Exit Five Newsletter #148

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Hello and welcome to the Exit Five Weekly Newsletter - read by 37,000 B2B marketing professionals around the world. Exit Five is a membership site designed to help you build a successful career in B2B marketing. Join 5,000 other members at exitfive.com.

By the way - this email was designed in Knak which helps you create email and landing pages in minutes without having to write code. Learn more about Knak here.

🧠 Here’s What 600+ Lifecycle Marketers Are Thinking About Right Now

Ever wonder what your peers are actually doing when it comes to lifecycle marketing?

Customer.io surveyed over 600 lifecycle marketers to get a read on what’s working, what’s not, and where teams are investing this year.

A few things stood out:

• Most teams are still prioritizing acquisition, but retention is starting to slip (down from 50% to 45%)
  
  
• Email is still the ROI king, but SMS is gaining traction as a fast, high-impact channel
  
  
• More than half of marketers say reporting is their biggest challenge – and most aren’t planning to fix it any time soon

If you’re leading lifecycle, growth, or retention, this report offers a real-world look at how other teams are approaching 2025… and what might be worth rethinking.

Get the full report here.

🔨 Build A Creator Program From The Ground Up In B2B

Clay, the data enrichment and sales automation platform, grew their LinkedIn following from 8,000 to 40,000 in just 10 months.

Their secret? A creator-led marketing program that turns users into advocates in a super authentic way.

And Bruno Estrella, Clay's Head of Growth Marketing, broke down exactly how Clay built a community of creators who genuinely love their product.

Identify natural creators in your user base

Clay noticed their early adopters included tons of freelancers and agencies who were already creating content to grown their own businesses.

So they built a three-tiered structure:

• Creators Program: People who want to talk about Clay
  
  
• Clay Experts: Freelancers and agencies building businesses on Clay
  
  
• Top RevOps Agencies: Enterprise-focused partners working with large clients

But they didn’t stop there…

Define exactly what you’re looking for

Clay formalized their approach with specific requirements for creators:

• They must already be creating content on LinkedIn
  
  
• They must have mentioned Clay before
  
  
• They must actively use the product

This isn't just an affiliate program. It’s closer to a community where members genuinely use and value the product.

Take the time to build a real relationship

Especially at the beginning, it’s going to be really hands on. For Clay, this looked like identifying agencies who were signing up for the product and personally reaching out to help them create content around Clay.

This dirty work created the foundation for their program before any automation.

Hopping on calls to understand their challenges and goals created a deeper partnership and gave them a chance to show a ton of value.

Example: The Clay team would help creators build solutions that drove results for their businesses that they could share with their audience in a really organic way.

Make content creation as easy as possible

How can you build programs that enable creators to do more? Clay does this with:

• Tools to auto-generate branded screen recordings
  
  
• Affiliate links
  
  
• Content templates they can customize
  
  
• Promotion of creator profiles in Clay's paid ads
  
  
• Special product feature access

Example: They recently launched a tool where creators recorded a voiceover, and Clay automatically generated a professional screen recording with the creator's face and voice demonstrating new features.

Key takeaway: By enabling creators who are already using (and loving) your product to showcase their success, you can build a powerful marketing engine that feels authentic and drives consistent top-of-funnel growth. Plus, you’ll have more UGC than you know what to do with!

📺 UPCOMING EVENTS

🧪 [THURSDAY] B2B Paid Campaigns: What Worked, What Flopped, and What You Can Steal

Most paid campaigns in B2B fail quietly — but the best teams are using smart testing to figure out what actually drives pipeline.

In this Exit Five Live session, Dave Gerhardt and Pranav Piyush (Co-founder of Paramark) will break down real-world paid experiments across LinkedIn, Meta, CTV, and out-of-home — based on anonymized campaign data from the last 18 months.

We’re not talking about high-level strategy or vague frameworks. We’re talking actual test hypotheses, what was tried, what worked, what didn’t – and what you can learn from it.

You’ll even get to vote on the outcomes and see how your instincts stack up.

We’ll cover:

• Which channels and formats delivered real results in B2B
• What failed (and why it failed)
• How to structure smarter paid tests without wasting budget
• Practical ideas you can borrow to improve your next paid campaign

We’ll keep it casual, interactive, and packed with practical takeaways. Plus, we’ll save time at the end for live Q&A so you can ask your toughest questions on measurement, channels, and testing strategy.

Join Live or Get the Recording

🏢 OPEN ROLES

Who's hiring right now?

🔥 HOT JOB OF THE WEEK: New North is hiring a Growth Marketing Strategist to own client relationships and marketing execution, translate client goals into actionable strategies, and oversee projects to drive measurable results. The ideal candidate is a strategic thinker with strong project management skills, a bias for action, and a knack for delivering high-impact B2B marketing work.

Interested? Apply here.

Other open roles on the Exit Five job board this week:

• Exit Five is hiring a Growth Marketer (Contract)
• Exit Five is hiring an Event Planner (Contract)
• Walnut is hiring a Senior Content and Brand Strategist
• Buddy Punch is hiring a Head of Marketing
• Clearscope is hiring a Partnerships Marketing Manager
• Overjet is hiring a Head of Growth Marketing
• Ten Speed is hiring a Senior Designer
• Overjet is hiring a Head of Product Marketing
• Neara is hiring a Demand Generation Manager
• Great Question is hiring a Senior Demand Generation Specialist

See all open roles

Have an open role and want to make sure the best B2B marketing talent sees it?

Just reply to this email and we'll send over more info on how you can post it on our job board + get it in front of 25k+ marketers.

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