding and screening candidates as well as their general knowledge of the labor market. In this episode, we speak to Wes Lieser, a VP and marketing recruiter as Versique Search. Wes shar...

The ability to monitor for purchase intent is changing how marketers identify and engage with potential customers. Latane Conant, CMO of 6sense and author of "No Forms. No Spams. No Cold Calls." joins us to discuss how the use of intent data has not only elevated account-based marketing (ABM) but led to better marketing all around. She also shares her advice on some of the more challengi...

Innovation is essential for successful companies. Yet, most struggle to prioritize innovation because of risk aversion and the fear of failure. As a leader, cultivating a culture of innovation requires that you develop resilience and a tolerance for risk.  In marketing, this could look like entering a new segment where you have no brand recognition; recommending a new campaign approach or undergoi...

One of the toughest tasks in marketing is crafting compelling messaging for complex products or services. Message too high and your audience will get mired in technical speak. Message too low and your audience will miss what's special and differentiated about your solution. Either way, the result is the same - low engagement and an under appreciation of product value. While messaging complexi...

When you step into that first marketing leadership role, it can be a bit like, “Great, I made it but… now what??” Because even if you’ve been working towards taking on leadership for some time and have been preparing for it, once you make it, there are many (even among experienced marketing leaders) who think, “Am I really ready for this? How am I going to figure this out?” In this episode, Jenn G...

Derek Weeks, CMO and community-led marketing expert, joins us to share a sneak preview of his new book, Unfair Mindshare. The book is a comprehensive guide to integrating three essential marketing orbits (product, brand, and community) to build engaging communities and generate exponential business growth. In the book, Derek recounts how he led a movement that created a thriving community of over...

Communities can be such a rich asset to companies and marketing teams. The challenge is how to build one that feels authentic and engaging to members while still being valuable to the community’s creators or sponsors. In this episode, we hear from Matt Heinz from Heinz Marketing about how he started and manages CMO Coffee Talk, a community for Chief Marketing Officers that began in 2020 and now ha...

For startups and early-stage companies, the question of when to bring on the first marketing hire can be a difficult one. Many founders have remarked that they probably should have hired marketing sooner. And when a marketing leader is eventually hired, that same leader faces a similar question - when to make the next  hire and what role. Our guest, Kenny Mazursky, has been a startup founder, a fr...

Paid Search is one of the most used digital ad strategies for driving traffic to a website. In this episode, we talk with Rob Bunting, a paid search specialist who has run these programs for hundreds of clients. We cover key aspects marketing leaders need to know such as when it makes sense to use PPC; how to estimate what kind of spending is needed; results you can expect; and how to use in conju...

Generative AI looks to be the latest technological advancement that could dramatically disrupt the way we live and work. Marketing leaders want to know how new tools like ChatGPT can and should be used, their impact on productivity and how best to guide their team members in developing their AI skill set. We talk with Nicole Leffer, a CMO with expertise in generative AI. Nicole answers questions l...

Believe it or not, sending cold emails can be quite effective at generating leads for the top of your funnel. But using email in this way is quite different than using it for nurturing or drip campaigns. We talked with Brandon Turnbull, an email specialist who has been running outbound email campaigns to generate leads for years. We cover the key things you'll want to know if you're goin...

Running a marketing department requires expertise in many domains, from positioning to demand generation to branding to martech and much more. As a business leader or a new department head, you may be an expert in one or more of those domains but usually not all of them. The Marketing Share podcast is meant to help close that gap. Listen to our first episode to learn why we've jumped into the...

The term Quiet Quitting captured the silent but detrimental phenomenon of employees feeling so disengaged, disconnected and undervalued at work that they resort to performing only the bare minimum to meet their assigned responsibilities. It also spawned a correlating effect termed Quiet Hiring, where companies ask employees to temporarily take on new responsibilities beyond their current job descr...

Almost every company, at some point in time, will face a crisis situation, whether it be internally or externally triggered. While some companies have a dedicated communications or public relations department, it's not uncommon for marketing leaders to have these responsibilities fall under their domain. What can or should you do then when a crisis situation unfolds but you have no formal com...

For B2B marketers, one of the most important internal relationships to manage is with sales. While it is becoming more commonplace for marketing teams to have their performance tied in part to revenue, simply putting this metric in place isn’t enough. Having an impact on revenue requires strategic and tactical alignment with your sales counterpart. In this episode, we speak with CMO, Kyle Hamer, a...