Mindful B2B Marketing | Business Growth and Social Impact (Former: Forward Launch Your SaaS)

TIMESTAMPS

00:57 - The most difficult science and how he got into marketing
08:18 - Evaluate works from a customer perspective
12:24 - Achieving an integrated marketing strategy
18:00 - How to get enough data efficiently
19:58 - How to make sure your teams are working in the same direction
25:38 - Using leading and lagging indicators in goal setting
27:44 - Understanding factors that can affect your metrics
30:12 - Determining controllable and uncontrollable metrics

GUEST BACKGROUND

Nishchal Dua is a remote work evangelist, co-founder of The Remote Work Summit, and the Director of Marketing at Airmeet. With 8+ years of B2B SaaS marketing experience, Nishchal has seen the B2B buyer's journey evolve from a top-down funnel to a roller-coaster ride.

MAIN INSIGHT

Most SaaS companies don’t have an integrated campaign strategy, which puts them in a position to fail and burn money on marketing.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

1. Winning people with your idea is difficult
2. Marketing is about building the right relationship with your customers
3. Marketing is a way of connecting people and getting them to the right place that will help them
4. As your company grows - never forget to always look at the bigger perspective and make sure that every decision aligns with it
5. If your revenue is not growing, the problem is not with the efforts, but with the direction you are moving
6. Everybody has to be aligned on the same goal for autonomy to work
7. Prioritizing your campaign and goal will save you from doing unnecessary tasks
8. Evaluate the WHY of the activity and the effort you’ll be doing
9. Ask for enough advice to get enough answers
10. Think of your reports to executives not from a delivery standpoint, but based on campaign success reporting

PRACTICAL STEPS

1. Get feedback from leaders and executives before executing a plan
2. Identify the part of the funnel that you want to work on
3. Identify the levers you can pull
4. Share it with your team and get feedback on how they can impact the funnel

TIPS FOR SUCCESS

1. Always look at the big picture
2. Stop thinking that you can do it alone as a marketer
3. Get enough data before jumping into a decision

MORE FROM AIRMEET

Airmeet is the fastest-growing platform for hosting a rich variety of virtual events. From Hackathons to ice-breakers, panel discussions to workshops, Airmeet’s intuitive experience delivers on organizers' expectations for a wide range of events and not just conferences. Learn more at airmeet.com

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02:00 - Insights on growing the company

06:02 - Getting direct feedback from prospective customers

06:52 - Dealing with different marketing design ideas

11:00 - How to make marketing design work

12:14 - Minimum work needed to get you to your customers

16:01 - What companies should be doing before creating different platforms

16:38 - What assets to test and not to test

Sharon Biggar is currently the VP of Marketing & Sales at Hotjar, a tool that provides product experience insights to over a million websites worldwide. Sharon recently spearheaded a company rebrand that helped Hotjar’s revenue grow more than 50% last year.

Keeping your customer at the heart of marketing helps you be more intentional and avoid burning money on testing.

1. The core of marketing today is analytics
2. Marketing has to be data-driven at its core
3. Keep the customer at the heart of marketing
4. Prospective customers can give you great, honest, and straightforward feedback
5. An advert needs to be understood before making it beautiful

1. Give up the idea that a beautiful advertisement is going to be the most effective
2. Identify the minimum viable concept that you can deliver to your prospective customer
3. Get feedback from your customers

1. Develop empathy with your customer
2. Do not assume that you understand your customers
3. If the cost of testing outweighs the cost of producing the asset and getting it live, it’s suggested not to test it, and if the cost of producing the asset is high, then it is to be tested

Hotjar is an intuitive, visual way to discover, consolidate, and communicate user needs. Hotjar provides product experience insights which shows how your users are experiencing your website and how to improve your website so that users have a great digital experience. Learn more at hotjar.com

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03:21 - Knowing what marketing campaign works

12:09 - Setting up your ideal customer profile

14:11 - Steps to implement a marketing campaign

18:49 - Tips to have a successful marketing campaign

20:45 - Collecting everyone’s point-of-view and aligning everyone on one vision

23:51 - How to get the best insights

Nadia is passionate about connecting businesses with their ideal customers. She has accelerated growth strategies for many B2B companies in the SaaS, e-commerce, and tech industries. Her sweet spot is when marketing intersects with technology.

