To celebrate the Content Bureau’s 20th anniversary, we’re seeking wisdom from 20 rock star clients whose serious B2B marketing cred, brains, and heart have always inspired us. Next up: Keala Gaines.
- Name: Keala Gaines
- In: San Francisco
- Hired the Content Bureau at: eBay, Intuit, PayPal
- For: Payments marketing content
- One word to describe the Content Bureau: Partner
- Best marketing asset ever produced: Intuit Demandforce partner portal
- Why: Demandforce presented an interesting opportunity to develop a new channel model and evolve informal referral partnerships to a true channel distribution model to increase velocity and revenue. It was incredibly rewarding to build a new GTM channel, partner program, and robust self-service portal from concept to launch in roughly six months. The partner program included a tiered structure with benefits, a self-service onboarding experience, and a partner portal with content and assets tailored not only to the partners’ program level, but also to one of five unique verticals.
- Biggest challenge facing B2B marketers today: Email is dead. The ideal experience is one where the individual user receives in-product messaging curated for specific use cases, behavior, and user data—but this requires data infrastructure, behavioral triggers, and messaging framework on top of a product that reveals the right experience at the right time. This is much harder to execute than email!
- B2B marketers of the future should: Not just know your customers’ needs, but anticipate the needs not yet realized. Truly be your customer.
- Marketing and sales: Both are needed. The holy grail is unassisted sales. But the more expensive and complicated the solution, the more you need both great marketing and human outreach. 2+2 = 5! You also need to train people to use the self-service tools you build. Customers don’t access half the content we build unless we actively point them to the assets most relevant to them, as well as make the experiences intuitive and easy to use, and constantly encourage repeat usage.
- If some extra budget fell into my lap, I’d produce: A well-instrumented marketing platform that leveraged real-time customer data and profiles that could trigger and reveal the right messages and experiences at the right time for each individual customer.
- Where I go to learn: Colleagues and peers. There are universal B2B marketing best practices that work across industries and use cases.
Smart thoughts from Keala Gaines, builder of amazing teams that in turn build beautiful programs. It’s been our pleasure to partner with three of these teams over the past ten years. Want to discuss anything you read here? Call me, or check out our financial marketing services.
