Oh, SaaS growth marketing…it’s a lot more complex than you think.
With all the moving parts: product, growth, customers, launches, and of course, profitability, it’s pretty easy to get lost in the weeds.
Until now.
Here, you’ll find what you need when it comes to how to successfully launch, market, and grow your product or service.
Whether you’re looking for growth traction, growth scale, or growth elevation, we’ve got you covered with this reference guide.
Here’s how it’s gonna work.
We’ve broken down this guide into sections that will cover everything from marketing and growth to customers and branding. Inside each section, you’ll find tips and tools to get you started.
Are you ready to start learning?
Let’s go.
Startup Marketing
One of the biggest challenges a start up faces is how to market a product or service with both limited time and money.
Part of the importance is tied in with making sure you have started the process the right way, that means having a product or service that hits the right customers.
This is where growth traction comes into play as well. At Stimulead, we know how critical the startup marketing phase is, and why it’s important to know what marketing channels to use (and when to double down on them).
Customers and Products
Some startups make one big mistake.
They focus all their efforts on either their product or their customer.
We don’t need to tell you doing that is the making of a potential disaster.
Yes, of course your product is incredibly important, but so much of your product’s success is going to be based on how well you understand your ideal customer.
After all, it’s your customers who are going to decide if your product or service meets their needs, solves their problems, and helps them fall in love with your brand.
If you aren’t speaking directly to them with your marketing, you’re never going to get very far, no matter how amazing you think your product is.
Remember, finding the right customer doesn’t just apply to business to consumer brands, but also business to business as well. Using a combination of “big” and “little” data to understand your potential buyers is a key part of the process.
Don’t simply rely on your product to have customers come running because you think it’s awesome, you need the right product.
This is where your product/market fit is going to come into play. As Marc Andreessen says a “Product/Marketing fit means being in a good market with a product that satisfies that market.”
Want more on the product/market fit? Check out these posts:
Here’s a nice visual way to understand the Product Market fit from the SlideShare A Playbook for Achieving Product Market Fit:
As you can see, hitting that sweet spot between the product and the market is vital.
Feedback
Once you find that product market fit and begin marketing, it doesn’t just end there. Nope, you want to continuously be looking for and gathering feedback.
And that doesn’t mean feedback for when the product is done, or what your final users think. That means collecting feedback along every single step of the way.
Look to do this through a couple of different channels like surveys, polls, emails, and yes even direct conversations with both current customers and your target personas.
Why is this important?
Because the most successful startups are able to roll with the punches and adapt. As Harvard Business Review says:
Startups are not smaller versions of large companies. They do not unfold in accordance with master plans. The ones that ultimately succeed go quickly from failure to failure, all the while adapting, iterating on, and improving their initial ideas as they continuously learn from customers.
When your brand is open to both customer development and feedback on your product or service you’ll be much more likely to connect with your ideal market through the improvements you’ve made.
Marketing
Realize that SaaS marketing is not quite like the marketing in the rest of the startup world.
Here are some reasons why:
- The sales cycle is shorter
- Consumers are much more dependent on information
- Your customers are looking for a long term solution
- You’re really selling more of a service than just a product
When you add those up, it can present a marketing challenge.
The good news is there are marketing strategies specifically geared towards SaaS brands that have produced results.
Concepts like going next level on customer support, positioning your brand as the expert in the field, optimizing your site for conversions, and focusing on providing high quality information and education are all good places to start.
Want more? Check out some of these posts:
Having a marketing plan is all well and good, but what about growth? Not to worry, we cover that next, keep reading.
Growth
By now, we’re sure you’ve heard the term “growth hacking” floating around the Internet.
At Stimulead, we’re less into spending countless hours searching for “hacks” and much more into helping you turn your brand into a growth marketing engine. And, we’re not alone.
Sounds better, right?
Still, it’s important as a startup brand to embrace growth. Not only experimenting to try to find what works, but having the mindset that means you’re willing to go out on a limb to really test the impact on your business.
Dive into Growth
But first, a look into what growth really is.
Put simply, it’s the intersection of marketing, testing, and engineering. The sweet spot, if you will, where when hit at the right time and place can become a massive engine that propels your product or service.
Get a primer on growth hacking with some of these posts:
Need more?
If you want a sourcebook all about growth that features over 150 resources, tips, tools, and experts to follow, we’ve got you covered right here.
Strategy and Team Building
Growth is about a lot more than just the trials and tribulations of testing.
No matter how many tests, trials, and experiments you run, you absolutely need to have two things in place to be successful: strategy and team building.
Yup, a strategy is needed when it comes to growth. You need to be able to sit down and not only map out your plans, but also think about how you can best execute them in order to actually achieve results.
