A Useful Framework for Scaling SaaS Marketing

Good morning. I'm slightly confused. First because my title is a useful new BS framework and in this room I'm not sure whether I can use the word bullshit or should I stick to bs? I think I'll stick to BS for the time being. So I'm here to talk to you about and help you think about marketing. Let's start with some definitions. So this title of this talk useful means that I've used this framework to drive millions of dollars of ARR in various companies. No, BS means that it's going to be very pragmatic, very common sensical, maybe even too common sensical for some of you. There's going to be no fancy words, no way concepts. I'm even gonna go all the way and try to distill marketing down into three spreadsheets. Let's see how that goes. And then framework means that there's gonna be no one size fits all ready made strategies. It's gonna be just a couple of thought exercises to help you answer questions like which channel should I focus on or which resources do I need to add to my team? Which skills do I need to add to my team in the next six months or 12 months? Before we go into that, I'd like to get a sense of who's in the room. So please raise your hand if you work in marketing or growth marketing. A few of you raise your hand if you work in an earlier stage company and if you work in a later stage company. That's excellent. Please also raise your hand if you think that this animal is cute. Please raise your hand if you think this animal is cute enough to maybe want to have it as a pet. It's a few people in the back. Raise your hand if you if you know what this animal is. What species is it? It's strange, like some people want to have this animal and they don't know what it is. It sounds like something that could be part of a marketing framework. Let's see. So first, who am I? I'm a T shaped marketer. These logos are in T shaped and by T shaped I don't mean this like shape of my torso. It is that I know a little bit about every marketing discipline. I think branding to product marketing to pricing to pr. But my specialization is acquisition marketing. So this talk is very much about acquisition. It's not going to be about viral tactics or, or branding. No bs. I promised you. And then I worked in marketing for 21 years now. I started out in fast moving consumer goods and media. Then for the last 12 years I've been in tech and for the last 10 years in subscription and SaaS. I spent four years at Skype in various marketing roles and from 2011 to end of last year I was with Pipedrive and helped us grow from zero to now more than 75,000 customers. And then started out Funnel Outfundle. There's two things you should know about Outfundnel. So we build a marketing tool that's super easy to plug into a CRM system. So if you're using pipedrive, please check us out. And secondly, we have a hockey stick revenue curve in the sense that for a long time it was zero and as of this week it's not anymore. Looks very much like a hockey stick. So the menu for today. For the menu for this morning, I'd like to start by talking about two concepts like category awareness and category urgency and how these two things actually really give you, spit you out the channel mix that you should be using or could be using. Then we're going to go slightly more technical but not too technical. We're going to look at the keyword SWOT analysis and how you can, you can build channel opportunity matrix if you put these things together. We're going to look at also at recommendations and driving word of mouth, which I think is the most powerful channel, if you can call it that over at all. And then there's one final spreadsheet if we have time, which relates to execution. Alright, so the animal I showed you before Daniel, actually it's called sugar glider. It's a flying squirrel, lives in Australia and that side of the world. And I think it's a helpful metaphor for understanding category awareness. Had I showed you a picture of a dog. Everybody knows what a dog is, everybody knows how a dog operates and if they want to get one, they know where to go and find one. If I'm a dog marketer, it's pointless for me to start to talk to people who don't want a dog about features of a dog. It has four legs, it barks, it sometimes farts on the sofa, it wouldn't change your mind. But it would be wise for me to seek out people who are already wanting to get the dog and then make sure that my dog shop stands out for them and my puppies somehow are different. However, if I was selling sugar gliders like these flying squirrels, nobody's searching for them. So the only way, the best way to market them is just find people, interrupt them, show them a picture and say, hey, do you want one? And Then some people do. And it's the same with software products. It's the same with hardware products. There are things like spreadsheets and smartphones, which everybody knows. And then there's if people want a smartphone or a piece of software, they activate, they start searching and then they just find whatever suits them. Things like CRMs and to do apps. Most people in the target audience know what these things are and they know where to find them. However, if you look at things like new categories like car fleet management software, or maybe serverless technology, maybe 2015 a couple of years ago, or if you think about things like airtable, which doesn't really belong to any category, so you have much like you have low category awareness, there's nobody searching for that thing at the moment. So the marketing is slightly different. And there's very seldom like a pure breed guard dog or a pure breed flying squirrel type product. Most companies are somewhere in between with one side dominating. And hopefully you're able to place your brand or your company somewhere on this category awareness chart. If you do that, there's one more thing to consider. So it's category urgency. This is a DVD player. High category awareness. I think most of us know what this is, but I bet that very few people in this room have bought the DVD player recently. It's same thing with gym memberships. We know what the gym membership is all year long, but it's only in the first two weeks of January when we activate and actually start signing up for gyms. So category awareness is high all year round, two weeks. It's also category urgency. And if you put these two things together, you get a bit of a matrix where you can have high category agency and high category awareness. These are, this is people, people actively actively looking for you. People using some search keywords to try to find you. You can have high category awareness and low urgency. And this is what VC sometimes calls vitamins. It's kind of important, but it's important tomorrow or maybe the day after tomorrow, you don't take the step to acquire this thing or product. You can also have high category agency and low awareness, which I think VC term would be a painkiller. So you people start to look for it when they have a