10 Things That Always Work in Marketing

These are stressful times for many of us. More stressful than a year or a year and a half ago. And sometimes it can seem like nothing is quite working and that everything is just harder. It can seem like that in product, in sales, but especially marketing. People are still retrenching in marketing. They're pulling back. Everyone needs to be more capital efficient these days. And that makes sense. But. But you've got to grow. You do have to grow. And even if things seem hard, I wanted to go over 10 things that always work in marketing. They just always work. Good times, late times, early times. They always work okay. Number one, a customer conference. And importantly, it's okay to start small folks to some extent. After March 2020 pulled back from in person events, folks didn't do them. We lost the DNA. Bigger folks often laid off their events team or moved to digital. You do not need to do a Saster or a Dreamforce or an Inbound for this to work. A customer conference with 20 of your customers and prospects, 50, 100, even 10. Which we'll get to next. Always works if you have even a few million in revenue. Plan a half day event, a one day event this summer, in the next couple months, whenever in the upcoming months or quarter, book a hotel. Book one room in a hotel and invite all your customers and all your current prospects. Do a half day of content. Do just a couple of sessions. It doesn't matter. Get your customers on stage talking about how great you are to your prospects and other customers. It is magical. It is magical for NRR because if your customers are talking to each other and saying how great it is, they will buy more from you. And it is magical because your prospects will come. Your prospects that are thinking about. You'll be surprised who in your pipeline and on your list comes to your little tiny itty bitty customer conference. And the prospects that come, your customers that bother to come, they can't help themselves. They go into sales mode. They start telling your prospects to buy your customers. So even if you can get 20 to 30 customers and prospects to come together for your first mini tiny customer conference, do it. Do it with some content and some structure and make it great. Second point, and I've said this on Saster so many times over the year and people almost do it or they have do it but they never really commit. It's a weekly webinar folks. This always works. You all can start next week. What is a weekly webinar? It is exactly what it is. It's a zoom or whatever tool you Want to use. It's got to be the same time each week. Say we do them at Saster ourselves. We do workshop Wednesday. We do it every Wednesday at 10:00am you should do the same. I love Wednesdays because it's the middle of the week and people get it. But do one every single week, not every other week. And invite everyone on your list and invite all. Have your sales team invite all your prospects. It is great because not all your prospects want to be sold to one on one and not all of them want to talk to chatbots. Some of them like to sit back and learn in a group format where maybe they can quietly ask a question at the end or they can hear the other questions or they can see the presentation. Your prospects will like it, your customers will like it. And here's the thing. For the weekly webinar, when you have other stakeholders in an organization, your customer will tell the other stakeholders to come to the webinar and learn more. And you need to mix it up. Don't make every week the same, although you can. It's better than nothing. Some weeks can be pure product demos with Q and A. I love having you know every couple of weeks have a customer come and share their story using your product. You can record it, you can repurpose it, you can turn into content. But the most important thing is that you invite everyone each week at the same time and you don't skip weeks. You gotta do it every week or it won't happen. You won't build up the muscle memory, you won't get it done. But if you do a weekly webinar and invite everyone, you can think each week more deals will close and more stakeholders in organizations will get exposed to your product and have a chance to answer questions. There are just folks who like 12 sum as a way to learn. We all learn differently. Some of us like podcasts, some of us like blogs, some of us like self service products or free trials. Some, some of us really like that one to one experience with the sales rep or a customer success professional one on one. But others just like this middle area where they can hang back and they can watch and they can listen. And you'd be surprised how many do. Totally worth it. Never not seen someone that does a weekly webinar for real that adds value, that doesn't see roi, costs nothing. You can start literally next week, maybe even this week. Okay. Point three. Just because we're so everyone's into content production this day. If you don't know what to do, write some Amazing blog content. You know it's funny, you can go back to the last Saster annual when the co founders of HubSpot came Dharmesh Ha and Brian Halligan and they had a contest in the early days who could write the best blog post. I think it was each day. I don't think it was each week. I think it was each day. They each wrote a post each week in it. And to this day SEO is one of their top five sources of new customers for for HubSpot, you don't have to do it that extreme. But I have never seen super high quality content in your niche in your industry. Super high quality content not ultimately generate leads, prospects and customers over time. This does not mean going into chat GBT and writing a hundred posts a day of very low quality. It doesn't mean farming this out to some agency you barely know. The pros