GrooveHQ has a great overview of how they used a 12 month growth strategy to achieve their goals. They managed to avoid the trap that many startups fall into, and highlighted in this Andrew Chen post, delusional thinking.
Once you have a strategy in place, it’s time to start building a growth team. The best teams have a combination of both diversity and expertise.
Of course, it’s always important to understand that both your growth strategy and growth team need to adapt and change as your brand hits different levels and phases of overall size and revenue.
Having the right combination of growth marketing, strategies, and team with your product or service can make all the difference.
Analytics
The great thing about SaaS products, apps, and other digital products is they are very easy to track all sorts of data.
This can really give you a leg up on other types of startups, not only because the data can be so incredibly valuable to learning about your customers, but also because it allows you to adapt very quickly when things aren’t working.
So, how to get started? Keep reading…
Data
When it comes to measuring the overall success of your business, data is where it’s at. Now, you don’t need to tell us how important all types of data can be, but if you haven’t quite embraced how to analyzing data, it’s time.
Start with these posts:
Use data to drive the decisions you want to make in your business and remove much of the guesswork that can get you bogged down.
Metrics
So, once you’ve decided to embrace data (woohoo), you need to understand which metrics are important to your brand.
Of course, the metrics can vary somewhat depending on what type of product or service you provide, thus a grouping of SaaS metrics can be slightly different from a grouping of consulting metrics.
But the overall principles are the same, if you aren’t planning your growth effectively, which heavily relies on metrics, you can be in trouble to put it lightly.
There are a number of metrics to track, these include:
- Customer Cost Acquisition
- Monthly Recurring Revenue
- Customer Lifetime Value
- Churn Rate
The key when it comes to metrics is to find the right mix that works for you.
Pretty much everyone is going to pay attention to these four metrics, but when you combine those with the data and goals you’ve set for your business objectives, you’ll have a solid foundation for success.
Learn more about metrics by reading these posts:
So, how do you actually measure this data? There are plenty of tools to help get you started.
Tools
Thankfully now there are quite a bit of tools you can use to not only help measure your data and analytics, but also help you learn quite a bit about your customers.
While Google Analytics is a great start (and can be a great tool), there are more in depth analytics tools you’re going to want to invest in also.
You can find quite a few tools with their descriptions here, but this is a very good list that will help get you off the ground:
Now that you’ve got the tools to start measuring your data and analytics, it’s time to start taking a deeper dive into your actual business model.
Business Models
Monthly subscription, yearly subscription, no subscription, freemium? These are just some of the questions a brand needs to ask before setting up a business model. You can use a business model canvas to start mapping your own.
Or perhaps, you’ve already come up with a model but it’s not hitting the growth strides you had planned and are looking for a change.
Regardless of what stage your product or service is in, having the right business model and pricing strategy is going to be the foundation for your launch success.
Let’s look at a couple of different options for models:
None of these are the end all, be all when it comes to pricing. The key is to understand which strategy is going to work best for you, choose the wrong one and you could see your product or service go bust.
Here’s a good video that speaks to pricing as well:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L1C2JB5XJe8
Once you have a solid pricing strategy in place, you can start ramping up towards your launch. This is where the fun happens!
Launch
Launch day is here. The real question is, are you prepared? The last thing you want to do is mess this part up, it’s something that you have to get right to have any hopes of seeing success over the long term.
Part of an effective launch strategy is preparation. As much as the idea of “if you build it they will come” sounds amazing, the reality is quite different.
That’s why you need to have a strategy and an audience before you begin your launch, without it, there can be a long road to building up traction since failure is so common.
So what kinds of launch strategies are out there? Plenty. Here are some in depth looks at the some of the steps you can take to help boost your chances of launch success:
Don’t forget to harness the power of your own network, the press, and sites like Product Hunt, StartupList and BetaList.
One way we love to learn about what works and what doesn’t is by checking out case studies of successful brands. These case studies on launches offer a ton of gold:
A successful launch is only the first step, next comes growth. Keep on reading to find out some of the best ways to keep growth on track.
Traffic Growth
Once the launch process is underway, new challenges will continue to emerge. Part of that is finding a way to continuously keep traffic growing. After all, unless you continuously find customers who are willing to pay for your product or service, you don’t have much of a brand.
So, clearly a large part of your marketing strategy has to be tied to how you’re planning to drive traffic growth to your site.
Growth is one area where Stimulead knows how to help. We’ve got specific strategies to help your product or service get traction, make the right adjustments, and find the channels that work.
So what goes into growth? It’s a combination of a number of factors.
