Marketer Crew - ⚡ MC - Retention Is A Growth Machine

5 things I wish early-stage SaaS startup founders knew about marketing

Why is it that some startups do exceptionally well while many struggles? There’s a host of reasons ranging from leadership to product-market fit to environmental shifts.

Here’s Michelle's marketing perspective on what works and doesn’t work.

1) Startup vs scaleup marketing:

This is a common scenario: You’re in the early stages of setting up your company and you’ve got a product and some customers. Naturally, you want to see more growth, fast. It sounds counterintuitive but please don’t be so quick to turn to marketing to crank up the demand gen engine. Marketing may be the last thing you should invest in right now.

If you take a look at your churn numbers and NPS, what story does it tell you? Many startups get excited by total customer numbers but they neglect to understand what happens to customers once they’ve signed up. Dig deep to identify the in-product activities that cause friction and those that create customer value.

Now use that knowledge to adjust your customer onboarding (in-app or otherwise) so you can guide users to value as quickly as possible. This is where a good product marketer will be super helpful. They can also identify early fans that you can leverage to amplify your brand’s reach. It’s a bit of a manual process, but unless you get it right, you really don’t have a solid foundation to scale from. You have a leaky bucket.

It’s a lousy place to be when you have to replenish your user base every year plus grow your revenue. First, walk. Then, run.

2) Different phases call for different marketers:

When you’re starting out, your budget is tight, and you’re reaching into your network to find someone, anyone, with a doer attitude and a bit of digital marketing experience. Heck, your first marketing hire might even be straight out of school. And it’s fine while you’re still at the product-market fit stage. Just realize that someone else has to put on the strategic hat - and it’s going to have to be you.

Now here’s where I’ve often seen things go sideways. Once you’ve established product-market fit, you turn to one of your first marketing hires and give them the mandate to build out your marketing team, and strategy. Chances are there you have even given them a big title like Director or Head of Marketing when you hired them to compensate for their low-ish salary. Unfortunately, your early-career hustlers may not be equipped to lead growth at this stage.

So, before stacking the responsibilities on them, go through the exercise of figuring out what you actually need from marketing.

Some things to think about:

• What are your overall business goals? ARR, ARPU, total customer count, active user count, etc.
• Does your product (price and complexity) justify a high-touch sales process or can you deliver it easily with zero-touch (aka automated self-serve)?
• Does your ideal customer heavily lean on word of mouth for their purchases or are you selling something more transactional?
• Are you targeting a highly technical audience?
• Are partnerships and/or integrations important to your business?
• Are you creating a new product category where education and problem agitation is necessary to drive demand?

My point here is that you should create an “ideal head of marketing profile” that’s not skewed by the capabilities of your initial hires. You’ll have more clarity when you go ahead and promote your existing employees or hire above them or below them. You’ll know how much support you need to provide. And you’ll be able to justify your decision to anyone who questions it.

Final word of advice on this. Save yourself the headache and don’t give big titles to your first junior marketing hires. You can always upgrade them later but you can’t downgrade them.

3) Marketing is a revenue-driving function:

Now here’s something else to think about on the topic of marketing leadership. I’m always surprised that there are still founders today who think of marketing’s role as “doing social and managing the website.” This is 2021, and if your intention is to grow, you need to shift your mindset and lean into marketing - not just sales - to drive revenue. Yes, even if the sale is always closed by a real human being. Both functions have to work in sync. Failure to recognize this means that you’re not optimizing metrics like customer conversion rate, pipe velocity, or CAC (customer acquisition cost). You're basically running marketing like it's 2009. Sorry.

So, as you start scaling, look for a marketing lead who:

• Has a business mindset.
• Has a deep desire to connect with and understand your ideal customers.
• Measures meaningful KPIs like active users and trial signups, not fixate on low-intent metrics like social followers and web visitors.
• Is eager to partner up with your sales team if you’ve got one.
• Is eager to partner up with your customer success team.

That kind of talent sometimes comes with a hefty price tag, especially if they’ve got experience. It may not be possible to bring them on board now. What is possible though, is to get yourself an advisor who is that person so they can guide your big marketing decisions - like strategy and hiring - and also coach your existing staff to up-level their skills.

