SaaStr Insider Webinar: How to Integrate Paid Media Into Marketing

the year. So for those who maybe don't know us, David, do you want to do an intro?

Yeah. Hey everyone, I'm David. I work as part of the sponsorship team here and supporting our sponsors at our events and also through our media, media engagement, which we'll talk a little bit about today.

Awesome. And yeah, I'm Amelia. I think you guys hopefully have either seen me or one of the many emails we sent. But yeah, I, I help run our, you know, marketing, sales, and events team. So yeah, kind of here to help share some learnings. So yeah, without further ado, today we want to talk to you guys all about media deployment and planning. And the reason we chose this topic was because a lot of our sponsors have been asking us about this recently. You know, it's Q4. If you're maybe a little bit behind on leads, what can you do still now and into the new year? To maybe play a little bit of catch-up and like how to think about media specifically too outside of our events. I think SaaStr is very well known for its events. We do a lot of media as well. And so we wanted to share kind of like the different ways we've seen it work, if it's helpful for you guys today and kind of how to think about it in your planning cycle to integrate it with the rest of your overall marketing plan. So, so yeah, David, do you want to kick us off?

Yeah, yeah, definitely. I'll kick us off. I'll just add a couple quick comments. Yeah, we're really well known for our events, especially from a sponsorship standpoint. But I think from an audience standpoint, you know, we're really well known for our content above all else. And it's what people are really passionate about, the learnings they get from Saastr and at Saastr from other folks. And a lot of that happens in our media channels. When we say that, we're talking a lot about our newsletters and our podcast. And we're also at an interesting time of year. You know, Annual's about, what, 2 months behind us, 10 months till the next one. And Europa is about 7 months away. Yet there's still a lot of need to like engage with the community, with your audience, with our audience. And so this allows you to do that. Cool. Let me flip through the slide here. So how some of our top sponsors really plan media. And so we were hoping to go through today is a couple of different common strategies for deploying, you know, creative through our media to reach the Saastr community of B2B SaaS founders, execs, and other buyers. So a couple of things that I thought we could talk about. I think, you know, one of the most common is really— the most common two ones are probably leading up to an event and post-event follow-up. Those are ones that usually sell— common because they probably sell out the most often. People will come to us now and choose months leading up to SaaStr Annual or SaaStr Europa for next year. And so now we're still— we're a little bit still in this— there's a little bit of an opportunity here in post-event follow-up. Annual being 2 months behind us, there's still, you know, a lot of opportunities to be had from the folks that you met with there, from the folks that frankly couldn't make it to the events as well, but are engaged with our channels and with our content. And so that's something that we see as probably one of the most common use cases of putting your brand in front of the audience. What do you think, Amelia? Any, anything that comes to mind that you've seen in that area?

Yeah, no, I think these are both great callouts. And I would say too, folks have done this in a variety of ways. Like as a lead up to the event, I've seen folks like, you know, an Avon or like a Booking.com, if they have a specific offer for attendees, you know, for them it's obviously travel related. So I know Booking.com did a really great media placement with us this year leading up to Annual that was like, you know, if you book your travel for Annual on Booking, you get like a certain amount of, I think it was credits. For booking to the annual. And so yeah, that performed really well for them. And then obviously on site, they had kind of, you know, similar messaging about carrying through on corporate travel. So it was nice that it was a good multi-touch campaign, if you will. So, you know, they got like the digital aspect of it in front of our audience and then people could interact with them in person once they finally got to the annual. So that's a good way to do a lead up. I've seen a lot of folks do post-event. Follow-ups in our media, right? If you wanna reach, if there's something new that you're launching at SaaStr and you wanna reach the broader SaaStr community, 'cause we always like to say as well about our media, like many more people read saastr.com than come to our events. I mean, it's why people come to our events, but there's a lot more readers of saastr.com than can maybe come in person for one reason or another. So it's a great way post-event to get in front of the broader SaaStr community And again, have that nice multi-touchpoint campaign to folks who did attend as well. So yeah, kind of, kind of love those two. And to David's point, those two kind of the two months leading up to the event sell out really fast as well as the month after. And then obviously the month of is like our hottest commodity. So, you know, that'd be June for Europa and then September for the annual. Those always go first. I think we already have maybe a couple holds on Once they're ready for 2024. Yeah, with folks who are wanting to, you know, be in the month of the event. So that's also a consideration there is, you know, if you, if you think about two traffic spikes on Zaster.com, there's a reason why as well, like when you're reaching the broader community with Zaster, those are really popular times to deploy with us because, you know, people are looking at the sites more right before the event to purchase tickets or thinking about attending. And then during the event, folks are watching the live stream. And then obviously after, you know, we're starting to release all that content from the event. So it's a time to capitalize on all that extra traffic.

