By Powered by Search
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The podcast currently has 97 episodes available.
Spotted this on a SaaS homepage headline recently:
"Supercharged software that delivers results"
If this sounds confusing to you, it's because it is.
"Hyperliquid water. That gets you wet"
Great! Now why should I buy it?
Here's the 2 part secret to writing great headlines for SaaS landing pages:
Be opinionated. Be specific.
1. Be opinionated
So much of B2B SaaS is vanilla. There are so many exciting flavors out there but we so frequently choose the one that's most palatable for the most people
The end result is that it's not particularly attractive to anyone in particular
Wonder why Basecamp have done so well all these years?
It's not just because they have a good product and were around before a lot of the other players
It's because they've consistently shared their opinions and attracted people who strongly believe the same things that they do
This comes through in everything they do including their homepage headlines
2. Be specific
The key problem with the headline that I shared at the top of this email is that it doesn't really say anything about what the result is going to be for me if I use the product
The indiscriminate use of 'results' leaves me thinking: OK. But. Like what?!
Why does this matter?
Because no-one in B2B buying looks at just one product. They're considering multiple products at any one time
If you fail to be specific about the benefits of your product over the other products they're considering, you're leaving yourself open to interpretation
And who's going to do that interpretation? Either your buyer will piece together the narrative themselves or your competitor will do it for them
Neither way is particularly helpful
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SaaS Marketing Bites is produced by B2B SaaS marketing agency Powered by Search. It's hosted by Head of Growth Marc Thomas. You can follow @iammarcthomas or Powered By Search CEO Dev Basu @devbasu on Twitter for more updates and marketing insights.
If you enjoyed this episode, you can do the following things right away:
1 Claim your Free SaaS Scale Session. If you’d like to work with us to turn your website into your best demo and trial acquisition platform, claim your FREE SaaS Scale Session. One of our growth experts will understand your current demand generation situation, and then suggest practical digital marketing strategies to double your demo and trial traffic and conversion fast.
2 If you’d like to learn the exact demand strategies we use for free, go to our blog or visit our resources section, where you can download guides, calculators, and templates we use for our most successful clients.
3 If you’d like to work with other experts on our team or learn why we have off the charts team member satisfaction score, then see our Careers page.
4 If you know another marketer who’d enjoy reading this page, share it with them via email, Linkedin, Twitter, or Facebook.
A lot of agencies view their clients as a problem.
"They ask so many questions"
"Why do they always want a call?"
"Why do I need to build a business case"
Jeez. With a mindset like that is it any wonder that the average LTV is ~ 3 months? Many of our clients have been with us for 3 years. No, you read that right: 3 years. Not 3 months. What do they see with PBS that they don't with other agencies? I believe there are three components that matter:
1. We have a differentiated methodology
Plenty of marketing agencies execute aspects of SaaS marketing work but Powered By Search is the only agency that takes a holistic approach to marketing by fully addressing: Attraction – going from obscurity to dominance in your marketConversion – eliminate friction in your conversion machineEngagement – go from loose engagement to locked-in prospects We’ve found that if you only execute one or two of these three stages, you might see some results, but you won’t be able to predictable decrease CAC and increase QPC and LTV To see how we’ve implemented this model across a variety of different companies, check out some of these case studies:
How Powered by Search Helped iWave Achieve a 7-Figure Revenue Growth from Paid Media in Under a Year
How we helped Loopio increase demos by 41% quarter over quarter and achieve consistent growth
How We Helped PointClickCare Get Over 2000 Leads with LinkedIn Ads
2. We're the only fully specialist B2B SaaS marketing agency who can support companies between $10M-$100M ARR
We work exclusively with B2B SaaS companies that sell to enterprise customers. Unlike most SaaS marketing agencies, we’ve developed a proven process optimized to navigate the complexities of longer customer journeys and are familiar with the nuanced challenges you’re currently facing Why does this matter? If an agency works with SaaS companies, ecommerce companies, and service businesses, they probably apply a “one-size-fits-all” marketing approach to all their clients A one-size-fits-all agency might drive some results, but it probably won’t drive the best results as the process isn’t designed for the nuances of your customer’s journey, and the employees in the agency probably don’t specialize in SaaS marketing
3. We prioritize our the health of our internal team
"Wait. Isn't this meant to be about why clients stay?"