problem, but you have no control when they start looking for it. And then you can also. Marketing is very different if there's low category awareness and low category urgency. And you can almost draw a line from the top left corner to the bottom right corner to separate the two kinds of marketing that companies do or could do. And I have drawn this line from the top left corner to the top bottom right corner. And if you're selling a product which is described as a guard dog, then the aim of marketing is to maximize findability. I think the grammatically correct term is visibility, but I think findability is more active. Visibility is somewhat useless. Visibility is standing outside somebody's house naked. Yes, you're visible, but it's like, what's the point? But findability is very pointed, it's very directed. If somebody has a need, they start searching for you. And if they start searching for you, they need to be able to find you. So this is what I mean by findability. And then if you're selling something more like a sugar glider, like this flying squirrel, then you need to maximize interruptions. Some marketers call it engagement. You need to maximize engagement with customers. This is bs. This is a no BS talk. So I think it's interruptions. What we need to do as marketers is we need to stop people in the tracks. We need to show them a picture of a flying squirrel and ask, do you want one? And some people will say yes. With me so far. All right, and then if you've done these steps, if you thought about, if you've thought about your category urgency and category awareness, it's very easy then to make your first pick of channels if you're on the left side. If you have high category awareness and high category urgency, people are searching for you. So then by definition, the channels which are probably most effective for you are the channels that come up in search. So that's search itself, it's adwords, it's content that is highly targeted at high buying intent keywords, which is search engine optimized, it is marketplaces, it is directories, it is direct response media channels. However, if you're selling a sugar glider, then the channels that tend to work best are those that target people who are actively not searching for you, who are spending time on social media or maybe some news site. So then you need to use social, either free or paid content, social media, certain type of content, display, ads, pr, viral, all these things work and cater best for situations where you have low category awareness and urgency. And no matter which side you're on, no matter whether you are a sugar glider or a guard dog, I think the most effective channel and the most efficient channel is recommendations and referrals. If you have a half good product, that should be part of any marketing playbook. All right, so let's now assume that we've, we've made These steps one and two, we've perhaps wanted, like, let's, let's, let's, let's take the example that we want to become more findable. How do you, how do you do that? Where do you start? Who do you become findable for? What keyword should be. Be findable for? And there's an exercise for that. That's my first spreadsheet, which is, which I would like to share with you. So let's take an example where I'm selling a CRM product and I have four, only four keywords to choose from. In real life, there's many more keywords to choose from. For the sake of exercise, I'm going to use four. And we only need to pick one keyword in this exercise. Who here would pick the first keyword? Nobody. Who would pick the second keyword? Sales coach, A couple of people. Sales Pipeline Management, morehands and Sales Pipeline Report. Some people are very selective about the keywords. They wouldn't pick any of these keywords, which actually may be the right choice because the right answer here is that search volume is not enough to decide what keywords to look for. And this now gets a bit technical. Please don't get lost. I'm gonna be back in the normal auto technical weeds in about two minutes. You need search volume to decide, but you also need difficulty, which is how many other companies, how many other content creators are targeting the same keyword. You can get difficulty from many sources. I'm using a mix of, on average of Google and Moz, which is an SEO tool. If you put these things together, if you go search volume and difficulty together, you get an opportunity score. And what I recommend to add to that is your personal subjective assessment of relevancy. So you want things which have high volume, low competitiveness, and high relevance to you. And then you can see here that while the first keyword, Customer relationship management, was 100 times more popular than the second keyword, the opportunity score, that they have the total opportunity score. They are very close to each other. The number you get when you make the calculation isn't your right answer, just an input to your answer. But you can use it as a guide to pick your keywords. This process is called keyword research in the marketing world, in the SEO world. But I like to call it keyword SWOT analysis because calling it keyword research makes it sound like it's like something you just some SEO person does. But I think this should be done and could be done much closer to the marketing leadership, maybe even company leadership. Because doing these keyword SWOT analysis really helps you identify your findability, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. There's three good reasons to do keyword SWOT analysis. One, you'll be able to know what keywords to target. Second, you'll know what language to use on your website. Another marketing collateral. And thirdly, you can go one step deeper with this work and then really get a detailed plan of what channels you need to target and what resources you need to target these channels. And that's the next step. By the way, there's a few links below, below some of the slides which have posts which kind of go in more detail about that topic. And the slides will be available later to you. Still with me. All right, next spreadsheet. So let's assume that one of the keywords which wanted to target is best CRM, which is a reasonable keyword if you're targeting a sales product. And what comes up on Google is like you get an ad, maybe a few ads. Then there's a media site. There's a like a semi media site which is a bit of media and a bit of kind of pay to play site. Then you have sites like Capterra and G2 Crowd, which are kind of directories or marketplaces. Where would you we want to. Where would you want to be present on that page if you want it to be findable? Top. Good guess. Some people say the top. Some people say that they want to pay that because that's under your direct control almost. Some people say that anywhere on that page is good. My answer to this question is if you want to really become findable, you should be present on all the listings on that page, every single one of them. No matter what the people who in