Yep, perfect. Good. Well said. Thanks, Amelia. The another really good use case that we've seen, and this can really happen at any point, right? We see these completely unrelated to the event timeframe is product deployment, especially around product launches. You know, there's probably no better concentrated audience of SaaS founders and execs to get your product in front of to announce whether like it's a rebranding campaign, whether it's a new product that you're launching, really top of funnel, trying to create awareness of those changes that you're making with a concentrated audience. That's something we see happen throughout the year. It can't always predict it. Like for us, it's— sometimes it happens in unpredictable fashion where people will hit us up at the last minute and be like, hey, we're pushing out a lot of media around this new product launch, Dio Space. And oftentimes we don't because it's so last minute, but it's something to definitely get ahead of. So if you know you have a product launch coming in Q2 of next year, I definitely recommend we talk sooner than later to think about different ways to communicate that to the SaaS community. That's something that I definitely recommend. And I guess it's a theme against all of these, which is like advanced planning around these. So looking at your marketing schedule, what are your tentpoles for next year? What are things that you're pushing out this is a great channel to get that in front of this concentrated audience.

Yep. Yeah. And the next one on this list is something I think that has worked 10 out of 10 times here. I mean, personally for Saastr's ebooks as well as, which we will be refreshing soon. So, you know, stay tuned for that. But yeah, I think for our partners and sponsors who have done ebook launches, Or even what we do sometimes, which is like, you know, we have all this great events content or new content that we kind of integrate into our like ongoing ebooks, if you will. Like we try and keep them fresh versus them getting stagnated. So yeah, if you've got like a really popular ebook that, you know, you want to stick a new cover on and get in front of, you know, SaaS before, you know, Q4, Q1 as like a, as the end of year or beginning of year launch, these always work really well. I think, you know, based on its content, if it's something that is also going to help community also get more leads and more business and help their businesses. But it's not overly pitchy, right? So I, I do think that is something that has always worked here. It's very, it feels very native and I feel like that's why it works really well here, right? It's like how we do them in our newsletters, especially when it's an ebook, looks super native. Like it looks like it's part of SaaS First content, which is actually a bit on purpose. So yeah, I do think folks really like that one. So if you've got a popular ebook or you've got one coming out, that one always works, I would say, for us, because it does look native and folks are used to consuming content with Soundster. So it could be a good one to prioritize there. If you've already got the ebook handy, it's just a matter of making a quick landing page for Soundster's audience for the ebook and then just getting the leads from there, right? And being ready for the follow-ups. But yeah, that is something that has worked really, really particularly well for this offer. For this, uh, audience.

Yeah, and I just want to, uh, echo one point that Amelia made, uh, which is, um, you know, tailoring like that landing page to the SaaS audience, um, and even tailoring, um, you know, the, the— it doesn't have to be the, the whole ebook, but just like what are the key points that make it relevant for SaaS founders. When I've seen, uh, people promote things that are really right for, for SaaS founders, hot topics within our community, within, um, you know, whether it's, uh, PLG or scaling or You know, anything related to what we talk about at our events or what Jason's often writing about. I mean, that's really what our community loves to see. And so, you know, making it as relevant as possible, you know, we see people get great results, you know, hundreds of downloads from these, whether it's an ebook or white paper or whatnot.

Yep.

And then, you know, broadening, right? Then there's special CTA offers, right? What are compelling, you know, offers or promotions that you are bringing to market. If there's a time of year that you're bringing something special to the market. Sometimes I see this also a little bit with webinars where they're really timely. I know that SAP was just promoting that in our newsletter in the past few weeks. They had a, a really relevant webinar just took place this week. And so they leveraged our newsletter to get this in front of a very relevant community. So that's one example of like a special CTA that was very timely. You know, and others have to do with a variety of different things, whether it's promotions, events that someone's doing, physical events. What else have you seen here, Amelia?

