Claire Wallace

Early in my career, I paid a lot of attention to onboarding dashboards. (Logins, Feature Adoption, Completion Rates.) Those metrics matter, but they don’t always tell you what is going to determine long-term success. In the first 30 days, I watch behavior. Who shows up consistently. Who makes decisions without delay. Who hesitates when commitment is required. Usage can grow over time. Commitment usually doesn’t.

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I kind of hate customer personas. (Don’t come for me!) Not because understanding customers isn’t important.... it is. But personas tend to box people in. They turn real humans into fixed characters with fake quotes and frozen motivations. Like… what if I’m a little Strategic Sarah and Analytical Alan? What then? People don’t behave like personas. They behave like context, timing, pressure, and trade-offs. Same person. Different day. Different decision. Instead of “Meet Marketing Mary,” I’d rather ask: → What problem are they solving right now? → What risk are they trying to avoid? → What would make this decision feel safe? Personas can be a starting point. But when they become doctrine, curiosity dies. And marketing without curiosity gets lazy fast. Personas: helpful guide… or creativity killer? 👀 #MarketingStrategy #MarketingResearch #BrandMarketing

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"That paid search headline is weak." That's some recent feedback I received last Monday. Brutal honesty at 2 PM on a Zoom call. They wanted me to replace a brand-focused headline with something more "feature-heavy." More technical. More... boring. Here's what I told them (and what every paid search manager needs to hear): Your 15 Google Ads headlines aren't a product catalogue. They're a conversation starter with someone who's drowning in problems. Think about it: When you're searching for a solution at 11 PM after a brutal day, what do you want to see? "Advanced inventory management system with real-time analytics" Or... "Still manually tracking inventory while your team stays late?" The second one hits different, right? That's because it speaks to the story already playing in their head. The 10-minute headline hack that'll boost your CTR today: 1. Lead with their internal monologue Not "AI-powered customer service platform". Try "Tired of angry customers waiting 3 hours for support?" (You're joining their story, not starting your own) 2. Paint the after-picture first "Leave the office by 6 PM again" beats "Automated workflow optimisation" (People buy outcomes, not features) 3. Create time-sensitive relevance "Q4 budget approvals closing soon?" (Urgency tied to their reality, not your sales targets) 4. Address the elephant in the room "No 6-month implementation timeline" (Kill the objection before it kills your conversion) 5. Use the bucket strategy Your 15 headlines should tell a complete story:  • 3 headlines: "I see your problem"  • 4 headlines: "Here's your new reality"  • 3 headlines: "This is how we get there"  • 2 headlines: "Act now because..."  • 3 headlines: "We're different because..." Here's the truth nobody talks about: Every headline is competing against the voice in your prospect's head saying "This probably won't work either". Your job isn't to list features. It's to interrupt that voice with something that makes them think: "Finally, someone who gets it". When you nail this, something magical happens:  • CTR jumps (because relevance beats cleverness)  • CVR improves (because expectation matches reality)  • Your sales team gets warmer leads (because messaging alignment works)  • Your boss stops asking why paid search ROI is trash  • Deals close (nothing beats cash in the bank) The best part? You can test this in the next 10 minutes. Pick your worst-performing headline. Ask yourself: "What's the real story my customer is telling themselves?"  Then rewrite it. Your future self (and your conversion rates) will thank you. Yes, this would've looked 10x better as a pretty infographic but "ain't nobody got time for that". What's the most painful problem your customers complain about? The one they mention in every sales call? That's your next headline.

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I didn’t start my career in customer marketing. Like a lot of us, I came up through demand gen. Performance marketing. Tied to a commercial number. Focused on lead flow, pipeline, conversion rates. That’s where I spent (and still spend) the bulk of my career. I ended up in customer marketing several years ago — not because I had a grand plan, but because new acquisition wasn’t cutting it. Google wasn’t delivering what we needed. Paid social was expensive. We had to hit our number. So I turned to the customer base. Long story short: I built a strategy focused on driving net new revenue from existing customers — and now I lead customer in a SaaS business. Here’s what I’ve learned: Customer marketing, as a discipline, is both mature and emerging. Yes, advocacy has been around forever. But building a customer engine that actually fuels revenue? That’s still new ground for a lot of companies. It requires a different kind of marketer. Someone who understands brand, loyalty, advocacy, community — but who can also do the math. Who knows what NRR is. Who knows how to track expansion revenue, retention, and product adoption. Those people are hard to find. And if you’re in NCA and struggling to hit your number, or if you’re in customer marketing and struggling to show value — here’s my advice: Start with referrals. Why? Because referrals get you close to the customer. They help you understand what’s working — and what’s not. They plug directly into your acquisition engine, which means instant attribution, trackability, and revenue impact. They’re also the perfect bridge to internal alignment. Suddenly you’re having conversations like: “We’d have more referrals if this product feature worked better.” “Here’s how we turn our top advocates into pipeline generators.” “Here’s the ARR this customer brought in by simply sharing their story.” You stop talking about customer marketing as a concept and start showing its business value. If I were building this function from scratch today, that’s where I’d begin. Referrals are a gateway. They build credibility. They build connection. They build revenue. Because at the end of the day, people buy from other people. And customers are still your highest-converting, lowest-cost, most powerful growth engine. Start there. Prove impact. Then scale.

