Leveraging Compounding Channels For Long-Term Growth with Demandwell | SaaStr Software Community

All right, diving in. So, you know, we're operating under the assumption that marketing teams should drive revenue here. It's an expensive team with a large budget, but it also has a huge potential to contribute to the bottom line and drive real growth for businesses. As we've recently learned, we have to be really effective and efficient with that budget. So the growth of the growth at all costs mindset of, you know, previous generations of marketers has gotten us into trouble and sustainability is the way forward. So sustainable growth is achieved through balancing a bunch of things. We have to drive immediate results while we plan for long-term success. We have to get in front of people who happen to be in market, but we also have to show up where they're actively searching for what we offer. And we have to invest in channels that you know, scale predictably with inputs where a dollar in results in X dollars out. But we also want to have channels that compound over time, like a 401(k), you put in an investment and over time, the results scale exponentially. And 3 channels that do this are brand, SEO, and community. So that's what we're talking about today. Brand. There's all of this amazing eloquent advice about what brand is. We know now that it's not just colors and font and t-shirts with your logo on it. Brand is what people say about you when you're not in the room, but that's not particularly actionable. What does that mean for early stage marketers? How do you drive sustainable growth with brand? In my experience, a few things need to be true. So on, first of all, I believe that you have to sacrifice demand sometimes in order for brand to work. Brand should have a specific purpose, a specific goal, and it should not be lead gen. Two, you need to get full buy-in from your leadership team because brand projects don't necessarily have immediate or even sometimes trackable ROI. You need to make sure that the people who are holding you accountable for your goals know this. And then lastly, brand projects and campaigns, I think, should stand on their own two legs. Like, they should add value to people regardless of if they're a customer or not. So to dive into a real-life example from this, from my time at Meister QA, we had an event series called The Art of Conversation. Meister QA is a quality assurance and coaching software for frontline customer support agents that helps them have really good conversations with customers over time. And so our goal and our brand purpose for this event was to enable support teams to orchestrate these amazing conversations at scale, even if they weren't a customer. And, you know, we had to get creative to make this happen. So on the one hand, we basically removed all of our lead gen goals from the picture for a few months, and everything we were doing was driving people to this event. So our SDR team was even spiffed on registrations, you know, instead of them trying to drive demos. And we had to partner with the whole company to make it possible, like our CS team, our customer success team, was driving customer registration. We had our success people speaking, our CEO spoke. It really was like a full company project. And we tried to really build something that could stand on its own. So there was a distinct brand identity and we tried to adhere to creating something of value regardless of whether or not someone was a customer. So here are some quick examples of that. So The branding was distinct from our company brand. It was similar, but it was its own thing. And the session titles and topics, we tried to avoid mentioning Maestro at all, actually, which is incredibly uncomfortable and unnatural for marketers. But what we really wanted to do was present people at companies who were solving real problems that others are probably facing as well in a multitude of ways. One of those ways would ideally be with our software, but like not necessarily, and no need to shout it from the rooftops, you know. And then this is just an example of full company buy-in. You know, our CEO moderated this panel with MeetUndies where they were talking about how they used quality assurance and a growth mindset to unlock improvements in, you know, a certain metric that matters to them. And having our CEO on a panel with such a great customer of ours just like built a lot of trust. You know, it's the same with your customer success team and it demonstrates your knowledge as a business. And the outcomes are huge. You know, brand looks a number of ways. Today I'm talking specifically about events and the impact that this specific event had. But I think like this can be applied to a lot of other types of brand projects as well. In our case here, so we had 20 customers who spoke on our behalf, building brand advocacy and relationship touchpoints with our internal team. We had 4 hours of engagement across 400 attendees. I mean, I dare you to ask someone, a customer-facing person on your team, to ask a customer or a prospect to join you for 4 hours in a single day. Like, that's not going to happen. But by providing value outside of your tool, you do get that type of engagement, which is pretty amazing. And then, you know, projects like this create a foot in the door where you might not be able to get one. For example, at this time, Maestro, we were like a $3 million business. I think we had less than 40 employees. Like we were small, small fries, but someone from Nike attended the event. Like, would they have ever taken a demo Probably not. But when you present value, people are more willing to engage. And additionally, I would say like it also opens the gates to prospects who might already have a solution in place and they might not be shopping for software, but they might be willing to engage with you. And then last thing, this is obviously the first step in a much larger relationship, which does result in meetings and revenue. So in the 2 years since the event, we've sort raised over $1 million from that event. And I think I'm taking up too much time, so I'm just going to conclude and say to drive sustainable growth with brand, give your brand a job that serves anyone, partner with your entire organization, say no to other marketing goals, knowing that the impact of brand projects will compound over time. You just have to trust it. And you're never too small to get started. You don't need to put on Dreamforce in order to create something that is really powerful. Over to you, Betsy.

