Interesting marketing organization that is helping SAS companies saw that crap. So, little round of applause.
We are a small software company, so most of us do marketing, we're not a big company we deliberately kept it small. And we're back in the original office in the garage that I founded in in 1999, I do have this beautiful office up at Kings Hill new Westmoreland, which I can't use until whenever the Boris derivative. So that's that's also really
fabulous, Zach.
Hey Zack Geminiani I am the founder and CEO at juice analytics, we have a data visualization platform, about 20 people. We are in the early stages of trend of launching our SaaS solution we've been a consulting company previously consulting services so we're learning this stuff and I'm trying to get our digital marketing, act together.
Right, what's your biggest challenge.
I am focused a lot on consistently driving new signups, at this point.
Did you want to pick on next Stasia, I'm keen for you to take on my power, because, like,
I'd love to hear from David I actually know David already.
Yeah Hi John, how are you, I was excited to see this talk coming up. Yeah, so I'm David, I live in Dominican Republic, I run two businesses one is a staff augmentation and recruiting business focused on developers in Latin America. The other is an E commerce consulting firm, and I'm kind of trying to do them both together, and in terms of my biggest challenge I think it's, I'd like to figure out how to make my marketing and sales less luck based, unless I met somebody that I have 10s happened to call me a few years later, and more consistent.
Well now I'm gonna be listening to that one. Can I share what you said your question was David Yes sure, yeah. what's wrong with my marketing, question mark. So there's almost, almost as sort of open ended, follow up there if we haven't he picking on next Asia. Yeah,
I'm thinking, Patrick.
Yeah, I think, Patrick.
Hi everyone, my name is Patrick Weaver, and I'm the marketing manager at juicy analytics. So I work very closely with Zack, he is my boss. And so super excited to be here with you guys today and I would reiterate what Zack said, but I'll add a little bit more to at our biggest problem with marketing is me keeping Zach in a good mood by delivering good signups because we never once admitted
through the code because you can either put poppers in the air conditioning, which kind of works when everyone's in the office and then everyone's in a good mood all the time, or deliver on the data and the results right so yeah your options get more limited now everyone's remote.
Sure.
Awesome. How about Richard.
Hey yeah sure. So my name is Richard I'm. I do, I do. I do marketing, in theory, I'm here because I'm working at the moment with Kirk and Mark actually on helping do some bus, marketing, a couple of days a week. I've done a bunch of marketing for SaaS companies in the past, like like automatic and close, I guess, I guess the thing I'm most interested in at the moment is. I'm just getting into marketing, business software type of stuff, and a big driver tends to be, you know, word of mouth and referrals and so on. So something I'm super familiar with in terms of
how to
re engineer to use this horrible sort of like words. You shouldn't engineer it, but how to make the most of it I suppose, we kind of maybe the thing I'm trying to get my head around most at the moment.
Awesome. And then, Linda.
Yes, so first I have to apologize I'm awaiting a laptop refresh and all as well except for my camera so I'm in the New England region of the US the Northeast. I work within the data center division of a very large global corporation work for Schneider Electric which is a energy management company within the data center division. I work within the software line of business, which is a decent data center infrastructure management, and we have, I guess we're probably about four to five years from shifting to all on prem to cloud based. I come from a very long marketing background with kind of full funnel activity. Strategic Marketing focused on software and digital services and I've recently as of q1 shifted into the software line of business to handle their, their journey management so any of the journey mapping for end users and customers and partners in any of the campaigns from first purchase through renewal so I sent in a lot of questions is, when I registered but I think probably what I'm, I don't want to say struggling but what we're really trying to get to sort of a tiered engagement where we're trying to do the same. You know, everything that we've done with success managers digitally without human touch. Maturing the partner journey and I feel like for me, I'm looking at things with sort of a traditional marketing, I and I can't find much body of work about like are the are the metrics, you know what are the benchmarks like I find a lot about like here's the different life cycles, life cycle stages and here's when you should engage but I'm struggling with, like, well, is that good, and should it be persuasive writing versus technical writing or. So anyway, so I'm, I'm happy to hear what you have to say and I'm also really excited to meet some other colleagues who are doing the same thing to kind of just kick the tires on some things with. Huh. Awesome.
Well, super excited to jump into the questions, and then I think we have Dave.
