On Demand Gen Visionaries, we sit down with marketing leaders from some of the world’s largest and fastest-growing companies to uncover the demand gen strategies that have been fundamental to their skyrocketing success.

In each episode, we ask our guests which three areas of investment are most important to their demand gen initiatives. Tune in to this special mini-series to hear the budget items our CMO guests can’t live without.

While every CMO had their own unique "uncuttable" budget items, there were three that were consistently mentioned as top priorities:

• You can't do anything in marketing today, and especially B2B without really stellar content. Don’t just put out content to put out content. 
• Your website is your storefront, brand, and identity. Your website needs to be, at the minimum, just as good as the product you’re selling.
• Before you start working on your SEO, be clear about what your message and story is. Come up with a tight content strategy. Then finally, think about how to make it discoverable.
  

‍Episode Quotes

“I definitely think that leadership would be my number one. And I say that because it is critical that your customer understands and believes in your category and you cannot win their trust. You cannot win their business, if they don't understand your category, let alone your product. And so I think thought leadership that's backed in data, ideally proprietary data to help your customer understand your space. The value of investing in your space, is really critical.” — Amanda Malko

“Without question it’s search engine optimization. That is the basis of how we start a lot of our strategies because it gives us information on what people are looking for. And I think the big thing there is to make sure that you pay attention to the long tail strategy. A lot of times people will just look at one or two really short keywords and say, ‘well, that's so broad people. I don't know what they're searching on,’ but you really have to look a little bit deeper and figure out where there's opportunity there — where there's a good search volume and low keyword density. And you combine the two and that actually gives you a really good playbook to go forward.” — Raj Khera 

“So if you kind of think about those three buckets, brand performance, media, and then life cycle, those are the sort of the three big buckets of things that I would never want to cut. But the order is actually flipped. The first thing I want to focus on is the life cycle followed by performance, followed by brand.” — Kady Srinivasan 

“SEO is one of those seeds that you plant in the ground and it takes a long time for it to blossom, but after a while it becomes as big as an Oak tree and it becomes the gift that keeps on giving.” — Justin Shriber

“I refer to our website as our number one salesperson, as it does generate the most leads. And it certainly helps educate people on what we have to offer and the value that we bring.” — Susan Beermann

“[Our website does] both education and conversion and is the way we think about it, but it actually plays all of the classic roles. It plays as our billboard. It's our always-on asset. We have complete control over it, so we want it to be great.” — Keith Messick

“The website is your second most important product. I don't think a lot of marketers think that way and that you should be investing almost the same amount of time and energy and making your website powerful and easy to use. Just as much time your product team is spending on the product you sell, because it's your storefront. It is your brand. It's your identity. Part of my philosophy, this also applies to demand gen, is to actually follow D2C or retail brands.” — Kyle Lacy

“No, not everybody thinks of STRs necessarily as a demand gen channel per se. But I think that when an SDR is doing it right and they're not just sending out robo spam, but they're really sending good well-crafted personalized messages, it makes such a difference because it's the human touch. And, I really do think that in the world where there is so much digital and scalable things, the human touch really matters.” — Jon Miller

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