Absolutely but marketing agencies are notoriously tricky to hire because your ROI depends largely on the people executing the process If the talent working on your account constantly changes, you’ll inevitably lose some time, money, and ground on competitors as they learn the nuances of your business We prioritize exclusively hiring experts. So instead of hiring a robust client management team, we pay top dollar for the talent that’s actually executing your marketing strategy You can check out our LinkedIn profile to see our employees’ impressive backgrounds for yourself We also realize that the experts we’ve hired could find another job tomorrow, so we prioritize their well-being and cultivate a workplace they enjoy This strategy has worked out well – looking at our Glassdoor reviews, you’ll see the average team member stays with us for two years This means you won’t have to build new relationships with new account managers every few months or worry about losing ground on competitors as new team members learn about your business
To see if Powered By Search is the best agency for your needs, book a call with us today
===
SaaS Marketing Bites is produced by B2B SaaS marketing agency Powered by Search. It's hosted by Head of Growth Marc Thomas. You can follow @iammarcthomas or Powered By Search CEO Dev Basu @devbasu on Twitter for more updates and marketing insights.
If you enjoyed this episode, you can do the following things right away:
1 Claim your Free SaaS Scale Session. If you’d like to work with us to turn your website into your best demo and trial acquisition platform, claim your FREE SaaS Scale Session. One of our growth experts will understand your current demand generation situation, and then suggest practical digital marketing strategies to double your demo and trial traffic and conversion fast.
2 If you’d like to learn the exact demand strategies we use for free, go to our blog or visit our resources section, where you can download guides, calculators, and templates we use for our most successful clients.
3 If you’d like to work with other experts on our team or learn why we have off the charts team member satisfaction score, then see our Careers page.
4 If you know another marketer who’d enjoy reading this page, share it with them via email, Linkedin, Twitter, or Facebook.
As a marketing leader, a large part of your ability to get the job done is in proving that you're delivering value already But it's also an area of marketing leadership that many get wrong Are these 3 communication errors killing your ability to prove the value of your work?
1. Stating an observation without impact, importance, or insight
2. Using passive vs active voice
3. Giving inputs more airtime than outputs
🚩 Stating an observation without impact, importance, or insight
It's extremely easy to notice something and report it. But all you're doing is giving metrics, not meaning.
By understanding the importance of a metric, we can make a choice about what to do next. Want an example?
❌ BAD – Traffic is up, conversion is down
✅ GOOD – Traffic is up, but conversion is down indicating that there's a misalignment between our ICP's pain points and the topic of our most recent blog posts
🚩 Using passive vs active voice
Generally, you should avoid using the passive voice when reporting
It weakens the entire point you're trying to make by removing any sense of agency from that message.
Make yourself or someone else the owner of the action rather than the benefactor and you'll see a great improvement in your executive communication. Want an example?
❌ BAD – Changes are being made to XYZ
✅ GOOD– We are making changes to XYZ
🚩 Giving inputs more airtime than outputs
No one pays you to be busy. They pay you to produce results.
But the majority of your reports are likely focused on what you did rather than what you produced.
In fact, this is the most common problem with executive communication.
If you're suffering from this consistently and have tried to change it, ask yourself:
if I can't produce results worth reporting, am I doing the right things in the first place? Here's an example:
❌ BAD – We created 5 new ad campaigns this month and we refreshed 15 creatives
✅ GOOD – We generated 329 new SQLs by refreshing ad creative and running new campaigns
===
SaaS Marketing Bites is produced by B2B SaaS marketing agency Powered by Search. It's hosted by Head of Growth Marc Thomas. You can follow @iammarcthomas or Powered By Search CEO Dev Basu @devbasu on Twitter for more updates and marketing insights.
If you enjoyed this episode, you can do the following things right away:
1 Claim your Free SaaS Scale Session. If you’d like to work with us to turn your website into your best demo and trial acquisition platform, claim your FREE SaaS Scale Session. One of our growth experts will understand your current demand generation situation, and then suggest practical digital marketing strategies to double your demo and trial traffic and conversion fast.
2 If you’d like to learn the exact demand strategies we use for free, go to our blog or visit our resources section, where you can download guides, calculators, and templates we use for our most successful clients.
3 If you’d like to work with other experts on our team or learn why we have off the charts team member satisfaction score, then see our Careers page.