the target audience search for and no matter where they click, they should be able to find you. And I know what you're thinking. You can't be present on all the places because some of them are competitor sites. And then you can't be. There's no good. There's no legal way to be present on your competitor sites. But all the other sites, 80, 70% of them, you can be present. And then there's an exercise which I've done a couple of times which kind of help you map then how to be present there. The trick is to take your keywords that you've selected can be 1 keyword or 5 keywords or 5000 keywords depending on your size. And then looking at the results that come up and putting these things into a spreadsheet, a beautiful spreadsheet and then if you do that, in this example, we have eight keywords and 10 slots. And you'll be able to see that the red ones, about 20 of them, are competitors. So these are out of your range. We have 60 slots left. So 60 slots where we can be findable. We're seeing a comparison site X. Let's maybe it's Capterra featured five times. And altogether, comparison sites are. I think there's 20 slots of this slide. So by being present on just one site, you can be. You can then be findable in almost 10, 10% of. You could almost get 10% findability. And if you work with all comparison sites, you then have about 20% or 30% findability. You can also see that about 15 of these slots are media sites. That. Right. If we establish the media function, if in an outreach function, maybe a PR person or an outreach person, and we also know what sites to target, then we could get another 15 slots covered. So we can increase. You'll be able to see how much each function or each site would add to your findability. Make sense? All right, so this is a channel opportunity matrix. And then this helps you understand exactly what channels you need to target and what resources you need to target each of these sites. Some sites need money, very simple. Some sites need content to be created. Some sites need media outreach. Some sites need to establish a relationship. But you at least you know what you need in order to become findable. And it's very easy then to plan out the marketing function and the marketing plan after that. All right, so what we've done, we've looked at category awareness and urgency. We've made the first pick of chandels like Brody. Are we a sugar glider or a guard talk? We've done keyword SWOT analysis. And then we've also put it to work in the channel opportunity matrix, which can be a really good input to marketing plan. I mentioned earlier that the next channel, if you can call it that, which any company should use, is recommendations. Recommendations is a topic, is a separate topic in itself. It's not really a marketing thing. It's more a product thing or a service thing. But one of the things marketing can do is it can build the referral program. And so at pipedrive, we built the referral program pretty early on. And about six or 12 months into that, I made a study. I asked people who had used the program why they had used the program. And I was expecting. I was expecting the three months we gave away as part of the program to be A big motivator for people. But actually we found out that people largely make recommendations because A, they really like the product, and B, they just want to help a friend or a colleague. And then the three months, which I thought was critical for this program, barely registered on this chart. Even knowing that, I still tried to incentivize people to make more accommodations. So we tried things like adding sweepstakes. So if you make recommendations this month, you get something extra, maybe like a book or a sweepstake or I think we did everything from Amazon gift cards to something we also, once we even, I think, sweepstakes, an iPad, which was not my best day as a marketer. And some of these things helped to drive invites, some of the things also helped to drive signups. But we didn't really manage to influence new paying customers, which we got from this channel, which I think proves that if you're building a referral program, it makes sense to keep the focus and the main message about the inherent reasons for making recommendation, it's a social transaction. It's not a. It's not a monetary transaction. And the people that get the recommendation, they don't want. So people who make recommendations, they don't want the people who receive their recommendations to come across as selfish and only done because of personal gain. So don't overdo it would be my advice. And the second thing I learned is there's no better time than the first one or two days of being a user of a product to ask for accommodations. This graph lists invites sent and successful invites sent from the pipedrive's telephone program a couple of years back. And as you can see, the first two days really are the best times for asking for recommendations. And it kind of makes sense because that's the time where people are most engaged with app. They're clicking around, they are starting to fall in love with all the things that they will like in the future, and they haven't yet found the things which will annoy them in the future. All right, one spreadsheet to go. Even if you've done steps one to five perfectly, you probably end up with more ideas that your team can execute. And then if you have that, then sometimes people start doing the things which they like to do, which is kind of good, but hardly optimal. So I've then found that ICE is something that the third spreadsheet I've added to the process, which helps team pick their battles. And it gives a shared language in the team when we talk about and they talk about different products, different projects. And ICE is a very simple spreadsheet. It just lists all ideas. You can have all the ideas you generated in the past five steps, and you assess the impact. Like what's the likely moving the needle effect of a project or an idea? You look at confidence. How confident are you that this thing will happen? And you look at effort. Of course, the easier something is, the better. And then you have an I score for every single idea. And then you pick the things with the highest I score. The trick here is confidence, because it's relatively easy to assess impact, it's relatively easy to assess effort. But confidence is where I think millions are made or lost. Nothing should have more than one point in confidence if it's just an idea. If it has worked elsewhere, it should be maybe two. And only if somebody has created a prototype or made a small scale test, a real live test, should confidence be three or four or five. And I've found that the more you work on the confidence aspect, the more you work on prototypes and testing, the more you can trust the results of this exercise. All right, so we've looked at six things that help you think about marketing, hopefully. We've looked at the three spreadsheets, we've looked at the pictures of two cute animals. And that's it from me. Thank you.