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Reporting on historical data is....really hard. We just released some new properties to make it easier. Now, when your contacts complete critical HubSpot events (think form submissions, email opens, CTA interactions, etc.), HubSpot will automatically enrich those events with the primary associated company AND lifecycle stage value for that contact so you will know exactly what stage they were in and where they worked at the exact moment that event occurred. We're calling them object property snapshots, and they're live right now. Auto enabled...for all the events you care about...no additional setup required (from yesterday moving forward 🙂). Just grab contact: lifecycle stage or contact: primary associated company when filtering your event reports. Even better? Custom event users get to enrich their events with whatever (non-sensitive-data) properties they choose. Tracking logins for your platform? Now you can keep track of what contact owner has the most customers logging in month to month without needing to worry about your data becoming inaccurate when contacts change hands.

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The new Skift piece on identity in travel marketing is worth reading. The headline stat - 70-95% of website/app visitors are anonymous to most brands' systems - is real. The performance problem it creates is real. There's also a second identity problem hiding under the first one, and travel brands need to solve both. The anonymous visitor on your site might also be a top-tier loyalty member who stayed at your sister brand last month, has 200K points, and called your contact center on  Tuesday about a points transfer. Those facts usually live in five different systems that don't talk to each other. So even when you finally recognize her as "the same person who visited last week," you still don't know she's a high-value guest you've been trying not to lose for two years. Anonymous-visitor identity is a marketing optimization. It makes the channels you already run work harder. Cross-system guest identity is a different kind of problem. It's the foundation that decides whether AI agents, real-time personalization, and multi-brand loyalty ever  actually work — or just hallucinate at scale on top of fragmented data. Both matter. The order matters too. Recognizing more anonymous traffic on a fragmented backend means personalizing more confidently on a profile that's still  missing most of what you already know about the guest. The hard part of identity in travel isn't seeing the visitor. It's stitching together every system that already has a piece of her. The question travel marketers should be asking right now isn't "can we recognize more visitors?" — it's "when we do, will we actually know who they are?"

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How do you get a feed? I see a BUNCH of messages from people looking for new feeds. I want to call out that this industry is FILLED with people that should not have feeds, and feed providers are absolutely swamped with requests. Make your request stand out by providing at least the following bare information: 👉 Where do you get your traffic from? 👉 Do you have full ownership and control of your ad accounts? 👉 Are you able to provide access to said ad accounts? 👉 What feeds are you currently working with? 👉 How much volume are you currently doing? 👉 How many buyers do you have on your team? Let me also point out, be professional. If you have a meeting scheduled with a feed provider, don't miss it. And if you have to, warn them early. You are competing with a lot of other people for very limited attention. We are always looking for good agencies to partner with, but also aware that 9 out of 10 people that reach out do not fit the bill. If you are denied a feed, try to understand why. There are a lot of business models in this industry that just don't cut it anymore. Ask yourself, are you just a useless middleman? If so, I would recommend buying the traffic yourself and building a more sustainable model. I hope this helps the great buyers out there get in touch with the great feeds that can help you grow your business. Good luck!

