The Latest Updates, Trends, and Patterns in B2B SaaS Marketing for 2021 w/ SingleGrain CEO Eric Siu

Single Grain and click up. This is going to be a fantastic session. We're going to let some more folks join in and get started. All right, just a couple more seconds, maybe a minute at most, and then we'll get started over here as we're letting everyone into, um, the waiting room. Alright. Welcome to Saastr Skål! Thank you so much for being here. Let's go through some housekeeping items before we get started today. Alright. This is a 45-minute interactive session. We encourage you to keep your cameras on and your audio muted unless you are asking a question. It is a great opportunity for you to dive in and connect with your fellow attendees, as well as our hosts, Erik and Zach. We will go through about 20 minutes of the presentation, and then we will break out into separate rooms, each led by Erik and Zach to answer specific questions there. If you have the latest version of Zoom, you can also select which room you would like to go into. Otherwise, we will pop you into a room as we go. After the breakout sessions, we will bring it back into the main session for a Q&A session as well. Go ahead, also drop in chat, say hello, let us know where you are joining from. We've had folks from all over the world today, so I'd love to hear where you're dialing in from and say hi as well. You can drop your questions into the chat as well if you have any questions along the way. These sessions are all recorded and the slides will be available for you after the event. And then if you haven't already, you can join our one-on-one networking session. And this is on Brella, which you are able to join. I have just dropped the link into chat. So go ahead and click on that. You can continue the conversation from today. I know we have a lot of content to get through. So I am going to hand it back over to Eric and Zach to get started today.

