CMO Chats with Thomas McGrath, Director of Content, Digital Marketing & PR at Nexthink

Hi everyone, welcome to CMO Chats. Thank you so much for having me. My name is Thomas McGrath, and I’m the Director of Content, Digital Marketing, and PR for Nexthink.

What sparked your interest in marketing?

What sparked my interest in marketing was probably being what they like to call nowadays a “content creator.” Earlier in my career, I was making videos, writing, and getting my work published. That was my first entry into the technology and content marketing space. I saw the early potential of digital for presenting and generating content, and for connecting people’s genuine interest and curiosity about a topic with the opportunity to use that interest – to leverage this platform and these vehicles – to make connections and foster engagement in an organisation’s message and mission.

Can you tell us more about what your company does?

Absolutely. Nexthink is the founder and inventor of a space known as Digital Employee Experience (DEX). It’s effectively B2B software that enables IT at large organisations to better measure and manage their technology distribution and usage. The space known as DEX, for short, is something we actually coined ourselves, and now it’s a concept that has really taken hold in the industry. Many companies are focused on the idea of experience, user experience, and employee experience more generally, but as it applies specifically to digital experience, that’s a genuine trend. Very soon – this year, in fact – we’ll see the first Gartner Magic Quadrant dedicated to the DEX space, which we coined ourselves. So, we’re the leader in this space, and it’s an exciting time to be a ‘Nexthinker’, shall we say.

As the Director of Digital Content and Digital Marketing in your organisation, what would currently be your main focus?

So, the team I lead is mainly focused on brand recognition. As we see the mainstreaming of DEX, as I just mentioned, it’s been an ongoing, growing process over many years, and now it seems to be reaching its peak in 2024. Our main target this year is to make sure we take full advantage of that growth in awareness and interest, and also act strategically to ensure we are recognised as the leader in this space. Obviously, the more popular a concept becomes, the more peers and competitors enter the fray, so we need to ensure that the recognition we’re receiving from the likes of Gartner and Forrester is reflected and communicated both internally and externally through our marketing.

Can you tell me about a particularly innovative or successful marketing campaign that you and your team have recently executed?

Sure. I mean, it’s a great team to be part of because we have a wonderful remit from our actual CMO – who probably should be your guest rather than a non-CMO like myself – to be as creative and risk-taking as possible. With that very broad remit to create awareness, interest, and excitement, we’ve launched all kinds of projects over the past few years: thought leadership hubs, an industry-leading weekly podcast, full television adverts, a global event series with our field team, and even a ‘Dummies Guide to DEX’ as part of the famous book series. But the one campaign I’d single out is a certification series we launched last year across a range of DEX topics. These certifications are free, and participants receive a badge at the end. We’ve had well over 1,000 graduates or certifications awarded to people completing them. This year, we launched two more certifications, bringing our syllabus to six in total. It’s a good example of ensuring our thought leadership remains preeminent, and it was quite successful.

What would you say are your biggest marketing challenges at the moment?

As I mentioned, 2024 is a significant year for our organisation, and the opportunity here is tremendous. Nexthink was actually founded by our CEO, who is also one of the co-founders, and during his postgraduate study at the Swiss Institute for Technology in Lausanne, he developed a prototype that eventually became Nexthink. He was studying AI at the time – back in 2004 – so we’ve just celebrated our 20th anniversary, and we have a genuine history in AI. At the moment, AI is a dominant topic, so our challenge is making that history count. How do we ensure that our investments and innovations in AI don’t get lost in the noise and hype? How do we make it clear to both potential and existing customers that we have authentic roots and a solid future in this technology?

In your opinion, what does the future of marketing look like to you?

That’s a fascinating question. The future, for anyone, is so difficult to predict right now. But I’ll throw in my two pence: particularly in content and brand marketing, the ability to create increasingly sophisticated content with AI is going to lead to a deluge. There’ll be an overwhelming amount of content produced by these increasingly accessible tools. Paradoxically, I think that human creativity, discernment, taste, and instinct in marketing will become even more important because it’s going to get harder and harder to create content that stands out. AI, certainly as it stands, doesn’t provide the nuance and sophistication that human sensibility can offer. So, I believe that creative professionals who can skilfully deploy these technologies will become more, not less, essential.