Uh,
yes hello
I'm Dave, I've had the lovely introduction from Mark already got into businesses software forever, it feels like in a good way. I'm based in the New Forest in the south of England. We do Google fighting We do search engine optimization and Google ads, mainly but not solely for software companies, and my marketing problem is the same, that many people can probably relate to that how to distinguish yourself when you genuinely good at what you do when Everyone claims to be good at what they do. Everyone claims to be high quality, and how to make yourself actually stand up without telling people that you're better.
That's, that's me. Cool, cool, cool,
where, where do we want to jump in, do we want to jump into questions nextar
Yeah, I reconcile, although I don't know if anyone can see on the Zoom screen there's a thing that says live on custom live streaming service. If you click on that we're testing today. So we're not going to. Don't feel like you should hold back on anything and giveaway to company secrets you absolutely should. But we're just testing an automated live transcript transcription service, which seems to be working pretty great so far so you can you can have a look at that and and play right yeah let's jump into two questions. Josh, Linda had a lot. Asia, what's your sense. Yeah, yeah, looking at something like David and I'm in, which is pretty broad question, or looking at some of the things that Linda was talking about.
I think I think I would like to start broad first, and then and then we can dig deeper into details from there and answer any follow up questions from their case I definitely heard the What's wrong with my marketing question. We'd like to start there.
Yeah, fine. Okay. All right. Um,
okay so what's, what is wrong with my marketing, there's well first there's like a billion things that go through my mind, I think. So what I heard was, how do we make this based off of much more predictable rather than based off of luck, I think, I think the first fundamental concept of of marketing, especially for software is that if you are in software if you're in SAS. I think that the very nature of our businesses dictate that people have to go to our websites, in order to, to engage to buy to sign up, etc. The very first place that I almost always start is the website and the website does a lot of stuff, it, it tells the customer or the prospect, your positioning your messaging, and the messaging ultimately translates that positioning into something that they can understand it, it should really clearly highlight what is the number one, or top two value props that the product offers. And then from there, the the website should ultimately handle objections, build credibility and communicate that message very clearly, handling objections, so if you, if you see a really robust marketing website for example, they might have tons of pages related to different solutions they might have persona pages there I mean there's so much that a website can ultimately do. And then in terms of building credibility. This is where we get into testimonials, case studies, As Seen On logos, the full gamut. That's the, that's the first place I start and the website I think is the most concrete example of that. It's, people can look at a website and they can they can go and research it. If those. If every single one of those criteria is very well defined, then, so we have really good handle on our positioning we have really good handle on messaging etc. We're doing a really good job of of communicating that on the website. After that I start looking at the conversion points of everything. So how well does the website convert into your most critical call to action that could be the demo that could be the free trial sign up that could be connecting to Dropbox, I mean, they're like, there's like what is that number one call to action, how well does the website convert into that, if we don't know we've got analytics debt. Then of course I want to know how does the rest of the funnel perform. When we think about what's wrong with marketing, if, if our core landing zone which is the website if that does not perform well, then, then we have bigger problems. And, on average, we're looking at a one to 2% conversion rate of new traffic new users coming into the website, converting into that most critical CTA for your business. If that's healthy. Then, then my question becomes what are the channels. If it's not healthy, then my question becomes how do we how do we better communicate that message improve the overall conversion rate because we couldn't handle traffic if you know if we, if we really wanted to. I have seen some websites convert as low as point 00001 6% I've seen websites convert as high as 10%. So it, it completely spans and runs the gamut. whatever your number is. It's okay if it's low. Marketing is certainly a process. But that's, that is how I unpack that. And that's how I start that process, where, where can I jump in to to better answer the question, where did that answer the question, could also be it.
I'm curious. The handling objections so starting at the top of your list there what are the top three or most common objections you think that people come to that they're looking, looking to get answered. And how do you best Absolutely.
