Some of them, like InVision and SafetyCulture, seemed to just grow naturally without any help. Sure adding sales & marketing help fuel the growth, but these business were growing pretty rapidly before they injected the sales & marketing rocket fuel.

In others however, growth has seem like a slog. We had great sales & marketing teams and growth definitely did happen, but it just seemed a lot more difficult.

So what’s the difference between these companies? And more importantly, how do you become one of the ones that grows naturally rather than one of the ones where growth is a slog?

Obviously Product/Market fit is a big factor here, but assuming you have a relative level of Product Market fit, I think the next thing key factor is having the right Go To Market model.

In this post, I’ll outline what a Go To Market model is, what the different elements of a model are, and how to define the right one for your business.

What is a Go To Market model?

The best way to illustrate what I mean is by examples, and I’ve used the email marketing software category to illustrate some of the different models taken by different companies in the space.

• MailChimp (Touchless acquisition) – MailChimp is an email marketing tool that uses a touchless acquisition model to acquire customers. They target small business owners and offer their product on a freemium model. It’s free to send less than 2000 emails per month, with paid pricing plans going up from there. They use marketing tactics like search engine optimization & virality to attract people to their website, where a portion of them will then signup and start using the product. AFter using the product for a while, these users typically hit some sort of limitation of the free plan (Usually having too many subscribers or wanting to use some of the Advanced features like Automation) and will ultimately become paying customers, all without ever talking to a human.
• MyEmma (Inside Sales) – MyEmma is an email marketing tool that uses an Inside Sales model to acquire customers. They target professional marketers at medium-sized companies and sell their product for an average of $300 per month ($3,600 Annual Contract Value). They use tactics like social media, search engine optimisation and paid advertising to attract prospects to their website, and then use demo requests, gated eBooks, webinars, etc to convert visitors into leads. These leads care then passed over to an Inside Sales team who work those leads and close the deal.
• Responsys (Enterprise Sales) – Responsys is an email marketing tool that predominantly uses an Enterprise Sales model. They are focused on acquiring large enterprise businesses and sell their product for several thousand dollars per month (meaning the Annual Contract Value is likely north of $50,000). Their marketing team may be using Account Based Marketing tactics to generate some leads, but majority of business is won by the Sales team prospecting, outreaching and closing deals and marketing plays more of a supporting function.
• Campaign Monitor (Channel) – Campaign Monitor is an email marketing tool that leverages a Channel model acquire customers. The end users of their software are marketers at SMB companies and they sell their product for around $100 per month (Meaning the Annual Contact Value is around $1000). Instead of targeting their Marketers directly however, they use tactics like SEO, Paid Advertising & Event Sponsorships to target Creative and Web Design agencies, who then resell it to their clients.

• Target customers – A description of who the target customer is, usually containing specific industries or job functions (but not always).
• Channels – A description of the kind of channels that will be used to reach potential customers and generate interest in the product.
• Offer – A description of the kind of offer you’ll make to convert interested prospects into leads/signups. If you’re taking a touchless acquisition model, common options are a free version of the product or a free trial to allow people to try the product out. If you’re taking a sales-lead approach, then offers like demo requests, free consultations, etc are common.
• Engagement model – A description of how the business engages with these leads and covnerts them into paying customers. For an Inside Sales business, it’s common to hand them over to a Sales Development Representative who qualifies them and passes the best ones on to an Account Executives. For touchless acquisition businesses, this would leverage a combination of product flows and one to many training initiatives to help them get started and see the value the product provides.
• Revenue Model – A description of how the company generates revenue. For a SaaS business, this is often via paid subscriptions to the software but could also come from things like payments revenue (Like Square for instance), partnership deals, etc.

Factors to consider

So now that you understand what a Go To Market model is and the importance of it, let’s look at some of the key factors that should be considered when defining your Go To Market model.

Target Market
Who is the target market for your product? And how big is that market? If your product is targeted at small businesses, then the number of potential customers is likely huge and a touchless acquisition strategy is going to make the most sense. On the other hand, if your target market is the Fortune 500 then your market size is much smaller, and an inside sales process may make more sense.

Product complexity
How easy is it for people to use your product? Is it the kind of product that someone can sign up and start using without needing dedicated training? If so, then it may be possible to adopt a touchless acquisition strategy. If, on the other hand, your product requires extensive training to start using, then it’s more likely you’ll need to employ a sales-based or channel strategy as you’ll need people to train your customers on using the product (and you’ll need to be able to do this without increasing the cost of acquisition beyond the amount of revenue you generate from these customers).

Product capability
Does your product have the necessary features and capabilities to serve the Enterprise? What about the appropriate security certificates and practices? In my experience, at a minimum you need to have features like single sign on, permissions and user roles, advanced analytics, etc. before you can successfully sell to the enterprise, so if your product lacks those features you may be best off targeting small to medium business on a touchless acquisition model until you can build those features out.

Adoption Cycle
How do users typically adopt your product? Is it the kind of product where one employee starts using it, sees the value, and adoption organically expands out from there (like InVision for example)? Or is it the kind of product that needs to be sold into the top-level and then pushed down to the rest of the organisation from there (Like HR software for example)? If it’s the former, touchless acquisition can work well and can even fuel an Inside Sales model if you have higher end customers coming through, but if it’s the later then you’re likely going to need sales people straight away.

Price
At what price point will you be selling your product? Is the annual contract value going to be in the hundreds of dollars? Or are customers going to be on $100,000 annual contracts? If it’s a low price point, then you’re likely going to need to employ a touchless acquisition model. Alternatively, if you’re going to be selling your product at a price point that is in the tens of thousands of dollars annually, then it’s likely you’ll need to adopt an Inside Sales model as very few people will buy a piece of software at that price point without talking to someone.

Availability of resellers
Is there an industry or segment of businesses who could potentially sell your product to end users? If so, then Channel could be a viable option for you. Xero, a company that makes cloud accounting software targeted at small businesses, recognized that nearly every small business uses an accountant to help with their taxes and accounting, so they leveraged accountants to generate Channel sales. Similarly, in the early days Campaign Monitor recognized that many small businesses turned to their web design agency to create and send email campaigns, so they built features that allowed these agencies to resell the product to their clients and opened up Channel sales.

Competition
Who are the competitors in the market? Who are they targeting? And what Go To Market model are they using?

If your competition is selling to large businesses using an Enterprise Sales model with high annual contract values and you’re planning on selling similar software to small businesses on a touchless acquisition model with a price point of $20, then it’d be worth thinking hard about this. Have you identified an opportunity that your competitors haven’t that allows you to take a different Go To Market model than they traditionally have? Or could it be that they’ve identified some barriers to the touchless acquisition model that you haven’t realised yet?

Zenefits is a great example of business model innovation. While all of their competitors were busy selling HR software to small businesses for $50+ per month, Zenefits started offering their software for free and made money by selling insurance to the users of the software.

So have a look at your main competitors Go To Market strategy (including their target customers, price point, product complexity, etc), and see what you can learn from it.

If you’re planning on taking the same approach they are, think about if there’s an opportunity to innovate and change your Go To Market model.

If you’re planning on taking a different approach, it’s worth double checking whether you’re not missing something, particularly in well established markets with multiple competitors.

Business Resources
What kind of resources do you have available in the business? Do you have the revenue or funding to sustain the costs of building a sales team? And what about the costs of supporting a sales team (I.e. a marketing person to generate leads, customer service people to support customers, etc.)? Atlassian, who is famous for their no-salespeople go-to market strategy, attribute that decision mainly to the fact they didn’t have any money to build a sales team and so had to find a different way to acquire customers if they were going to build a business.

Desire
What kind of company do you want to build? And what’s the goal?

As Christoph Janz points out in this great Infographic, if you’re goal is to build a billion dollar company then you’re going to need to get to around $100 million in revenue. If you’re product is mainly used by small businesses then you’re going to need to acquire over 100,000 of them at somewhere around $100 per signup. To do this, you’re going to need to utilise a touchless acquisition model and invest in heavily in scalable marketing tactics like content marketing, virality, etc in order to get the kind of volume you need at an appropriate cost per signup.

However, if you’re goal is to simply build a lifestyle business then you may be able to take a different approach. With Shaperbase (a SaaS product I founded and run on the side), my goal is simply to build a passive side income, so therefore I can afford to adopt an Inside Sales approach as I’m happy to put some time into working with customers during the initial sale and adoption phases, as scaling the company is not something I’m hugely interested in.

Viral Opportunity
Is your product something that people inherently use to share or broadcast something? Is it like MailChimp, who’s users predominantly use the product to create email campaigns and send to them to thousands of people? Or is it more like Xero, where your users don’t naturally share anything through their organic use of your product?

If it’s the earlier, then you might have an opportunity to drive customer acquisition through virality (I.e. people using the product naturally attract others to it). Virality is one of the strongest drivers of customer acquisition you can have, as it has the ability to scale almost infinitely at next to no cost.

If you have a viral opportunity, it can be worth structuring your Go To Market model to make the most of it. Adopting a freemium, touchless acquisition model can ensure that you get the maximum number of people using your product, and that they then send as many ‘invites’ to the product as possible, and that those ‘invited’ users can then start using the product and sending out more invites.

How to select the right Go To Market model for your SaaS product

What’s interesting about this list of factors that help determine your ideal Go-To Market strategy is how interlinked they are.