What is the role of a Director of Digital Content and Digital Marketing in one word, and why?

The one word would be “facilitator.” We have a talented and diverse team – videographers, digital specialists, content strategists, customer marketing experts, PR experts, writers – and I see my role as knitting together all these different talents, not only with one another and our wider team strategy but with other departments and colleagues. While we have a clear remit to produce our own work, it’s also absolutely essential, in my view, that we support the various needs of the rest of the company week to week.

What career advice would you like to share with other marketing leaders?

My career advice would be to take risks. The real winning projects and the most rewarding ones are often those that make you feel nervous or stressed as you plan, execute, and launch them. That feeling, to me, is an indicator that you’re doing the right thing. You should be stepping out of your comfort zone, taking risks, and doing things that get noticed by your colleagues and, of course, by your target audience. So, my advice is to push yourself – make yourself nervous.

As VP of revenue marketing, what is currently your marketing focus?

My main focus is two things: at the simplest level, it’s acquiring new customers and then growing existing customers. On the acquisition side, we do that through demand generation, other acquisition channels, advertising, paid media, and such. The website, our SEO, and the self-serve funnel, as well as field marketing and events, are all focused on bringing in new customers into the funnel.

On the growing existing customer side, this is more of your growth marketing process. We’re testing and iterating across onboarding and lifecycle marketing, working with sales, and trying to create opportunities for self-serve accounts that are coming in with the opportunity to grow. I also oversee the marketing tech stack and all of our marketing operations and systems. What I try to do is get these things working in harmony. Because all of these are kind of squarely placed against the customer life cycle where we’re bringing them in, we’re nurturing and onboarding them all digitally, and then as they adopt the product and as they use more of the product, we try to grow those customers and introduce other features and products to them.

Can you tell us about a particularly memorable marketing campaign, whether it was particularly challenging or especially successful that you’ve executed recently?

Prior to DigitalOcean, I was at Google for seven years, and one of the things that really has stuck with me in, really, my whole career was during COVID when I was on Google Workspace. Team workspace is, you know, Gmail, Calendar, Doc, Slides, Meet, etc. This was when Zoom and the surge of video communication began; all of us were locked at home, and all of the chaos was going on. It was a great opportunity for Google to strategically bring Google Meet into that conversation. At the time, I was leading growth marketing for the workspace team, and we created a master class on how to get a team focused, mobilise that team, give them strategy, give them structure, and ultimately execute a really big vision.

We had maybe 50 people coming in and out of this work, streaming across daily stand-ups, regular syncs from a program management perspective, looking at metrics and reporting to leadership, and a full project scope. We had people from brand, media, the UX team, research, product, product marketing, growth marketing, sales, and even engineering sometimes. What was really, really amazing to me was that it could have been utter chaos. It could have been a complete disaster, right? You have that many people that many opinions, and that many agendas, and it wasn’t. It was just that everybody was so focused on what we were trying to do. Each person was completely content with their work stream, their tasks, and what they needed to do, and everyone had the autonomy to sort of own their own lane in the pool. That, in itself, was just amazing to be a part of. I’ve taken that with me and thought through it whenever I’m building a project team.

But the thing I was most personally proud of was on the growth side. What we did was figure out how to introduce Google Meet to existing workspace customers. So these were customers that were heavy users of probably Gmail and Calendar, maybe even docs and slides, and some of the collaborative document types. What we figured out was a way to extract some of the signals of what these customers were doing in these apps and then feed that into a predictive formula that would then introduce Google Meet at the right time. An example of this I’ll share is: let’s say you and two other folks in your workspace account are all in a document at the same time. Maybe you’re editing; you’re sort of interacting with each other. That’s a great opportunity to say, “Hey, did you know you can actually take this document and share it directly and meet and have a quick huddle? ”You can see each other. You can have a conversation. Maybe that makes your collaboration a little bit easier. There were dozens and dozens of these experiments. But it was new. It was the beginning of what would later become a more solidified, cross-functional growth process. It was just a really profound opportunity to be a part of that when the world wasn’t at its best. We all found some solitude in that process.