maybe can do that. For most of us, it'll get you absolutely nowhere. It may at the margin be negative to your brand. I'm talking about ideally once a week, write something epic. Write something truly epic. If you do niche payments in some industry, if you do niche payments for restaurants or for hospitals or for nonprofits, write the world's best piece of content on how payments really work at non profits or how accounting products really work in your industry, write a couple of great pieces per month, ideally one per week. Again, so you have this cadence and amazing things happen over time. I'm not an SEO expert. You're probably not. Google changes things. But every single startup I've worked with that has done this, it has worked. And even Saster itself is an SEO empire. After all these years, it's our number one source of traffic. Just by writing early content that I knew about. You know, I was. There are so many more successful founders than me these days. But I was pretty early in writing about my failings building a sales team, building my failures in marketing my failures. But I knew it. You know, it wasn't that it was epic, but I knew it. And that content just performed. So write a couple pieces when you don't know what to do. It may not get you a thousand leads, but it's going to get you a couple really good customers if you add value. Okay, point four of the ten things that work. This is a simpler version of your very first little customer conference because you probably can only pull one customer conference off a year. So maybe if you haven't done it, do it three to four months out. Even if it's small, even if it's just in a hotel room. You need three to four months to plan it, even if it's simple. But steak dinners, that's the mini conference, okay? Go to every city you can where you have even a tiny concentration of customers, and invite your customers and prospects and prospects to dinner. Get eight or 10 of them in the room. They will talk about how great you are, and the customers will sell the prospects, just like at your customer conference, just on a smaller scale. Even our little team, we did one at Re Invent, we just did one at Shop Doc in Vegas. Wherever your customers are, whenever you can get just a little concentration, get out there and have a steak dinner dinner. And some of you will get this. Some of you are already doing this. For some of you that are a little more product focused, a little more sit in front of the imac focused. It may seem strange to do a steak dinner. And I remember the first time I saw this. I was good at events, but I didn't know steak dinners. But I remember back in the day, I was at the Ferry building in San Francisco, and Aaron Levy from Box was there doing a steak dinner at like, there's an upstairs at the Ferry building. It's kind of like an area you can have a nice mini event. And I couldn't believe it because I love Aaron to death. I looked up to him, but he was the clap back then. He was Box was just going to Enterprise. It was just getting there. And he was transitioning from one of the guys that worked in the dark room with the engineers to being that Enterprise CEO. And I said, you're doing a steak dinner? He's like, yeah, this really works. I'm learning. It really performs. And that was my aha moment years ago of the power of steak dinners. And even for our own team at Sastor, we're doing them today. They always work. We love. Literally did one last week, so try to do one if you're gonna do the steak dinners, okay? Force yourself to do one per month. Okay? And map out your cities. Do you have enough customers in New York? Do you have enough customers in the Bay Area? Do you have enough customers in Southern California? How about London? Even if you don't really want to go to Europe, wherever, I bet you have at least 10 cities where you have a customer concentration. Go there and maybe do, maybe, maybe do the good ones twice a year and magic will happen. Customers, prospects, get them to eat together, who knows? I don't personally love going out to dinner every night. I don't need to go to another fancy restaurant. I would prefer to just have a nice simple meal, but people just love these steak dinners. Okay, five Related to it Go visit your customers when you don't know what to do this is such a classic Saster post and it may not seem like marketing, but it is. It's customer marketing. Go visit them. Go visit all your best customers. And I tell this to founders that aren't sure how to grow or what to do. And sometimes they're like, I don't know what to say. I don't know. I would love to go visit my big customers. I'd love to go visit whoever it is, Google or PayPal or Aetna, but I don't know what to say. It's easy if you haven't done this before, go do a roadmap presentation. Especially as a CEO. Your customers, if it's a sales call, they may not want to meet in person, but if you tell them you want to show them the roadmap for the product for the next year, you will almost always get a meeting and you'll be shocked. Every time I used to do started to do this, I would walk in at big customers like Dell and others and there'd be 20 people in the room. They all because they were bought in. Your product is important to your customers usually, and they want to see the roadmap. And if it's actually the CEO or a founder, even more amazing because they can ask all their questions and you'll get a lot of. You may get a lot of tough questions in the room. And I remember back in the day when everything was getting mobile and our mobile apps were a little rudimentary and we got some rough questions always. But that's okay. It's great feedback for you to get. So expect some tough questions if you do these. But everyone loves to see the product roadmap. Your customers at least are generally really bought