For instance, if you want to target small businesses but have a complicated product that requires hands-on training and is adopted top down (like a Point of Sale system for example), then it’s going to be tough as you’ll need to invest a reasonable amount in acquiring new customers and training them, but given they’re small business who don’t have a lot of money you can’t set your price point too high.

Similarly, if you’re creating a product that is fairly complex and targeted at Fortune 500 companies, but don’t have the desire or resources to hire sales or support people, then you’ll likely have a lot of trouble acquiring customers as these companies have lengthy buying processes that will require a sales person to work with them through.

So the key to finding the right Go To Market model for your SaaS business is aligning the factors as they apply to your business.

For example, let’s look at Shaperbase as an example.

Target Market
Small to medium sized surfboard shapers, of which my research suggests there are 1000-2000 globally. These businesses are typically doing between 50-100 board orders per month at an average of $500 per board, so they’re likely doing around $300,000 in revenue. By all measures, they’d be considered small businesses. We target the owners of these businesses as they typically only have 1-2 employees.

Product Complexity
The product is quite easy to get started with. There’s really no setup involved (there are a few things you can customise, but it’s not necessary to get started with the product). Majority of users simply create an account and enter the first order that comes in.

Product Capability
The product isn’t really built for the larger surfboard shapers. It doesn’t have any real user permission system, there’s no analytics, and it lacks a few specific features large surfboard shapers would want. The product is definitely much more suited to the small-medium sized shaper who has simpler requirements and wants a simple, easy to use system.

Price
The pricing is based on the number of boards being managed by the system, and starts at $20 per month and goes up to $100 per month.

Availability of Resellers
There isn’t really any obvious resellers here.

Competition
There are 2 other players in the surfboard production management space. They both have quite complex products targeted at the ‘Enterprise’ segment of the market (the board shapers doing 500-1000 orders per month).

Business Resources
Virtually none. I run it as a side business to my day job, so have very little time to spend on it.

Desire
My goal is simply to build a fairly passive side income.

Virality
The product is used to manage internal production of surfboards, so doesn’t have any organic virality.

Based on the above factors and their relevance to Shaperbase, the Go To Market model that I decided to employ was a purely touchless acquisition model.

Here’s why:

Target market
Based on the product and the problems it solves, the target market is primarily small businesses doing less than $300,000 in revenue. A touchless acquisition model makes sense here as they have limited budget to spend on software and likely wouldn’t spend more than $100 per month, meaning the annual contract value (ACV) is $1,200 at best. At this kind of ACV, you can’t afford to be paying sales people to close deals as the cost of the sales person would exceed the revenue from the customer they close.

Product Complexity
The product is quite simple to understand and get started, which lends itself nicely to a touchless acquisition model. The target market is easily able to sign up, start using the product and become a paying customer without needing to speak to a sales person.

Product Capability
Given that the product isn’t really suited to the ‘Enterprise’ end of the market, that means we’re better off targeting the small-medium sized shapers with a price point of around $50-$100. At that ACV, a touchless acquisition model is the best bet.

Price
These businesses are small and relatively cash-strapped as it is, therefore selling the product at anything more than $100 per month would price majority of them out. If I was targeting the enterprise end of the market (those doing 1000 boards per month) then I could likely charge a lot more, but that wasn’t who I wanted to help.

Availability of resellers
There really wasn’t any obvious resellers in the market. All surfboard shapers have suppliers (like foam manufacturers, fibreglass, etc) but these companies are busy creating and selling their own products, and the time it would have taken to convince them to sell the product, train them on it, etc. was better used trying to go direct to the market.

Competition
There are 2 other players in the space, and both have far more sophisticated products targeted at the ‘Enterprise’ end of the market. They adopt an Inside Sales model and sell their product for annual contract values of $5000 – $10,000 per year.

Given the size of the market at the enterprise level (there are probably 20 surfboard shapers in the Enterprise segment), it doesn’t make much sense to go after them as it’s pretty much saturated. However, the SMB end of the market is largely underserved by these other competitors, so it made sense to go there.

Business Resources
Given that I was running this as a side business and had very limited resources to hire sales people, it made sense to adopt a touchless acquisition strategy.

Further to this, my background is marketing, so I’m able to use my skills to excel at the marketing side of things and drive customers through a marketing-lead touchless acquisition model.

Desire
Given that my goal for starting Shaperbase was to create a passive side income and I still have a full-time job, I didn’t have a huge amount of desire to be spending hundreds of hours doing demos, following up prospects, etc. Therefore, a touchless acquisition model fit my desire for the company best.

In conclusion

So spend some time really deeply thinking through some of the factors outlined above and determine the Go To Market model for your business, as once you’ve knuckled that down the next steps in terms of marketing tactics, hiring, etc all become pretty clear.

The post How to Define the Go-To Market Strategy for Your B2B SaaS Company appeared first on Aaron Beashel.

That CEO was a guy named Alex Bard.

Alex co-founded the well-known SaaS company Desk.com before selling it to Salesforce and becoming the VP of Service Cloud (their second largest business unit, behind Sales Cloud).

During his time at Salesforce, Alex was fortunate enough to work directly with Salesforce co-founder and CEO Marc Benioff, and together they utilised a framework Benioff himself devised called the V2MOM to align and manage the Service Cloud team.

When Alex joined Campaign Monitor a few years later, he brought the framework with him and instilled it within Campaign Monitor as a way of aligning the organisation and getting the entire team focused on the same goals.

It was game-changing for the company, and for each team that implemented it.

So in this post, I want to outline how the V2MOM framework works and how you can use it to align and manage your company around what’s most important.

What is the V2MOM framework?

The V2MOM framework is a methodology for setting the vision for your company, and then aligning all the various teams so that they are working together to achieve it.

It’s an acronym for the following:

• Vision – The vision for where the company is going and what it should look like in a in the future.
• Values – The values under which the company operates and adheres to.
• Methods – The key initiatives each team is focused on that will help the company achieve the vision.
• Obstacles – The identified obstacles that each team will need to overcome to complete their methods and help the company reach the vision.
• Measures – The measures by which you’ll assess your progress on the methods.

The V2MOM framework helps everyone understand exactly where the company is going, and how the work each individual team member is doing contributes to helping the company achieve the Vision.

How to create a V2MOM framework for your company or team

The V2MOM framework works best when the whole company is utilising it. That way, all teams (product, engineering, etc) all have a clear vision that they’re working towards.

However, even if the entire organisation isn’t onboard with it, it can still be a very useful tool for just aligning a specific team (such as a marketing team).

Either way, the process of creating a V2MOM starts as high up the organisation as it can (I.e. The CEO if the whole company has bought in, or the CMO if it’s just the marketing team who has bought in), and the first step is setting the vision.

Step 1: Set the vision

The first step in creating a V2MOM for your team/company is setting the vision.

The word ‘Vision’ seems to have a lot of various definitions and meanings, but I personally like the Vivid Vision approach popularized by Cameron Herold, the former COO of 1800-GOT-JUNK who helped it grow from $2 million in revenue to $100 million in six years.

Essentially, it involves imagining exactly what your team/company/department will look like in 3 years time and then documenting that in detail.

So for instance, here’s a shortened version of what the Vision might look like for a B2B SaaS marketing team.

In 3 years time, our team of 10 across inbound, paid acquisition, product marketing, PR & operations has successfully built out an optimized growth engine.

We’re ranking number 1 for our key terms in Google, have thousands of engaged social media followers, are frequently mentioned in trade publications and are advertising across key sites our target market hangs out on.

All of these initiatives are driving prospects back to our highly-optimized website. Here they’ll find a beautifully designed website with clear messaging built on in-depth buyer personas, and a blog and Resources section with the highest-quality educational content available in our industry.

From the website, users can either signup for our product and proceed down the onboarding path towards becoming a customer, or can download an amazing in-depth content piece before being put through a strategic lead nurturing workflow that showcases the benefits of using our product and convinces them to signup.

All these initiatives are constantly working to turn prospects into paying customers at a CAC payback time of less than 1 year, and is underpinned by an integrated marketing technology stack that gives us full visibility into what’s working and what isn’t, and allows our team to move fast and achieve the things we want to achieve.

The key to setting a good Vision is to not get bogged down in the ‘How’ and just to dream big. You and the team will work the how later.

Step 2: Set the values

With a clear vision set for the company/department/team, it’s time to set some values.
These values could be set at a company level, or if they don’t yet exist there, can even be set at a team level.

At Campaign Monitor, we have a series of company wide values that we all adhere to. These include:

• Make Mum Proud – Treat our customers, and each other, with honesty and respect. There are no assholes at Campaign Monitor.
• Care About Why – We’re always inquisitive, always striving to understand the problems we are solving.
• Create The Change You Want To See – Have a new idea or a way to make things work better? Do it! It’s up to you. Actions always speak louder than words.
• If Our Customers Kick-Ass, We Will Too – Help our customers be awesome and do incredible things, the rest will follow.
• Do Less, But Do It Best – Ruthlessly prioritize. Let’s focus on projects that deliver the most value to the company.

Alternatively, when I was at Dubsat, the company hadn’t set a series of values for everyone to live up too, so I set my own for the team.

By including the values in your V2MOM, you help ensure they’re lived by the team as they become a part of the document that everyone is consistently focused on and referrign back to.

Step 3: Work with key individuals to set the methods

Now that you, as the leader of the company/department/team, have set the vision and the values, it’s time to work with key individuals to set the methods.