I've got two off the top of my head, pretty sure I'll come up with a third, but the first two. The first most obvious one is, how much will this cost me. How much is this going to cost me, and usually that's handled by the pricing page within that pricing page, there's a number of other questions How does this compare to your top competitors or competing alternatives. What, what is the customer service, or the support situation look like, am I gonna have someone that I can talk to, or, or is this just going to be like you know, I only have so many hours before, I mean there's so many different things here, service level agreement kind of thing. And then of course it could just be, talk to us anytime. And I think that the second most critical piece of this also is, you know, outside of pricing I think the second question, or objection to address is, what does this product actually do. And for whom what beyond just describing features. Now, I want to be careful here because some of you guys are selling to technical audiences like maybe you're selling to engineers, maybe you're selling to SIS admin people. I think go to market does look a little bit different. So, those folks usually like just plain features like don't sell me you know the value proposition. However, I think that's something that, that still needs to be investigated. Every, every market every customer segment, every business is different. However, usually one of the top questions is how does this product actually serve me. What, what do I really get out of this. And what's the experience going to be like when I get in, I think, I think the third. The third thing has to do with, are there people here who aren't getting true value out of this, who look like me. What are other people saying about this, because I don't want to be. I don't want to be caught with a product that that's, you know, trash, and I think that that's something that people are really sensitive about, oh, there are, there's tons of debate on do case studies and testimonial like do people actually pay attention to them. For my experience they 1,000,000% do, even if they don't read them, just to know that they're there, they skim them, just just to get the feel for, oh man, like this is a company that is on the same level or plane as me or beyond. There is something psychological that happens when, when a prospect sees that, you know, Airbnb is one of your customers like that, there's something there that happens, whether unconscious or conscious. So those, those are the top three things I would say, beyond that, it really becomes about how you're telling the story and what what other value besides just the product you're providing. Yes I think David has a follow up.
Yeah, so it's actually a question that maybe comes a little bit before, folks, folks arrive at your site right. So, my business in particular is one where we're selling high ticket items as opposed to too many, you know, smaller things. And one of the challenges that we see frequently is, we have inconsistent. Let's say signups or leads through our site, right, so we'll have one month or get we'll get number of them and then another month that's super slow. And we've been talking a lot about SEO internally, and what what's happened is that it, it feels so broad, like there's, there's just so many, there's, yeah, there's so many factors that that tie into SEO, and depending on what you do, you're bringing in the right traffic the wrong traffic or larger quantities lower quantities and we've improved our in our on site technical SEO a lot, but then there's always, you know, we need to build backlinks, we need to do this other thing. What, what do you suggest are like the main areas of focus in terms of bringing traffic to the site.
Mm hmm.
This is going to be okay so I'll give you the, I'll give you the blanket SEO answer and then I'll give you the dispense answer. Okay, so the blanket SEO answer. And I also I believe I defer also to Dave who I think who specializes in some of this or at least as a team who does, however, my understanding of it is that backlinks. At the end of the day, it doesn't really matter unless you've got a pretty strong domain rating, and also it's really crystal clear that the team is aligned around what is the number one high volume keyword that you would ultimately like to rank for. And then, all of your effort points to that one keyword, one of my absolute favorite examples slash case studies of this is actually Ruben gammas of Doc sketch and bid sketch. He, please, you know, look him up on Twitter. Also, you know, his, his product is pretty cool as well. But he, he talks a lot about how he got bid sketch and Doc sketch number one for some of the most competitive keywords out there, and it, his main focus was almost always building links, generating really quality backlinks and getting his domain rating to a place to where when he went after a keyword, he was, he was going to rank for it. That's the technical I guess SEO answer. Now in terms of what's most important, I think it I think it does ultimately depend on what your goal is, if you are primarily focused on building traffic, then then what I said, that definitely takes precedent, I would focus on improving your domain rating. However, if, if you don't necessarily care about the traffic volume but you do care about how well does that article post guide whatever it is, how long does that piece of content convert into the funnel, then I would actually, I would actually pause the SEO conversation, and I would actually focus far more on what value does this content ultimately provide to your target audience, and does that content is that bottom of the funnel content, meaning it, it is something that takes people to the next step of signing up. This could be content that directly addresses an objection. It could be content that really highlights a concrete outcome that someone wants to achieve themselves. You might have seen posts back in the day of, like, how, how I text my MRR in three months or something ridiculous like that, like that's that's the kind of thing that might not necessarily rank for a keyword, however, it, it tells a story about how something solved something for someone else and so that's kind of where your content could really go in either direction. I think it ultimately depends on your target customer and what, what most appeals to them.
Thanks.
Yeah, absolutely.
Anything you want to add that day.
Yeah I was gonna say, any any other SEO, what would you recommend on the SEO side.
