• The cons I quote here are applicable solely to the marketing team.
• If you want to gain knowledge and experience in marketing, this definitely is not the place. You will unlearn a couple of useful things in fact.
• Over the last couple of months, we went from working towards a cohesive marketing plan to just focusing on MQLs and SQOs. It was partly annoying but mostly disappointing to see how wrong leadership could take everything down.
• Many would say marketing is not an exact science, which is true. Some things can become a roaring success while those same things can bomb at a different company. But you have got to try. You must mix creativity with analytics to measure success. At SC, it became all about pumping money to get leads – that was their strategy as well as execution. No analysis went into how can we get better leads or nurture the current ones. Basically, a short-term approach to generate leads without any strategic thinking.
• Usually, different groups in marketing – demand gen, content, product marketing, PR, etc. – should work together to inform the strategic direction and, also, to execute the overall plan. However, things here became so siloed that nobody knew what the other team was doing or why exactly we were doing what we were doing. Massive lack of communication ensued, completely driven by incompetent leadership without any awareness of who does what in the team. So much so that content was being produced, and campaigns were run without any clarity on messaging or understanding of market or customer pain points.
• How do you measure success in marketing? At SC, we took one KPI by heart — the number of leads. It didn’t matter that those leads were pointless, for many reasons. Confused messaging, wrong channels, poor copywriting, lack of consensus between teams, and absolutely no focus on understanding the buyer journey. By just creating gated content, you can’t get hot leads. And even with that, such a lackluster effort at creating quality content. Here’s Marketing 101 – Focus on providing value to your prospects, and leads shall follow.
• There was a website overhaul done recently to change the copy and design. Reason — our new leader did not like it. How wonderfully concrete and valid in times when you can look at data and find out if that was required at all. Decisions were being made on the basis of how people felt about things, rather than looking at data and analyzing results. You know you have got a true marketing leader when the first thing they do is change the website and pump money to get more leads. Those are tactical measures, not strategic.
• They focused heavily on a specific use case which was a highly-searched keyword but had nothing to do with their product. This was one of those examples where a company wants to ride the SEO train but has no clue about the journey. Context and intent of readers didn’t matter to them, it was just about banking on a keyword that could get them website traffic and leads. And somehow in their world, people would magically realize after coming to the website — oh I think I need their product; more than what I came looking for. If a new parent is looking for baby diapers, they will not buy tampons, no matter what.
• I tried communicating my concerns to a lot of people, on multiple occasions. Through engagement surveys, one-on-ones, emails, and even had a talk with the CEO. Nothing helped. So although I do say in the pros that they encourage people to speak up, in my case, they didn’t. Because if it’s something minuscule like workload, they can work out a solution; but dare you say something against the C-suite.
• There were many instances of passive-aggressive and inappropriate behaviour but I don’t want to get into that now for the sake of my mental health.