Think of Methods as the individual initiatives your team will focus on in order to achieve the Vision in 3 years time. In my time at Campaign Monitor, we’ve experimented at doing quarterly methods & half-yearly methods, and personally prefer quarterly, but it really depends on the business and the team.

To illustrate what Methods are, we’ll continue the previous example of a Marketing Team at a B2B SaaS company and examine what the Methods might look like as the team works towards the aforementioned Vision:

• Increase organic search traffic (Paul) – Find and onboard SEO agency. Conduct keyword research and identify key terms. Complete technical audit & implement changes.
• Grow social traffic (John) – Scale posting across all our social media accounts. Experiment with untapped channels like Medium & Quora.
• Scale paid acquisition (Paul) – Find and onboard PPC agency. Implement programmatic buying. Design and implement retargeting strategy.
• Optimize website to increase conversion rate (Amy) – Refine messaging on homepage. Launch new features page to better explain product. Develop & launch new case study video for customers page.
• Scale content production (Leanne) – Devise content strategy. Find and onboard a team of freelance writers. Scale blogging to 3x per week. Produce 2 eBooks per month for lead generation.
• Implement lead generation & nurturing (John) – Design lead nurturing strategy & workflows. Design & launch gated content landing pages. Create emails and setup nurturing workflows. Work with sales to define MQL point and handover process.
• Scale PR (Frankie) – Identify key media publications and influencers to engage with. Build a story framework that aligns with the brand, positioning, company vision & mission, etc. Generate 30+ media hits in key publications by producing executive bylines, supporting product launches & telling customer stories.
• Enable team success by building a foundation for growth (Leo) – Implement Segment on the website and start tracking key events. Setup Amazon Redshift data warehouse to store data. Purchase and implement Looker and build key dashboards for access by the marketing team.

As you can see above, each Method has 3 parts to it: The overview, the owner and the detail.

The overview is a short description of the Method, while the owner makes it clear who is responsible for executing this method, and finally the detail provides some more information on what exactly needs to be accomplished in the timeframe (it’s usually a good idea to set and revise the Methods every quarter to remain agile as you work towards the longer term Vision).

Depending on your management style and team makeup, you can set these top-down, bottom-up or a mix of both. I personally prefer a combined approach where you put the Vision and Values in front of team members and let them come up with their own methods, before working with them to refine them based on your own knowledge of priorities, other team member’s methods, etc.

Step 4: Identify obstacles and come up with a plan to mitigate them

In any team, there are obstacles to success.

It might be lack of design & development resources to get things done, or maybe it’s lack of budget.

Regardless of what the obstacles are, a good team can overcome them as long as they identify early what they’re likely to be and have a plan in place for how they are going to overcome them.

The obstacles each company and each team faces are obviously going to be very different, but here are some example obstacles for the marketing team at the fictitious B2B SaaS company I’ve been discussing throughout:

Access to creative resources
We have a limited number of people in the creative team and a lot of projects coming from the various parts of the marketing department that need to be prioritized.

In order to achieve the Vision, the marketing team needs the creative team’s assistance with initiatives like designing pages for the website, designing eBooks & landing pages for lead generation, designing emails for lead nurturing, etc.

In order to overcome the challenge of limited creative resources and ensure all Methods are executed, we will:

• Build strong relationships with the creative team – Invite creative team members to marketing team events & dinners to foster positive relationships among the teams.
• Encourage open communication & transparency between teams – Invite key members of the creative team to weekly marketing team meetings so they understand the initiatives we’re working on and why.
• Frontload submission of creative briefs – As early as possible, submit briefs to the creative team for work needed to be carried out, in order to give the project adequate time to progress through the backlog and get prioritized.
• Make compelling revenue-based arguments for the project – Help get projects prioritized by coming up with revenue models that clearly outline the value of the work for the business, and attend creative team meetings to fight for prioritization.

As you can see, each Obstacle being outlined in the V2MOM contains a clear description of the challenge faced by the team/individual as well as a plan for overcoming that challenge and ensuring execution of the Method within the agreed timeframe.

Step 5: Define the measures of success

In order to know whether you’ve been successful or not, you need to set clear measures for each method.

In my opinion, these measures should include both output and outcome related metrics.

For instance, here’s what the measures might look like for the ‘Grow social traffic’ method in the section above:

By end of December 2016, be posting 300 times per month to our social channels, and have completed experiments in 3 new channels (Medium, SlideShare, Quora). Be generating 2000+ engagements (likes, shares, etc) on our posts each month, and be driving 10,000+ visitors to our website from social each month.

As you can see, a number of the measures are based on output (posting 300 times per month to social channels and completing experiments in 3 new channels), while others based on outcomes (2000+ engagements, 10,000+ visitors).

In my opinion, it’s important to have both because outcome-based metrics aren’t always fully within the control of the owner.

For instance, in the case of a social-media focused method like the one mentioned here, external factors like changes to Facebook’s Newsfeed Algorithm and Twitter introducing an algorithmic feed can have a significant impact on engagement and click-throughs.

If you were only measuring success on outcome-based measures, it would look like John (the owner of the Method) is doing a poor job. However, if you have output-based and outcome-based measures that John has committed to achieving then you can get a much better handle on John’s performance.

In conclusion

From a managers perspective, The V2MOM is a great framework that you can implement in your team to help create alignment, focus people on projects that deliver the maximum value for the business, and create a culture of ownership and accountability amongst the team.

From an employee perspective, the V2MOM framework has a lot of benefits as well. It gives clarity to individual team members on the projects they own and the outputs and outcomes that are expected of them, and helps them understand how those projects contribute to the overall success of the organization.

Although V2MOM isn’t the only framework that can help you achieve this (OKR’s is another one), it’s certainly a great start. So take it, customize it to your business (we’ve even tweaked it a little bit at Campaign Monitor to make it right for us) and start using to align, focus and motivate your team.

The post How to use the V2MOM framework to align and inspire your B2B SaaS marketing team appeared first on Aaron Beashel.

And there is a lot of content out there that can teach you how to do it effectively as well, with the likes of HubSpot, Marketo and Kapost all producing great content that’ll help you create a winning content marketing strategy for your company.

However, I’ve found there is a lot less content around how to actually execute content marketing on a day to day basis.

So in this post, I wanted to share with you the process we use to manage our content machine in the hope you can take away some ideas that’ll help you manage your own.

What content at Campaign Monitor looks like

Before diving in to our process though, I wanted to give you some insight into what content marketing looks like at Campaign Monitor.

In terms of velocity, our (rough) monthly schedule is as follows:

• Publish 3-4 blog posts per week
• Publish 3-4 new Gallery entries per week
• Publish 1 new guide/eBook per month (our latest one on list building is 6000 words and is a collaboration with Noah Kagan and the SumoMe team).
• Publish up to 150 posts on our social media accounts per month
• Send over 250,000 emails across 15+ campaigns each month.

To top it all off, we do it with a team of just one and a half people. I’m pretty much solely focused on content while our Community Manager, Ros, splits her time 50/50 between content related tasks like managing our social media accounts and non-content related tasks like organising sponsorships, speaking at events, etc.

Our Process

So how do we do it? Let’s take a step by step look at out process:

1. Ideas

The whole process of planning and publishing content starts with ideas. As mentioned before, we currently publish on the blog 3 – 4x per week and create longer guides once per month.  So how do we come up with ideas for all this content?

By reading.

I personally subscribe to over 50 marketing blogs via Feedly, and I’ll read nearly every post they publish. These blog posts cover topics such as conversion rate optimization, copywriting, content marketing, and more.

The posts I read on other blogs serve as inspiration for the Campaign Monitor blog content. If I see a great tip on conversion rate optimization that’s also applicable to email marketing, I’ll repurpose it with an email marketing focus and turn it into a blog post.

When ideas come our way, we add them to a Trello board to keep them all in one place. Trello is an amazing tool for this, not only does it have apps for every device (which is great for when ideas come to you on the go) but each board has it’s own email address, so whenever I read an interesting article that we might be able to use on the blog, I email it to the board with a few comments.

On top of that, we’ll also use tools like BuzzSumo and SEMRush to find content that has performed well on other blogs in the past, and then add those to the ideas column with an email marketing focus applied.

2. Planning

At the end of each month, I’ll sit down with our Ros (virtually, as I’m in Sydney and she’s in San Francisco) and we’ll plan out the content for the next month.

This usually involves looking through the idea list and moving any concepts we like into the ‘Scheduled’ column. We’ll then assign them all a due date and an author (typically either Ros or me) and build out the Editorial Calendar for the month.

Once we’ve planned the blog content for the month, we’ll use that framework to start planning out our email campaigns, namely the newsletter and lead nurturing campaigns, as they primarily feature content from the blog.

To do this, we’ll look at what content we have coming up and choose the most relevant articles for each list we send too.

Once we’ve worked what content goes in each, we’ll actually create a wireframe for each campaign, outlining the articles that go into it and the copy we’ll use. This helps us visualise what is going out and ensure we’re creating a good user experience for our subscribers (being an email marketing company, it’s critical we’re leading by example when it comes to email best practices).

Finally, we’ll also plan out our major guide for that month. We’ll pick a topic that we want to take a deep look at (such as list building) and plan out the structure for the guide usually by writing the table of contents and a basic synopsis for each chapter. We’ll also plan the promotional activities around it, such as social media posts, blog posts, emails, guest posts, paid advertising, etc.