in. They've invested a lot of their career, probably more than you realize, in your product. Your product may be much more important to your customers and your customer is to you. It's quite likely you'll find. And so this always works. You do not need an excuse. You do not need to do a sales call. Just say we want to show you our roadmap for where the product's going. In the next 12 months, they will get you a meeting. Try to do one of these at least per month if you can, more if possible, and then do as many as humanly possible on Zoom. It just always works. Just take your top 20, 30 40, 50 customers and force yourself to go do these roadmap presentations, as many as you can. Okay. Sixth, in marketing, it's gonna sound really simple, but Outbound. I want to talk about Outbound for just a minute because again, there's this classic Saster post that I keep rewriting each year or two, which is, outbound always works if you do it right. And I think a lot of founders have figured this out. Actually, I did this survey on LinkedIn not too long ago. What percent of your revenue comes from outbound? And we had 1600 votes. More than that. Actually, 53% of folks said 30% or more of their revenue came from outbound. 53% most. So if you're not getting 30% or more of your revenue from Outbound, ask yourself, is it because we're not good at it? Is it because we don't know how to do it? That's probably the answer. And as founders, you may not be comfortable. A lot of founders are not comfortable with Outbound. They may think it's a little unseemly, a little odd, a little weird, or even worse. What they may do is hire an agency or hire someone that just takes a bunch of names and dumps them into a raw cadence asking for coffee. Or with really the most simplistic or banal outreach once in a while. That works. This brute force works. Okay. I definitely see very broad based apps. It must work. It must work for certain payroll applications and others that everybody uses. I have limited success with the Spray and pray Outbound. What? I have a hundred percent success for my entire career. And every company I've invested in works is the highly curated, thoughtful Outbound email. Figure out who the top 200, 300, 400 buyers are in your industry. Take your time. Take your time and figure out what they do for real, not for fake. Go look at their website and then find another customer. Like them. Like them. Okay. Back in the old days, we did this with insurance. We did it with Aetna, and then we did with Cigna, and then we did it with United Healthcare. And we kept doing it and doing it and doing it. And you could go out to United Healthcare and you could say, hey, this is how Aetna uses our product. This is how we use Adobe Sign. This is the benefits they've gotten. I bet this could help you a lot. I'm simplifying. But that email, how someone else in their industry is for real getting high ROI from the product and why you think they could benefit, that's like 95 times better than the average spray and pray email I get in my promotions box. Slow it down. Write four to five tailored outbound emails today to someone like a customer. You have make it personal. Get the right email address, write it to the right person. Force yourself not to put it in a tool. Force yourself. Most importantly, the way you can make sure this works is if you do it in Gmail, okay? It will force you not to use a tool. I love tools. I was a very early investor in Salesloft. I'm also an investor in Mixmax for email marketing. I love all these tools and they have their place. But to get this initial like high value outbound email to work, the forcing function is do it in Gmail. That will force you to make sure to read the text and if it's not that good, if you haven't done your homework, if you haven't done your research and importantly if you can't point to another customer like them and and how you would solve the problem, you might not send that email, you might not send an email. And I just find it's magic. And what you can look for when you do outbound, right is double digit connect rates. Double digit connect rates. Can you get more than 10% of this highly targeted, highly thoughtful outbound to agree to a call or at least agree to take more information from you? If you can get to double digits, this is going to work for you. If just forget about in the beginning how much you can close. It's going to take you time to learn how to close from outbound. Maybe sometimes, sometimes you're quite good at it. But if you can get even 10% of folks, high quality folks to respond to, take a meeting, to take a call or even to take more information, that means you've got it. Your, your outbound is nailed. So slow it down, do it better, do it for real. Solve their problem. Show them a similar customer you already have. I just, I've just never seen it not work if you commit to it. But again, buying a random list off the Internet and sticking it in a tool with a generic, a generic message or outsourcing it to someone that doesn't even understand your product, I have seen it work once in a while. Don't get me wrong. And if you have a VP of sales that's proven it, let her or him try. But if that's all you've done and you think outbound doesn't work, you just haven't really run the right playbook. Okay, Number seven of things that always work and you'll get conflicting advice here, but you know this works. Top industry events, go to them. Okay, Go to them and let me talk about why. Because the Internet and Twitter will give you different advice. Notice first in this out of the 10 I said put on your own event. I really do think it is better, but different than going to industry events. It is better because if you do your own little customer event, even if it's just 30 or 40 people for half a day in a hotel, you can control the