Content
Content is more important now than ever. But, keep in mind not just any content will do today, consumers are continuously hit with thousands of pieces of content on a daily basis, most of which isn’t that great, so yours needs to stand out.
So, it goes without saying, you need to have your content marketing game ready to roll in order to really see (and drive) growth. Here are a few guides to help you out:
Once you have your content marketing strategy set, it’s time to begin writing. Remember, just any old blog post won’t do.
Your content needs to be engaging, informative, and amazing. That typically means long form content that both teaches your readers something and answers their needs.
Another important aspect has to be content distribution, that includes strategies like guest posting (a very beneficial way of growing traffic when done correctly), paid distribution, and social media.
Email and Social Media
Your blog isn’t the only place where you can grow customers. It’s also important to pay attention to other channels like email marketing and social media as part of the marketing strategy as well.
is one key method of growing a customer base. But it’s only part of it, you need to be able to write everything from awesome sales emails to killer support emails to keep both your list and customer base coming back for more.
Social media is also an exploding channel as well, you can use it both as a paid and free tool to drive growth. Here are some resources:
SEO
Most of your website visitors (and future customers) are going to come to you from search engine traffic. So, obviously, you will need to optimize your website in order to avoid any penalties and ensure your brand is getting traffic.
Part of your overall search engine optimization approach also has to include both link building and on-page SEO as well. You don’t want to miss out on any traffic because you’ve neglected either strategy.
In particular, you should pay close attention to your on-page SEO with a checklist. You won’t get nearly as much value out of your link building if you’re lacking the critical elements that make up an SEO optimized page. It’s a lot more than just installing plugins and setting up a sitemap and includes site speed, content presentation, and engagement with the page, amongst just a few key pieces.
Paid Traffic
Though most startups have a very limited budget, it doesn’t mean you can’t apply some with the funds you have in order to grow traffic.
When looking at paid traffic, look at the following channels to guide you:
Now that you’ve got a plan to get people to your website, it’s time to convert them into customers. Learn how in the next section.
Conversion Optimization
Understanding and mastering conversion optimization is key for any product or service, otherwise, all of your other efforts are simply going to waste.
There are two main places where you want to focus on when it comes to conversion optimization.
The first is on your actual website.
This is where you’re asking people to perform a call to action, things like signing up for an email list, purchasing your product, or opting in for a trial account, for example. There are a number of best practices you can employ to help increase your conversion rate.
The second place is inside your sales funnel.
It should go without saying, but you need to pay attention to the conversion rate of your sales funnel. Any small glitch can actually be pushing customers away, the last thing you need (or want).
As always, we love case studies when it comes to conversion optimization, they help show you what is working right now. Here are a few to dive into:
Once your website and funnel is totally optimized for your ideal customer, you’re going to be able to move much of your focus towards keeping the customers who are signing up for your product or service.
Customer Retention
You’ve worked so hard to get customers for your product or service, the last thing you want to do is lose them.
Now, of course, you need to reasonably expect that customers will churn, that’s just the name of the game. But if the rates are too high, your brand will quickly become unsustainable.
There are a number of customer retention strategies you can put into place but one main focus of your customer retention has to be on having an amazing onboarding process. After all, most customers will start thinking about leaving your product or service very early in the process.
So, in order to keep customer retention rates high, you need nail down your onboarding process. A number of brands have been able to serve as great examples:
Don’t forget, when it comes to customer retention, your strategy should go beyond onboarding. You also want to pay attention to the emails you send and your customer support and success matrix.
Branding
While branding might not be the most important aspect of your overall marketing strategy, it still matters when it comes to selling your product and service.
Remember, that branding is all about your overall customer experience with your product or service. That means understanding that everything you do online carries your message and story; from your social media accounts, to your customer service, to your logo goes into your overall brand.
Especially today, your brand has to be a lot more than just your logo, you need a personality, something that helps connect with and attract customers in a very crowded and savvy marketplace.
Here are a few more posts that feature the finer points about getting branding right:
With the right message, your customers will find it easy to fall in love with your brand and keep coming back for more.
The Next Step
Now that you’ve gotten to the end of this guide, you should be ready to go with building a marketing strategy that can take your product or service to the next level.
If you think this is given you a great overview, but you want to really drive your growth, we can help. Contact Stimulead today to get in touch and we’ll have a discussion on how we can grow your bottom line.
Video Series: Cold Emails for Qualified Lead Generation and Closing Sales Opportunities
/in Acquisition, Activation /by Samuel J. WoodsYour ideal customer receives at least 27+ unsolicited cold emails (and phone calls) every day.
How do you make sure he reads your email – and respond?
