# Mike MacDonald

Mike MacDonald shares practical advice on B2B demand generation and growth marketing, including email re-engagement, content strategy, customer advocacy, and measuring marketing’s contribution to revenue.

- Profile: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/creators/mike-macdonald/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikemacdirect
- Topics: b2b-marketing, content-marketing, email-marketing, go-to-market-strategy, demand-generation, marketing-measurement
- Based on 17 dated posts, latest 2026-10-06

## Summary

Mike MacDonald is most useful for practical B2B demand generation advice on email, content, measurement, and advocacy.

- Best for: B2B SaaS or marketing technology brands wanting thought leadership on demand generation systems.
- Not for: Consumer brands or campaigns needing video, media kits, demographics, or guaranteed reach and engagement.
- Check first: Ask for partnership terms, formats, inquiry route, audience demographics, and supporting performance evidence.

### Takeaways

- Re-engagement plan uses a 30-day sequence and removes contacts who do not respond.
- Email measurement suggests comparing a matched no-email group with a group that receives email.
- Posts propose a 60/40 split between long-term brand building and performance marketing.

## Main ideas

- **Demand generation is a buying-journey design problem, not a lead-volume problem**: Mike MacDonald argues that most demand generation programs fail because they are built backwards: teams start with “we need more leads” instead of asking what buying journey they are designing. The distinction is between lead volume and lead progression: moving buyers from unaware to aware, interested and ready to buy. Without a system that intentionally moves buyers forward, they describe marketing as renting attention. The demand engines that worked best, they write, mapped content to buyer-intent stages rather than running one-off campaigns to collect more leads.
- **Earn attention instead of renting it, on roughly a 60/40 split**: Buying attention makes a company a tenant on a platform, exposed to algorithm changes and rising ad costs. Earning attention through authority content builds a relationship the company owns. Authority content, they argue, creates that ownership, converts attention into trust at scale and qualifies prospects, so they reach sales better educated and closer to a yes.
- **Prove that marketing causes revenue, not just that it got clicks**: Mike MacDonald identifies a gap between activity reporting and causation: marketing teams present open rates while finance asks what the spend produced. They propose a holdout test, treating the difference between a withheld segment and a receiving segment as revenue the channel caused, rather than merely touched. The same argument extends to vocabulary: likes, impressions and clicks versus customer acquisition cost, lifetime value and payback period.
- **Dormant contacts are a fixable liability, not just a big list**: Companies that have been around a while can have 50,000 or more contacts who have not opened an email in six months, visited the site or spoken to sales. Keeping those contacts costs money through the CRM or marketing platform while inflating database numbers. Mike MacDonald says they damage deliverability, skew data and drain budget. The fix is a systematic re-engagement and scrubbing campaign, paired with an always-on program for newly disengaged contacts, so dormant contacts are revived or removed rather than left to sit.
- **Customer advocacy is a demand engine, not a nice-to-have**: Mike MacDonald opens with the claim that the most effective marketing is not an ad but a recommendation. Companies spend heavily on demand generation while ignoring their own customers; a structured customer advocacy program, they argue, is one of the strongest demand engines available. The reasoning is social proof: a company praising itself tends to fall on deaf ears, while happy clients saying the same thing build authority and credibility in the market.
- **Fix the data plumbing before buying more tools**: Most commercial stacks, MacDonald says, are a “Franken-stack” of tools that do not talk to each other. When the CRM does not connect to the email tool and neither knows what happens in the product, lifecycle marketing becomes guesswork, measurement is unavailable and prioritization turns into a nightmare. They recommend holding off on new purchases until the existing tools are confirmed to integrate accurately, then working toward a single source of truth that can trigger the right message at the right time.