Thanks, Chantal. Yeah, so— Chantal, no, go ahead, Jessie.

Sorry, Betsy. I just realized that we had a lot of participants kind of join in a little bit late. So Chantal, if you could just give a quick recap, like maybe go back to the beginning of this presentation and just do a quick recap of everything you discussed just for late participants, that would be amazing. Sure. I think this is probably the most important slide, and then the rest is just examples. Basically, brand, I think, in order for it to drive sustainable growth, has to serve a specific purpose that is, you know, sort of counterintuitively not necessarily lead gen, but you provide value to anyone, prospects, customers, regardless of their status. And make sure you have full buy-in from your leadership team, because if you're sacrificing lead gen potentially and maybe not seeing ROI for a while, it's important to be really clear on that. And then, yeah, the best thing you can do is to build something that serves your audience on its own outside of your platform. I gave an example of an event. We tried to create value even if people weren't customers, and we sacrificed a lot in order to bring it to life in a way that was really authentic and really adhered to our goal of helping people scale a certain function, even if they weren't a customer. And we had some cool outcomes. OK, Betsy.

Thanks, Chantal. Yeah, so Chantal mentioned this earlier. If you could hit the slide one more, Chantal, that just looking at some compounding tactics, SEO is definitely one of those that has a compounding effect. And it will work for you long after you've worked on it. Another thing is marketers are constantly looking to decrease their customer acquisition cost. How do we hit our goals and also stay in budget? But if you build an SEO strategy that works for you long term, you are essentially creating an inbound lead generation machine that just works for you in the background long after you've worked on it so that you don't have to spend money on leads and other tactics. Can you hit the slide? So there's 3 major components to SEO: technical SEO, off-page SEO, and SEO content. So technical SEO is really one of those things where like, Google is looking at you to make sure that you've got your foundation in place. Is your site ready to receive traffic from them? I mean, they're a business. They want, you know, their customers to keep coming back and searching and finding the right results that help them. So they're looking for page load times, you know, page speed. Are your clickable links resulting in errors? That sort of thing. There's limited impact there though, because really it's like you just should have your site looking and feeling a certain way in 2022. Otherwise Google's just not gonna show your site. Off-page SEO, you can have a tremendous amount of impact with off-page SEO. But it is really hard to scale it because it's not in your control. So if you get third-party quality endorsements of your brand through a clickable link back to your site, you will see the results. You will see an impact there. But it's just really hard for you to do that on your own. You can't say, we're gonna get 3 really great third-party endorsements. Every week. That's just not scalable. A lot of it's out of your control. But with content, it will move the needle significantly. And the scale of it is in your control. You can, you can scale it up as much as you want, scale it back, scale it back as much as you need to. The scaling ability there is infinite because it is in your control to produce content and publish it on your site. I'm gonna hit the slide. So we looked at customer— our customers who have created 50+ pieces, 50 or more pieces of content. And the results were pretty incredible. We saw that they saw on average a 280% increase in traffic, a 440% increase in impressions, and a 930% increase in ranking keywords. And 50 pieces of content may feel like a lot, But the reality is it's one search optimized piece of content a week. And you know, that's not a whole lot to see the results like our customers have seen on average. Can you hit the slide? So I want to talk a little bit about keyword research. I think that a lot of folks think of keyword research as being this thing that you do so that Google, for Google, you do this thing for Google. But the reality is, is that keyword research is audience research. You know, you're, you're really trying to meet your audience based on their search intent. And so your keyword research should reflect that as well. The way that we see most folks searching is they search for pain or problem, they search for a solution and their perceived solution at least. And then they also truly believe that there's a solution out there that's like perfect for them. So, so this, you know, on this slide you can see the problem modifiers, diversity recruiting, that's a problem that someone is experiencing. If you want to hit the slide, we then pair that with the solution modifier. So in SaaS, that'd be, you know, platform, system, tool, app, software, solution, etc. So diversity recruiting software, diversity recruiting platform, we put all those combinations together and then pair it also with an audience modifier, if you want to hit the slide real quick. Because people search like diversity recruiting software for financial services, we then We take those, all of those variations and combinations of all of those different pains, problems, solutions, and audience modifiers. And then we generate a list of real live searched queries based on topical relevancy to those modifiers that you added in, because that's what people, that's how people are searching. We may not search in a grammatically correct kind of way, but we certainly search for our pains, our perceived solutions, and then our, our specific things specific to us. If you wanna hit the slide. So a couple things that I just, you know, as, as you know, you leave here, I want you to think about, create SEO content for people. It's, you know, Google is a system that works for people and you want your content to meet them there. If someone's searching for a guide, give them a guide. If someone's searching for a question, give them an answer. If someone's searching for a platform, Give them a demo. And then one of my favorite questions is, would you rather have $1 million today, or would you rather have a magic penny that doubles daily for a month? If you take the magic, or if you take the million dollars, you're a millionaire on day one. If you take the penny, you only have a penny on day one. But if you wait and you're patient for the entire month, at the end of the month, you could have nearly $11 million if you take the magic penny. So two things, create SEO content for people, And don't delay doing it today. And don't delay, do it today. That's all I got.