The reason we do all of our planning in one go is two-fold:

• It all ties together – By planning everything at once, we’re able to make the most of each channel to cross-promote our content. For instance, if we are planning to publish a guide on list-building around the middle of the month then it’s the perfect thing to fit in our Newsletter at the end of the month, and also can be repurposed into one or two different blog posts (which need to be planned in to the editorial calendar)
• It gives us our run sheet for the month – By planning everything at the beginning of the month, everybody is clear what needs to be produced and when and there are no surprises or missed deadlines (though there are definitely still some tight ones). It also gives other people involved in the process (such as our design team) a good idea of what’s coming up that month that they’ll need to work on.

3. Production

Once planning is done, we move on to actually writing the content. This is basically an ongoing process throughout the entire month, and we aim to have a first draft of each blog post done a week before publish date in order to allow for editing time and design work.

Generally speaking we’ll work through 2 or 3 rounds of writing for each content piece (or at least I do anyway). The first is just a massive dump of information into a page. It’s often terribly worded and full of mistakes, but the goal is just to get research and information onto the page.

The next round will focus on making that huge dump of information legible, and will often involve rewriting sections so that it flows better and is a much more refined and focused read.

The final round is usually proofing the copy for spelling and grammar errors and optimising for longtail SEO. We try to always get someone else to do this part as it’s very hard to proof your own work. We also use tools like Grammarly which has been a big help in picking up the little things we humans tend to skim over.

4. Design

Campaign Monitor is an extremely design-focused company, and we’re fortunate to have an incredible team of designers who work on almost every piece of content that goes out to ensure any images, graphs, etc all look amazing.

So the final step before anything goes out the door is handing it over to them to work their magic. They live inside Basecamp, so this usually means jumping in and creating some tasks before the studio manager picks them up and assigns them to one of the designers.

5. Publishing

Once a piece of content has been reworked by the designers, it’s back over to us to publish it. This is pretty straight forward, so I won’t go into too much detail here.

6. Promotion

Once a piece of content has been published, we’ll get to work promoting it. Depending on the type of content it is, we leverage a variety of channels, including:

• Social media – We use Buffer to manage our social media posting and will usually schedule 4-5 tweets for each blog post as well a 1-2 shares on Facebook and LinkedIn. We’ll do most of the sharing activity in the first week the post is launched, then spread out other activity up to a month after it goes out.
• Email – We create and send an email campaign to our blog subscribers list every time we publish a new post (on top of the newsletter and lead nurturing emails discussed earlier). We used to do this automatically using the RSS to email feature, but found that doing it manually allowed us to run a number of A/B tests which have significantly improved our click-through rate. We’ll also A/B test blog post headlines using the email subject line, which has proven to be highly effective as well.
• Partnerships – We try to leverage partnerships with other influencers and organisations as much as possible, as it’s a great way to get our content in front of their existing audiences. We’ve worked with Neil Patel, Joe Pulizzi, Noah Kagan, Unbounce, Shopify, SumoMe & more to do this and it’s been very effective.

6. Reporting

The final piece of the process is reporting. Although we’ll keep an eye on our analytics tools all month, we do most of our formal reporting on our content marketing efforts at the end of each month.

We initially started off measuring the basics like traffic, email subscribers, signups & customers but found this aggregate view wasn’t really telling us much. The numbers would go up and down month to month and we had no real indication of why it happened, what to do about it, or whether it was even a bad thing.

So we recently changed it up and are more focused on measuring content’s contribution to our wider metrics. So we now measure things like:

• Contribution to total sitewide sessions
• Contribution to total sitewide signups
• Contribution to total sitewide customers
• Year over year growth in sessions
• Year over year growth in signups
• Year over year growth in customers
• Growth per channel
• Growth per content type

This is measured in a custom-built spreadsheet that pulls from our internal databases as well as Google Analytics.

This refined focus on contribution to total has been a much better approach. We’re not publishing content in a vacuum, and our numbers are heavily swayed by seasonality, search trends, changes to social media platforms and a host of other factors, so by looking at it from a contribution to total perspective we can help reduce the effect of these factors.

Another big change we’ve made recently is starting to focus on ‘number of people helped’ which we measure through comments and tweets like these:

• “I like it. Picked up a trick I can use on the next email blast.. Thanks for the insight”
• “Gosh, @campaignmonitor just produces such great content. Thanks guys!”
• “You are the best!! i was struggling with the subject line for my follow up email and I landed here looking for ideas. Got a good one now :)”

On top of the spreadsheet mentioned above, we’ll also do monthly writeups on the internal wiki where we present the numbers back to the company and talk about a few of the things we achieved this month and what the plan is for next month.

In conclusion

In fact, just this month we made a change to the way we handover the newsletter and lead nurturing campaigns to the design team based on some inefficiencies and errors we identified in the process from the month before.

So while I’d encourage you to learn what you can from our process, your process will need to be different depending on the unique attributes and players within your organisation.

The best way to get it right is to outline a basic process to start with, get cracking producing content and then refine your process as you go.

Your turn: What other tricks and hacks do you have in your content production process? I’d love for you to share them in the comments below!

The post How to manage and run a content marketing machine for your B2B SaaS company appeared first on Aaron Beashel.

It’s a great lead or subscriber magnet to offer people, and when done right it can significantly increase the amount of leads you generate and help build your all important email list.

So when I sat down to plan out our latest guide on How to get Better Marketing Results with Beautiful Design, my natural inclination was to create a PDF eBook that would live behind a landing page with a lead capture form.

The medium wasn’t even part of my planning to be brutally honest. I started mapping out the usual things like goals, target audience, and promotional channels and didn’t even give a second thought to the format the content would take.

It wasn’t until one of the members of our design team put forward the idea of doing a microsite that I really took a second to assess why I went straight for the PDF.

And to be perfectly honest, with the exception of “That’s just how it’s always done”, I couldn’t think of any reason why creating a PDF would be beneficial over doing a microsite.

So instead of creating a traditional PDF eBook and putting it behind a landing page with a form, we decided to make our content piece a website, and here are 5 reasons you should consider doing so as well:

1. More exposure through search engines

Although a typical eBook landing page can be indexed by search engines and drive some traffic, most I’ve seen only contain a few hundred words and would be lucky to rank for the main title of the eBook.

By creating a website on the other hand, we’re able to attract a whole new set of visitors from search engines that we never would have reached through our planned promotional campaigns.

Speaking specifically of our latest guide on How to Get Better Marketing Results with Beautiful Design, there are over 5000 words across 13 pages targeted at terms like ‘How to create desire for your product’ and ‘beautiful stock photography websites’. All that extra content on a website for Google to index means the big G will drive traffic for us long after our promotional campaigns come to an end.

In fact, although this guide has only just been launched, Campaign Monitor has been publishing guides to email marketing for years and placing them on the web as opposed to in PDF’s. Looking at the numbers, those guides generate us around 50,000 visitors each month despite not being actively promoted. Can you guess where majority of that traffic comes from? Search engines.

Now I understand the counter argument to this might be that people are able to find and access the content without hitting a landing page and submitting their email address, but if you had written the content as a PDF these people likely wouldn’t have found the content anyway. I’d rather have a few extra people find, read and be influenced by the content without giving me their email address then have these people not find it at all.

2. Access to a larger audience using responsive design

I love my iPhone 5 to bits, but have you ever tried to read a PDF on such a small screen size? It’s not a pleasant experience. Most PDF’s are designed for viewing on a desktop or even on paper, and on a small device like an iPhone you need to zoom right in for the text to be large enough to read. Then, because it isn’t responsive, you have to scroll side to side as you read each line. It isn’t fun.

With a website on the other hand, you can employ some basic responsive design techniques and suddenly your content is a pleasure to read on any device.

I know I personally do most of my reading on the train during my morning commute, and by making your content piece a responsive website, your readers can consume your content on whatever device and in whatever location suits them.

3. Better Analytics & Reporting Capabilities

By simply installing the Google Analytics tracking code on your content website, you can get a wealth of information about how people interact with and consume your content.

Instead of just being able to track visits to the landing page & total downloads, you can see a whole host of other information such as:

• How many people actually read the content piece vs just downloading it
• How many pages people read
• Where they dropoff in the content piece
• How long they spend reading it
• What devices they are reading it on
• Whether they shared the content or not
• What network they shared the content over

Better still, you can break all this information down by a variety of factors to get deep insights into how people are engaging with your content.

So you could compare whether people arriving from Twitter spend more time reading the content than those from Facebook? Or whether people coming from email share the content more than those from search? Or whether Americans read more pages than Australians do?

This is important because a download isn’t the whole story. A person who reads the whole content piece then shares it over Facebook & Twitter is a much more engaged & higher-value reader than someone who just downloaded it but never actually got around to reading it, and you can’t know that with a PDF.

4. Faster to produce

As any content marketer would know, creating great long-form content is a lengthy process and is often approached using a waterfall methodology. Writers do the research and writing, editors proof and edit the copy, and then the whole thing goes over to design & development to design the PDF, build the landing pages and hook it all up to your email marketing tool.

When it’s a website though, you can create content in a much more agile methodology. As long as you knuckle out the structure first, design and development teams can be designing the website and building the theme on a CMS like WordPress, while the writers are still working on the copy. Once the copy is written, it can just be dropped into the CMS and suddenly it’s all there, beautifully formatted and ready to go.