She is a leader that has helped build high-performance teams, producing triple-digit growth in engagement, acquisition, and revenue. In 2020, Nadia was added to Marketo's Fearless 50 list as one of the top 50 marketers in the world.

Understanding your customer and creating customer intimacy will lead to the success of your product and marketing campaigns.

1. You really need to understand your customers/users no matter what the stage of your company is
2. Customers decide if your marketing campaign is successful
3. Give your customers options on how to engage with you
4. Involve your whole team in figuring out your ideal customer profile
5. Create focus groups that are within your ideal customer profile
6. Create polls and surveys if you have a tight budget
7. The best insights come from actually talking to people

1. Create opportunities to interview your customer
2. Identify the pain points and AHA moments of your customer
3. Identify what they love about your product and what else they need
4. Identify why your customer chose you rather than competitors
5. Create ideal customer profile (ICP) by having a cross-department workshop
6. Make sure that everyone on your team is aligned and understands your actual customer

1. Get a lot of viewpoints from the executive chain
2. Listen to your customer before creating an ideal customer profile
3. Dedicate time to listening to customer calls
4. Test your homepage
5. Build a collaborative culture within your company
6. Maximize all your platforms in collecting customer feedback

Proposify’s proposal software helps growing teams remove document bottlenecks and get visibility into the most important stage of your sales cycle: the close.

Learn more at proposify.com

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03:10 - What is a “K Factor”, and why it gives Contractbook exponential growth

08:29 - Why Contractbook charge based on the automation they provide

09:20 - How Contractbook demonstrates value to their users

11:37 - Build trust and expose your user to the power of your platform

13:53 - How Covid helped their market and user to mature

16:30 - Finding different angles to invite more customers

20:02 - Why you should invest in bottom-of-funnel marketing even in the early stages of your business

Niels Martin Brøchner is CEO of multiple startups and currently CEO at Contractbook.com, software that innovates the PDF and makes contract flow less chaotic. He believes you can learn and reuse a lot of unique approaches from other people but still focus on the hand you're dealt instead of what others have done in the past.

Identifying and focusing on a solid go-to-market strategy that suits your product helps your company grow exponentially.

1. Charging your customers is all about the value and solution you provide to them
2. Leverage your customers and their networks
3. Expose your users to the power and value of your platform
4. Remember to experiment and change your strategy to make great progress in your company
5. Narrow your focus on the user experience and how they can share your product
6. Hire someone who can understand and convert opportunity to sales
7. Activation should be easy for your user 

1. Identify who your users are
2. Identify the user journey
3. Find out how you want to invite your users and how your users can invite other users 

1. Find one thing that your competitors can’t do and leverage it 

Contractbook helps you streamline every step from contract creation to post-signature handoffs. Learn more at contractbook.com

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00:00 - Introduction

00:42 - How the company started

02:05 - Truth discovered is more powerful than truth revealed

04:02 - Earned Insight into being an SEO Expert

09:00 - Concept of Art of War in marketing campaign

13:40 - SEOs are different from writers

16:00 - How SEO can scale up traffic to your website

19:30 - Implementing Organic Content Strategy successfully

28:28 - Conversion rate optimization

Alexander De Ridder is the Co-Founder, CTO, and Creator of the INK Editor, a new AI content performance optimization platform. Ink’s award-winning technology has helped deliver over 1 million more organic visitors per month for Fortune 100 companies and freelance content creators alike.

INK was founded in 2017 by leaders in search marketing optimization. They are on a mission to help the world communicate with purpose and craft Natural Language Optimization AI models to understand the meaning of content and uncover the nuances of what makes it perform.

INK helps your content to be found, to engage and to convert – so that you and your business can rise above the noise.

Learn more at inkforall.com

Paid marketing can be a waste of money if your organic marketing is not yet established.