content, you can control who's there, you can invite exactly who you want, customers and prospects. Of course, in a sense, that's better than going to Dreamforce or Inbound or Saster or Shop Talk because you control it. But the downside of your only event is you only get your own list. You only get the people you can get to come. What founders sort of know, but sort of forget. But the best field marketers know. This is what field marketers are really good at is they know the top industry events attract the top buyers. It's just a fact. You may or may not like events. You may think that they're a huge waste of time, a lot of travel time, that you'd rather be working on your product or on Zoom or selling, selling on the Internet and not schlepping all the way to the Bay Area or London or wherever or Vegas. I get it. I do not enjoy Vegas at all. But here's the thing. And this is why field marketing overall is the single biggest area of marketing spend in SaaS. The number one area is field marketing, especially for bigger accounts. It's because buyers go to the top events to learn to do discovery. Just like some buyers will come to your webinar if you actually do it. Just like some buyers will do a Google search and find your great content if you do it. A lot of buyers go to events now. They don't. Here's the thing, and you know this intuitively even if you don't know it empirically, the best buyers, the best buyers don't go to the fifth or eighth tier event. Okay? They just don't. They're busy too. They will go to a couple of events per year. They will go to those iconic events that everyone knows in the industry. And while, and, and, and while I'm recording this, a lot of folks just came back in the e commerce space from Shop Talk in Las Vegas and it's a great event if you're in E commerce and. But it's actually pretty stripped down. It mostly just has meetings And a little bit of content. But why is it so powerful? It's because people know the buyers are there. And even for our own, you know, I learned a lot about field. I didn't know, you know, we have 12,000 people coming to Saster annual. There's a lot of buyers. There's just a lot of buyers. And yes, events are expensive in hard costs and soft costs. And yes, like, don't go overboard here if you don't know what you're doing. You know, buying a booth and staring at your shoes for three days isn't going to work. Okay, There is a playbook here. You have to engage with people. You have to follow up. If you want to do events right and deploy money at them, you need a marketer that knows how to do field marketing. But here's the thing, the buyers are there. So figure out how to make the top industry events work. If you don't know how to do a booth, if you don't know how to do a private dinner, if you don't know how to hack it, at least figure out a way to participate and show up and meet a couple of prospects. But the more you engage, well, this is why, as crazy as it seems, as crazy as all these events at these events seem, the better you are at it, the higher the roi. Because the buyers are there and it's just special they go and the buyers. As strange. If you don't understand an expo at an event, you're like, oh, who wants to go to the expo? And you know who wants to go to the expo? A buyer who's looking for either discovery to find new vendors or importantly, this is really important. A buyer that wants to talk to a vendor they've heard of but not have not yet purchased from. That's magical. At the top events. Oh, I'm thinking about buying this product. I wanted to talk to you guys. I've already heard of you, but it's another touch or third. Your customers. Your customers go to the top events. They go to inbound and Saster and shop talk and all of this. And it's another chance to meet them. Get your, get your C set up, get your NR up, your mps up. Build those relationships. You really cannot lose doing top industry events. Just find the way initially to do them in a way that works for you. Okay, point 8 out of 10 of things that always work. But you need. But just like field events, you probably need someone good to help you. Okay, again, you don't want to buy an expensive booth and stare at your Shoes Point eight is partner marketing. You can't just sit there and wait for partner partner marketing to magically happen. If you go to the Saster website and search for partner marketing, you'll find a great we have a bunch of great sessions, but one of the ones I love is from a company I was one of the first investors in called gorgeous, which has 12,000 small businesses in E commerce and half of them are from partners and half of them are from Direct. And watch that session about how you get half of them from partners and you'll learn a lot from that session. HubSpot gets about probably 40% I think I'm making that up but I think it's pretty close from their customers from partners. Shopify is something like that too. Like approaching 50 at last seen its material. The key is you got to invest. You need a whole team to do it at scale. But the thing is, whatever it is, start small, make it work. Find one or two partners that work for you and double down. It's going to think about partners. Here's the thing we need with founders it can be hard sometimes to be patient in many areas it just takes a while to get going. You build these relationships and if you're really lucky you get one lead and then three months later you get a second one and then a year later you get the third. So this flywheel takes a long time. But here's the number one mistake I see with partner marketing. Typically something happens. Someone wants to do a little something with you. Zendesk wants to do a little something with you. Salesforce does HubSpot Shopify whomever and the CEO handles it her himself. They handle. They get it going. Of course