A few things I completely agree with what you're saying about the backlinks, I always think there's a, there's a catch 22 Isn't the links that will actually make a difference, and we're never going to get them and the ones that we can get a worthless and Link Building for the sake of it. It worked 15 years ago. Okay, the on site, on site is a big factor. I think that's often overlooked, but I think the for me the generic answer is, you've just got to, you've just got to be better. The generic answer is that there isn't a generic answer such you've got to be better at your competition if they have a huge amount of fantastic content. That's why you have to focus. If they're on site is amazing and their site speed is incredible on Google's Hoover them up with joy, then you just got to beat them. But yeah, I agree with absolutely everything you said. SEO is dope. As you know,
yeah, yeah. Okay, so that's really interesting. Okay. Yeah. Awesome.
Great, so maybe if we move it on slightly to Robbie you there from Mapa docks. I know he emailed me earlier on and he was gonna, he was saying how do you measure the integrated marketing of all your instruments combined. It's time to move into that but should we dig into a little bit with Linda. Yeah, so much to talk about best practices metrics digital engagement benchmarks. What's the thing that's going to be most interesting to most people,
I think, I think from a clarifying perspective, when, when we're talking about this, we're talking are we talking about because I heard a lot of demand gen, and I'm curious if Linda if the way that you're looking at this is on the demand gen side where you are actively like running campaigns and going through channels.
Yeah, our marketing organizations are pretty large and complex so there's, you know like we, we have like the web team who focuses only so much I can, can, can control so I have. I work at the global level and in the different regions we have strong marketers and field marketers who are doing, you know like, top of funnel outside of the top of funnel brand awareness lead gen. And then we also. So a lot of that's happening a lot of what I'm, what I'm working with is working with customers, and channel partners, it, it channel partners who have hit our web page either converting or not. Usually we're pushing, you know, demos or free trials in I'm usually working with people on the email campaigns and communications trying to move them along from free trial to paid, or they've purchased. And it's campaigns that are supporting either taking the place of or supporting live customer success manager engagement with customers trying to move them, you know, onboarding adoption expansion renewal naval engagement around, you know someone turned in, so I'm kind of working with people, we've already sort of, you know, hooked in reels, to some extent, and probably mostly with with paid so onboarding through renewal.
What would you say is that is the number one success metric, you're either measured on or most aligned to is that the number of demos that you're able to generate or what would you say is the thing that you are in the team are working towards.
I'd say probably, you know, probably like in the, in the regions there probably have more metrics around. Driving. Driving pay you know webpage traffic, you know, as I'm listening to you right like it's, it's good to kind of like hear another perspective and just kind of the back to the basics of like, you don't have a webpage your follies start startup and you're, you know what should your web page have because we definitely have while regions are driving traffic for signups we do have a pretty big drop, you know, we don't have a lot of conversion from web page to that. And I think we sort of say, Oh hey, you heard of our offer. Here it is one of buy it or want to want to try it. Click Here sign up, we're like, maybe we should tell them a bit more about how they saw how it solves their challenges and will make their lives better. So I think the regional marketers have more focus there. I think for us. For me, there is renewals, I mean it's revenue, you know, revenue we're, we're at that place we're trying to shift from, to more recurring revenue as a percentage of recurring revenue versus the, the on prem. So the revenue is not so lumpy so I think for me. Growth. Growth renewals, You know decrease in churn, and then on for both our end users and our partners we're really trying to instead of everybody gets the same journey with the same campaigns, we're really trying to take a differentiated tiered approach where we have you know a tech touch. And nobody, no human touches them. Except for me through a campaign, you know, on through three or four different tiers depending on in the region. So I think the tiered piece is, is probably where I'm focused on most now and then grow. Yeah, my nose. Okay.
This is a big one. Yeah, I'm like, Okay,
this is a big one.
Okay, so, so, just, just for context, um, it sounds like Linda's team is part of a an initiative. Sounds like it's also global so but my assumption is that you're probably in a very large company, many different teams, all working towards, similar or related goals, it also sounds like you guys are introducing a self serve Mr bass almost like a SaaS company within a larger company is that, is that accurate. Absolutely. Yep. Okay, okay.