What are your biggest marketing challenges at the moment?

I’ll share something I think is kind of general for the industry because I think that might be more relevant. I certainly face some of these, and I think a lot of them. When I talk to friends and colleagues in marketing positions, we’re all kind of hearing and saying the same thing. But I think what’s happened is that, particularly in B2B, the buyers that we’re trying to market to are extremely fatigued. In some cases, they’re annoyed, right? They’re tuning out our marketing. I think you see that in the data. You see website traffic start to go down, and you see impressions go down. You see advertising costs go up. It’s ultimately just harder to get in front of our buyers, on top of even just understanding who our buyers are.

The second thing is that I think over the last few years we, as marketers, really kind of overdid it. We had this surplus of budget and desire to grow during COVID. And so, what did we do? We did tons and tons of webinars, tons of digital content, tons of digital media, and tons of messages nonstop. We were able to distribute this on a scale we never had. Unfortunately, what we did was just saturate the market, and now, as a result, we’ve got these buyers who are engaging less with marketing, and I think, ultimately taking the sales process into their own hands. You see all these stats where the average sales deal the buyer has already completed, like 60% of the process before they even talk to a salesperson. In some cases, they want to do it all themselves. They want to go to a review site, they want to talk to peers, they may join a community, they look at social media, and they’re already formulating their opinion before they even talk to you. That’s a key sort of risk for marketing, where we typically try to influence that thought process before they talk to sales.

On top of that, you see budgets are down. Marketers are facing lower budgets, and they’re trying to do more with less. But also, for the companies that we’re selling to, their budgets are down, right? They might be investing less in certain types of software or certain types of processes. And so, all of these things happening at once kind of create this perfect storm where it’s just become a lot harder to market, is what I think. As a result of that, I believe it’s forcing the marketers to get back to some of the basics. We need to understand who our customers are and what pain points they’re trying to solve, and then creatively explain what our product or solution does to them. This is where you’ve got to find something unique and just simply use the channels that every other one of your competitors is using in a kind of mundane way. It’s just not going to cut it, right? You really have to focus on the customer and what they’re looking for, and then build around that.

What are some common trends that you have noticed different companies capitalise on to stay ahead of their competitors in terms of marketing?

Right now, I see two things really growing: One is the rise of the B2B social influencer. You go on LinkedIn now, and it is, it’s all; it’s either founders, CEOs, CMOs, or some sort of C-level that is positioning themselves as an influencer in their industry.

Then the second is communities. You can see how these things can actually work well together. But a lot of companies are investing in the community. I think the ones that had this sort of strategy in their DNA as a company before are doing really well because they’ve already got this built-in audience. And so, as I mentioned before, it’s getting a lot harder to reach that audience through media, essentially renting it from LinkedIn, Facebook, Google, or whatever you’re using as an ad platform. If you have that built-in community, you now have a leg up. You have a community of, hopefully, your prospects and customers that you can learn from. You can do research, understand what their pain points are and what they’re looking for, and then design products, solutions, and marketing around that. So, I think influencers and communities are really important right now.

But I think the catch here is that it’s like content. Simply creating content doesn’t drive growth or performance—it has to be good content. And so, on the influencer side, I think you see some who have kind of stumbled into this, and their posts just look like promotions for their company or their product, not really creating any value. You have to be a part of the conversation; you have to join the conversation and add value to it. It’s the same thing with communities, right? If you build up a community and all you do is advertise your product to them, you’ll likely not have a community very soon. I think it’s all about how you create value across these two channels and, ultimately, how you build and win the trust of your customers and position them to consider doing business with you.

In your opinion, what does the future of marketing look like?