they do what's important. But you run out of time as the CEO you do not have 40 or 50 hours a week to do nothing but work on partners channel and strategy as so my one advice here is as soon as you have even something happening in your partner channel, something something, a smidge. Hire someone full time with experience in either partner management or partner marketing. Because if it's working even a smidge, it will work more. But not if you're doing it a couple hours here and there yourself. And I see it always stall out this sort of partner partner marketing. Okay, 0.9. This one's going to sound almost silly 0.9 to you guys, but it always works. I know it's going to sound silly. Website redesigns so what do I mean by this? Okay, so let me talk about bad website design from a marketing strategy and Good bad website design is you hire a new marketer, they're very expensive, and all they do, their first month force, four months, is redesign your website. I mean, you're going to pull out your hair. I can't tell you how many marketers that fail, they don't get you leads, they don't get you customers, they don't talk to the sales team, they don't do the webinar or the customer event or anything. They just, they just redesign the website because they don't like it and it's not any better. Okay, that's bad. Okay, Mediocre marketers burn too many website cycles on mediocre web design. But here's the thing, here's what you got to step back, here's where it works. What's better, your marketing site or your product? This is what you gotta ask yourself every month, every quarter, take a look. And usually when we start things as a founder, in the very beginning, our product doesn't do much. So our marketing site, usually such as we have one, is better. It's very exciting. And so, hey, we do all these things, we're going to change the world and then use the product and it does very little. So often, often in those first couple months, the marketing site, so to speak, is better than the product. But I find as time goes on, they diverge and the product actually gets better than the marketing site. The marketing site isn't updated properly, it doesn't have case studies, it doesn't sell the future, it doesn't say where it's going, it's clunky. And you lose prospects and customers when you don't put your very, very best foot forward on your website. So I don't care whether you, what, what product you use, what CMS you use, how you do it, la da da da da da. And this is different than lead capture and all the other great things you can do with the marketing site. I say just slow it down and ask yourself, what's better, my marketing side or my product? If your marketing site is worse than your product, it's so much easier to fix. You don't need an engineer, you don't need to ship any features. Spend a month making your website better than your product. Always pays off, always pays off. Because those precious leads otherwise just bounce off your website. And that's just a shame. Okay, Last idea number 10. For things that always work, but you gotta do them well. You gotta do all these, well podcasts and videos. So let me slow down for a minute. The last thing the world needs is is another podcast or another YouTube channel. The world really does not need you pontificating about banking or about crypto or chat gbt. I don't not believe the world needs yet another random podcast or video, nor do I think it needs the 10,000th interview of the exact same guest as on every other podcast or YouTube. But here's the magic and it goes back to the the general blog content and SEO we talked about before. Forget about trying to get 10,000 people listening to your podcast because you want to emulate someone else on the Internet. Imagine 10 great prospects. Listen to your podcast and video, which is just about your industry. Again, it's just about that niche. It's just about this type of product and this type of industry. It's just about Environmental Science and SaaS or some sort of finance product. In SaaS, it starts off very, very niche. If even just 100 people listen to it and 10 reach out to you because of it, and one buys for 20,000 a year and stays 10 years, that's $200,000 from that podcast and video. And it's wonderful. And you can reuse this content and you can put it on your website and you can put it in email marketing and especially try to do it in a way that's not too timely. Again, if you could do one of these a week, one podcast slash YouTube video, you can combine them together. That truly adds value. It's okay if 100 people in your industry listen. It's okay if the only people actually even that listen are folks that already come to your website, already use your product. They will forward it to other people. They will share it again, just like these other other products we talked about on this list of 10. They'll share it with other people in their organization outside of it. Quality over quantity in SaaS for podcasts and video. Again, you do not need to compete with the all in podcast or, or the Saster podcast or any of these things. Put that aside. Don't get, don't get. Don't get caught up in the LinkedIn feed hype. No, make if, if you're passionate about this, if this is something you want to do, make the best podcast in YouTube for your customers in your industry and do it relentlessly. You will get customers from it. Okay, 10 things that always work. I think most of these 10 don't even take any money, although they take time. And the key is you got to commit. You got to do them. You, you got to do the weekly webinar every week. You got to go to the industry events that matter. You got to do the podcast or the video every week. You got to do partner marketing full time for real. But if you commit to these 10, you can grow faster and you can start some of these next week.