Okay, so
this is really, this is a really fun thing to start to unpack because there's a lot of moving parts, and also different complexities, especially along are among different executives in the organization and of course manager, director level etc. Okay, so here's, here's how we think about classic go to market when it comes to SAS, the CIO self, the self serve model it kind of sounds like you guys are really focusing on generating that monthly recurring revenue. I'm going to use pirate metrics for a lack of a better framework. However, I do think Pirate Metrics is is still pretty, pretty solid. Pirate Metrics, I think it's a R three r, So, R, but yeah, okay, cool. We got there. There's acquisition. How many, how many how much awareness are we driving how many people are entering into our funnel activation, how many of those people are ultimately converting into revenue. Some people also do consider activation to be how long does the website convert, and then after that we get into, we get into retention of yours the sister to or the cousin to turn, and then I believe revenue, and then referral revenue really speaks to that Cr, O PS, are we optimizing how much revenue we're getting per user that kind of thing, and about time that we get to referral, it's, we are creating a product or service, so amazing that people have to tell other people. I think the first place that I would start is, do we have a really clear understanding of who our ultimate best paying customer is, because that ultimate best paying customer, ideally at least going to market, we build go to market around them. I think one of my big questions consultant from a consultative perspective is, is self serve the right model here. Does it actually need to be a demo model based off of what the services, what, what is the what is the pricing upon which we are going to market with is this a really high ticket item that someone has to buy, are we selling to businesses, who was the target ideal customer. All of those things has implications based off of go to market, and that's just go to market which is already huge. But then go to market, we get to marketing, and that's what Linda is really working on. So, I heard a need to improve the activation rates and for this to be a self serve in low touch as possible. I think you know one of my fundamental strategic questions is, is, is that the right model to go to market with, or is that something that was decided by maybe executive level leadership, totally cool either way. However,
if we're thinking about self serving we're thinking about keeping us as low touch as possible. There, there needs to be a home for that product for that for that service and if there is already a home for that. That could be a landing page, as part of like a much larger enterprise website. It could also be a microsite that lives off the side from the main enterprise website I think I'm not certain the situation here but that's the way that I would at least start thinking about it so you can almost craft, you can be responsible for crafting the marketing narrative around that that SAS product within the larger organization. From there, you mentioned benchmarks. Okay, so I'm just going to run off the top of my head, what an industry standard blanket, not taking into account you know your pricing or anything like that, but just a blanket industry standard benchmarks for SAS, we should be converting into our free trial demo etc. One to 2%. After that, if we're looking at free trial to paying conversion rates it should be at least 15%, although we can see as high as 30 and 30% and even higher. If you have a demo model instead so you don't have self serve, we're still looking at the one to 2% conversion rate from the website into the demo however we should be closing 20 to 30% of our deals, however there are some consultants that would say that that needs to be higher. However, I would say 20 to 30%, pretty, pretty ideal, and then turn in order to be effective based off of what's at the top three to 5% There are some however that would say it definitely has to be less than 3%. Those are the those are the baseline KPIs industries industry standard. However, every industry is different. And what I found is there are certainly patterns in the early days but once a business matures, that's when it gets completely different, and it really depends. And it just, you know, it just depends on what makes that business profitable for them. I think my, I think my follow ups are what I would be thinking about is how do we have clarity on how well our full SAS funnel is is operating and working from acquisition, all the way down to activation to retention. And then from there. How do each of our individual channels perform. If we don't have clarity on that, it's going to be really hard to say put effort here. If we do have clarity on that then we can we can usually dig deeper. So what are the top channels, How well do they perform. And from there, how, how well does each convert into paying customer. I think I heard however that activation was a big challenge. What I would probably do is, if it's possible in your organization and maybe this is something that you take to your manager or you build a case for internally but. Or maybe there's a BI team possibly that you could lean on here, but I would, I would try to interview people who, who did sign up and reverse engineer what that funnel self serve at least should actually be and what, what were the triggers that made them sign up. What were the things that they had objections about that they, that they managed on their own. We couldn't, you know, of course, like we can splinter into many different directions from there. But, but that's the way that I would think about it. If we have if we have a lot of clarity around our top customer segment, And why they buy, it's actually really easy to reverse engineer what to put in front of them to make them convert better, faster, stronger cetera.