If you need to change or add some content, there’s no need to waste time re-designing entire sections of a PDF either. Simply login to the CMS, make the change and you’re done.

5. A better user experience

The nature of a PDF also puts a lot of unnecessary constraints on your content. PDF’s are inherently boring documents, with basic text and static images on a page. The experience is also very monotonous, with most people reading in a linear fashion that is dictated your chosen page order rather than the needs and interests of the reader.

With a website however, you can add an almost endless amount of interactivity to your content piece which can really take your audience engagement to a new level, including:

• Videos – According to studies, when we are listening to someone speak our brain patterns start to couple with the speakers, mirroring each other in a way that increases our understanding of the message being communicated. By going beyond the static image and text of a PDF and incorporating video in your content website, you can communicate your key messages and learning in a much more effective, engaging manner.
• Galleries – With a website, there’s no need to make your audience squint to see screenshots and images. You can use simple gallery plugins to show images full-screen when clicked and allow people to browse through and share your visual content.
• Customisable navigation – PDF’s are inherently read in a linear fashion, with readers going page by page in a flow dictated by your chosen page order. However, sometimes people want to be able to choose their own path, reading only certain sections or perhaps diving deeper into particular areas they have a stronger interest in. With a content microsite, you can increase your readers engagement by enabling people to customise their experience with your content.

Some final words

Although it took a designer to snap me out of my complacency, developing our latest guide as a website rather than a PDF has been a great experience. It has significantly reduced both the time and stress involved in creating the guide, and we’re getting a much better, more measurable result out of it.

If you can’t quite ditch the PDF just yet, then perhaps take a hybrid approach. Tools like PDFmyURL can turn your content microsite into a PDF, and you can offer it for download to those who still love the feeling of a good old fashioned PDF eBook.

For those of you ready to embrace the future of content marketing, get yourself a WordPress install and make your next long-form content piece a microsite.

The post 5 reasons to ditch the PDF eBook from your content marketing appeared first on Aaron Beashel.

I’d heard through a content marketing friend of mine that getting featured in their recommended section drives a ton of social sharing activity, and I was definitely intrigued by the idea.

That said, the recommended section is human curated and Courtney, Kevan and the guys over at Buffer know content well, so getting featured wasn’t going to be some little hack or trick you could pull.

So how did we do it? And what were the results? Read on to find out.

How one of our articles ended up in Buffer’s recommended content section

I had always been inspired by Buffer’s idea of A/B testing blog headlines against each other using Tweets, and then changing the headline of the post based on which tweet performed better.

However, when I started running content over at Campaign Monitor (an email marketing tool), I realised there was an even better way to do this – A/B testing blog headlines using email subject lines.

So we started doing it on our blog subscribers email which goes out to a few thousands subscribers each time we publish a post, and we started getting some GREAT results from it.

In fact, in one post on measuring your email marketing using Google Analytics we got a 57%  increase in opens on line A over line B.

This is a huge result, and likely netted us a few thousand more visitors from social networks as the improved headline results in more click-throughs when readers share the post via their Twitter & Facebook accounts.

Being an email marketing blog, we decided to share our little trick with the world and wrote up a step by step guide to how to do it. Given that the idea was inspired by the Buffer guys anyway, I decided to mention them in the post and actually challenged them somewhat, outlining why I thought using email subject lines was a more accurate way of testing blog post headlines than using tweets.

When the post was published I reached out to Kevan via Twitter and let him know it was around. I have had a few tweet exchanges with Kevan in the past but we are certainly far from besties, so I tried to engage him by asking for his thoughts on our approach.

I never actually heard back from him, but I did notice a click-through from that tweet was recorded so I was hopeful he had at least checked out the post.

What really happens when your content gets featured

Turns out Kevan did check it out and obviously liked it, because when I woke up on Saturday morning I had a whole heap of notifications on Twitter and sure enough, there were 100’s of tweets of the post coming through.

I checked the Buffer and Daily apps on my phone, and sure enough there was our post in the Recommended Content section.

I’m not going to lie, it was really exciting. I’d check my phone every hour or so and there’d be a hundred or so new shares of the post.

It was very ego-boosting and I was really excited to check out our analytics a few days later to analyse see the traffic data and analyse the flow on effect into subscribers, signups and customers. We’d recently had another post go quite well on social media and it had driven a bunch of traffic, so I was looking forward to seeing a similar result.

To my surprise, despite the huge number of shares (over 800 at last count, a good 10 – 15x more than our average per post), there was no visible spike in traffic and certainly no positive effect on any of the main KPI’s like subscribers, signups & customers.

Keen to understand a bit more about this, I started looking through the tweets and noticed some interesting patterns.

• The type of people who were sharing them was really random – Of the 800 or so shares we had, there was no real discernible pattern between the people who shared the piece. There were mechanics, personal trainers and even a priest amongst the people who shared the content. Considering this is a very niche post that would likely only appear to content marketers, it was odd to see people who probably don’t even know what A/B testing is sharing the post.
• The people who shared it didn’t actually appear to have even read the article – This is quite anecdotal evidence, but pretty much every tweet was the exact same text as Buffer had added to their recommendations section and it appeared people had just gone through and clicked ‘Share’ without actually reading the content. Perhaps it’s just my sharing habits, but when I share something on Twitter I usually add a personal comment like ‘Great read’ or ‘Cool idea for marketers’ and occasionally throw in a hashtag as well, but basically nobody had added any sort of commentary to the tweet or modified it in any way.

To dive deeper into this, I spent some time looking through the feeds of some of the people who had shared it and I found that majority of the accounts I looked at had shared a lot of content I’d seen in the recommended content section before.

Based on these patterns, my guess is that there are a lot of fake or inactive accounts that are just hooked up to automatically tweet out content from Buffer’s recommended section.

Given this kind of ‘automated’ sharing activity, it makes sense that their audience isn’t hugely engaged with their tweets and therefore aren’t clicking through to read the content they share.

What you can learn from this

If you’re looking for advice on how to get your content featured in Buffer’s recommended content section, you might be a little disappointed.

Kevan and Courtney are awesome content marketers and no amount of tricks or hacks will land you in there. So my advice is really simple:

1. Write epic content that would appeal to them and their audience
2. Make sure they know about it (by tweeting at them or I believe there is a form somewhere).

However if you think getting featured in the recommended section is going to be a silver bullet for your content then you’re going to be further disappointed. Perhaps it was just the particular niche of our content, but as I mentioned earlier there was almost no increase in traffic or any of the metrics that really matter.

This also speaks to a larger trend I’ve seen recently where the posts with the most sharing activity aren’t actually the ones with the most traffic. This is particularly true for Twitter and I can remember 2 or 3 times on the Campaign Monitor blog where an article has had a large amount of shares but no discernible increase in visits.

According to this Quora thread, the average CTR on a tweet is around 0.3% but I know personally my CTR is closer to 0.1%.  I’ve also worked with few marketing influencers who have 100k+ followers but an individual tweet would be lucky to get 20-30 click-throughs.

This might be pretty good if you are just starting to build your following, but when your doing content marketing at scale unfortunately 20-30 clicks doesn’t move the needle much.

The post What really happens when you get featured in Buffer’s recommended content section appeared first on Aaron Beashel.

It was quite the event, with 40,000+ people all converging in one bigass field outside of Byron for 3 days of music and drinking.

There were probably 100+ bands playing over the 3 days, and we went and saw a good number of them

Whilst always fun, the problem with this is that you end up going and seeing bands that you only partially like. You know maybe 2-3 of their most popular songs, and the rest you have either never heard of or only vaguely know.

You find yourself in this weird sort of up and down state, where for the songs you know your jumping around going crazy while the others your kind of just standing there trying to look like you know whats going on.

It was during one of the songs I don’t know that I realized content marketing is kind of like a rock concert. How you ask? Let’s dig in to find out:

You can’t always create epic content

I think one of the most over-used lines in content marketing is ‘create great content’.

But what the hell defines great content? How is one supposed to know whether a content piece is great? And doesn’t ‘great’ differ depending on your goals, organization, content type, etc?

I recently stumbled across an article by Gregory Ciotti who put forward the concept of ‘white bread vs wheat bread’ content which I found really interesting.

The idea is that white bread content is that really snackable, shareable content like listicles that will tend to get shared a lot, but doesn’t really do a lot leave a lasting impression of thought leadership and authority on your brand.

A recent example of this is an article I wrote on the Campaign Monitor blog titled ‘8 free sites to get amazingly beautiful images for your email campaigns’.

Our design team did a great job of the visuals on the post and it was quite a hit, attracting a ton of visits and shares. At last count, it had about 10x the number of shares then we’d see on an average post.

However, despite the extra shares and traffic, the post did not perform any better in terms of signups and probably did very little for us in the long run. Majority of new visitors came from social media and likely either clicked through to the featured sites or just bounced away. Very few people subscribed and most people would be more likely to remember and have a favourable brand affiliation towards the stock photography sites then they towards Campaign Monitor.

Compare this to ‘wheat bread’ content on the contrary, which are those more in-depth, deep dive articles you do on a particular topic. They don’t get shared around nearly as much, but those who do read them genuinely learn something.