I love that. I love that magic penny analogy. It's such a hard thing for people to grasp. And every mistake that I've made in my career as a marketing leader has been because it's so easy. We get in, we play this game of, we try to, we prioritize the short-term thing right now. We're always chasing the this quarter thing. But like multiple times in my career, I've seen like the, if we did what Betsy said and like actually the way we could be growing 30% faster today is if we planted those seeds 2 years ago. And I can go through this quickly because I know we're bumping up against time, but I've seen now 3 times at Drift, at Privy, and now with ExitFive of the power of building a community. If you want to just— we can say on this slide, actually. It's fine. The power of building a community. And so it actually piggybacks perfectly off of what Betsy was talking about, which is, I think especially in B2B, the way to win is through, uh, education and entertainment. And it's, it's why Saastr has grown to be such a powerful brand in this space. And, um, I think it's, it's an advantage that you can use typically inside of a B2B company. No one's starting that company just for fun. Uh, they are, have some deep expertise in an industry, in a niche, and that all can be used to build a community around professionals who want to learn learn and grow. And so, a perfect example was at Drift. I got hired there 6 months before we even launched our product and the mission in marketing was, "Don't worry about revenue yet, build an audience." And we actually, the first thing that— one of the first things that we launched was our podcast called Seeking Wisdom, which we were a MarTech company. Seeking Wisdom was not a podcast about us talking about marketing technology. It was between David and I, who he's a CEO and founder, and me earlier in my career, just kind of talking about things we're doing, books we're reading, lessons from from building the company, like observations from life. And we grew that podcast to 50,000 downloads and we never talked about marketing. It happened to be 2 people that work at Drift and we happen to host this podcast. And that led to us building this initial audience. And by the time we were ready to launch, we had this podcast audience, we had 3,000 people on a waiting list and we got to reach out and say, "Hey, Chantal, you've been listening to us for the last 6 months. We got some actually exciting news to tell you and that's we're launching a SaaS product. Here's what it is." And we drove our first initial business from that. The community part of Drift eventually morphed from going from online to in-person where we did a conference the very first year of the company and we had 1,000 people show up in person and that was the moment, like being in the room that day to feel the power of community beyond, you know, SEO is great, blogging is great, content is great, but there's just something different about like when people are in the same room together and that was an extension of that online community and I think even today you don't have to win with, you don't have to have the biggest podcast, you don't have to have the biggest social media channel, is how can you win with a unique angle and something that is interesting or different for your, for your core audience. If you want to go to the next slide for a second. And then at Privy, we took a different angle with that where Privy is selling to small businesses who really wanted education about marketing that they weren't going to get on their own. And so we started a podcast, but this was a daily podcast hosted by Ben, who is the CEO. He did a 5 to 10 minute daily episode with one really tactical tip that, that, that show was so easy to produce for him because this is all the stuff he was thinking and doing already. And that led to this podcast that had 250,000 downloads in the first year and this loyal audience of operators in e-commerce and doing marketing who are listening to Ben's podcast every day, they start to associate Ben with the brand. They see him as an expert in the industry. This gave us an audience that we didn't have outside of the traditional channels. And I think so often when we do marketing, we like to go and run to the quick fixes. And I'm not saying there's anything wrong with paid advertising or outbound. You have to do those things, especially as you sell to enterprise, you have to do outbound. But I don't— I still think we the ability to build your own audience today. That is what marketing is about. You have all these channels that you didn't have. You don't have to wait for Forbes or TechCrunch or pay some PR agency $20 grand to write about you. You can do this on your own channels and it has many benefits beyond direct response marketing and many SEO benefits like to Betsy's stuff that she just went through. And then if you go to the one last slide, I'm feeling this again firsthand with ExitFive where it's a community in a niche where it works because it's very clearly focused on helping B2B marketers learn more about B2B marketing. It just once again is retelling this, like, people want to connect with each other. We're not selling any software, and so it's like working really well because there's no incentive to like try to sell into the audience. But I think if you can take that back to your company and think, hey, how can we create a place for our ideal customers to hang out online, like regardless of whether we were there or not, and then can we facilitate that for them? I think it's a, it's a great approach. And if you want to just go to the last slide, I can wrap this up with this thought, which is like, if we're talking about sustainability today, not to be like, use a corny analogy, but like, there's nothing more sustainable than like growing your own food, right? And so like, can you plant the seed? And especially now in the next 6 months, like a lot of companies' buying is slowing down. Maybe your, you know, revenue expectations are held back a little bit. You're not under pressure to deliver the hardcore revenue right now because things are a little bit slower. Well, how can you use that time to invest in these things that are gonna pay off 6 months, 12 months, 2 years down the road? And so there's nothing more sustainable than building your own audience as opposed to always having to rely on external sources. It, it goes back to inbound marketing, which we've talked about forever. It goes back to, to earned media. Um, all of those things relate to the, the power of building a community. The end.