1. Earned insights are some of the most valuable things you could have in your business
2. Truth discovered is more powerful than truth revealed
3. Paid marketing can be used to A/B test marketing channels
4. Create and write content with a purpose
5. Content that once ranked and became popular may drop off

1. Analyze your product and understand what problems need to be solved
2. Ask yourself who is suffering from that problem the most (target market)
3. Ask that group of people, “what are they looking for online to solve their problem’
4. Collect all the terms related to it and keywords around it
5. Pick one type of audience
6. Hire someone expert to go and help create a content plan
7. Start executing and creating that content

1. Optimize your content for a good user experience
2. Make good use of tools relevant to SEO/optimization
3. Google values trust, so keep on creating content on the same topic
4. Not all SEOs are good writers, and good writers are not all SEOs

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00:52 - Introduction of how he entered the start-up world

02:35 - How Photon Commerce Started

04:05 - Where is Language Monetizable?

10:38 - Difference between marketing and sales

12:09 - How do you find your market?

18:15 - Success in finding the right people/customers

19:37 - How do you know when to adapt your messaging based on the feedback you are getting

Michael Young is the founder & CEO of Photon Commerce. Photon accelerates customer acquisition for fintech leaders using instant payments and invoicing through AI and is supported by a venture firm funded by Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates. After dropping out of a Stanford PhD, Michael led advanced R&D programs funded by the Department of Defense, created hundreds of jobs, raised $50M across his venture-backed startups, and took them to acquisitions.

Photon Commerce’s financial AI platform empowers fintech leaders to instantly process B2B payments, invoices, statements, and receipts. Photon's intelligent platform understands and harmonizes data, down to even line-item purchase analytics and prediction. Learn more at photoncommerce.com

Reach out to Michael at linkedin.com/in/michaelyoungphoton

Sales and marketing should blend together, especially for an early-stage startup, so you can learn more about your customer and find a product-market-fit fast.

1. Marketing is all about communicating the problem you are solving to the world
2. Marketing is a job of story-telling amazing stories to your team, your investors, your customers, and the world
3. Experiment and try different things to see what will work for your company
4. Content should be optimized for SEO and engagement, and repost
5. Look for a direct marketing strategy
6. Distributing content and getting more traffic is as important as producing content
7. Treat every single market conversation as unique
8. Test your messages
   1. Create different landing pages
   2. Utilize email marketing
9. Visual thumbnail and title are two of the most important components of your content
10. Engagement is as important as creating content
11. A/B test your content

1. Find the biggest problem that is worth solving
2. Identify your WHY for solving this problem
3. Share your why to your team and customer to inspire and motivate them

1. Understand what tools you should use
2. Test your websites and landing pages
3. Use Hotjar to see heatmaps on your website and the behaviors of your users
4. Encourage your marketing team to be analytical and technical
5. Don’t hesitate to share some of your content directly and add a personal touch to it
6. Timing on presenting the content is also important

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00:30 - How creativity and curiosity about human behaviours make Kathryn love marketing

01:10 - Why there is no silver bullet in marketing

04:35 - Kathryn's experience and why you need to be brave in testing data

07:15 - Why everyone is a marketer

10:35 - The power of story for marketers

14:25 - The moment when you can say “job done” as a marketer

20:50 - The groundwork before doing any marketing campaign

25:05 - How to create a customer persona when you’re targeting large businesses

AppFollow is on a mission to help teams working on mobile apps to turn insights from reviews into new product experiences that users love. Learn more at appfollow.io

Kathryn Lye is the Global Head of Marketing at AppFollow. She has more than 20 years of experience in marketing and scaling B2B tech businesses, and she understands how to help growing startups overcome their unique challenges. Kathryn has helped businesses grow from almost no revenue to multi-millions.

Using different sources to augment data helps you to look at a bigger perspective on all your marketing efforts.

1. Don’t assume that your team has the same knowledge as you
2. You need to be creative and brave in testing data
3. Always look at the perspective of all your marketing channels combined
4. An anecdote can be a data point

1. Never assume
2. Start asking questions to your team, founders, and potential buyers
3. Understand if there’s a gap in your information
4. Start thinking about how to get that information either by test, experiments, advisors

1. Doing any marketing campaign without knowing your customer is setting yourself up for failure
2. Talking to buyers is massively underrated for marketers
3. Look outside in and not inside out

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03:01 - Why you should focus on one single growth channel

14:59 - How to choose a marketing channel as a bootstrapped startup

17:33 - Journey of a bootstrapped company from 0 to 4000 customers

22:34 - Understanding Google and SEO

33:53 - How to create a product for link building

Kalo is the co-founder of Encharge.io - a marketing automation platform. Encharge launched in 2019 and Kalo and his team bootstrapped it to 4,000 customers as of today. All of its growth has been gained through organic search traffic.