4 If you know another marketer who’d enjoy reading this page, share it with them via email, Linkedin, Twitter, or Facebook.
Landing page best practices? Useful. But not always the best
This page by Cognism is almost perfect
And it breaks a lot of the best practices that you'll find in an article about making B2B SaaS landing pages
✨ Best practice 1: Keep your landing page copy short
Cognism's response: here's a wall of text
Their homepage hero currently comes in at 116 words. Compare that to ZoomInfo which comes in at 33 words
The best practice assumes the reader doesn't have time to make a choice but when they're buying a tool like this, they *need* to make a considered choice
There's potentially millions of dollars resting on the choice because the data quality and usability of that data matter in their own sales process
That Cognism spend the time to go work through objections right from the top of the page and at depth shows how clearly they understand this
✨ Best practice 2: Shallow on the homepage, go deeper later
Cognism's response: Grab your snorkel and dive in!
Every section on the homepage ought to help a customer qualify or disqualify themselves quickly
But the common practice of giving shallow info about the product in the hope that the prospect stays to learn more is so weird to me
What Cognism do feels bang on the money: help people learn whether the product's for them ASAP
They do that by giving answers to common objections, adding a section on who their product *isn't* for and also including use case based information
Crucially: none of it is skimmable – you've got to work to get that info.
I believe that these two approaches to landing page design have probably caused a huge number of prospects to book a call with Cognism
Honestly, incredibly impressive work
===
SaaS Marketing Bites is produced by B2B SaaS marketing agency Powered by Search. It's hosted by Head of Growth Marc Thomas. You can follow @iammarcthomas or Powered By Search CEO Dev Basu @devbasu on Twitter for more updates and marketing insights.
If you enjoyed this episode, you can do the following things right away:
1 Claim your Free SaaS Scale Session. If you’d like to work with us to turn your website into your best demo and trial acquisition platform, claim your FREE SaaS Scale Session. One of our growth experts will understand your current demand generation situation, and then suggest practical digital marketing strategies to double your demo and trial traffic and conversion fast.
2 If you’d like to learn the exact demand strategies we use for free, go to our blog or visit our resources section, where you can download guides, calculators, and templates we use for our most successful clients.
3 If you’d like to work with other experts on our team or learn why we have off the charts team member satisfaction score, then see our Careers page.
4 If you know another marketer who’d enjoy reading this page, share it with them via email, Linkedin, Twitter, or Facebook.
Most B2B SaaS companies spend too much time on new customer acquisition and too little time on expansion, retention, and referral.
The PE-backed companies we work with get this playbook. Here's what we do:
1. Measure these 4 areas for customers
- NPS – it's a leading indicator of how much people like what you do and we think it's linked to churn (high NPS is correlated with low churn)
- Products subscribed – how embedded is the platform you're selling in the client's business. If there are multiple 'products' in use, then not only is your expansion revenue growing but you're also likely to see less churn as the switching risk increases
- Seats sold – pretty simple. If more people are using your product in a business, there are more voices to protest on your behalf if someone wants to switch to a competitor. Get those seat numbers up!
- Last price increase date – companies expect prices to rise most years. Everyone acts outraged when it happens but real talk: raise your prices periodically. You'll see more revenue and almost no-one will care long term. The trade off between losing some customers and gaining a lot of revenue is an obvious one most of the time.
2. Prioritize growing by doing the following:
- Reach out to the happiest customers first
- Show them how subscribing to product B if they already pay for A has a "better together" effect.
- Recruit more of their teams into the product suite.
- Add new features to renewals on the existing platform to reward customer loyalty, and then sell through higher pricing on product B.
3. Some of this is CS work, so how can marketing help?
- Target high NPS customers with email and revenue expansion ads.
- Show high NPS customers a webinar highlighting product B
- Use marketing automation to ask a question (sent from AE's inbox) to activate customers who have partial org adoption
- Create a calculator to pinpoint the total value added since the inception of the relationship (money made, money saved, time saved)
Demand generation isn't just "paid ads" or "email marketing". It can be so much strategic and impactful than that.
===
SaaS Marketing Bites is produced by B2B SaaS marketing agency Powered by Search. It's hosted by Head of Growth Marc Thomas. You can follow @iammarcthomas or Powered By Search CEO Dev Basu @devbasu on Twitter for more updates and marketing insights.