## Work to read

- [Re-engagement and contact scrubbing: a plan for disengaged email lists](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/mikemacdirect_marketing-growthmarketing-emailmarketing-activity-7467363850472816640-J0h9)
- [Demand generation built backwards: mapping content to buying stages](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/mikemacdirect_demandgeneration-marketing-growthmarketing-activity-7449218670410551296-SF78)
- [The 60/40 split between brand building and performance marketing](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/mikemacdirect_gtm-marketing-performancemarketing-activity-7456685323016749056-Otmq)
- [Proving email causes revenue: a holdout test](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/mikemacdirect_emailmarketing-b2bmarketing-marketingstrategy-activity-7500666762036772864-7YNU)
- [Why a disconnected tech stack blocks lifecycle marketing](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/mikemacdirect_marketing-gtm-growthmarketing-activity-7454573729961074688-zCqF)
- [Customer advocacy as a demand generation channel](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/mikemacdirect_customeradvocacy-wordofmouth-socialproof-activity-7453423781949112320-69T0)
- [Presenting a growth plan to finance in investment terms, not activity metrics](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/mikemacdirect_growthmarketing-demandgen-marketing-activity-7454879296436953088-wGOe)

## Partnerships

Mike MacDonald's nine available posts, published on LinkedIn between March and September 2026, offer no partnership, sponsorship, or paid-collaboration terms. They provide marketing commentary on how brands should build customer advocacy, re-engagement, and content programs—recommendations to marketing teams, not offers Mike sells. The posts include no sponsor disclosure, rate card, media kit, format specification, or contact route for brand work. Before planning spend, ask for a commercial contact, terms, deliverables, and disclosure requirements.

## Alternatives

- Mohammad Zumair: Choose Mohammad Zumair when the demand-generation problem is proof rather than pipeline. Their posts argue that the buying decision often happens before a lead reaches the CRM: a buyer asks an AI assistant about a category, a shortlist forms, and analytics records no click, form fill, or MQL—yet the decision is already moving. They propose measuring influence instead of interactions: AI visibility, category association, share of consideration, brand recall inside buying groups, third-party validation, customer advocacy, shortlist creation, sales-cycle acceleration, and win-rate movement. That makes them the better pick for a company whose demand engine already runs but whose reporting can no longer explain why deals move, or for a brief about building presence during AI-driven and peer-driven research before the buying window opens. Both posts lean on outside research—a 2026 Forrester figure on AI use in buying processes and McKinsey's 2026 B2B Pulse on buyers using around ten channels, plus a 2025 6sense report and Gartner research on buyers shortlisting vendors before contacting sellers—so the reader gets a measurement vocabulary rather than a campaign recipe.
- Joe Kaszynski: Choose Joe Kaszynski when the dormant asset is old pipeline rather than an unengaged email list. One post describes reactivating a backlog of cold and closed-lost Salesforce opportunities with conversational AI email. Instead of guessing from messy records, they asked the sales team which three or four topics generate the most excitement in live calls, built the sequence around those pain points, and reported 45 direct responses that turned into 34 qualified opportunities with no added budget. The other post tells a campaign story about a Wiley Dummies book for a highly technical audience: a subject-matter expert predicted the campaign would fail, but it performed. The lesson: experience is one point of view, and the market settles the argument. For a reader seeking a firsthand account of a reactivation programme—with response and opportunity counts and a method for sourcing messaging from sales—this is a stronger starting point than a framework alone.
- Devoreaux Walton: Devoreaux Walton is the better choice when the need is hands-on email and social automation for a boutique or independent eCommerce brand, not B2B SaaS demand generation. Both posts are benefit-led guides aimed at that audience: one walks through email automation—timely follow-ups, behaviour-based triggers, segmentation at scale, lifecycle campaigns, and testing—and the other covers social media automation, including scheduling, content variety, real-time replies, and analytics. Each ends with a direct invitation to get in touch about setting up or migrating a platform, so the posts read as a practitioner offering implementation work rather than analysis of someone else's programme. Choose this name when the sponsor wants someone used to running the tooling for consumer eCommerce brands and is comfortable starting with a direct approach.

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AI-assisted summary of public posts. Audience demographics are not available. Engagement appears only where we checked recent posts. Method: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/methodology/