Linda I'd be really curious to know how much input you have on deciding what your core metric your key metric is weather because SE is very big and there's a bunch of product people that come to come to boss and how much, how much say do you get in, in that type of organization,
it depends. It really depends, I'll say, you know we're you said a large corporation and then, you know, sort of a SAS pocket within it. You nailed it right on the head so I come from, you know come from a place where we're sort of zero input, you know, dictated from the CML office and this is the metric and this and it's measured and this is, you know, in the overlapping matrix of five other people who were believed they are the Sayers of so who also will sprinkle things in and now you know within the, within this sassy array, there's certainly, there's a lot more, it's a lot smaller a lot more nimble and a lot of a lot more opportunity for input, around that so it really it really depends, you know, on, on, especially when you talk about like the web and that sort of thing, really depends on what what the thing is, just follow up question easier so you give some good benchmarks in terms of some overall sort of funnel based metrics, how about when you're looking at the actual email campaigns like this open here's my dirty laundry. I work with someone who's a technical writer so they do a lot of tech specs and that sort of thing so her style is very technical accurate I come from a write like the subject line subject line exists for one reason only, it must be truthful, but from a straight, direct mail back to, You know, back to print, walking in from the mailbox what made me want to open this envelope so subject line is persuasive to get someone to open it. Because, doesn't matter what's inside. If someone doesn't open it so just any guidance you have in terms of like plain texture, html or how personal when we're doing customized stuff that's coming from customer success managers and, like, how personal versus just the tone and some of the metrics around the emails would be great to be.
Sure, absolutely. Okay, so this is a question about Tactical Performance, how, how well can we improve, or how can we improve the tactical performance of a channel.
So
the short answer is. There isn't. There isn't really one way that works. The, the only way however, that you, that does work, is to generate a hypothesis and run a test. There are some communities and industries where text only straight to the facts that something that works, not and I'm thinking of like marketing to lawyers for example or even marketing to engineers in some case. And then, and then there is the far more flowery or really interesting, or I cannot help but open up his email because the subject line is too good, and and you know really heavily designed it completely, just depends on your audience, if it's possible for you to get access or talk to your customers and awesome. However, if you're not able to do that the best way to approach it is to run a test. A B testing I think in this scenario, especially if you have a really large volume that you're working with, that's going to be your best friend, and that's how you ultimately get to knowing. I could tell you that you know text only is the way to go and like really interesting subject lines is the way to go but my audience is SAS founders. So, so that's going to likely work really well with an audience, but your audience might have different requirements for what kind of emails they open. I think generally speaking I think the trend right now is to be interesting and provide value in some way. People are getting emails from all kinds of organizations, and all of those organizations have varying degrees of brand experience and things like that. I think that's kind of like the blanket like we're all being bombarded by email, so your emails need to stand out. Industry standard benchmarks here, with sales outbound prospecting, we're typically looking at a one to 3% close rate, or maybe it's an opportunity rate, upon which we're generating opportunities from our email sends, so I would say two to 3%, maybe even just a one to 2% That's kind of the range, I'd be looking at of out of all of the emails that we sent one to 3% of those should convert into a closed deal or a sale in some kind of way. If the funnel isn't that direct, then, then you might see a higher conversion rate so maybe the next step isn't a sale but a webinar sign up. So that's kind of the way that that I think about it, that's that those are benchmarks, they can absolutely be thrown out the window, though, you might see something completely like way higher. And then also based off of volume possibly lower. I do recommend one best practice I will recommend here however is segmentation. Segmentation is going to be your best friend. In addition to testing different kinds of emails within those customer segments I think that's going to be really critical for performance.
Okay, thank you.
Yeah, of course, any. This is, I think this is just kind of blanket marketing wisdom and in a way but anytime you find yourself having a question about a tactic. Usually, usually some research will will give you a few ideas for how best to execute on that tactic. I almost always take, I take my guidance, if you will from customers themselves. However, if that's not possible in the organization, then doing some research identifying a few experiments you want to run and then seeing how it works, that's that's usually the best way to go, and I do recommend going for big swings if you are going to run tests. If you have the volume of that statistically relevant, then go for a big swing so have one email a, then email B is completely different like full HTML fun subject line, try something completely different go for big swings if we're going to do any kind of testing, but anytime you find yourself stuck on tactics like that I definitely recommend just poking around what some of the other companies are doing, and then picking out two to three experiments you want to try for yourself.
Great, I'd love to dig into the juicy stuff if.
Yeah,
you guys are interested because you've been going quite a while, I think exactly, you come
on, we've been around. We've been around for 15 years as a company, but we're, didn't you come to Boston, 2008, my boss, yes. But we're fresh and new in the SAS world so we're gonna say what are
you paying attention.