Cool, thanks Tammy for the wonderful introduction. Um, always love the SaaStr community. So, um, before I get started, if those of you that are comfortable, turn on your cameras because I just actually came from a book marketing meeting where all the cameras were on and I can actually see your faces. It gives me energy. I want to know where you guys are coming from. Um, type in the chat where you're coming from right now and, uh, I just want to get this thing, get this thing a little engaging. And yeah, let's see what we got in here in chat real quick. And I'm gonna try to go fast, by the way. I know we've got 45 minutes, but we got Brisbane, Australia. You're amazing for you being here right now. We got Santa Monica, we got Chicago, we got Sweden. Thank you for being here. So real quick, I'm gonna go fast. We get into the breakout rooms. So I'm gonna be talking about timeless tested SaaS growth marketing principles. Quick background on myself and Zach. So I have a SaaS company called ClickFlow. And then also we have a SaaS ad agency called Single Grain. And really what I do ultimately is, you know, we, what we do is we help level up marketing businesses, right? So we've got a podcast called Marketing School. I've got another podcast called Leveling Up. Zach is the general manager for ClickFlow and he kind of helps me with all the things, all the other things that we do. So my goal here is to give you at least one takeaway. So I talk fast. Watch the recording. Don't try to take everything at once because again, I'm going to try to condense this into 20, 25 minutes or so. Tammy, you stop me when I'm coming up on time. Uh, so I will know. And, uh, yeah, let's get going. So quick question for you guys to answer in chat right now, guys and gals. Um, what do you think is the number one factor to success with not only your ads, but your marketing, right? Do you think it's your, your click-through rate? Do you think it's your conversion rate? Cost per click. These are just numbers I'm throwing in there, or not numbers, these are just phrases I'm throwing in. It doesn't have to be any of these, but what do you think is the number one thing that affects all of your advertising, all of your marketing in general? Just type it in chat right now. Let me see what you guys got. Let's see, we got conversion rate, quality of content. Okay, we got conversion rate. Uh, Passion.io says story, customer journey, target personas. Okay, so we come from a SaaS world, right? So we're all— we are— we're always going to focus on kind of bottom of the funnel numbers like conversion rate and things like that. The number one thing that matters, and I think the person that said story, you're kind of getting close to it, right? What ultimately matters the most is your, well, it's your creative, right? 'Cause if your creative is good, your click-through rate's gonna be higher, and that's gonna affect all your down-funnel metrics. So if we take a look at ClickFunnels right here, this is Russell Brunson, and some of you might be thinking, oh my God, Russell Brunson, you know, he's an internet marketer, we don't like using those tactics. That's fine, but I think it's important to learn from the internet marketers to see what they're doing well, and then take it over, take it and move it over into the SaaS world. And by the way, he's in SaaS too. And I'm not saying he's a dirty marketer or anything. I think he does get, some people don't like him. I'm personally fine with him. I think he's great. But Russell Brunson, ClickFunnels, they do over $150 million ARR a year, and they're approaching $200 million. They didn't raise any money at all. But the key thing I wanna show you here is this. You can see that when I open up Facebook ad library, he's got 630 results over here, right? Most SaaS companies I look at, when we open Facebook ad library, they might have less than 5 results. That's usual, right? It's because too much time goes into— oh, by the way, the number one thing I get asked for, Eric, I need a demand generation marketer. I need a VP of marketing, blah, blah, blah. And what are you going to do with that person? Oh, uh, you know, we're going to hire them to run Facebook ads and LinkedIn ads and Google ads. Everybody knows how to do that right now. Everybody knows how to do that. But what not every— what everybody doesn't know how to do is create really good creative. So you can see Russell here, he's always testing new things because if you think about it, a lot of these advertising platforms are scroll-based, right? So how do you get people's attention? How do you pattern interrupt them? How do you stop them in their tracks when they're doing something? And the problem is you come up with a new pattern interrupt, it's going to be old tomorrow, right? So Russell has understood this over the years and he continues to test. So this is just another view, right? Like he's got a cookbook right here. He's got cartoons. He's got him riding a bull over here. He's got another video. Um, and he just keeps going, right? And so how do you compete with that? You don't need to do 630. I'm just saying, do a little better than your competitors and try to think about what's a headline that's going to stop them. What's, what's a video that's going to stop them, right? And then deliver on that. Your click-through rate is going to be higher. And I'll tell you for For one of our campaigns that we're running, our click-through rate was horrendous. It was like, what, it was like 0.5%, right? And then once we started focusing more on creative, it jumped up to 2.5%, 3% or so, in really good cases, and our performance started getting better across the board. So if you want to affect your conversion rate, you want to drive your CPAs lower, think of your creative first. Not enough people think about that. And so, you know, one of your questions might be, well, how do I do that, right? One of the simplest things to do, especially if you're running Google Ads, is to focus on copywriting. And I'm telling you again, I think what happened over the years is that we think demand generation is just running ads, right? Like I'm telling you, it's not hard to learn a Facebook, LinkedIn, or like an Amazon or any of these platforms. What's hard is actually understanding your customer. And we talk a lot about customer development in the world of SaaS, right? But how about understanding messaging and then using that to attack when it comes to your marketing, right? And April Dunford does a good job of talking about positioning. Well, copywriting kind of goes into that a little bit, right? You gotta be good at copywriting. So what I think is important is not trying to reinvent the wheel here, because if you want to get good at copywriting, you want to write great headlines. Great headlines are pattern interrupts, right? And David Ogilvy, advertising master, right, has said that, you know, 80 cents on the dollar has been used after you write your headline. I'm paraphrasing here. And so if we just leverage headline formulas, you know, there's a lot of these, you can just Google headline formulas and there's gonna be a lot of these templates. How can you apply it to the world of SaaS, right? So on the very left side over here, you can see I got this headline type and we just go back. Um, so I have my laser pointer. So 13 ways to benefit. That's the headline type. Okay. Here's the formula. 