A good example of this kind of content from the Campaign Monitor blog is ‘How to use social proof to get more subscribers and convert them into customers’

This post is an in-depth look at social proof from an email marketing perspective, it presents research on the importance of social proof,  offers actionable advice on how to apply it to different aspects of your email marketing, has screenshots and examples and even presents a number of interesting do’s and don’ts related to implementing social proof.

In short, it was the kind of post a reader would genuinely learn a lot from and could serve as a reference for the topic in the future.

In comparison to the 8 free sites with beautiful images post, this article got far fewer shares and views. However I am confident that the people who read this article came away from it having learnt something valuable, which builds authority and thought leadership around the Campaign Monitor brand and makes readers much more likely to signup for our product in the future.

In my time running content at Campaign Monitor, I’ve also noticed a 3rd type of content which I’ll call ‘Multigrain bread content’ to keep with and build on Greg’s work

Multigrain bread (named because it’s still whitebread, but it has grains which makes it a bit healthier) is the kind of in-between content.

A good example from the Campaign Monitor blog is the post ‘This little-known copywriting formula will increase your email click-through rate’

This post still has elements of white-bread content in that it has a ‘link-bait’ style headline and is quite short and shareable with really immediately actionable results. However, it also has elements of ‘wheat bread content’ as well, it isn’t just some listicle or a roundup of other people’s content… It’s actually something a person could learn from and apply to improve their email marketing.

Multigrain bread is kind of like the happy medium. Posts should still be snackable and visual which leads to elevated sharing activity, but it still needs to teach readers something that they can apply and get results from in order for it to leave a positive impression of authority and thought leadership on your brand.

So how does this all fit into the rock concert analogy? I’m getting there.

Why your content marketing should be like a rock concert

As I mentioned before, rock concerts tend to have a lot of highs and lows. You end up jumping around and loving the old classics, but then you are a bit more mellow during the band’s new stuff that you don’t know yet.

You should aim to have a similar rhythm to your content marketing. Each month  you should aim to produce a little bit of white bread content that gets shared and drives traffic, as well as aim to produce some more wheat bread content which deep dives into a particular topic and really teaches the reader something.

The rest of the time, you should aim to produce multigrain content that is somewhere in the middle. Still really great and valuable content, but content that is a little less in-depth and slightly more snackable and shareable.

How to apply this to your own content marketing

If the big 1400 word analogy wasn’t clear enough, let me lay it out straight.

Everything you publish online should be great, but don’t always think everything has to be epic.

It would be extremely difficult to always be producing well-researched, wheat bread content on a daily basis. Don’t be afraid to mix your content up between those kind of pieces and the more light-hearted listicles or round up posts that are easier to produce and get shared more.

The key is maintaining the balance and realising the need for wheat-bread content, despite what your analytics may be telling you. Although it’s super easy to look at your analytics and share count and say we need to be producing more and more white-bread content, are these the metrics that really matter to your business? And at the end of the day is this really the best kind of content to build your brand?

I think the best example of this is the PetFlow blog. In case you don’t know, PetFlow is an online pet retailer that sells pet food, supplies, etc.

If you removed their branding from their blog, you’d be forgiven for thinking it was BuzzFeed or Upworthy. They basically take the most popular content from around the web (mainly YouTube videos) and post it on their blog in the hope of driving traffic primarily from social sharing. As you can see below, they smash out the curiosity gap headlines and the content has no real theme or strategy.

Now I’m not privy to their analytics, but I have enough experience to understand that posting this kind of content probably requires very little effort and drives them a bunch of traffic from social sites like Facebook.

On the surface it would seem like a great deal. They likely have some intern doing it and the sharing stats probably look great.

But what does it do for the real metrics that matter to their business like sales & revenue? My guess would be very little. In no way has their content taught me something or improved my life, and in no way do I look at their site with any sort of authority or trust as a result of reading their blog. I have absolutely no brand affinity towards them, and I am in no way more inclined to buy from them than any other pet retailer.

So the message here is simple, balance the types of content you create.  Don’t feel that you need to create epic, amazing blog posts every time as you’ll kill yourself, and don’t be afraid to create a little bit of white-bread content once in a while to generate some shares and help boost awareness.

Just make sure you don’t get caught up in the vanity metrics of white-bread content, as you’ll end up fat on visits, but skinny on customers.

The post Why your content marketing should be like a rock concert appeared first on Aaron Beashel.

You’ve written an incredible post.

You know your audience will be delighted, as your post has heaps of actionable ideas on how they can make their lives better. You’ve even tweaked the headline to perfection. It grabs attention. It arouses curiosity. It’s got it all.

You publish the post and get some good sharing activity and attention, but then you noticed in your analytics tool that nothing good actually happened.

You got all this traffic to the post but then everyone just left. Nobody signed up for your product or requested a demo.

It’s a feeling that is all too familiar for content marketers out there. You can get some great traffic, but it doesn’t convert into paying customers and leaves you feeling like you should just throw in the towel and go back to Google Adwords.

Enter the Hail Mary offer.

What is a Hail Mary Offer?

The Hail Mary Offer is the offer you make when everything else you’ve tried to do has failed to convert the user, either directly into a customer or even into a lead or subscriber.

More technically speaking, the Hail Mary Offer is a broad-appealing offer you make in an exit intent popup to ‘New Visitors’ who are exiting after one page (i.e. are about to bounce). It’s great for high-bounce rate sections of websites like blogs, where majority of people generally come in from search engines and social networks like Twitter, consume the piece of content they were looking for and then leave.

I’ve seen plenty of different offers used before, from T-shirts and different swag items to educational courses and eBooks. The offer you make largely depends on your target market, but in order to be effective it needs to have the following characteristics:

• Be so top of funnel it’s almost out of the funnel – Don’t forget these people were about to leave, so they’re not likely to be very far down the buying cycle. The offer you make can’t be a buyers guide to your software, it needs to be something that is going to appeal to them even if they aren’t really interested in buying your product at that point in time (which doesn’t mean they won’t be in the future by the way).
• Be widely appealing – Given that these people are ‘browsers’ and have come to your site for a wide variety of reasons (usually just to consume a single piece of content that either caught their interest on a social feed or met an information need they had at that moment), your offer needs to have broad appeal. This is why I think things like T-shirts or swag work really well here as everybody loves some free swag, particularly if it’s unbranded (more on that later).

How do I implement a Hail Mary Offer?

The best part about the Hail Mary Offer is that it’s super simple to implement. Here’s a simple walk-through in 3 easy steps:

Step 1: Think of a broadly appealing offer

To start off with, you need to come up with a broadly appealing offer. One that still narrow enough that it will appeal to your target market and not just everybody, but still broad enough that it will appeal to people regardless of how or why they ended up on your site.

The best offer I have seen is by the folks over at InVision. For their Hail Mary Offer, they got Kyle Steed (a well known and respected designer) to design a T-shirt that says “Design makes everything possible’.

Not sure why that’s so great? Here’s why:

• It’s unbranded – Somebody who has just landed on your website and is about to bounce doesn’t want to start wearing your company name around on their shirt in front of their friends, so by choosing to make it unbranded they broadened the appeal of the offer significantly.
• It aligns with their target market – Their target market is designers, and I can tell you from experience these people think design does makle everything possible (and I tend to agree with them actually). By removing their branding but also going with a statement their target audience believes in, they make the offer really appealing to the kind of people they want to enter their email address, their potential customers.
• It positions their brand amazingly – By going for such a statement on the tshirt, they instantly align their brand values with the values of their users. According to a HBR study, shared values is the number one cause of brand loyalty, and this offer is creating brand loyalty for InVision in spades.

In the situation where the offer isn’t easily or cheaply given away to every person (I.e. a Isn’t a digital product), you could consider doing a competiton where you give away one of the offer every week to people who enter their email address that week. That way, you don’t giving away thousands of tshirts every month at a seriously negative ROI.

Step 2: Design the offer and add it to an exit-intent popup

Nest step is to design the offer and put it into an exit-intent popup on your site.

I won’t go into detail about this as you can choose whatever design you like and whatever popup tool works best for your CMS and unique technical attributes.

I will however recommend a tool you may want to check out. I use Pippity on this blog (a free WordPress plugin) and that has all the functionality you’d need to make this work, including the targeting abilities to only show on when a new user is bouncing from a specific content section on your site.

Step 3: Target it at new users who are exiting after just one page, and only on high bounce rate areas of your site.

This one is a bit more optional, but I personally believe popups tend to ruin the user experience of a website.

I would therefore only show it to New Visitors who are exiting after just one page, and I would also only show it on high-bounce, free content areas like a blog.

That way, considering it’s an exit popup your not really affecting the experience a user has while they are on your site, and even if someone does take a disliking to being shown a popup on exit they are the kind of people who would be leaving and likely not returning anyway.

I personally would never implement a tactic like this on a page of the marketing site or anywhere you could reasonably think the visitors is further down the buying funnel and therefore of higher value.

What do I do with all the email addresses I collect?

The key to generating a positive ROI is making sure you do something with the email addresses that come in that leads to sales.

I’d recommend setting up an auto-responder series using an email marketing tool like Campaign Monitor (disclaimer: I work for them). Conveniently enough, Campaign Monitor integrates directly with Pippity to automatically send people’s email addresses to a designated list and then start sending them the auto-responder series.

In terms of what to content to put in your auto-responder series, I’d recommend following a similar plan to what I outlined in my post Creating a Growth Engine for your SaaS product (which to be fair, was based on Patrick McKenzie’s writings on the subject).