Yeah, I've seen, yeah, I've seen physical events, I've seen virtual events, I've seen webinars, I've seen, yes, special offers. So I know folks like Snowflake have done like a special offer, you know, the Booking.com one I just mentioned, like If there's a special offer you're doing for, you know, end of year and you want to get extra eyeballs on it. Now, again, it's fairly turnkey and easy to get these into, you know, a newsletter. Really, it's an ad and really a specified landing page. I can't, we can't stress this enough. It does help if you have a SaaS or landing page that's specific to the offer versus maybe a generic one. It does help, you know, because again, some of these can look super native. It does help to ensure that, you know, you've thought about how to fully engage the SaaS audience. But yeah, we've seen kind of, you know, end of year credits this time of year, holiday offers, new customer offers, whatever it might be. And then yeah, I think too, you know, in these kind of special CTAs, it does actually help to have some sort of expiration on them, right? So when folks have done limited time offers, it does help drive a bit of urgency with folks end of year as they're, you know, starting to plan their holidays, etc. So it does actually help to have some deadlines on these so that folks can take advantage of them before they expire, right? If it truly is a special offer that you're doing that's limited time. So yeah, those have worked pretty well. And I think the last one, right, is we've touched on it a bit, but if you've got a slow month, you know, kind of, and you need some additional lead support, if you have collateral like an ebook or a webinar or an in-person event or maybe a smaller customer meetup that you're doing or a small prospect dinner that you're doing, right? Doesn't have to be in person. We do have an international community, but could be a virtual roundtable or whatever it might be. Yeah, this is something where the media can help as well because, you know, again, our insertions, we try and make them fairly simple for, you know, media. It's like an ad unit size basically. You can either give us copy or we can actually create it for you. So it, it feels again more native. And then yeah, it goes out regularly. So that's quite nice. So I think a lot of our media placements, which we'll look at the individual ones here next, but a lot of them have really great frequency, I would say, on our newsletters. And then if you do have something where you're like, I just wanna drum up some like extra leads for something evergreen we're doing, that's where the podcast is a really great medium for that. 'Cause we've seen folks, you know, kind of do offers there that are good for whatever, or just reinforce something. Again, good multi-touch channel. And our podcast is one of the number one podcasts in our industry. And so yeah, there's, you know, there's only so many of those podcasts and now's a good time to be on the pod because there is, again, really great content that we're putting out from FastTrack Annual at the moment, as well as we've done a lot of really good original, like, end of year content. Like CRO Confidential that just came out last week. Jason's been doing a lot of interviews right now that are going up on the pod. So yeah, that's a, that's a great way to get in front of our audience too and maybe also associate yourself with some of our really great content is by, by doing the pod. So I know we don't talk about audio a lot, but just wanted to throw that out there.

Yeah. And, and I'll just re-echo one point on the, or that I said earlier about planning ahead, like looking at your cycle, looking at months that might be slow, but you still need to, you know, equip your team with leads or get messages out or, you know, is another way to repurpose content that's worked with your own audience. How can you get it out to a broader audience? And so looking ahead at the calendar and saying, hey, this is where we need to kind of juice, provide leads to support sales goals in Q2 or Q3, you can plan ahead for dead months so that they never become dead. So yeah, that's some of the ways. That we've seen media deployed. I'm sure there are others. We'd love your ideas. If you have ideas for how you've deployed media, let us know. We could add them to a future webinar, or you can join us and talk about it. Okay, so I have a couple of slides that kind of recap some of those options, and we can kind of talk about these in the context of, you know, where they can be used against the different strategies we just talked about. So Amelia already really just talked a bunch about the pod and how you can leverage the podcast. I think those ever— I think one point that I thought was really smart is, you know, evergreen offers are a really good one for the podcast. We get downloads on our podcasts for months or years after the podcast, a popular one, is published, and your ads are embedded in the podcast, so they're always there, right? So it's a great way to, like, send people to evergreen promotions or evergreen branding that you have. That's where I've seen a lot of good results.

Yeah. Yeah. And the last thing I'll say on the podcast, right, of like, but I think if you're thinking, oh, do evergreen promotions actually work? I would say we do evergreen promotions on our podcast and they do work. We're currently evergreen. I mean, we do have sponsor ads on our podcast right now, but we're also promoting, you know, our upcoming SaaS events. And people do use those offers that we give them in the podcast. You know, we basically flip them every couple of weeks. Around some of our events that we're doing, you know, next year in 2024, and people do use those codes. So yeah, I would say they do work. Obviously, there's a lower barrier to entry on attending faster than maybe purchasing a brand new platform. But the point being that, you know, it is driving eyeballs and traffic to whatever, you know, URL and landing page you're creating in an audio format. So yeah, people do actually, they do actually take action on podcasts and go to, you know, The landing pages, et cetera. I will also say like the offer is always linked in the podcast description. So, you know, people are hearing it, but also, you know, if you're on Spotify or iTunes, it's clickable for them too. So it's super easy. So just want to call that up too. I think some people don't realize that it's both, right? You get like an embedded link in the podcast description of the episode, and then you also get the audio format at the beginning and end of the pod. So yeah, kind of calling that out. It's a good one.