13 surefire, surefire roads, paths, ways to benefit your offer. 13 surefire ways to stay energized in the morning. How about 13 surefire ways to increase your CAC, right? What if I wrote that as a blog post, right? Um, or acquire a benefit quickly with the new method, acquire a high ARPU customer in one day with the STEPPS method. Like that would be amazing if you could do that, right? Um, well, I hope someone writes that blog post cause I would definitely read it. So look, we don't need to try to reinvent the wheel. Human beings, we're all kind of the same, right? We've been the same for hundreds, thousands of years. We all have the same desires, the same needs, right? So how do we go find these? Easy. We go Google headline formulas and we can do stuff like this. Look at this one right here. How prospects can achieve desirable benefit this year. How SaaS founders can achieve exponential growth this year. Okay. So that's one piece of it. Okay. The other thing with copywriting is You don't, and by the way, go ahead and pop in questions because Tammy might, if she sees something really good, she might just stop me in my tracks. But good copywriters, good marketers understand that because they don't need to reinvent the wheel, they can have swipe files, right? And Zach comes from a copywriting background. You know, we'll look at things that stop us and we'll often share in our marketing Slack room, right? We'll talk about, oh, you know, this ad over here, or this is not actually an ad, this is a Bloomberg thing on everyone has a wealth number, but that actually stopped me in my tracks, right? Or, you know, this little, this graphic over here, or data always gets me too. Or, you know, some of these videos actually caught my attention because we had a course. I was like, oh, this course ad actually caught my attention. Let's save it. So Facebook allows you to save ads. Instagram allows you to save ads. What you want to do is you want to make a swipe file. So in the marketing world, you just have a bunch of these headlines that you like, a bunch of ads that you like, you keep them there. So when you're ready to come up with new creative, You just look at that for inspiration. So you don't have to start from scratch. Does that make sense? Cool. So let us move on to the next piece. So if I'm writing copy, if I'm trying to write a long form, um, let's say I'm writing a long form post on LinkedIn, trying to get engagement there, or let's say I'm writing a long form Facebook ad. What I want to look at is I want to get a general sentiment analysis, right? You can use Grammarly for this because Grammarly will give you like a little happy face or a sad face when you're writing. But in general, most of the time you want your sentiment to be positive, right? That way, you know, you're, you're creating positive emotions. You might get more engagement on the ad. But what I do is I just plug in my text into a sentiment analysis tool and you can Google that. And I just want to make sure that it's positive, right? That's, this is just like another check before I, before I go on and I hit publish. Does that make sense? Cool. So what I recommend doing later, I'm giving you homework right now. If I were to recommend one top book when it comes to copywriting, and we're talking about marketing psychology here or human psychology, it's this book over here on the very left. It's called Breakthrough Advertising. The book was actually, I paid $600 for the book a couple of years ago because it was out of print. It's actually back in print now. So you can pay, someone bought the rights. I think you can pay $100 or $125 for it now, but it was written in the '20s. So this book passes the, what is known as the Lindy effect, right? The longer something stays around, like it passed the Lindy Effect thing, which means it passes the test of time, right? Same thing with the book like How to Win Friends and Influence People. So Breakthrough Advertising, timeless. You'll understand human psychology. You'll understand the process of taking someone from unaware of the solution to problem aware, to aware of your solution, give them a deal, right? Take them through that whole process, right? And we only have so much time in this one, so I can't go too deep into it, but you got other books here that are really great. 16 Word Sales Letter, That is written by a guy that writes for a company that does over a billion a year, and it's mainly like a financial newsletter called Agora. But he's got this entire flow, right? Boron Letters is great, Gary Halpert Letters is great, and then Ben Settle newsletter. So I'll leave this right here for you to look at. But just keep in mind, again, I think when I think about the world of internet marketers versus like, you know, tech marketers, they're very much at odds against each other, right? So it's been I've been fortunate enough to look at both worlds and hang out in both worlds where I understand that, hey, there's some elements that I like from the internet marketing world, and there's elements I like from the tech world, and I'm just going to combine it and then we'll see what we can get, right? We're going to remix it and see what magic we can get from that. There doesn't need to be like internet marketer versus, you know, tech marketer type of thing going on. Cool. All right. So this is another thing I want to take from the world of copywriting. And this comes from a guy named Dean Jackson. And so he used to be in real estate and he has this concept called the 9-word email. So he comes from a copywriting background. And the way the 9-word email works is just like this, right? Hey Tammy, were you still interested in growing your SEO traffic? Okay. So let's say you opt into our list and you initially indicated interest in SEO services, but you weren't quite ready at the time. Every 90 days, we'll hit you up with an email like this. Hey, were you still interested in SEO traffic? So for Dean, one of his clients, they closed a 9-figure deal. So we're talking about a yacht right here, $100 million or something like that, right? And so it was, you often for a yacht, whenever you signal interest for a big purchase like that, and I can't act like I bought a yacht, but I'm just guessing, you're probably not going to take an action that quickly, but you know, lo and behold, 69 days later, hey Zach, Are you still interested in that yacht? Boom, right? Transaction gets done. And I've done this, I've done this more than a couple of times, right? Our open rate on this is, it's pretty decent, 50%, but the response rate is phenomenal, 20%, right? Because in the world of SaaS, if you're looking at your SDRs, you're looking for about a 10% response rate. Um, 20% is phenomenal, at least from what I know. And we've closed multiple 6 and 7-figure deals just using this 9-word email concept. So, My point is you don't have to try to reinvent the wheel again, right? A lot of stuff has been done already. Human psychology remains mostly the same. So, you know, it is what it is.