If you enjoyed this episode, you can do the following things right away:
1 Claim your Free SaaS Scale Session. If you’d like to work with us to turn your website into your best demo and trial acquisition platform, claim your FREE SaaS Scale Session. One of our growth experts will understand your current demand generation situation, and then suggest practical digital marketing strategies to double your demo and trial traffic and conversion fast.
2 If you’d like to learn the exact demand strategies we use for free, go to our blog or visit our resources section, where you can download guides, calculators, and templates we use for our most successful clients.
3 If you’d like to work with other experts on our team or learn why we have off the charts team member satisfaction score, then see our Careers page.
4 If you know another marketer who’d enjoy reading this page, share it with them via email, Linkedin, Twitter, or Facebook.
Accompanying blogpost: More than a robot copywriter: how AI unlocks hidden productivity gains in B2B SaaS
Most SaaS marketers’ opinions on the use of AI in marketing range from maximalists, who believe it will change everything and replace all marketing jobs, to AI skeptics, who believe it lacks soul and won’t disrupt any jobs.
We see AI slightly differently and instead believe that AI can assist humans and help them become more effective marketers.
So instead of replacing humans altogether, we believe marketers can apply ChatGPT and other generative AI to existing workflows to attain more volume and velocity.
While we don’t believe AI will take a marketing strategy from zero to one, it will help marketers get there faster by automating steps in the process. Additionally, it can make the final product yield a higher ROI if you use it properly.
As a result, marketers that know how to use AI effectively can produce better results in less time and with less resources.
In this post, we’ll discuss:
By the end of this post, you’ll have a different perspective on how to use AI within your marketing organization: it’s not just a robot copywriter.
If you’d like help navigating a tougher economy and finding out how AI can improve your marketing team’s productivity in a time when everyone’s being asked to do more with less, we should talk. Start by getting your free marketing plan here.
===
SaaS Marketing Bites is produced by B2B SaaS marketing agency Powered by Search. It's hosted by Head of Growth Marc Thomas. You can follow @iammarcthomas or Powered By Search CEO Dev Basu @devbasu on Twitter for more updates and marketing insights.
If you enjoyed this episode, you can do the following things right away:
1 Claim your Free SaaS Scale Session. If you’d like to work with us to turn your website into your best demo and trial acquisition platform, claim your FREE SaaS Scale Session. One of our growth experts will understand your current demand generation situation, and then suggest practical digital marketing strategies to double your demo and trial traffic and conversion fast.
2 If you’d like to learn the exact demand strategies we use for free, go to our blog or visit our resources section, where you can download guides, calculators, and templates we use for our most successful clients.
3 If you’d like to work with other experts on our team or learn why we have off the charts team member satisfaction score, then see our Careers page.
4 If you know another marketer who’d enjoy reading this page, share it with them via email, Linkedin, Twitter, or Facebook.
Accompanying blogpost: 12 Best SaaS Marketing Agencies (And an Evaluation Criteria)
Choosing a B2B SaaS marketing agency is tricky because, on the surface, they all seem similar.
So when you Google “best SaaS marketing agencies” and see a list of 20 or 30 different options, how do you distinguish a world-class agency from a mediocre one?
Unfortunately, most clients don’t figure out the answer to this question until after hiring an agency and wasting thousands of dollars – not to mention all the missed sales opportunities a more effective agency could have helped you win.
To help you avoid hiring the wrong agency, here’s what we’ll cover:
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SaaS Marketing Bites is produced by B2B SaaS marketing agency Powered by Search. It's hosted by Head of Growth Marc Thomas. You can follow @iammarcthomas or Powered By Search CEO Dev Basu @devbasu on Twitter for more updates and marketing insights.
If you enjoyed this episode, you can do the following things right away:
1 Claim your Free SaaS Scale Session. If you’d like to work with us to turn your website into your best demo and trial acquisition platform, claim your FREE SaaS Scale Session. One of our growth experts will understand your current demand generation situation, and then suggest practical digital marketing strategies to double your demo and trial traffic and conversion fast.
2 If you’d like to learn the exact demand strategies we use for free, go to our blog or visit our resources section, where you can download guides, calculators, and templates we use for our most successful clients.
3 If you’d like to work with other experts on our team or learn why we have off the charts team member satisfaction score, then see our Careers page.
4 If you know another marketer who’d enjoy reading this page, share it with them via email, Linkedin, Twitter, or Facebook.