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Looking to understand the psychological impact of mass layoffs with AI? When layoffs are framed as "Strategic Alignment", the psychological impact on the "tribe" shifts from fear of failure to a crisis of identity and belief. The leader isn't saying, "You aren't good enough"; they are saying, "The mission has changed, and some no longer exhibit the right fit for our goals." 1. The "True Believer" Filter: By framing layoffs as a shift in goals, the leader creates an Ideological Purity Test. The Mechanism: The remaining members feel "anointed" as the ones who understand and embody the new direction. The Result: Loyalty increases because survivors see themselves as the "Guardians of the New Mission." They feel a heightened sense of responsibility to prove the leader's new vision is correct, effectively doubling down on their commitment to justify why they were kept: Survivor's Guilt. 2. Shared Sacrifice and the "Sunk Cost" of Loyalty: When a company changes its goals and removes people who don't fit that vision, those who stay often experience a psychological phenomenon called Cognitive Dissonance Resolution. The Thought Process: "If the company just let go of 10% of my friends to pursue this new goal, it must be incredibly important. If it weren't, the sacrifice wouldn't make sense." The Result: To avoid the pain of believing their friends were let go for nothing, the survivors become fiercely loyal to the new goal. They need it to succeed to give the layoffs meaning. 3. Cognitive Re-Categorization: In this context, the leader is essentially re-drawing the borders of the tribe. The Old Tribe: Everyone who worked here. The New Tribe: Only those aligned with the 2026 Strategy. By narrowing the definition of the tribe, the leader makes the remaining members feel part of a more cohesive, elite unit. This is a classic move in In-Group Dynamics—the smaller and more exclusive the group feels, the higher the internal loyalty tends to be. 4. The Risk: The "Logic Gap": While this can temporarily tighten the tribe, it relies entirely on the Credibility of the Goal. If the remaining tribe members don't see the "new goals" actually being pursued, or if the goals seem arbitrary, the Black Sheep Effect reverses. Instead of being loyal to the leader, the survivors begin to view the leader as an "Unreliable Narrator," leading to a rapid collapse in trust. The Psychological "Hook": This strategy works best when the leader can convince the survivors that the "severing" was a painful but "noble" necessity for the tribe’s survival. It transforms a business transaction into a moral crusade.

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One lesson I’ve learned in retention strategy: You can’t out-email a weak offer. If customers don’t truly want the product, No amount of automation will fix churn. Email amplifies what already exists. Strong product + strong positioning + strong lifecycle That’s when email becomes a growth engine. Retention strategy isn’t isolated. It touches product, support, and brand perception.

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I'm pumped for this: Every tool in your tech stack just became a direct mail trigger. We just launched a new open API, and it's a big deal. Until now, true direct mail automation lived inside a handful of native integrations - Shopify, Klaviyo, and a number of others. Now it lives everywhere. If it can make an API call or trigger a webhook, it can fire a direct mail campaign through PostPilot. Braze-powered personalized offers on a postcard? Done. Punctuate a Gorgias CS interaction with a handwritten note? Easy. Customer pauses their Recharge subscription? Automatically trigger a win-back card before they're gone for good. Attentive. Iterable. That janky internal tool you vibe coded at 2am. Doesn't matter. Oh, and did I mention you only need an email address? Even if you don't have the physical mailing address, we've still got you covered with MailMatch. Your entire connected ecosystem can now power physical touchpoints, with the same real-time automation, A/B testing, incrementality measurement, and live ROI tracking we're known for. Connect all of your digital workflows directly to your customer's homes and hands. And it works. Really, really well.

