Today, we’re talking about customer experiences as fuel for content. We all know the power of customer stories, but it’s sometimes challenging to come up with ways to weave them into different content formats. Alfredo Deambrosi, Content Marketing Manager at Perspectium, is doing some really interesting things with customer stories, and I know you’ll get some great ideas from what he has to share.

For key takeaways and show notes, visit ideallymarketing.com/saaspodcast.

For more on Perspectium, check out their website at perspectium.com.

In this episode, we're talking about a dilemma that's common to nearly every marketer: long-term brand building vs. short-term lead gen. My guest today is Andy Smith, who is the VP of Marketing at PowerReviews. And he’s sharing his team’s strategy for long-term vs. short-term, and also his insights on brand building. And I know that you're going to enjoy this episode!

For key takeaways and show notes, visit ideallymarketing.com/saaspodcast.

For more on PowerReviews, check out their website.

Welcome to Episode Six of What's Working Now. Today we're talking about thought leadership and ranking content and search engines. We all know on some level that ranking content is not enough to land new customers. The search engine results are packed with competitors' content. To get prospects’ attention, you must stand out and give them a reason to dive in further. 

To do this, your content needs to demonstrate thought leadership and a compelling point of view. Today, I have Julian Alvarado joining us who is the senior manager of content marketing at Sigma, a data analytics software. 

(13:20) Educate for differentiation, and mold it with your company’s unique perspective.

We follow the Challenger Sales model, which basically is that you’re teaching for differentiation. You're using your knowledge of their business and molding it within your unique perspective to teach customers something new — and then, obviously, show them how you can help them solve their problems with your product.

(17:37) Use mid-volume keywords to develop better content than your competitors. 

You really need to find that Goldilocks zone. [The volume] can't be too high or you'll never rank. It can't be so low either — you need to find a term that has a good chance that you can develop content better than the other guy and it has to be relevant to your audience and value. 

(21:00) Know your audience when choosing SEO terms since terminology has different connotations for different disciplines. 

There's a bit of friction that exists between your SEOs and your content teams. And that's where the art and science of knowing your audience and knowing your customer comes into play. For example, the term “Big Data” is a term that we would all assume would be relevant to our industry. And in the analytics world, everyone's heard of it. You go in, you have every keyword and every one that's related to it has super high search volume. 

But, when you're using that term in relation to business intelligence and analytics, it's a no-no. Because of the connotations that it has with a failed period of analytics. So, basically, our team had to go back and work with our SEO to find other terms that would be accurate and relevant. Which is important, because we don't want to tarnish our credibility with our audience. So that's where the art and the science come into play.

(22:01) Demonstrate thought leadership with unique views and ideas.

Are you a thought leader if everyone agrees with you? To that point, I would say it's about discovering a unique point of view. How are you challenging the status quo? And that's not necessarily to say being controversial for the sake of it. But, it's just actually thinking about things. 

(24:25) Always be on the lookout for new and compelling ways to tell stories.

At its core, all marketing is storytelling. Human beings have been doing this since the dawn of time. If you tell a story, they will come.

For more on Sigma, visit the company's website at https://www.sigmacomputing.com/.

Check out https://ideallymarketing.com/saaspodcast/ for show notes and additional episodes.

Welcome to Episode 4 of What's Working Now! If you've ever given yourself the freedom to focus deeply on something, devoting dedicated attention and energy to it, you know the power of focus. In marketing, it's easy to feel like you need to do everything — all the strategies, all the tactics — and if you can't, to feel like you're falling behind. But it's often more effective to focus on just a few things and put your resources into those few things. In this episode, Sesame Mish, Growth Marketing Director at Intellimize, is going to share how she and her team have harnessed focus for impressive results. 

(2:46) When choosing where to direct your marketing focus, high-quality leads are key.

We have a very high bar for an MQL (marketing qualified lead) here at Intellimize. The lead not only has to have requested a demo of Intellimize, but they also have had to take that critical next step of scheduling that first call on the calendar with our sales team. So at any given time, I am focusing on the right channels and opportunities that come my way that have the best chance of producing these high quality leads for us.

(4:39) There comes a point when the way things have always been done in the past no longer produces the same results.

Over time, our email strategy had become stale. And unfortunately, the open and click rates were dwindling. When COVID hit, everything changed, and there were other circumstances that meant that I was going to have a lot more trouble generating MQLs. I really was thinking deeply about this, and I envisioned the recipients of our nurtures getting to a point where they were actually excited to receive our nurture emails and would even look out for them in their inbox. What could I create, what could I offer, that would create that great situation for us?

(8:06) Create email nurtures that actively involve your customers by answering the exact questions they are already asking.

It seemed like a no-brainer to answer these frequently asked questions through a series of emails. And this was also our way of going back to the customer, listening to the customer, and giving them literally exactly what they've been asking for.

(14:56) Make your target accounts list more manageable by narrowing down your criteria for adding accounts. 

I look at technographic data to see whether the account is already using competitive tools. And therefore I know that that account is probably experiencing pains and challenges that our solution can solve for. Second, I look for a customer of ours that's in the same industry or has a similar use case that I can put in front of that target account and know that it's relevant to them. And the third thing I look for is whether or not we have any relevant personal connections into this potential target account, because that would help facilitate an intro that much easier. And so, therefore, if one of the accounts that is showing buyer intent also meets these three other criteria, then they go on the target accounts list.