Your outbound prospecting and lead generation are likely leaving opportunities on the table simply because your emails are not good enough.
They’re too focused on your products, services, and company – not about the problems or pains your customers need help with.
They’re asking for “a quick 10-15 minute phone call” too soon, without having established rapport or provided value.
Their timing and pace are not optimized, with the right message at the right time.
What should you do instead?
Read more
SaaS Growth Marketing 101: Resources to Launch, Market, Scale
/in Growth & Agile Marketing /by Samuel J. WoodsOh, SaaS growth marketing…it’s a lot more complex than you think.
With all the moving parts: product, growth, customers, launches, and of course, profitability, it’s pretty easy to get lost in the weeds.
Until now.
Here, you’ll find what you need when it comes to how to successfully launch, market, and grow your product or service.
Whether you’re looking for growth traction, growth scale, or growth elevation, we’ve got you covered with this reference guide.
Here’s how it’s gonna work.
We’ve broken down this guide into sections that will cover everything from marketing and growth to customers and branding. Inside each section, you’ll find tips and tools to get you started.
Are you ready to start learning?
Let’s go.
Startup Marketing
One of the biggest challenges a start up faces is how to market a product or service with both limited time and money.
Part of the importance is tied in with making sure you have started the process the right way, that means having a product or service that hits the right customers.
This is where growth traction comes into play as well. At Stimulead, we know how critical the startup marketing phase is, and why it’s important to know what marketing channels to use (and when to double down on them).
Customers and Products
Some startups make one big mistake.
They focus all their efforts on either their product or their customer.
We don’t need to tell you doing that is the making of a potential disaster.
Yes, of course your product is incredibly important, but so much of your product’s success is going to be based on how well you understand your ideal customer.
After all, it’s your customers who are going to decide if your product or service meets their needs, solves their problems, and helps them fall in love with your brand.
If you aren’t speaking directly to them with your marketing, you’re never going to get very far, no matter how amazing you think your product is.
Remember, finding the right customer doesn’t just apply to business to consumer brands, but also business to business as well. Using a combination of “big” and “little” data to understand your potential buyers is a key part of the process.
Don’t simply rely on your product to have customers come running because you think it’s awesome, you need the right product.
This is where your product/market fit is going to come into play. As Marc Andreessen says a “Product/Marketing fit means being in a good market with a product that satisfies that market.”
Want more on the product/market fit? Check out these posts:
Here’s a nice visual way to understand the Product Market fit from the SlideShare A Playbook for Achieving Product Market Fit:
As you can see, hitting that sweet spot between the product and the market is vital.
Feedback
Once you find that product market fit and begin marketing, it doesn’t just end there. Nope, you want to continuously be looking for and gathering feedback.
And that doesn’t mean feedback for when the product is done, or what your final users think. That means collecting feedback along every single step of the way.
Look to do this through a couple of different channels like surveys, polls, emails, and yes even direct conversations with both current customers and your target personas.
Why is this important?
Because the most successful startups are able to roll with the punches and adapt. As Harvard Business Review says:
Startups are not smaller versions of large companies. They do not unfold in accordance with master plans. The ones that ultimately succeed go quickly from failure to failure, all the while adapting, iterating on, and improving their initial ideas as they continuously learn from customers.
When your brand is open to both customer development and feedback on your product or service you’ll be much more likely to connect with your ideal market through the improvements you’ve made.
Marketing
Realize that SaaS marketing is not quite like the marketing in the rest of the startup world.
Here are some reasons why:
When you add those up, it can present a marketing challenge.
The good news is there are marketing strategies specifically geared towards SaaS brands that have produced results.
Concepts like going next level on customer support, positioning your brand as the expert in the field, optimizing your site for conversions, and focusing on providing high quality information and education are all good places to start.
Want more? Check out some of these posts:
Having a marketing plan is all well and good, but what about growth? Not to worry, we cover that next, keep reading.
Growth
By now, we’re sure you’ve heard the term “growth hacking” floating around the Internet.
At Stimulead, we’re less into spending countless hours searching for “hacks” and much more into helping you turn your brand into a growth marketing engine. And, we’re not alone.
Sounds better, right?
Still, it’s important as a startup brand to embrace growth. Not only experimenting to try to find what works, but having the mindset that means you’re willing to go out on a limb to really test the impact on your business.
Dive into Growth
But first, a look into what growth really is.
Put simply, it’s the intersection of marketing, testing, and engineering. The sweet spot, if you will, where when hit at the right time and place can become a massive engine that propels your product or service.
Get a primer on growth hacking with some of these posts:
Need more?
If you want a sourcebook all about growth that features over 150 resources, tips, tools, and experts to follow, we’ve got you covered right here.