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Your next great hire is probably slinging drinks at your neighborhood watering hole. I've always been bullish on hiring out of the hospitality sector for people-forward roles. But now maybe more than ever. Every business has AI now. Some are using it better than others, but the technology is ubiquitous. People are the difference maker. Especially the folks who've mastered the soft skills. 𝗣𝗲𝗼𝗽𝗹𝗲 𝗶𝗻 𝗵𝗼𝘀𝗽𝗶𝘁𝗮𝗹𝗶𝘁𝘆 𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝗶𝗻𝗰𝗿𝗲𝗱𝗶𝗯𝗹𝘆 𝗵𝗶𝗴𝗵 𝗘𝗤. They have to be. They carry sales quotas and feel the impact tangibly and immediately. Show up with a bad attitude and go home with lighter pockets at the end of the night. They launch products and drive time-sensitive promos aligned to the needs of the business. That BOGO passion fruit martini they just sold you? Driven by the 20-pound bucket of frozen puree that expires in three days. They're sales, fulfillment, and customer success rolled into one. They take your order, upsell you on the premium side, then endure verbal abuse from line cooks when they ask why your ribeye is taking 10 minutes longer than it should. They check in with you and call for a re-do when your medium rare steak shows up as medium. They come wired with intangibles that are practically impossible to train for I've run this play successfully time and time again. Favorite bartender > BDR > AE > President's Club in 3 years. 𝗛𝗲𝗿𝗲'𝘀 𝘄𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗮𝗰𝘁𝘂𝗮𝗹𝗹𝘆 𝗹𝗼𝗼𝗸𝘀 𝗹𝗶𝗸𝗲 𝗶𝗻 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗼𝗿𝗴: High-EQ service recovery → Customer marketing, community moderation, CS escalations Time-bound promos & product pushes → Event marketing, launches, partner promo calendars Upsell & attachment rate → BDR qualification, event booth conversions, webinar CTAs Orchestrating back-of-house/front-of-house → Cross-functional campaign ops "𝗕𝘂𝘁 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝘆 𝗱𝗼𝗻'𝘁 𝗸𝗻𝗼𝘄 𝗦𝗮𝗮𝗦." Teach product. You can't teach empathy at speed. Pair them with a call library, battlecards, and 30-60-90 certification. "𝗕𝘂𝘁 𝗿𝗮𝗺𝗽 𝗿𝗶𝘀𝗸." Start with events, community, or BDR programs where scripts and outcomes are clearer. Measure CSAT, show-up rate, meetings booked, event-sourced pipeline. 𝗦𝘁𝗲𝗮𝗹 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝟯𝟬-𝗱𝗮𝘆 𝗺𝗶𝗰𝗿𝗼-𝗽𝗶𝗹𝗼𝘁:  • 𝗘𝗱𝗶𝘁 𝗼𝗻𝗲 𝗷𝗼𝗯 𝗽𝗼𝘀𝘁: "Customer-facing experience (hospitality/retail) welcome. Service or upsell comp a plus."  • 𝗦𝗼𝘂𝗿𝗰𝗲: Ask three local GMs for their top person, post in service industry FB groups, pull team referrals  • 𝗜𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗿𝘃𝗶𝗲𝘄 𝗲𝘅𝗮𝗺𝗽𝗹𝗲𝘀:  - "Tell me about a time you turned an upset guest into a regular—what did you do and how did you measure it?" -"Your chef needs to move 20 lbs of puree in 3 days—what's your promo plan and why?" -Role-play: handle a pricing objection, then upsell the premium side.  • 𝗥𝗮𝗺𝗽: 30 days shadowing + scripts, 60 days co-piloted calls/events, 90 days full ownership with CSAT or event-sourced opp target. Your pipeline engine is probably behind a bar right now. Hire accordingly.

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Yes to all of this. 🙌 As a marketing leader, I’ve worn every one of these hats—strategist, storyteller, analyst, creative reviewer, internal culture builder—and sometimes all before lunch. The context switching is real, and it’s what makes marketing both challenging and deeply rewarding. The best marketers I know don’t just execute—they translate, connect, prioritize, and pivot across teams and goals without losing sight of the big picture. 📣 Marketing = strategic, creative, cross-functional leadership. Period.

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You’ve finally got $1,500 to spend on marketing. Now what? Here’s the marketing advice I’d give every home remodeler with a $1,500 budget: 1. Don’t start with ads. Not yet. If your messaging isn’t clear and your content isn’t compelling, paid traffic won’t save you. 2. Invest in your website. Within four seconds, ⏱️ your website must reassure visitors, “We understand your problem and know how to fix it.” If it doesn’t, people won’t stick around. Ask yourself: What is your ideal client’s problem? 🤔 How can you solve it?  That’s what needs to be above the scroll point of your homepage. 3. Create three blog posts that answer real questions your clients ask you all the time. Make them useful. Skimmable. Shareable. Use photos from past projects. Be specific. 4. Clean up your Google Business Profile. (Don’t have one? Time to fix that! Make creating one your new Step 3) • Add recent photos.  • Get a few fresh reviews. (Need help getting them, just ask me!) • Ensure your information is current. This is low-hanging SEO fruit, 🍒 and it matters—especially locally. 5. Use social media to build visibility—not sell. • Post before-and-afters. • Talk about why you love a particular project or product. • Comment on other industry posts. • Use social channels for networking, 🤝 not just posting. 💡 Marketing on a budget is all about leverage. $1,500 won’t buy you a full-blown content strategy—but it can absolutely buy you momentum. —--------------------- Hi 👋 ! I'm Carol, THE Home Improvement Content Marketer. If you’re in the trades and are trying to figure out how to do marketing on a budget, let’s talk.

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I keep seeing the same job listing. “Hiring: Head of Demand Gen. Must have experience with ABM, paid social, SEO, content marketing, email automation, event strategy, and analytics.” Salary: $130K. So you want one person to own strategy and execution across 7 channels, report to the CMO, manage a budget, and somehow also build the systems underneath all of it. Good luck. This is the mistake I see over and over with Series A and B companies. They think hiring a demand gen person solves demand gen. It doesn’t. Not if there’s no system underneath them. What actually happens: the new hire spends 3 months trying to understand the existing mess. They duct-tape some tools together. They launch a few campaigns. Pipeline looks okay for a quarter. Then they burn out or get blamed when the CEO expected 3x growth from one headcount. Before you hire for demand gen, you need to answer one question honestly: If a great demand gen lead walked in the door today, would your system convert them? Or would they get lost in the same mess everyone else does? Hire the person after you’ve built the machine they’ll operate. Not the other way around.