Yeah. Nice. Nice. The weekly in terms of what this is really good for. You know, this goes out to probably our largest list every week. And so it's a good way to get a lot of reach through ads here. I've definitely see, you know, we can see the sample here. This is like an offer, right? An example of an offer and what Snowflake was doing in terms of something that they were promoting for the startup community. So that was a really cool one. I remember that. I think that was from last year. Yeah, I think— what do you think, Amelia? Offers, ebooks, that's typically what I've seen here.

Yeah, I would say offers and ebooks work really well in the weekly. This is like our biggest audience that it goes out to every Sunday. I actually think we're up to like 100,000 people now. So yeah, we do need to update our slide, but that's on us. It's just growing so fast. So yeah, I mean, the Weekly has been kind of like our longstanding SaaS newsletter. It does go out to a lot of founders and CEOs. If you have something that's founder-specific, it's good for that as well. But yeah, it's great from that standpoint of it comes out Sunday mornings because it's going out to founders and CEOs. That's when this audience is actually engaged and has time to read the Weekly and click the links. So yeah, it's a good one because our Daily, which I love, which has more frequency, does go out during the week, right? So it's, it's, people are maybe a little bit more distracted, but you know, they have other things also going on when the daily goes out, whereas the weekly I do like for that time of day factor of, you know, you're kind of hitting folks on Sunday when they've got a little bit more time to digest what's in front of them. And then yeah, the daily, that is why we have a bigger frequency on it, right? This does go out 3 times a week. And then you'd be in multiple dailies basically every other so that, you know, you build that consistency of folks if you're So if you're not catching them on, you know, Tuesday, Thursday, the next one goes out Saturday. It's the same idea as the weekly, right? You're kind of hitting folks when they have a little bit more attention to detail and can read through, you know, the latest SaaS news as well as your offer here. So yeah, these can be a little bit more timely and you can swap them out a bit more often. The weekly, we tend to recommend doing the same ad for the 4 weeks of the month. Whereas in the daily, we do kind of recommend switching out the offers. Either regularly or maybe at the midway point. Just 'cause again, folks are, you know, seeing a lot in the dailies, so it helps to kind of stand out. I've also seen folks do in the daily like GIF ads or GIF, however you wanna say that. And that works really well. You can also do a video, like it doesn't have to be a static image. So that's kind of a nice part of the daily too. Like you can do either a static image or a GIF. Or a video, and any of those formats will work in our newsletter. So yeah, that's kind of a nice call out there too, if you want to get a little bit creative. So that's obviously though, like, you know, a little bit more effort. So I would say the daily has gotten really great clicks because of the frequency, but it does, you know, require a little bit more legwork on changing out the creative, being more robust with it, being able to swap it out. Whereas like, you know, the weekly, you could almost set it and forget it and we do the rest. So just something to bear in mind there. Like if you want to just make one landing page, one asset, probably do the weekly. If you have the bandwidth to do, you know, something a little bit more creative, probably do the daily.

Great. Yeah. And don't forget, I mean, the podcast is probably the lowest lift of all of them in terms of effort. It's a 15-second script that you need to jot down and we do the professional voiceover on that. So, uh, really easy, sounds super, uh, high, high fidelity. Yeah. And one thing on the daily and the weekly, they both have that kind of native feel that Emilia talked about earlier where there's a headline and some text and an image, which is really the same format of our articles. And so I also like the approach where people send, you know, great for product launches, right? Because you can go right to like you don't even need a landing page for that, right? You can take them to your product pages or, you know, either way you don't need gated content all the time. You can just send traffic to something you're trying to create awareness for.

Yep.