Essentially, he recommends a series of 8 emails over 30 days that increase in ‘Salesness’ as time goes on:

A simple email lead nurturing campaign could be as follows:

• The problem email – Designed to break the status quo (remember; everybody is using something else to achieve what your product does, whether it be pen & paper, excel, email, whatever) and open the reader to the possibilities of replacing their existing process with software. This email should focus on educating readers on the problems associated with their current method and should barely mention your product.
• The benefit email– A look at the benefits of using software like yours to achieve whatever it is your product achieves. This email should focus on the benefits of using your category of product (I.e. person-based analytics tools as opposed to KISSmetrics directly) and how it can help improve their lives.
• The transition email – As mentioned before, everybody is switching from something and the switching process itself is a barrier you need to overcome. This email should focus on outlining a simple and easy process for making the switch to using software to achieve the problem.
• The tools email – An overview of the tools available to achieve what your product achieves, almost a quick buyers guide. This is the first time you introduce your product and outline why it’s superior to your competition. Include a CTA to signup for your free trial/free plan in this email.
• The case study email – A case study on how one of your customers uses your product, what problems it solves for them (tied to the problems outlined in the first email and what benefits it bring them (tied to the benefits outlined in the second email). Include a testimonial  from you customer and a CTA to signup for your free trial/free plan in this email.
• The resources email – The final email. Suggest some other eBooks, blogs, templates, kits, etc for learning more about whatever it is your product does. Include a CTA to signup for your prdocut with a discount code or special offer as if you havent converted from the previous emails, a special offer can help tip them over the edge.

Whilst this is just an example campaign, you can see that the focus is on educating prospects rather than making the hard sale. Only once they have been sufficiently educated on the problems of their existing approach and the benefits of replacing it with software do you introduce your product and make an offer, at which point they are much more likely to signup for your free trial/free plan.

This sounds like a cool idea, but does it really get results?

To be honest, it doesn’t matter. All I could tell you here is whether or not it has worked for other companies (which it has), but they’re not you.

They have different target markets, different products, different sales cycles, different brands. The only way to know whether this will work is to test it yourself.

If you’re really hesitant to do that, you could run a ‘lean’ test on this by simply implementing the popup, connecting it to an email marketing tool and then sending an email to whoever enters their email address saying you’ll send through the offer in a few days. It’s not ideal, but at least that way you can test whether the idea will work for your business without designing and printing 1000 t-shirts.

The post The Hail Mary Offer: How To Turn Bounces Into Customers appeared first on Aaron Beashel.

Recently however, I was looking at their Open Blog and in particular the Content Marketing Report for April and found some of the statistics quite interesting. Here’s a rundown:

• 729,832 unique visitors
• 962,389 total visits
• 1,193,967 pageviews
• 1,604 conversions
• 22,291 total email subscribers
• 20 total posts published

Now I don’t want to take anything away from them here, 729,000 unique visitors is incredible and it’s probably one of the highest trafficked blogs I know of.

However what shocked me was the fact that they only got 1,604 conversions from the blog, a conversion rate of 0.2%.

Contrasting this, companies like HubSpot and KISSmetrics (who both run highly trafficked blogs) both claim that the blog and their content marketing efforts in general are their most effective customer acquisition channel driving significantly higher conversions than this.

Now I know there’s a big difference between Buffer and HubSpot with different content goals, acquisition models, price points, sales processes, etc…. But is there something that we can learn here about how to increase the effectiveness (read: conversions) of our content marketing?

I spent some time analysing both of these blogs and the content in general and I think one of the key differences is how HubSpot focuses on using content to create behavioural change, where Buffer do not.

In this post, I want to dive into what behavioural change is, what causes it and how you can use content marketing to make it happen.

What is behavioural change and what causes it?

All marketers are in the business of changing behaviour. If you’re not changing people’s behaviour in a way that benefits your business, it would be difficult to call it marketing.

Regardless of what your product does, it is highly likely that your potential customers have a ‘status quo’. It may be a competitors product or it may be a substitute such as excel spreadsheets or email, but either way they were using something else to accomplish what your product helps them to achieve.

Therefore, in order to acquire new customers it is your job as a marketer to change their behaviour. To shift them from their current methods of doing things to using your product to achieve the same thing.

In The Advertising Effect, consumer psychologist and advertising legend Adam Ferrier states there are 3 conditions that are considered necessary to change a persons behaviour, including:

• The person has formed a strong positive intention to perform the behaviour (AKA motivation).
• The person has the skills to perform the behaviour.
• There are no environmental constraints that make it impossible for the behaviour to occur (AKA they have the opportunity to do the behaviour)

Let’s break these down a little bit to help you truly understand them as they are critical to both the learnings of this post and to the success of your content marketing.

Motivation

In the book, Ferrier states motivation is composed of two different factors; individual incentive and social norms.

Individual incentives is the idea that at a basic human level we are motivated to undertake a certain behaviour either to gain pleasure or avoid pain. It’s that simple.

Similarly, social norms is the idea that we are driven to act in a way we believe would be considered normal. When deciding on a behaviour, we think about things like ‘How will I look if I perform this behaviour?’ ‘What are the social norms around this behaviour?’ and ‘Are people I consider influential performing this behaviour?’

So in order to satisfy the ‘motivation’ factor of the behaviour change equation and drive people to make the change you want them to make, you actually need to satisfy both the individual incentive and social norms factors. To do this, you need to show people how the desired behaviour you want them to take will either reduce pain or increase pleasure in their lives, and you need to reassure them that is a perfectly acceptable behaviour to undertake.

Skills

Another key factor in changing behaviour is whether or not the person has the skills to make the behavioural change.

Ferrier illustrates this with a great example of weight loss programs. Majority of people who are overweight want to lose that weight (therefore motivation isn’t an issue), yet only a very small few actually do. This is because the biggest inhibiter to taking that action is not motivation, but that they usually don’t have the skills to do so.

So in order to satisfy the ‘skill’ factor of the behaviour change equation and drive people to make the change you want them to make, you must either upskill the user (through educational content for example) or reduce the complexity so that it comes into line with the persons existing skillset. Continuing the weight loss example, vendors like Jenny Craig and Weight Watchers have come up with simple points systems (as opposed counting calorie intake, carbohydrate levels, etc) which make it easier to measure your food intake and therefore bring the skill level required down to a common level.

Opportunity

The final key factor in creating behavioural change and getting people to adopt your product is whether or not their external environment allows them to do so.

A great example of this from my own personal experience was at Dubsat. When marketing our Adsend product we found that often while the product had enough benefits to make the ‘champion’ in the buying process sufficiently motivated to change, they often had to convince others (like the CEO and CFO) of the benefits before being able to make the change.

In this case, the person had sufficient motivation and skill to make the change, but due to external environmental factors did not have the ‘opportunity’ to make the change.

So in order to satisfy the ‘opportunity’ factor of the behavioural change equation and drive people to make the change you want them to make, you need to make sure you understand the external enviornmental factors in the change and ensure you can address and minimise them.

How can I use content marketing to create behavioural change?

This little lesson in behavioural change theory is all well and good, but without some actionable advice it isn’t likely to help you much.

So how can you use content marketing to address the 3 factors of behavioural change and get people to make the change you want them to make at scale?

Let’s dive into each factor one at a time:

Using content marketing to create motivation

I believe the key to creating motivation through content marketing is by telling a brand story.

A brand story can be defined as the underlying ‘theme’ that disseminates itself across every one of your content pieces, including blog posts, eBooks, webinars and more.

To illustrate this and help you understand it a bit better, let’s look at HubSpot’s brand story which they thread across all of their content (taken from one of their webinars):

We all do marketing a similar way. Banner advertising, trade shows and other methods that interrupt the user with our messages but offer little value or education.

But the old marketing playbook isn’t cutting it anymore. The world’s changing. People have gotten very good at tuning it out and have ended up hating all marketing. 

There’s a better way to do marketing and that’s Inbound Marketing. Creating content that people love because it educates and offers value to them. HubSpot’s software allows you to do this effectively.

If you’ve ever read a bunch of HubSpot’s content, you will definitely be familiar with this story.

But how is it creating motivation for you to make some sort of behavioural change? Here’s how:

• Diss the status quo – Notice how in HubSpot’s brand story (and subsequently in their content) they diss the status quo of traditional marketing and show why it isn’t working anymore? By doing this, they are showing you that by undertaking the behavioural change they want you to take (adopting Inbound Marketing) you are avoiding the pain associated with the traditional methods and how ineffective they are.
• Present the benefits – Notice how in HubSpot’s story they also present the benefits of Inbound Marketing? By doing this, they are showing you that by undertaking the behavioural change they want you to take (adopting Inbound Marketing) you will be getting the pleasure of effective marketing that people love and drives your business forward.

By telling this brand story throughout their content, they are creating the motivation people need to ditch traditional marketing and adopt an inbound marketing approach using their software.

Contrast this to the content Buffer creates and you’ll see how the brand story is important. Buffer write about everything from happiness and productivity to best practices for using social media sharing, and while this content is awesome and gets shared a lot it does very little to present the reduced pain or the enhanced pleasure using their product will give to a person and therefore does little to actually create conversions & sales.

So in order to enhance the effectiveness of your content marketing, create a brand story that both disses the status quo and presents the benefits of your product (in a non-salesy way) and tell that story subliminally across all your content pieces.