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🔥 Hot Take: It’s time to retire MQL and SQL as marketing and sales terms. We’ve been clinging to these labels for years, and honestly they’re creating more division than alignment. Here’s the truth: A lead is never the result of a single campaign or a single team. It’s the culmination of multiple touchpoints, across content, outreach, ads, conversations, events, and more. So why do we keep splitting ownership like it’s a turf war? 💡 Instead of defining leads as “marketing’s” or “sales’,” we should treat them as collaborative outcomes—measured through multi-touch attribution that reflects the real buyer journey. Because once you do that, a few powerful things happen: - You stop debating MQL vs SQL definitions. Clearly this drives me batty. - You start evaluating what actually drives pipeline. Isn't that what we are here to do? - You get marketing and sales aligned around a shared strategy, not fighting over credit. It is possible. It’s not about giving up on attribution. It’s about evolving how we look at it and using it to make smarter decisions together. When both teams agree on the levers, tactics, and timing you get a cohesive engine, not a disconnected process. It can become more about the win and less about egos. I'm curious how are your teams aligning today? Are you still tracking MQLs and SQLs, or have you moved beyond? #B2BMarketing #RevenueAlignment #AttributionModeling #GoToMarket #SalesAndMarketing #LindasThoughts #HotTake

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Myth: Direct mail is only good for retention. False. Brands that crush retention on PostPilot don't stop there. While it can be a predictable starting point, channel champions know the power of direct mail goes far beyond simply waking up dead lists. These champions leverage direct mail across the entire customer lifecycle. And they drive real results. What's possible? > Prospecting? AcquisitionAI builds real-time lookalikes, as smart as Meta. > Welcome flows? Triggered postcards drive double-digit ROAS alongside Klaviyo. > LTV expansion? Postcards that hit when spend thresholds are met, even if a client is actively engaged with digital. > Retargeting? SiteMatch identifies and converts more anonymous traffic. Brands using both digital and direct mail, strategically placed side by side, see an average 2.89x higher incremental ROAS compared to digital alone. And look no further than our many case studies (https://lnkd.in/gzC3Hb2j) with brands like Laird Superfood and Caddis to see just how powerful this can be. Direct mail isn’t a last resort. It’s a first-class customer journey tool. If you're still running postcards like it's 2012, let's talk.

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Hot take (from the “been there” files): You don’t get scrappy and perfectly planned. Pick one. Scrappy marketing teams operate just-in-time. They test, learn, ship, adjust. They make smart calls with imperfect info because momentum matters more than perfection. The “plan every breath” version of marketing? That’s a luxury model. It requires: • Time • Headcount • Research • Real budget (think multi-millions, not “be creative”) • Leadership that understands tradeoffs What doesn’t work is asking a lean team to: • Move fast and be fully baked • React in real time and predict outcomes months ahead • Operate scrappy and deliver enterprise-grade polish • Own results without authority, resources, or air cover That’s not high standards. That’s mixed signals. Marketing doesn’t fail in isolation. It reflects the system it’s built in. If you want scrappy — protect speed. If you want precision — fund it properly. But you can’t demand both and then call the misses a performance issue. Curious where others land on this 👀

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Nobody talks about approval delays as a financial issue. They should. 85% of creative teams report that approvals run past planned timelines. Over 75% say those delays directly waste budget. That's not a process inconvenience. That's money left on the table every single quarter. Creative Ops leaders are being asked to do more with less, while their biggest budget leak is hiding inside a broken review process. Fix the approval workflow. Protect the budget. That's what StreamWork was built for. #CreativeOps #ApprovalWorkflow #CreativeProduction

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The little things that made one candidate stand out in our hiring process👇 We recently wrapped up hiring for my team. And while many candidates were strong, one person stood out by far by focusing on the little things 🔹 Sent thoughtful follow-ups after every step. Not just thank-yous. He included summaries, links, and flagged if no action was needed from our end. 🔹 Came well-prepared for the interview. Clear structure, solid STAR-format answers, and strong communication. 🔹 Paid close attention to details I shared during the chat—and reflected them back in his case study. It wasn’t generic. It was tailored. 🔹 Did the homework. He actually researched the company and had an idea of the ICP that helped him shape his case study. In the end, those signals told me something more important than resume bullet points ever could. → This person pays attention. → This person communicates clearly. → This person already acts like a part of the team. What’s something small but powerful a candidate has done that made them stand out?

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