Encharge was created in 2018 as an alternative to clunky unusable marketing automation tools. They believe that automating your SaaS marketing should be more enjoyable.

Learn more at encharge.io

If you are a bootstrapped startup, focusing on one marketing channel and testing it for 6 to 12 months is the best path to go rather than spending your small resources on different channels.

1. Find a marketing channel - founder fit
2. If a marketing channel is producing good results then it’s a good indication to focus on that channel
3. Do not underestimate the learning curve in trying to find a marketing channel fit
4. Focus on the bottom part of the funnel if you want to validate if the marketing channel

For finding a marketing channel:

1. Find a marketing channel founder fit
2. Validate the channel
3. Focus on running your marketing for 6 to 12 months
4. Find other channels to test your marketing efforts

For growing and building your SEO marketing channel

1. Focus on the bottom of the funnel topics and keywords
2. Look at the smaller competitors who are doing well
3. Write content with SEO-rich keywords and topics
4. Start link building
5. Hire more content writers

1. Do your best to create a product on link building
2. Focus on one part of the funnel at first
3. Do everything in a micro-test

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Maze helps you create truly customer-centric products by empowering your entire product team to collect actionable insights anytime, anywhere.Learn more at maze.co

Bozena is the VP of Marketing at Maze and previously led Product Marketing at Typeform and TravelPerk. She enjoys the ups and downs of working at a high-growth startup — from building strategy and collaborating cross-functionally to scaling a fully remote team. She's currently based in Barcelona but considers herself a world nomad.

Building an advisory council no matter what level you’re in can help you mitigate your blindspots, be confident in decision-making, and fast-track your learnings.

1. An advisor can help you identify if your strategy is working and if you need to tweak your strategy
2. Advisors will not tell you the exact answer but they will give you another point of view and another lens so you can come up with a conclusion
3. Advisors affect your decision-making, tactics, prioritization, strategy and team growth
4. Find the right advisors that fit your culture

1. Identify the challenges you’re facing
2. Go to your networks, such as your investors or other executives to find advisors
3. Qualify the advisor to ensure it’s the right fit
4. Prepare a list of questions and documents before jumping into the meeting
5. Filter all the guidance and advise as you see fit for your company

1. Do a self-assessment to identify where you lack experience and areas you’re truly confident to make decisions before getting an advisor
2. Seek conversation with people in your field and learn from their approach, experience and previous results

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Otter empowers your team with real-time, accurate notes that are stored in one central, secure, and searchable place so you can be more engaged, collaborative, and productive.

Learn more at otter.ai

Reach out to Chang at linkedin.com/in/ccchangchen/

Chang built and led the team at Otter.ai for both B2C and B2B growth & marketing. She scaled the ARR from tens of thousands to double-digit millions and grew the individual user base from 20k to several million in 10 months.

Prioritize the native growth loops in the product before investing in external marketing channels. That way, your customer will promote your product and increase retention.

1. Optimize your growth loops before doing traditional marketing (paid ads, content marketing, etc.)
2. If you do traditional marketing without enhancing your growth loops, you’ll end up with a leak in your funnel that will make you lose customers
3. Identify the type of users that will likely promote your product to other people
4. The users should be able to build and contribute to more networks and users

1. Stay focused on improving your product and optimizing growth loops before going to other marketing tactics such as paid ads, content marketing, etc.
2. Look into the product and see how you can design the growth loops to be embedded into the users' flow while retaining enough friction to encourage them to upgrade their plan to a paid plan
3. Add more growth loops, such as:
   1. Not interrupting the user to keep the user’s trust
   2. Give them the NEED to share your product
   3. Identify the “AHA” moments of your users and make sure that they get and share those benefits
4. After optimizing your growth loops, it's time to accelerate and get more traffic using traditional marketing

1. Understand user behavior and how you can give enough value without interfering with the existing user behavior while maintaining a proper amount of friction so users upgrade their plan
2. Give before you ask

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