Strategy and Team Building
Growth is about a lot more than just the trials and tribulations of testing.
No matter how many tests, trials, and experiments you run, you absolutely need to have two things in place to be successful: strategy and team building.
Yup, a strategy is needed when it comes to growth. You need to be able to sit down and not only map out your plans, but also think about how you can best execute them in order to actually achieve results.
GrooveHQ has a great overview of how they used a 12 month growth strategy to achieve their goals. They managed to avoid the trap that many startups fall into, and highlighted in this Andrew Chen post, delusional thinking.
Once you have a strategy in place, it’s time to start building a growth team. The best teams have a combination of both diversity and expertise.
Of course, it’s always important to understand that both your growth strategy and growth team need to adapt and change as your brand hits different levels and phases of overall size and revenue.
Having the right combination of growth marketing, strategies, and team with your product or service can make all the difference.
Analytics
The great thing about SaaS products, apps, and other digital products is they are very easy to track all sorts of data.
This can really give you a leg up on other types of startups, not only because the data can be so incredibly valuable to learning about your customers, but also because it allows you to adapt very quickly when things aren’t working.
So, how to get started? Keep reading…
Data
When it comes to measuring the overall success of your business, data is where it’s at. Now, you don’t need to tell us how important all types of data can be, but if you haven’t quite embraced how to analyzing data, it’s time.
Start with these posts:
Use data to drive the decisions you want to make in your business and remove much of the guesswork that can get you bogged down.
Metrics
So, once you’ve decided to embrace data (woohoo), you need to understand which metrics are important to your brand.
Of course, the metrics can vary somewhat depending on what type of product or service you provide, thus a grouping of SaaS metrics can be slightly different from a grouping of consulting metrics.
But the overall principles are the same, if you aren’t planning your growth effectively, which heavily relies on metrics, you can be in trouble to put it lightly.
There are a number of metrics to track, these include:
The key when it comes to metrics is to find the right mix that works for you.
Pretty much everyone is going to pay attention to these four metrics, but when you combine those with the data and goals you’ve set for your business objectives, you’ll have a solid foundation for success.
Learn more about metrics by reading these posts:
So, how do you actually measure this data? There are plenty of tools to help get you started.
Tools
Thankfully now there are quite a bit of tools you can use to not only help measure your data and analytics, but also help you learn quite a bit about your customers.
While Google Analytics is a great start (and can be a great tool), there are more in depth analytics tools you’re going to want to invest in also.
You can find quite a few tools with their descriptions here, but this is a very good list that will help get you off the ground:
Now that you’ve got the tools to start measuring your data and analytics, it’s time to start taking a deeper dive into your actual business model.
Business Models
Monthly subscription, yearly subscription, no subscription, freemium? These are just some of the questions a brand needs to ask before setting up a business model. You can use a business model canvas to start mapping your own.
Or perhaps, you’ve already come up with a model but it’s not hitting the growth strides you had planned and are looking for a change.
Regardless of what stage your product or service is in, having the right business model and pricing strategy is going to be the foundation for your launch success.
Let’s look at a couple of different options for models:
None of these are the end all, be all when it comes to pricing. The key is to understand which strategy is going to work best for you, choose the wrong one and you could see your product or service go bust.
Here’s a good video that speaks to pricing as well:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L1C2JB5XJe8
Once you have a solid pricing strategy in place, you can start ramping up towards your launch. This is where the fun happens!
Launch
Launch day is here. The real question is, are you prepared? The last thing you want to do is mess this part up, it’s something that you have to get right to have any hopes of seeing success over the long term.
Part of an effective launch strategy is preparation. As much as the idea of “if you build it they will come” sounds amazing, the reality is quite different.
That’s why you need to have a strategy and an audience before you begin your launch, without it, there can be a long road to building up traction since failure is so common.
So what kinds of launch strategies are out there? Plenty. Here are some in depth looks at the some of the steps you can take to help boost your chances of launch success:
Don’t forget to harness the power of your own network, the press, and sites like Product Hunt, StartupList and BetaList.
One way we love to learn about what works and what doesn’t is by checking out case studies of successful brands. These case studies on launches offer a ton of gold:
A successful launch is only the first step, next comes growth. Keep on reading to find out some of the best ways to keep growth on track.
Traffic Growth
Once the launch process is underway, new challenges will continue to emerge. Part of that is finding a way to continuously keep traffic growing. After all, unless you continuously find customers who are willing to pay for your product or service, you don’t have much of a brand.
So, clearly a large part of your marketing strategy has to be tied to how you’re planning to drive traffic growth to your site.