Only a handful of SaaS marketing leaders I spoke to in Q1 expected that they'd even be close to their pipeline goals
And almost certainly, CMOs, VPs, Directors, Heads of, will be asked by the higher-ups what happened
The answers will be simple:
Whether it's the relentless cutting of teams and budgets, deals taking longer to move through pipeline or a decrease in demand across the market
It has been... unpleasant
I've been reflecting on my own performance this quarter and I'm OK with admitting I'm behind what I'd normally expect in Q1
But I'm also not beating myself up and here's why:
1. The client-product fit is extremely strong
We've been talking about how bad this period will be since Q2 last year! So as a team, we decided to focus on revisiting the quality of our pipeline
By refining our targeting and our messaging, we were able to attract more perfect-fit prospects than ever before
And because the messaging was pain point focused messaging for right now, those prospects are converting into customers at an extremely satisfying rate
2. The infrastructure we built in Q1 is future-focused
It's likely going to be a bad Q2 compared to historical performance too. Maybe even worse than we expected because of aftershocks from the emerging banking crisis
That said, we fully expected it to be uncomfortable in Q2 too and made the choice to focus on building out foundations for new channels that would pay dividends in Q3 and Q4 when everything (we hope) picks up again
What does that look like?
– Building a total addressable market audience – I personally reviewed thousands of companies for fit
– Built systems for getting in front of those companies today
– Built systems internally for managing the different kinds of companies who we are already seeing fill our pipeline (it's a trickle, but it's an early sign)
3. We got problem focused and scrappy again
We've been in years of plenty and that breeds an attitude of entitlement: "we do x and we get y"
But the past 90-120 days have been all about trimming the fat in what we do
We removed heaps of stuff that wasn't serving us in reaching our best customers, redistributed investment to channels that we're building, tried stuff that made everyone feel uncomfortable (see basically any post I've done since Jan 1 on LinkedIn 😂)
It's been great to approach a bad year with positivity and proactivity
Let's do it!
===
SaaS Marketing Bites is produced by B2B SaaS marketing agency Powered by Search. It's hosted by Head of Growth Marc Thomas. You can follow @iammarcthomas or Powered By Search CEO Dev Basu @devbasu on Twitter for more updates and marketing insights.
If you enjoyed this episode, you can do the following things right away:
1 Claim your Free SaaS Scale Session. If you’d like to work with us to turn your website into your best demo and trial acquisition platform, claim your FREE SaaS Scale Session. One of our growth experts will understand your current demand generation situation, and then suggest practical digital marketing strategies to double your demo and trial traffic and conversion fast.
2 If you’d like to learn the exact demand strategies we use for free, go to our blog or visit our resources section, where you can download guides, calculators, and templates we use for our most successful clients.
3 If you’d like to work with other experts on our team or learn why we have off the charts team member satisfaction score, then see our Careers page.
4 If you know another marketer who’d enjoy reading this page, share it with them via email, Linkedin, Twitter, or Facebook.
July 2021 was one of the worst months in recent memory for B2B SaaS marketers. Almost everyone in my network was sharing horror stories about sudden drops in leads.
In this episode, I’ll walk through the same 5 common reasons for seeing sudden drops in conversions, and expand on each of them in more detail.
Accompanying blogpost: How to Diagnose a Sudden Drop in Leads in B2B SaaS
===
SaaS Marketing Bites is produced by B2B SaaS marketing agency Powered by Search. It's hosted by Head of Growth Marc Thomas. You can follow @iammarcthomas or Powered By Search CEO Dev Basu @devbasu on Twitter for more updates and marketing insights.
If you enjoyed this episode, you can do the following things right away:
We here at Powered By Search often get many messages asking what are some of the best questions to ask during a customer interview. So in this episode, we'll be breaking down some of our favorite questions and best practices you should keep in mind when conducting such interviews.
Some of the topics we touch on in today's episode include:
By the end of the episode, you'll know exactly how to conduct the best customer research interview.
===
SaaS Marketing Bites is produced by B2B SaaS marketing agency Powered by Search. It's hosted by Head of Growth Marc Thomas. You can follow @iammarcthomas or Powered By Search CEO Dev Basu @devbasu on Twitter for more updates and marketing insights.
If you enjoyed this episode, you can do the following things right away:
The podcast currently has 97 episodes available.