The end. Yeah, I love that. I also love what you said about like, oh shoot, we should have started a year ago. Like the reason that we have had events at such an early stage at Maestro was because Jason M. Lemkin, one of our investors, told us like, it's never too early, just get started. Like, don't hold yourself back, you know? Yeah.

And I think you need to have the, you know, oftentimes like it's, you need to have that permission from, from, uh, an investor, an advisor, a, a, like I was lucky to work with David at Drift and Ben at Privy who both believed in this and were like, this is how I communicate and interact with people online. Like, of course we have to do this for our company, but sometimes we don't, we don't take that lens. And so I didn't have to like justify or try to validate like, well, how, you know, what's the ROI of us doing a podcast? Because they both believed in like the, the long-term approach and, and, and they paid off. And I'm not saying this is gonna work for everybody. Uh, the, the advice is don't, don't immediately go start your podcast, but I think it's this type of thinking, which is like, hmm, what, what channels can we create where we can really, we can build our own audience as opposed to always having to spend to go and get people's attention.

Yeah, I think also like you make a really interesting point about getting executive buy-in because I've been in so many situations where like in my My Store QA example, like the founders were really all in on this approach and currently at Demandwell, like we're an SEO company. So, you know, the founders understand that SEO takes time and it's okay if you don't see results right away. But that's definitely just like a universal challenge for marketers, I think, is like how do you manage up? In situations where you're doing things that have results now, but you also are doing things that are not going to have results for a long time. Yeah, that's definitely a tricky thing.

I think you just got to think of it like ultimately you're a portfolio manager where your, your job is not to invest entirely in like, you know, super low risk things and that are super— you have to be able to split your thinking. And so like I think 70/30 or 60/40 is a good way to think about like, how do I split how much is happening I'm doing today, you know, how much I'm thinking about today versus the future. Because it gets tough. It's like next year you're going to be planning for 2024 and you're gonna be like, shoot, I wish I did those two things. But it's like it's never ending and you have to make the hard decision to like to do this inside of your company or else it's never going to work.

Yeah, totally. We have a really good question here. With so much noise across so many channels, how do marketers break through to reach their target audience?

Um, make a LinkedIn video of just like lighting a bunch of money on fire and use that as your ad creative.

Do something insane.