Growth is one area where Stimulead knows how to help. We’ve got specific strategies to help your product or service get traction, make the right adjustments, and find the channels that work.
So what goes into growth? It’s a combination of a number of factors.
Content
Content is more important now than ever. But, keep in mind not just any content will do today, consumers are continuously hit with thousands of pieces of content on a daily basis, most of which isn’t that great, so yours needs to stand out.
So, it goes without saying, you need to have your content marketing game ready to roll in order to really see (and drive) growth. Here are a few guides to help you out:
Once you have your content marketing strategy set, it’s time to begin writing. Remember, just any old blog post won’t do.
Your content needs to be engaging, informative, and amazing. That typically means long form content that both teaches your readers something and answers their needs.
Another important aspect has to be content distribution, that includes strategies like guest posting (a very beneficial way of growing traffic when done correctly), paid distribution, and social media.
Email and Social Media
Your blog isn’t the only place where you can grow customers. It’s also important to pay attention to other channels like email marketing and social media as part of the marketing strategy as well.
is one key method of growing a customer base. But it’s only part of it, you need to be able to write everything from awesome sales emails to killer support emails to keep both your list and customer base coming back for more.
Social media is also an exploding channel as well, you can use it both as a paid and free tool to drive growth. Here are some resources:
SEO
Most of your website visitors (and future customers) are going to come to you from search engine traffic. So, obviously, you will need to optimize your website in order to avoid any penalties and ensure your brand is getting traffic.
Part of your overall search engine optimization approach also has to include both link building and on-page SEO as well. You don’t want to miss out on any traffic because you’ve neglected either strategy.
In particular, you should pay close attention to your on-page SEO with a checklist. You won’t get nearly as much value out of your link building if you’re lacking the critical elements that make up an SEO optimized page. It’s a lot more than just installing plugins and setting up a sitemap and includes site speed, content presentation, and engagement with the page, amongst just a few key pieces.
Paid Traffic
Though most startups have a very limited budget, it doesn’t mean you can’t apply some with the funds you have in order to grow traffic.
When looking at paid traffic, look at the following channels to guide you:
Now that you’ve got a plan to get people to your website, it’s time to convert them into customers. Learn how in the next section.
Conversion Optimization
Understanding and mastering conversion optimization is key for any product or service, otherwise, all of your other efforts are simply going to waste.
There are two main places where you want to focus on when it comes to conversion optimization.
The first is on your actual website.
This is where you’re asking people to perform a call to action, things like signing up for an email list, purchasing your product, or opting in for a trial account, for example. There are a number of best practices you can employ to help increase your conversion rate.
The second place is inside your sales funnel.
It should go without saying, but you need to pay attention to the conversion rate of your sales funnel. Any small glitch can actually be pushing customers away, the last thing you need (or want).
As always, we love case studies when it comes to conversion optimization, they help show you what is working right now. Here are a few to dive into:
Once your website and funnel is totally optimized for your ideal customer, you’re going to be able to move much of your focus towards keeping the customers who are signing up for your product or service.
Customer Retention
You’ve worked so hard to get customers for your product or service, the last thing you want to do is lose them.
Now, of course, you need to reasonably expect that customers will churn, that’s just the name of the game. But if the rates are too high, your brand will quickly become unsustainable.
There are a number of customer retention strategies you can put into place but one main focus of your customer retention has to be on having an amazing onboarding process. After all, most customers will start thinking about leaving your product or service very early in the process.
So, in order to keep customer retention rates high, you need nail down your onboarding process. A number of brands have been able to serve as great examples:
Don’t forget, when it comes to customer retention, your strategy should go beyond onboarding. You also want to pay attention to the emails you send and your customer support and success matrix.
Branding
While branding might not be the most important aspect of your overall marketing strategy, it still matters when it comes to selling your product and service.
Remember, that branding is all about your overall customer experience with your product or service. That means understanding that everything you do online carries your message and story; from your social media accounts, to your customer service, to your logo goes into your overall brand.
Especially today, your brand has to be a lot more than just your logo, you need a personality, something that helps connect with and attract customers in a very crowded and savvy marketplace.
Here are a few more posts that feature the finer points about getting branding right:
With the right message, your customers will find it easy to fall in love with your brand and keep coming back for more.
The Next Step
Now that you’ve gotten to the end of this guide, you should be ready to go with building a marketing strategy that can take your product or service to the next level.
If you think this is given you a great overview, but you want to really drive your growth, we can help. Contact Stimulead today to get in touch and we’ll have a discussion on how we can grow your bottom line.
How to Build a SaaS Growth Model Framework
/in Growth & Agile Marketing /by Samuel J. WoodsOnce you have a product you believe in and it’s selling, founders get anxious to move straight into the growth marketing and scalability phases.