4) Marketing can’t be an echo chamber:

Anyone on your marketing team who creates content (website, articles, videos, ads, emails, etc.) needs to deeply understand your ideal customer profile. If they don’t, your message won’t land. And don’t fall into the trap of thinking that you, your co-founders, or sales can just “tell them what to write.” Sure it’ll be good enough at the start but it’s not a strategy to build a business.

So, make “customer interactions” an integral part of your marketing teams’ job from day one and give them the time to do it. Here’s what I’ve seen work really well:

• New marketing hires spend 3-5 days with your customer success team. Match them up with a buddy so they can listen in on calls, read chats, then graduate to answering simple questions themselves (if it’s realistic for your business.) Repeat this every quarter for 1-2 days.
• New marketing hires spend 3-5 days with your sales team. This is sometimes tricky to implement because sales peeps often want to protect customer relationships. The goal here is for marketers to be invisible and to listen. They shouldn’t interfere with the call *at all* without discussing it with the sales rep ahead of time. Again, repeat every quarter.
• And now the most important activity: Get your marketing team to talk directly with real customers! Sounds simple but it rarely happens consistently. Your marketing lead and anyone creating content need to be on the phone/Zoom/whatever talking to the people they target. Weekly or at least monthly. The goal is not selling, it’s listening. If anyone in your company is guarding customers (think customer success or sales), get in there and stop the nonsense. You want your business to grow? Then marketing needs facetime with customers.
• Finally, make sure your marketing team spends plenty of time doing social listening. On your own social channels but also on different online communities where your audience hangs out.

5) Beware the fake voice:

Let’s imagine your product is a FinTech app you sell to Finance directors or a tool you sell to developers. We’re not talking about a mass-market product here but one that solves a problem for a specialized audience. 

Do this test: Can your marketing content creators speak credibly to your customers face-to-face? Even if they do all of the immersive work I mentioned above, could you, for example, put them on a podcast to intelligently discuss industry challenges with some of your customers?

If you target industry or audience that’s specialized in any way, carve out some time from your schedule or your co-founders’ to be the face of your company (assuming you have subject matter expertise.) Or hire an SME/evangelist early on. No amount of prep and scripting behind the scenes will make your young marketing manager sound credible talking to a technical audience on video, on a podcast, or in-person (unless they come from the right background.) 

It's 2021, customers want to feel a human connection with brands. Even in B2B. I know this type of SME is a unicorn - part technical, part educator, part marketer - but it’s 100% worth it. It works. People buy from people and brands they trust, even in an era of zero-touch sales.

Support us by sponsoring an issue sent to our 2000+ subscribers each week. (US audience: 91%)

.

Snippets

• TikTok is testing a tool for brands to recruit employees. Users can post a TikTok video resume to the site rather than a traditional resume. The idea is for users to give an elevator pitch or work experience summary via the video in a unique way.
• TikTok is working with brands including streetwear label Hype to test in-app sales in Europe, a move that will intensify its competition with Facebook Inc. and further blur the line between social media and online shopping.
• Facebook is testing pop-up messages telling people to read a link before they share it.
• Spotify adds timestamped podcast sharing which allows users to tune into a particular moment of the podcast episode and other social features.
• Google Chrome prepares ‘Desktop Sharing Hub’ with copy link, QR code, other shortcuts.
• Landing Letter is a weekly newsletter that will help you learn to build landing pages that convert. You will get descriptive teardowns, articles, resources and much more. All for free.
• UserHunt - a minimalist tool to instantly check your usernames across the platforms.
• Ads will take you to the building, relationships take you to the penthouse. (Tweet link)
• A good mentor will teach you how to think, not what to think. (Tweet link)

.

Worth Reading

1. What Oliver learnt roasting 200 landing pages in 12 months

2. How we built high quality backlinks at scale using personalization

3. Retention is a growth machine. It drives acquisition, improves monetization and virality.

.

Here's how they make the Instagram sign in real life:

💲 Grow your projects by sponsoring an issue.

⏩ Please forward this email to a friend. Anyone new can subscribe here :)

👉 Follow us on Twitter.

Unsubscribe