And speaking of awareness, the Insider, that is our newsletter that is distributed via LinkedIn. I often describe it as like a twofer because I subscribe in my LinkedIn account. So when it— when this newsletter is published 3 times a week, I believe I get an alert in my— on my phone because I subscribe on LinkedIn, which is really cool. But I also get an email in my inbox. So I'm getting like 2 alerts for this content. The content itself lives on LinkedIn, which is really cool because there's a bit of like a built-in social component to it. There's going to be comments, there's going to be likes on the content that we share, and your ads get a really high like share of voice. It's a really big ad unit that has high visibility and gets you a lot of impressions and a lot of branding. So I think it's really great for that last-minute dead month. Let's call it the dead month concept. Where you really want to get a lot of eyeballs on something or product launch. That's how I think about this. What do you think, Amelia?

Yeah, no, I think those are really great ways to use it. I think the insider too. One thing I've brought up to folks is like, this is maybe more tapping into Jason's personal audience, right? Like Saastr.com, the newsletters are very Saastr. This goes out through Jason's personal LinkedIn newsletter. It is called like the Saastr SaaS for Insider. Yeah, it has SaaS in the name, but it has him as the author. It's literally his name on the email when it sends the email to David's Point, or it'll say like, new newsletter by Jason M. Lemkin. So that is something I always, you know, preface to folks. I'm like, if you really want to tap into the Jason M. Lemkin network specifically, or like, you know, attach your brand to his audience a bit more, then this is the best way to do it, right? It's like, I know folks ask us all the time, like, How can we get Jason to promote this? Sponsor the Insider. I'm like, that's the easiest way. It basically has, you know, his authorship and your ads. So yeah, it's an implicit kind of endorsement. So, yeah, I would say that's the biggest thing to always remember about the Insiders. Like, that one is specifically more attached to his profile. So again, if that is what you're looking for, definitely go for that. I do like the 2-for-1. The ads are also a little bit bigger, which is nice. So they're more like billboard style. Which is quite nice. And then yeah, obviously, you know, everyone in town is on LinkedIn, so it's a good way to get in front of them where they already are.

And then one last slide here. This is really like one of the things that we see some top partners do every year is build what we call like a year-round campaign with SaaStr. It's almost like staying always on as opposed to just showing up at annual, and having your booth and talking to folks once a year, there's an opportunity to engage with this community across multiple events and across multiple channels and really build your brand and your presence with, you know, the world's largest community of B2B SaaS founders and cloud execs. And so, you know, here's a potential like look at what that could look like, right? You could look at both SaaStr Annual and Europa. I would say, you know, look, Annual is the bigger event, right? And what do we have, 150 or so sponsors there? Europa, probably about 50. I would say there's a huge percentage that Europa sponsors also do annual, right? Like looking at both, looking how to communicate with the, the SaaS audience globally. We see a lot doing both events. And then, you know, in between and around that, you know, all the different tactics we just talked about, pre-event, post-event, looking at that media bundle, to figure out how to combine across these different assets throughout the year to build a calendar of communicating with, again, the largest B2B SaaS community in the world. So that's something that we're happy to talk about and help you strategize around. It's not— it's really bespoke, right, to what you're trying to do, what your plan looks like for the year. What are your tentpoles? What are your flagship events? You know, owned events that we can plug into and help build your presence. So that's something that really is recommended around a conversation. And this is just a sample of that.

Yeah, I would say too, like, if you know, you have the budget to do something more multi-touch, usually one of the newsletters, right between the Insider Weekly or Daily, we can kind of help determine what your offer might work better in for one of those 3 newsletters. Layered with the podcast is always the thing we see work the best, right? Because again, multi-touch, you're getting folks, you know, hopefully at one of our events, plus also on the pod and in a digital format. So that's kind of like the omnichannel option, if you will. But yeah, that's kind of the big boy option. But yeah, one that works really well because you are hitting folks in multiple places.

Very cool. Good. Well, listen, we're here to answer questions. You know, reach out if you want to talk about, you know, your 2024 strategy, your 2024 planning. You know, things are really busy right now as we're working on all end-of-year folks wrapping up their sponsorships for next year. So encourage you to reach out about that for events as well. And yeah, we're here to answer questions.

Awesome. Well, thanks so much for the help, David. Yeah, please reach out to us if folks want to get in touch with David. You're just david@saastrank.com, right?

Yeah, that's it. Very easy.

That's it. All right, super easy. We will not see you guys next week because it's Thanksgiving, but we'll see you the week after. In the meantime, we're always online. You can catch us on saastra.com, um, or yeah, just reach out to us via email. So for that, thanks to everyone who's watching on the live stream. I know a lot of you watch there now, so thanks for watching, and we will See you guys soon.

Bye. Thanks, Amelia.