They get us a while to get here. I did I add a little trifacta, Channel questions, if I could ask about, we are trying to figure out what we'd like to have as a diverse, or a few different channels that I can count on for driving new signups and testing a bunch of things, PPC, we've done that we have a lot of SEO traffic that we're trying to tune but a few that I'm curious about product directories that kind of stuff you search on a software thing and you get your, your list of the top 10 data visualization solutions and stuff. It's curious about your perspective on those as channels and how success if you have like kind of tips on how to work with those in order to optimize driving efficient traffic, social media, I'm curious about because it doesn't clear to me that we're able to, we can speak to our existing audience but how do you reach a broader. Can you reach a broader audience, using social media. And the third bar, my question is, was, Are there any surprising channels that you've seen or kind of emerging things that maybe most people are not thinking about that are new ways of reaching people who are aged in between. Okay.
Yeah. Okay.
Um, okay. So one of the most common things that I hear from CEOs and founders is we want predictable marketing and and usually the first thing I say, okay, great. Let's invest in predictable channels, so I'm glad that you're investing in PPC I'm glad that you're investing in SEO, focusing on generating inbound, those are relatively predictable, it's not quite like a conference or something that is intermittent where you have to wait for the conference to happen for you to get leads and you see you know the ups and downs of that but okay. Overall though, I like where your head's at. Okay so the first question, if I'm not mistaken was about
product directories. Yeah,
okay, product directories, thank you. Okay,
so
my first response is. Has it ever come up in customer interviews, have you ever asked a customer how they found use analytics and has that ever has it ever been something that someone's ever said, totally okay if not, however, I do wonder if, in terms of like wild crazy channel ideas if you were to ask your customers, not just how they found use analytics, but how do they find other software, that's a great place to start in terms of like new wild ideas, but my first response to, you know, things like Capterra and Jeetu crowd and trust pilot and trust radius was has it ever come up in any customer interviews, totally okay if not, the second thing is, yeah, I've had, I've definitely seen success from leveraging something like a Capterra. I find that every single software directory has or attracts a different kind of audience. So kaptara Overall you're going to get pretty much any kind of vertical, any kind of industry. They have tons of software categories there. But one thing I have noticed is that Capterra users are more likely to be a little less tech savvy. So these are, these are industries that might not necessarily be like other software SaaS companies, I find more SAS companies will use a G to crowd or. And then of course enterprise, are more likely to use like a TrustRadius or a Trustpilot, so I do you think it depends on the audience that you're ultimately targeting and that's going to kind of give you the bet on which one do I put my effort in. But absolutely, you can absolutely see results from that. I find it also helps improve search ability in some ways. So even if, even if Capterra doesn't necessarily generate direct sales but it's still at least helps generate the awareness piece, and then if you have other parts of your marketing cycle that do retargeting or offer a lead magnet or what have you, then you can capture people that way as well. So the short answer, absolutely. The fun part I think about building a channel strategy is, there's very rarely any wrong answers, like this is absolute, you know carbage Like it did nothing for us. I find it's far more about what takes priority. And then what's your what's your post, convert like what does your post you know marketing cycle look like after someone clicks through the Google ad or they click through the Facebook ad, what, what does your marketing do at that point. That's kind of what I think is our, you know, that's a huge pressure point, because it's really easy to generate traffic and convert none of it. So that's kind of a way that I think about it. I think the second question was around, was that wild and crazy channels knows about social media and that's right yes
for the best use that because my, my concern is that you're speaking to the same people that who have been following you for a long time and we certainly want to maintain those relationships but is it a way to, how do you extend beyond that to new reach to minds.
And just to clarify, are we talking organic social or paid social, or
both. Organic is what I'm thinking about, okay, okay.
This is where it, it really becomes about the market. I find that SaaS and software companies that really see results from organic social, they are in spaces where brand and presence matters a lot, so is juice analytics part of the conversation that's already happening, and are they bringing people together socially that already talked about these things, it, I think a lot of a lot, a lot of the times, organic social gets kind of reduced to, we're just gonna share articles, all day long and sure cool graphics I guess but, but, if you're going to do organic social IQ, it needs to be treated as if it were community building. And that's, and that takes quite a lot of effort. I think the, the, the big question to answer is how does the market perceive social is our audience, ultimately there and are they talking about these things. My guess, just knowing very little about just analytics but knowing that you're in the analytics and data visualization space is absolutely yes. The most common strategy for organic social is publishing, it's either going to be publishing original research or things that you've observed in your, in your market or in your industry. So Moz is a great example of this, they are constantly producing different industry reports based off of their own analysis internally of things, and that kind of content gets shared over and over and over again. And then there's the flip side of it, and this, this lends itself to companies like CU, where they, they bring together other influencers might have things like tweet chats and they have conversations, there's, there's all kinds of different strategies, I think the ultimate question is, is that going to be something that helps us grow faster now or is it something that we expect to pay off in a year or two, I think, and I think you know that's a tough one for me to answer right now, but that's how I'd be thinking about it. I certainly think that could be a channel that you guys jump into. And then wild and crazy channels. I think tick tock is actually the thing that I get lots of questions about, which I think is really magic.