(27:47) You can’t do everything at once. It’s much more effective to put all of your energy and focus into just a few projects or channels than to spread yourself thin trying to do it all.

Once I embraced this mindset that you can't do everything at once, I became much more effective. At any given time, I'm only focusing on about three or four projects or channels at a time, so that I can go full force in each of them. If you're trying to do every last thing, then you can't go 100% — or anywhere near close to 100% — in any of them. And you're not going to be as detailed, you're not going to be as personalized, you're not going to do the follow-ups as well. And things are going to fall through the cracks. That's how marketing is. You need to be fully focused on the channel that you're in and completely embrace this mindset.

To learn more about Intellimiz

I have a fantastic guest for Episode 3 of What's Working Now: Tim Whiting, who is the VP of Marketing at Label Insight. Label Insight is a product attribute data platform for CPG, and they're doing some really interesting things related to original data reports. So we're going to dive into their strategy around the reports, the results that they're seeing, and the advice that Tim has to share with SaaS companies who want to start creating original data reports or improve the strategy around their existing reports.

(5:52) Focus on listening to and meeting the needs of existing customers just as much or more than bringing in new ones.

Probably the most important for a SaaS business is the retention and expansion of existing customers. It’s very, very exciting to bring new customers in and get them going. But even more important is listening and meeting the needs of existing customers. 

(8:47) A data-driven approach enables you to get people’s attention, build trust with customers, and validate their purchase decision.

As you go through building a relationship with a potential customer, you have to establish some trust to move forward. Having a data-driven approach, with a strong methodology to back up the data, is key to building trust in any relationship. It helps folks inside the business make the business case that problems do exist that they might not be even aware of, or opportunities exist that they might not be even aware of, and feel confident that, if they move forward and evaluate the solution, business value will be derived.

(11:59) Look for the large market problems and use your unique data to better understand the problem and potential solutions.

[Data report] topics really should be driven by large market problems. What are the large market problems that are affecting their ability to grow? Then, if we're hearing a problem, how can we use our unique data to say something different, something unique, something compelling, to either further define this problem that we're hearing whispers of from our customers, or start mapping out a solution of how they might be able to take advantage of the opportunity?

(17:28) Creating good content opens up new opportunities and platforms. 

Good content takes on a life of its own. These types of data-driven reports are soundbite-rich. So we promote the really good quotes and people then share them. Interestingly, these reports themselves have almost become platforms for how we position the value of our solutions overall. We now have elements of the reports in every customer pitch. 

(23:19) Stay top-of-mind by reusing and updating data reports on a regular basis.

Even as a marketer, sometimes it's easy to get excited about the next new thing. And you forget about the great new content that maybe you're getting bored of, because you've been seeing it for a while. But certainly the market is not getting bored of it. And these types of data-driven reports lend themselves very well to a series or an index where you measure something and you come back a year later or a quarter later, and do similar analysis and see what's changed. 

(27:49) It’s important to serve customers at the micro level as well as the macro level.

At a certain point, there's an individual that's getting tasked with, go out and research some solutions, go out and figure out some new ways to drive innovation, go out and gather information. And so really, this content serves a couple different layers: the more strategic level that's organization-wide across the customers we serve, but also the needs of those individuals that are being tasked with solving the problems. 

(32:24) Partner with your sales team to understand who you are speaking to and provid

Welcome to Episode Two of the What's Working Now podcast, which focuses on experimentation in marketing. We are getting meta in this episode — we're talking about the process of running experiments.

I'm very excited to bring Rebecca Flora to you, who is the digital marketing manager at Network for Good, a certified B Corp that offers a SaaS fundraising and donor management solution for nonprofits. Rebecca and her team have made some changes in their approach to marketing over the last year or so. And this approach has been guided primarily by experimentation. I know you'll come away from this episode with plenty of ideas for your own marketing experiment.

The campaign creative helped increase our impressions by 314% month over month. The new creative assets gave us the opportunity to offer a standalone single moment of consumption. What I mean by that is, I was able to start a story and end the story in the platform where prospects were viewing the content, as opposed to starting a story in an ad, and then finishing the story on the landing page. That also resulted in a 69% reduction in our CPM. 

We defined an experimentation matrix that fell in line with the purpose of what we were doing as a collective. And we took that experimentation matrix and we templatized it so that going into every experiment, we used that documentation as our North Star, and did not move away from that at any point. 

You have customers because you have a great product. And you've encouraged people to really lean into that. People aren't becoming your customers because it's their last resort, or there isn't any competition out there. So I really encourage SaaS companies to lean into what's working, identify those paths from prospect to customer, and then eliminate all of the friction from those paths.

Defining your initiative prior to launch allows you to best understand where your audience exists, which platforms to launch in, and what objectives to use.  Also, this allows us to use certain objectives to build into other objectives. 

Learn more about Rebecca here.

I hope you enjoyed that conversation with Rebecca, and are inspired to try some new things with your own experiments. I was really excited to hear what she had to share about the experimentation matrix and template.

If you like what you heard, I'd be grateful if you'd rate or review the show. You can find show notes with links to the resources we mentioned at https://ideallymarketing.com/saaspodcast/ — just click on Episode 2 there.

Thanks for listening and I'll be back next month with another interview full of ideas and insights. Until then, happy marketing!