Do something insane. Uh, I'll answer that one sec, but, uh, somebody asked 60/40 immediate results or future or the other way around. I would say 60/40, 60% focus on today. It's probably more like 70% on today and 30% on the, on the future. Uh, with so much noise, how can, how can you break through and reach their target audience? Well, I, there's no like secret hack for this because the only way it works is like a deep understanding of your ideal customer. And so I have this conversation with myself all the time. I'm like, how did ExitFive grow to be a 3,000-person like paid community? And I'm like, oh, well, it's because I spent the last decade working in this world. And so I kind of have a better sense than most about like what ideas are interesting to people, right? Think about SaaS. Perfect example. Jason M. Lemkin spent his career in SaaS and new B2B SaaS. And so like what types of content, what things are people interested? So I think it starts with like a baseline level of like, what is your ideal customer? What keeps them up at night? Who influences them? What are, uh, what, what blogs and what, what websites are they reading? What books are they reading? What podcasts are they listening to? Who are they following on TikTok and YouTube? And like starting to do an assessment about like, where are they getting information from? And then what can your unique angle be to, to, to do that? Maybe it's like, you're gonna have a much, like, I think, um, Amanda and Rand Fishkin, what they're doing at SparkToro is a great example of good content marketing right now where it's like in a world where blog posts have become very like kind of bite-sized, they're going a little bit deeper and doing long-form stuff that's very tactical. Like, okay, we're going to win like that. But that starts with a deep understanding of the customer or like assessing all the channels and be like, hmm, a lot of people are talking about SEO, but no one in Demandwell's niche has really figured out like YouTube and YouTube Shorts yet. And we're going to go bet on that channel. And so I think it's like this layering of like knowing Knowing what they care about and then figuring out how you can insert yourself from a content standpoint and figuring out like what is the hook going to be and what channels are you going to play on? And ideally it's one core channel to start, right? It's like when you try to take this approach and try to like, yeah, we're going to be on YouTube and we're going to do a podcast and we're going to do webinars and we're going to do that. You got to pick one or two things. I think if you look back at the brands who've done this really well, like Gong focused almost entirely on LinkedIn for a bunch of years, and I think that paid off really well as opposed to trying to like spread things everywhere.

Yeah, I agree. I think regardless of the channel, it's really just about like what is the audience hungry for in that place? And that's a reason why events were so impactful for Maestro was basically that like the quality assurance professionals that we served were really hungry for gathering and learning from each other, you know, and so we gave them that. Give the people what they want.

Yeah, I think—

oh, sorry, go ahead.

Oh, I was just gonna say, I think that, you know, using search and like, as an example, it's like create a section on your site that's dedicated to those specific industries and, you know, make sure that you're focusing in on the content that you put in place that is aligned with who they really are, who that core audience is. And have them come to you, you know, if you work specifically with B2B, and get a whole lot of content on your site around, around that specific audience. Make sure that you also are showing up for your audience to be there.

I really like this question. How do you balance sustainable approaches with the need for immediate results? It's, it kind of gets back to the portfolio concept that Dave was talking about where like, yeah, I go ahead.

Yeah, I think typically, I think typically like that question to me is asking like my boss How do I explain that to my boss or the CFO or whoever? And I think that this is where you have to be able to like present about the marketing strategy. And so you're like, look, my job in marketing is not just to manage this channel today, but I'm thinking long term, same way the CFO and the CEO are thinking about the 1, 3, 5, 7 year plan for the company. Like, I think you gotta level up how you talk about marketing inside of the company. If you only talk about short-term things, then people are gonna only expect short-term things. But if you're like, hey, look, you might need to— I've done this at companies. You might need to go in and be like, this is how we should think about marketing today. It's a portfolio. We're in year 1. Yes, we would need to hit these goals. Here's what we're gonna try to do to do that. But we also need to lay the foundation for the future. I think it comes back to like, you have to be able to present on your marketing strategy and show people. If they don't see it, you have to show them this. And you, you know, it's all the stuff that like, it's literally like mapping out the equation that, that Betsy put down about the magic penny. It's like having that conversation. You have to be able to articulate your marketing strategy and tell people why it can't just be short-term things. And I've found that if you're working with a CRO or VP of sales or whoever, they can be pretty rational in that moment. If they can see the light at the end of the tunnel, it's like when you're missing the number for this quarter and they have no idea what the heck the future marketing plan is, that, that's a really tough position to be in. But I've, I've worked with VP of sales. They're like, yeah, we understand if this channel is not going to be turned on for now, but 6 months from now you're going to be— it's going to be an amazing new thing for us. And I think you can get people to buy in that way.

Totally. I've also had really good luck, like, in communicating with our CFO about budget, about what we're spending money on. It's like, it would be impossible for us to hit our goals next year if we're just doing what we're doing today. So we need to be putting money in the bank that we'll be reaping the rewards of in the future. Like, we couldn't afford afford to drive what we need to drive because of how high the growth curves are for SaaS businesses.

It's— and it's not some like magic machine that there's like when you're ready you put money into it and like it prints you out customers. You have to figure out channels and offers and strategies and you have to be able to test into those things. And so you need— but you need, you need time and budget to do it now before you need it.

Yep. Yeah, I mean, if you look at the, the Magic Penny example, um, if you, if you just waited 15 days by the end of the month, to accept that magic penny by the end of the month, you'd only have $163. So it's like, you know, the compounding effect is really— it really happens, you know, after a lot of hard work that you put into it, but it is significant.