Eric, let me hop in here. Going back to that 9-word email, what's the subject line for the 9-word email?

Yeah, so you can make it very simple, right? "Are you still interested in SEO?" "Are you still interested in Yacht Model?" Right? Just super simple.

Awesome. Thanks.

Yep. That's a great question. Keep the questions coming, by the way. Um, so I do want to talk about this concept of going omnichannel because you see a lot of YouTube creators doing this. You see MrBeast, he's got 56 million subscribers, um, on YouTube, but he's also got big channels elsewhere. Um, you can look at these other creators and maybe I might be just mentioning random people that you don't know. Casey Neistat, uh, you know, big YouTuber. Uh, who else do you got? You got Logan Paul who started from Vine and now he's got a big Instagram following, a big YouTube following, and now he's going to box Floyd Mayweather. Right. How does that even happen? So, um, you know, key thing here is this, right? For us, we have the Podcast Marketing School and we average about 1.5 million downloads a month right now. Um, so we have a great podcast audience, but the time I spend with my, my, um, my partner doing this, um, it's a lot, right? So every couple of weeks we're going to be recording and it's a daily podcast. So we've got to be on top of it. And so if we're going to be putting this much effort to meet, you know, he's got his businesses to operate. I got mine. So how do we keep that going? So what we do is this, let's go back to the YouTube example because we actually start with video because when I start doing the podcast, we go into Zoom, we record. Okay. And let's say we go for 60 minutes and we do 10 episodes. Each one's about 5 minutes each. Right? So, Each video can be chopped into audio podcasts. Can they be— can then be— you can then have a writer expand on them because audio is more or less maybe 40 to 60% of a blog post. And then the blog can just be a lot more detailed, detailed. And I would just go to a site like Problogger to hire great writers. Um, and then what you would do is you promote it and then you focus on monetization, right? So basically we call this content sprouting and you start with one seed piece of content. So if Tammy likes to write, maybe it's a blog post. If Zach likes to do audio, it starts with audio. If I like to do video, I start with video. But the idea here is that one piece can become 50 or 60 pieces a day. And that seems overwhelming, but I'm telling you, if people like Gary Vee are out there doing that, and yes, he has a team, but he also started with nothing when he was doing that, right? So you can slowly get stronger and stronger. The idea here is, oh, Eric, oh, what about conversions? I need more free trials, right? But if you're doing social, the goal here is reach, right? The more people you can reach, that is ultimately what the goal is, right? This is more of a top of the funnel type of play for me and everything. As long as you keep adding value on the top of the funnel, people are going to come down to you, right? And work with you. So we've got seed, sprout, sprout, pollinate, harvest, right? I got these little, I got this bee over here too. So look, we have our, we have our YouTube channel and you know, it's called Leveling Up. Cause I've got a book coming out called Leveling Up. And, um, you know, we put all our videos here. So what we do, and Joe Rogan does this really well, he takes his video cause he goes for like 2 to 3 hours per interview. He chops it up. So he has a JRE Clips channel that has about 5 million subscribers and then he's got his own stuff. Right. Um, so we put most of our stuff here and then we put it on the podcast and then we will put it onto IGTV. We'll put it on Instagram and Honestly, it's not like we have a massive team doing it. We have 2 people that focus on it, that work really hard on it. I wouldn't say they focus on it because they do other things, but that's how we make it work. And do we want to expand it? Absolutely. Because I just talked to my, one of the guys that used to work at my company, he works for Gary Vee now on his brand team. They got 30 people on that team. And I was like, okay, how does it look for, to make it easy for people? It's like, all you really need is a brand manager and someone to kind of repurpose the content if you want to make it bare bones. And then if you want to make it crazier, you'll have like a specialist for each channel, right? And then you'll have a brand manager at the top. That's how it looks. So, um, Tammy, just cut me off if I'm, if I'm coming up on time. Um, cause I think I got, I got more.

Great.