Oh, I love this question. I think the answer is that it’s different. It’s going to look different. I’ve already made some, like, I guess, predictions you could call them from, say, six months ago, that are stale already. I think the big thing is that AI is obviously going to change a lot of marketing. But what I’m excited about is where AI strategically gets placed in your marketing supply chain. If you think about the entire marketing process across brand, creative, demand, generation, and operations, and how you’re showing up to meet buyers in their hypothetical journey, I think that’s the key. There are so many places where it can be valuable. And what you see now is kind of the first foray into AI, which was messaging and creative. You can now build content and copy and visuals and videos and audio just super, super easy—almost too easy—to an extent, where we really do run this risk of over-saturating and already saturated market content is just becoming a lot easier to create, but also harder to find and harder to consume.

The second area is workflow management with AI agents. This is where I’m really excited because you think about all of the mundane commodity tasks that a marketer might do, even just preparing a social post. They historically, maybe, went to a copywriter to get the copy, they went to a designer to get the design, and then they went to maybe a channel owner who’s going to craft all that together and put it into the channel, click Post, and then you’ve got a person who’s going to report on that. You’ve got agents now that can do most of that, and then you’re sort of managing these agents. I think that’s really cool. It also comes with some responsibility, right? If you’re sort of hyper-accelerating with crappy messages, it’s not going to do you well, right? You still need to be creative, but what you can do is speed up the delivery process.

Then the third one I think I’m particularly fond of, and I’m really keen to learn more about, is just predictive analytics and better insight creation through AI. In my career, a kind of pre-chat GPT coming up with insights requires a data scientist. Building a predictive model required a data engineer, a data analyst, and a lot of resources, and the results were great, right? You can really understand a lot about your customers by looking at that data, but I think I imagine a world where a lot of that is automated and streamlined. As you launch a campaign, you basically feed that campaign into some machine learning or predictive model, and it’s now looking for all the things that you’ve trained it to look for. As a result, it’s giving you much faster, more real-time insights that you can take action on. It could be simple things like changing creative or changing messaging, or it might be something more along the lines of, “Hey, your most valuable customers are doing X, Y, and Z before they take that action.” And so, it’s starting now to help you understand what the buyer journey is and doing that at a way more granular level. All customers are created equal; they’re all very, very, very different. Now you have this proliferation of buyer journeys that are driven by insights, and then you can take action on that, personalize messaging, and do all that fun stuff.

If you could describe the role of a CMO in one word, what would that word be? and why?

I love this one. I think I just sort of came across this as an aha moment, but the word is servant. There’s a common description of servant leadership. As a leader, are you serving? I really want to understand what this means. There’s the leadership side, but even as a marketing team, you have to think about your role of serving customers, those on your team, your organisation, and then other areas in the company, right? Most businesses don’t succeed just because of marketing. I think you really need to be okay with that; you need to be humble that your role is to work with products, to work with product, marketing, sales, engineering, operations teams, and strategy teams, to bring the brand to life in the market, or to bring those products and solutions to market in a creative way. For me, the times where I felt the most successful are when I’ve been really tuned in to these other teams and really understand what they’re working on and what their goals are, and then I can bring that marketing perspective. Whatever it is, whether it’s from a creative side or it’s from more of an operational and growth side, either way, you know the value that you bring, and you’re working with these teams to execute.

What career advice would you like to share with other marketing leaders out there?

I thought about this one a bit, and where I landed was to control what you can control. Thinking about where I’ve been successful or felt the most successful is in the places where I didn’t get caught up in either politics, drama, changes in the organisation, or things that I just couldn’t control, right? Like, maybe the market’s down. I can’t really control that, right? But what I can control is my little slice of marketing, my team, and the people I work with.

In some cases, as I’ve personally grown through my career, most of my role changes were the result of reorganisation and new organisational design, which most people kind of commiserate around. “Oh, I don’t want this change. I don’t want to do that and this and that.” You can’t control the fact that it changed. But what you can control is how you show up, how you work with your new leader, and how you transition from the old leader. If you’re getting a new team or joining a new team, you can control how you show up there, and you can control your personality and your outlook. Those types of things, I think, go a really, really long way. I’ve tried to think about this and even the day-to-day. You can very quickly at work; just get thrown into a bunch of things that you realise you really have no control over. But find the thing you can control and just run with it. Do what you can do as well as you can, and block out what others are doing and the things that are out of your control.