He said he would never be on tick tock. Later,
in a meeting on Monday morning, he was like, Are you, are we gonna, you know look at tick tock, and I was like, personally I'm tired of seeing the ad so I'm never gonna, I'm never gonna get on it first video I obviously get one first video post viral 3.5 million views and I come back in on Monday and I was like so over the weekend I went viral on Tik Tok.
That's amazing. You know it's it's one of those things to where it's like, like, Should we be on this new hip channel that all the kids are on, and, and there's from now until the end of time there's gonna be those. I, at the end of the day I think it really just becomes about two things one, are you in a place that you can invest in experiment, and you're totally cool with taking the loss if it doesn't work out, there are many businesses that are in that early stage or growing stage where they really can't afford to do that because it is truly an experiment it's unproven who knows. So that's the first part of that, can we invest in this now, does everything else work. Are we willing to take that risk. I think the second thing is, is your audience on it, I asked the obvious one so clubhouse comes up a lot to like should we be on clubhouse and it's like well, does your website convert, no. Okay, well then No, don't worry about clubhouse like that's not gonna, that's that's not going to be the thing that helps you, because we don't even have like an established baseline, you know what I mean. But then there's you know, we're, we're investing in eight channels they're all working extremely well can we do clubhouse, it's like okay well is your audience on it. Yeah, that's like, alright, let's, it's very low effort for us to try this out. Knowing that if it doesn't work, that's okay, we've got eight other working channels. That's why I think about it.
Yeah, well then I would have been that it came out a little bit I think there are people that really obsess with the new the latest the greatest, and quite often, digital marketing people confuse that engagement with value, so that when I'm interviewing people for, for our organization. So there are some people out you know I'm doing some stuff on Twitter or whatever and it's getting loads of loads of loads of engagement and actually it's skateboarding cats. So, if we want to get people to come to a high value great conference. Skateboarding cat like as is probably not our market and there are a bunch of these things that kind of, They come in waves three or four every year, and having two teenage children I'm much more aware of them now. Oh my god, they're so brutal about I mean, they're like, Okay, this is hot now but then it's done it's dead. And, as an organization, you really have to understand who your audience is and really look at the, you know, the Northstar metrics and the data that that metrics that, that matter. So, Yeah, it's interesting. No, we're on the top of the hour, so we should be, should be wrapping up, I guess we can we can hang around and continue. A bit of a conversation afterwards you don't have to run away straightaway, but I'm just very conscious that there are there any questions that kind of people have outstanding that they'd like to like to pick up on, and I would love to know, because we're really pleased that he is going to be involved with the boss conference spring event, which happens over two days 26/27 of April, it's gonna be super cool. And we're doing another little breakout there what's the what are the things that you would know, is there something that we can dig into in that session would love to get bit of feedback from people's experiences today is looking at one particular thing. An interesting option if so, is that something you want to look at, or do you just want to bring some challenges you've come along. Zach,
yeah I was, I was formally. So one of the things that we've gotten to but I thought that might be an idea for a conference session is we've gotten to building out our dashboard and the metrics that we're tracking across channels and the measures that we're tracking for each of those channels. I sort of, we worked our way there, but I wonder if for a session one way to do it would be don't be like this is everybody's different, everyone's gonna pursue different things but this is kind of where you're trying to get to in terms of measuring and understanding your digital marketing efforts. Then maybe like reverse engineer, how do you, okay, how do you fill that out, how do you get the data around that but really back to like, what are the experiments and efforts, you should be pursuing because it's sort of, once you kind of know where you're trying to get to it can sort of give you the, the set of the project and the set of activities you need to take to get to that view of your marketing, at least that's how I thought about it like this isn't a live, live victim sorry,
a live case study approach, which I think is quite interesting, I'd say.
Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah, how much, how much work have you done just in terms of kind of thinking things through and have you got experiments that you're running at the moment sack.
I just set up Google Optimize I'm starting to use maybe testing on a landing page, and yeah, we have a collection I'm building a quite long list of experiments that I want to run or things across different channels so it's it's.