Cool. So what we do here is, look, you see these videos over here. Here's a video. Here's a video. I constipated here. Um, but yeah, so the idea here is we go to YouTube. And then we, we, cause IGTV or even Instagram feeds only allows for 10 minutes and then a feed video can only be 60 seconds. Right? So our team will chop it up. Say, oh my God, Eric, it's so much work. Of course it's a lot of work, but it's, it's better that you make the most of the car that you buy versus drive it for 2 weeks and you're done with it. Right. Um, and then, you know, here's a bonus. We've realized that, um, doing carousels on LinkedIn or on Instagram, you get a lot more engagement. So when I do a carousel on LinkedIn, I'll get 6 times more engagement than a typical post. Okay. So that's another little, little tactic for you right there. And we learned that from a guy named Chris Do, and he actually grew his Instagram to 500,000 or so followers, but we learned that that actually carries over really well into the world of LinkedIn. So take advantage of LinkedIn organic reach while you can right now, because, you know, Microsoft is going to start to push really hard on monetization, you know, whenever they get the chance, right? So take advantage, don't write the broetry stories, actually try to add value, right? So you got a lot of great people like, you know, Gaetano from Nextiva, you got Dave Gerhardt, you know, at Privy. So you got a lot of great people that are out there putting themselves out there and they're showing you how it's done on LinkedIn, right? I think we just had a post recently about, we have a Slack group for content team leads. If you guys want into that, just tweet at me @EricOsu and we'll get you in. But that one got over 1,000 comments and over 120,000 people viewed it. Right. So that's, that's our claim to fame. That's the best one we've had, but I'm just telling you something simple like that can do well. All right. So talking about the output, it's important that you measure, right? Or else you can't manage it. So for our Slack, you know, we'll have these reports. Hey, you know, LinkedIn was one time, leveling up was 7 times yesterday. Here's our daily output breakdown. And eventually we want to go from 25 to 50 to 75 to 100 a day. And again, it's a frantic pace, but if the goal is reached, we're fine. At least you give, if you give your team a target to aim for, they're good to go. Okay. Um, final thing I'm going to talk about, there's a lot more experts than, than myself in this, but I think about mergers and acquisitions from a marketing perspective. So from a growth perspective, because If I can go buy a website, let's say I'm spending $500 grand a month on ads. Why don't I just go buy a website for $1 million? Okay? And the website gets 5 million visits a month. So instead of paying for all those clicks on Google or Facebook, I now have bought the attention. Okay? So I go buy the media company. So I think most people in here love Naval Ravikant. So I'll tell you something he says. 4 points of leverage: code, capital, media, and labor. Most people lack on the media point, right? And by the way, like, you know, the reason our podcast continues to compound is because both Neil and myself, so he's my podcast co-host, we just love learning about marketing and learning about operating businesses and we just love talking about it. And then people learn that way, right? And so if you build in public, that's a very easy way to just build an audience. I think there's a guy named Paul, he runs a company called Copy.ai on Twitter. He's building in public, right? He's revealing his MRR numbers, you know, what he needs and things like that. So anyway, working towards wrapping up on these slides, and then we'll jump in the breakouts. If you think about growing through acquisitions, you can actually do a couple of things here, at least in America. You can buy a company, locate a company, do seller financing. You could do a deferred down payment. You could have milestones. You could do a carve-out. I'm just giving you a couple of tools in the tool belt because When you think about mergers and acquisitions, you actually— there's over, you know, 200 types of tactics that you can use. And this comes from one of my friends, Roland Frasier. He actually has an entire program on this. So what do I mean, Eric? What are you saying right now? So let's say you're a pet SaaS business and you're at $3 million ARR and you spend a lot on ads. Example I gave earlier, you're looking to buy some pet media sites that get over 500K visits a month. So let's say you find a site that's doing $1 million in annual revenue. and $200K in profit. Okay. It's not, you're not gonna pay $1 million for it. You're gonna pay less. You, let's say the multiple on that website is 3X. So you pay $600K. All right. Well, in America, what you can do is you can put 10% down on the business, right? And you can get the rest financed by the seller. Okay. So I'm just giving you an example of something that you might do. So I put $60K down and then, oh, guess what? Uh, seller, how about you pay for the rest of it? And I'll give you, uh, we'll give you a note for that. Maybe like a, like some type of interest rate, right? And then what you can also do is you can do a deferred down payment, right? Where you put, let's say you put, you say, hey, let's hold off on the $60K. I'm going to pay it to you in 30 to 45 days. And you can go use that time to go find a way to get that money, right? So there's a lot of different ways to play this game. I'm just trying to get you to think of it from a point of acquiring media assets so you can grow faster. And a lot of people think this is out of reach. But it's actually not. All right. So you don't need to be a fancy or big investors to do these types of deals. You can do these, look, you're not going to get on TechCrunch, right? You can do a deal for a couple hundred grand or so, but it's good enough to make a difference in your business. All right. So here you can follow me on all this stuff. And if you want to get a free chapter of my upcoming book, just go to levelingup.com. It's right there.

Awesome. Thank you so much, Eric. I know we're going to hit replay on so many of these as well. Um, but let's go ahead and break out into the sessions. I will,