What so many SaaS companies do is start with experiments in a loose, or even well-documented fashion without outlining their growth model first.
Growth “hacking” or marketing isn’t just awareness, acquisition, and experiments.
You need a robust SaaS growth model framework to get sustainable, predictable results.
Read more
Growth Funnels Look Linear But They’re Not
/in Growth & Agile Marketing /by Samuel J. WoodsHow simple is your sales and marketing funnel?
You get some leads in the top, send ‘em some content and then they come out the bottom (some becoming customers and others not). That sounds ideal, and if every business owner had their way, it would work flawlessly.
But it doesn’t, and probably never has worked in a straight up manner like that.
Read more
Growth Hacking the Psychology of SaaS Lead Nurturing
/in Acquisition, Activation /by Samuel J. WoodsI’ll admit it, SaaS lead nurturing often times gets reduced to the experiments…
Sending several emails to find out which copy works best, changing the color of your opt in to see if it increases sign ups, running a few ads, etc.
…When it really should focus on the psychology of lead nurturing – and figuring out how to “growth hack” it all.
Those things are fun and it’s truly exciting to see the numbers skyrocket based on those little tweaks.
But they are only part of the process.
Read more
The 5 Phases of Startup Growth (What To Do And When)
/in Growth Marketing Process /by Samuel J. WoodsGrowth is a fun topic. Especially when it comes to startup growth.
Why?
The sheer amount of creativity you have to conjure up and the break-neck speed you have to do it all with.
Thinking about the numbers going up quickly is enough to make many founders and marketers giddy. Experimentation, figuring out new markets, and moving the needle are definitely things that can bring a sense of fulfillment—but it’s not easy to get there.
While there are many things that are enjoyable, the process (like most) has some elements that aren’t as pleasurable as others.
There are about five phases or stages of growth that a company can go through.
Read more
20 Growth Marketing Case Studies (Unicorns, Enterprise, SaaS, Apps, Marketplaces)
/in Growth & Agile Marketing /by Samuel J. WoodsIt’s one thing to have a list of “growth hacks” and a general sense of growth marketing methodology and process…
But quite another to learn how other companies went from zero to traction, then scale and growth.
More than anything else, I regularly come across people asking for growth marketing case studies.
They want to discover what other companies have done. To see what’s possible, across channels, growth processes, “growth hacking”, and growth teams.
Uncovering hidden growth opportunities takes time, effort, analysis, and constant testing.
So, I sat down to analyze and study how “unicorns” made it.
Read more
Fives Stages of Awareness (Find Out Where Your Leads Are in the Buying Cycle)
/in Acquisition, Activation /by Samuel J. Woods“It’s all about timing. If it’s too soon, no one understands. If it’s too late, everyone’s forgotten.” — Anna Wintour
How true is that quote, especially in the world of B2B sales?
Timing is an integral part of so many things in the world.
A joke told with poor timing isn’t funny, a lesson taught at the wrong time won’t be learned, and a pitch made at the wrong stage of the buying cycle won’t get closed.
It can be hard to gauge whether a lead is ready for the next stage of contact and content, but the better we reps are at tuning in; the more sales we make.
Read more
Cold Emails and Subject Lines: What Works (According to Hard Data)
/in Acquisition /by Samuel J. WoodsMost studies are conducted over a limited period of time with a relatively small number of test cases. Usually, we are forced to go off of data from a few hundred or few thousand different sources. The data derived is usually pretty accurate, but more would be nice.
Usually, we are forced to go off of data from a few hundred or few thousand different sources. The data derived is usually pretty accurate, but more would be nice.
The data derived is usually pretty accurate, but more would be nice.
How about 24 billion (with a B) different tests?
Read more
How to Use Compelling Email Content to Drive Meaningful Conversations
/in Activation, Reactivation, Retention /by Samuel J. WoodsSending resources and content through email has been around since email itself. Reps and other sales facing members of the workforce have used content as a means of breaking the ice, adding value, and increasing rapport.
But can these resources be effective in getting prospects to engage in a conversation (either directly or through interaction within the email)?
Yes.
What Is “Compelling Email Content”?
Before we explain and share how to do so, let’s define what we mean by “compelling content”. From the subject line to your signature (even the p.s. if you have one), every aspect of your email should be compelling. We aren’t going over every element here.
The content we’re talking about is specifically the resources and copy that your business recipients will find useful and intriguing. We’re talking:
You’ve probably used a few of these to get the attention of those you wish to reach, but these items haven’t been more useful beyond getting your foot in the door.
