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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....

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 b...

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...

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 l...

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...

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&#3...

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 marketin...

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, ask...

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...

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...

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...

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&#39...

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 episo...

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...

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 c...

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....

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.

Podcasting is one of our favorite forms of content because it is so versatile. Not only can you publish the long-form audio on all the major podcast platforms, but when you record it with video you can repurpose on YouTube, break it down into smaller LinkedIn video posts, and a whole lot more. Taking full advantage of your podcast is a huge opportunity to generate demand on dark social. In this ep...

Dave Gerhardt , Chief Brand Officer at Drift, joined Chris for another Demand Gen Expert Session, this time on the topic of "Marketing and Sales as One Team." Obviously, Marketing and Sales are quite different. But at the end of the day, their end goal should be revenue. By thinking of the two as working together rather than working towards completely separate goals, both teams are bette...

Adding "How did you hear about us?" to your demo request form gives huge insights into what channels are working. But, there's a right way and a wrong way. And if you're making these three common mistakes, you could be doing more harm than good. In this episode, Chris goes over the top three mistakes people make and why it's so important to fix them immediately. He also talks...

Marketing is the best tool growth stage companies have, not sales. But how does the founder/CEO play a role in driving marketing performance? The problem with most early-stage B2B SaaS companies is there is a lack of customer understanding leading the product roadmap. For the leadership to positively impact marketing, they need to start by understanding the customer. Segmenting down so much to whe...

When Sydney Sloan walked into Salesloft three years ago they were optimizing for MQLs. Marketing had no efficiency. Salespeople were overwhelmed with low intent leads. Conversions were low. When Sydney took over as CMO, she wasn't interested in the vanity metrics that were being measured up until that point. She wanted to eliminate waste and increase marketing effectiveness at driving pipeline...

Marketers love to hate on "vanity" metrics, and rightfully so. But the problem is, they are misdiagnosing vanity metrics and using the real vanity metrics to make strategic decisions. I'm talking about MQLs, eBook downloads, website visits, blog views, etc. These may have been important KPIs back in 2011 when marketing's only goal was to find fit and feed leads to sales. But this...

You don't need more budget. In fact, less budget would probably help you do a lot more with your marketing dollars. The sad truth is that marketing teams across industries almost universally wasting money. Poor strategy and even worse execution can't be helped by more budget. And most marketing teams are converting at less than .1%. In this episode, Chris talks about how to rethink marketi...

If you're in sales you're certainly thinking, "Demos?! Really??" And our answer is a resounding, Yes! But there's a small catch. It's time for marketers to rethink what a demo consists of. In the past (and as we record this podcast), a demo is when you go on a website, fill out a form and request to talk to a salesperson to see it in action. But as a marketer, your goal i...