How Marketing Teams Survive and Thrive in 2023 [Webinar]

EM Marketing recently hosted a webinar panel discussion about how marketing teams can survive and thrive in the coming year. Moderated by EM’s Director of Business Development Molly Tapias, the discussion ranged from what challenges marketers face these days to how to decide where in the sales funnel to invest marketing dollars.

Here are a few quotable takeaways from this wide-ranging and illuminating discussion. Check out the entire webinar to hear more.

Webinar participants:

• Jessica Gilmartin, CMO of Calendly, a scheduling automation platform
• Kenny Lee, VP of revenue marketing at Segment, the global leader in sales enablement
• Chris Matthews, independent marketing consultant for stealth and early-stage startups
• Stephanie Peterson, VP of marketing at Blurb, a self-publishing print-on-demand platform
• Samantha Wu, former CMO of Brain Trust, a decentralized talent network

What are some current challenges in marketing?

Samantha Wu: “Striking a balance between short-term results and longer-term strategies. In this macro context, there’s a lot of pressure to stop making those longer-term investments and just execute in the short term.”

Stephanie Peterson: “One of my biggest challenges right now is new customer acquisition. What worked maybe a year or two ago doesn’t quite work right now. So our customer acquisition costs have gone up dramatically, and we’re testing new things.”

Chris Matthews: “Right now I’m seeing that clients are actually not quite sure what the problem is. ‘Help us organize the marketing chaos from rapid consumer shifts, to new AI tools coming in, to how we organize and understand the data.'”

How are you prioritizing in these times?

Kenny Lee: “We are working closely with our business and operations partners to really look at where we think our revenue will come from, looking at our forecast and our revenue complexion. The other thing that I’m finding is we needed to reboot our go-to-market campaign model.”

Samantha Wu: “I think it really starts with being quite ruthless about what are those core marketing programs and priorities that actually map to the company. The hardest thing is just being ruthless and cutting.”

Chris Matthews: “Marketing needs to be aligned with the whole leadership team because you can’t operate as an island; it has to be integrated into the business strategy. So when you’re prioritizing, ask hard questions, like what are you actually short on? Are you short on time? Are you short on cash? Are you short on results? Starting from there help you filter which of these things to prioritize.”

Which activities do you keep in-house and which do you outsource?

Stephanie Peterson: “It really depends on the priorities in your marketing mix and what you think is going to perform best for you. And also budget. There are ways to get things done where you can minimize having to bring in FTEs. You can leverage agencies and contractors to help you grow.”

Jessica Gilmartin: “I think about outsourcing versus insourcing in two dimensions. One is around how deeply they have to understand your product and customer to be successful. The second dimension is whether we are in scaling or testing mode. Anything that we’re in discovery mode for I always like to outsource. And then once we have seen that it is successful, that it’s a program that we’re going to invest in, that’s when I bring that expertise in-house.”

What do you think of ChatGPT and other AI in terms of marketing?

Chris Matthews: “Every day [these tools] get better. Every day there’s another 20 companies doing something new. And the capabilities are really impactful because normally tools either make something faster or cheaper… Ultimately it’s not going to replace us, but the people using those tools will replace people who don’t.”

Stephanie Peterson: “I don’t see any of these tools as a replacement for anybody. I think it helps to be more efficient at their job. It allows us on the content side to get things out a little bit faster.”

Jessica Gilmartin: “I would really encourage people to think very carefully about putting anything confidential in any kind of public AI forums, because that becomes part of the public domain. So we are being very careful about that. We’re leveraging AI tools internally.”

Watch the full webinar

These are only a smattering of the insights contained in this interesting webinar. Our panelists have a whole lot more to say.

Here’s a final nugget of wisdom from Kenny Lee: “One thing that I’ve seen and heard from my peers and mentors in the marketing space is that they’re all working on reaffirming their relationships with their CEOs… You want to reaffirm those relationships and make sure that you’re all rowing the boat together.”

Check out more of their thoughts in the webinar recording.