There are some forms of content that are harder to turn into a meaningful conversation. Blog posts, white papers, and industry reports are an offering that should build your image enough for the call-to-action (CTA) of your email to get a response.
Let’s get into some of the content types that can get the talking started.
Webinars are Direct but Effective
Unless you’ve been under a rock, you’ve heard of and possibly have been a part of a webinar. It’s an impressive sales tool, especially in the online product space. These (mostly) live online presentations have stellar conversion rates and help turn out more brand advocates due to their value-adding nature.
But are they good for outreach? Yes, again.
There are still some misconceptions that webinars are best used for demos and product sales. While these presentations are beneficial down funnel a bit, they still have a tremendous amount of use in delivering value upfront to potential clients.
You have an inventory management software/SaaS product for small and medium gas station/convenience store chains. Imagine how tempting it would be to click open an email that said, “John, Register for: How to Reduce your Shrink dramatically in 2017”.
After opening there is a well-constructed email from you and an invitation for John (possibly an asset protection exec) to join the webinar.
He joins and is blown away by the sheer value of your inventory control techniques and is likely to be willing to hear about the products to help him reduce shrink more effectively. He may not be ready to buy but is certainly ready to talk long enough for you to qualify the lead.
Studies, Research and Polling Data
When you’re researching prospects, you often try to read between the lines of data. Really trying to figure out the why behind the numbers. It helps immensely in the sales process to understand the intent behind decisions.
One of the things most execs love are relevant numbers, stats, and facts.
Any bit of data to reinforce current practices or improve their performance are typically welcome forms of content—making them fantastic for outreach purposes.
But again, how do you turn it into a conversation?
There are a couple of ways to liven up studies and data in order to get more responses and data for your efforts.
Combine Resources
Giving a juicy tidbit of data is a great way to get a clickthrough in your email. Most sales reps know that it takes multiple points of contact to get the sale. A few of those contact points can be fairly hands-off.
Sending an email with a couple of closely related figures along with a link to your newest blog post (or a webinar/white paper/report) with all the data and tips on how to use it for your leads is a great way to get a small yes on the way toward the big yes.
Make the Studies Ongoing
You can send all the data to some of your contacts and it may get an open, but no response. However, if you give recipients an opportunity to be a part of an ongoing study; it’s a chance to benefit others.
If done correctly, you could even work out a phone call to both get the data for a study while helping you qualify the lead.
Send Interactive Content
Our last type of material to get leads involved in the conversation is the newest and perhaps most powerful tool in the arsenal of sales reps.
Interactive Content: Content that requires the participants’ active engagement — more than simply reading or watching. In return for that engagement, participants receive real-time, hyper-relevant results they care about. (Source: SnappApp)
Technically, this category includes games, videos, polls, questionnaires, and anything else that warrants an interaction.
We’ll narrow it down a bit for the most effective outreach uses.
Studies Again, but With a Twist
If you do have study data that can warrant putting together a series of questions that results in a useful outcome for leads and valuable data for you, then put together a “fit quiz”. For instance, if you know that the majority of your target industry struggles with issues that your product alleviates, give them a way to find that out.
To use our previous example (about the convenience stores): Email a series of questions that asks execs to put in some basic data on which areas bring the most shrink in their convenience store(s). Once they are done, it shows them how they fare versus the data of average chains. You get to see where they need help and they get awareness of their problem.
Resource: Here’s a great post from HubSpot about how to put together one of these quizzes with a popular inexpensive tool.
A Simple Poll or Questionnaire
That’s right. Sending interactive content is as easy as asking a question (or questions). Let them participate and let them know that you’ll get in touch with the results once they are in-house.
Make sure it’s specific industry data and take advantage of insights garnered from the study. It would be silly just to use a poll in order to get leads to respond when you can also become a smarter salesperson.
In-Depth Interactive Content
Like we said, this is a newer form of marketing and sales strategy that has been yielding great results. Some companies have taken it to an extreme place and developed completely custom campaigns.
The thing you should know is that big brands are effectively using this method. Disney, Hasbro, and many others do it regularly. But not for the direct pitch.
Instead, they use it to get leads involved with their emails and websites to create awareness and familiarity. That’s what using resources is all about. Getting the conversation going.
Resource: Another post outlining how to use interactive content at the beginner, intermediate, and advanced level.
The Key to Interaction
Unlike an in-person conversation, email requires you to say something the recipient wants to hear. Talking to someone face-to-face means the other person has to respond or risk being considered rude.
Email isn’t like that. Leads don’t have to respond or feel bad about not responding. That means that you have to deliver tremendous upfront content in a compelling manner to get them to open up.
Use content. Be compelling. Start a conversation.