Using content marketing to create skill

All good content marketing educates the reader and creates skill, but are you creating the right kind of skill that actually encourages the kind of behaviour change you want people to take?

Again looking at HubSpot and Buffer, HubSpot’s content is all about educating you on how to do Inbound Marketing effectively. They produce blog posts, eBooks & webinars which educate you on how to blog, use social media, create lead nurturing campaigns & everything associated with Inbound Marketing.

By doing this, they are giving people the skills they need to undertake the behavioural change that HubSpot want them to make. At the end of the day, HubSpot’s goal is to get you doing Inbound Marketing using their software and by educating you on best practices for doing so, they are giving you the skills you need to make the behaviour change.

Contrast this to Buffer’s content which is also educational and enhances people’s skills, but I’d question whether they are the right skills to create behavioural change. Majority of their content is around things like productivity, happiness, etc and while it’s all awesome and has definitely given me new skills, they weren’t the kind of skills I needed to make the behavioural change they want me to make (which would be starting to use their tool to share on social media rather than my previous tool).

So in order to make your content marketing effective, make sure you are educating people in the skills they need to make the behavioural change you need them to make. To do this, think about what the switching costs would be to go from their previous method of doing things to using your product. What data or content would they have to move over and how do they do it? What people would they have to re-train and how? What else would they need to know to successfully use your product? By using content to give them this information, you are effectively giving them the skills they need to make the change you want them to make.

Using content marketing to create opportunity

The final piece of the behavioural change equation is creating an external environment in which the person has the opportunity to make the behavioural change you want them to make.

Again looking at HubSpot and Buffer, HubSpot does a great job of mapping their content to the different information needs a person has as they go through behavioural change HubSpot wants them to make (adopting Inbound Marketing).

As a prospect moves through the different stages, they have different content & offers that match the information needs at each stage. Through research, they have a deep understanding of the information needs of both the ‘Champion’ and the other people who have influence in the process and the use lead nurturing to deliver that content to the right person at the right time.

By doing this, they are giving people the opportunity they need to make the behavioural change. They are removing roadblocks that may exist from other people or environmental circumstances and paving the way for the person to use the motivation and skill they have gained to make the change.

So in order to make your content marketing more effective, make sure you understand the stages a person goes through when making the behavioural change you want them to make and ensure you have content that addresses their information needs at each stage. By doing this, you will be removing blockages that prevent them from making the change and creating for them a perfect opportunity to make the behavioural change you want them to make.

In conclusion

By understanding some of these psychological principals of behavioural change, you can begin to shape your content marketing in such a way that people who consume your content will be more likely to make the changes you want them to make (such as signing up for and using your product), therefore making your content more effective.

P.S I want to make it known that it was in no way my intention to put down the content marketing work the Buffer team do. I understand I have somewhat bastardised their content throughout this article but in actual fact the reason they don’t do the things I have said HubSpot do is because their goals are different to HubSpot’s, not because they don’t know this stuff or aren’t capable of doing it. I actually have huge admiration for them (729,000 uniques!) and personally know and admire Belle Beth Cooper (who wrote most of their content for a very long time). If any of the Buffer team are reading this, I apologise for using your content as an example to illustrate my point. You’re awesome and keep it up.

The post How to use behavioural psychology to improve your content marketing appeared first on Aaron Beashel.

But do you get the feeling that there is just so much you could be doing it’s hard to know how it all fits together to achieve that illusive ‘Growth’?

I’ve been fortunate to lead marketing & growth for several great SaaS companies, and in that time it has been my responsibility to take all this great knowledge & information and distill it into a strategic plan and a set of prioritised initiatives to which we can execute.

I haven’t always gotten it right, but over the years I have formed somewhat of a ‘framework’ for how all these different initiatives come together to drive growth. This framework focuses on combining all these different initiatives into a ‘machine’ I like to call a Growth Engine.

I wanted to present this framework for thinking about customer acquisition and retention in the hope it will give some context to all the different marketing channels and initiatives that are available to you and help you prioritise and execute the right ones at the right time.

What is a growth engine?

Let’s start with a definition – A Growth Engine is a systemised, measurable and scalable process for turning potential customers into happy, paying customers.

A Growth Engine should be a structured, machine-like process that takes into account the different paths users can follow to becoming a customer, and provides an automated, integrated process to meet their needs at each stage of the buying process and drive them towards the ultimate conversion point of becoming an happy, paying customer.

This customer-centric, machine-like approach is designed to ensure the following:

• The process of acquiring customers is aligned with the way customers buy the ?product
• The process is scalable and efficient, so that you can maximize ROI on top of funnel ?marketing activity (channels).
• The process is automated where possible, so that it can be run with as little human ?resources as possible.
• The process can be thoroughly instrumented, so that you can identify bottlenecks in the machine, prioritise activities based on those that will gives you the highest ROI and understand what channels are turning a positive ROI and scale them.

How do I design a growth engine for my SaaS product?

It’s important to note that SaaS is a product delivery model, not a business model. Salesforce, Xero and Unbounce are all SaaS products but their business models are VERY different. Salesforce has a huge team of inside sales representatives that drive their sales, Xero gets almost half of their revenue from channel sales whilst Unbounce is almost exclusively leverages touchless acquisition.

In order to design a Growth Engine for your SaaS product you first need to have a firm grasp on your business model and ensure it is aligned with the way your customers buy. I’ve never seen a business sell a $10,000 per month SaaS product on a touchless acquisiton model. It’s just unrealistic.

Assuming you have this handled however, the next step is to create a diagram of your Growth Engine. When doing this, think about all the different pathways a person can go from potential customer all the way through to happy paying customer.

To show you what I mean, I have included two examples below from different types of organisations:

Model 1: Touchless Acquisition + Inside Sales

The above diagram is an example for an organisation that uses a combination of touchless acquisition for SMB customers and inside sales for enterprise customers.

Potential customers find the product through the various channels (SEO, PR, etc) and arrive at the destinations (Marketing site, blog, etc) where they are educated about the product. From here, they can either signup for the product and start using it themselves (known as touchless acquisition) or they can request a demo or download an eBook, in which case they are put through lead nurturing and scoring processes and ultimately passed to the sales team for closing (known as inside sales).

Model 2: Touchless Acquisition + Bottom Up Sales

This diagram on the contrary, is for an organisation that uses a touchless, bottom up approach to acquisition.

Potential customers find the product through the various channels (SEO, PR, etc) and arrive at the destinations (marketing site, blog, etc) where they are educated about the product. From here, they can download a content offer and go into the lead nurturing stream or they can progress down the direct conversion path by signing up, activating and going on to upgrade to a paying account. Once a user has signed up and started receiving value from the product, an assessment on whether they are a Sales Qualified Lead (SQL) happens and if they’re qualified they are moved into the sales process in an attempt to upsell them to enterprise-level plans.

As you can see from the above diagrams, there is a fairly significant difference in the growth engine depending on your business model, target market, customer buying process, etc. Not only do the channels you use change, but the way you convert them from website visitor into paying customer is significantly different.

How do I build a Growth Engine for my SaaS product?

Now that you understand what a Growth Engine looks like and have mapped it out, it’s time to start building and optimising the engine to start driving that illusive growth.

In order to wrap your head around it and get an understanding of where to begin, it’s helpful to look at the Growth Engine in multiple ‘parts’ just like a normal engine.

I generally look at a Growth Engine as having 4 parts; channels, destinations, conversion paths & customer success.

Channels

Channels are top of funnel activities designed to reach customers where they’re hanging out (social networks, other blogs & news sites, etc.), raise awareness of your product  and drive traffic to the website.

There are a number of different channels available to SaaS marketers today and your mix will likely be unique to you and your target market, however there are some general ones that are available – with varying effectiveness – in all situations, including:

• SEO – There are more than 131 billion searches conducted everyday and in my experience, traffic from search tends to convert 3 -4 x better than other sources due to the intent visitors arriving from this channel have. Definitely worth exploring for your product.
• Direct – Direct is one of those channels that is a bit harder to measure and optimise. Depending on your product and marketing mix it can include word of mouth and customer referrals, offline campaigns & brand awareness and many others.
• PR/Guest Posting – Whilst only proper customer discovery can tell you where your target market is hanging out, it is highly likely they are reading various blogs on the web and a significant opportunity exists to leverage the audience of these bloggers to drive traffic and signups.
• Paid Acquisition – When done right, paid acquisition can be a solid source of visitors and signups, but it isn’t always easy to do it right. You need to have a thorough understanding of what a sustainable CAC is (I like to base this on time to payback as per this great article) and then you need to experiment relentlessly with the different networks & sites that have a reach into your target market.
• Viral Mechanisms – If you have a product that has an inherent viral aspect to it (I.e. people share things using your product, like files with Dropbox or designs with InVision) then it is likely you will be driving some traffic through this channel. There are a number of things that can be done to optimise this, but it all starts with measurement.
• Social Media – While customer discovery will help you understand where your target market is hanging out, it is high likely they are active on at least one or two social networks. Through the creation and curation of great content relevant to your target market you can build a strong social following that can one day turn into customers, or at the very least help you spread your content to others that will (little tricks like this can also help).

Destinations

As the above diagrams shows, channels are essentially all designed to draw users back to your destinations, which in most cases will include a marketing site as well as a blog and often even landing pages for content offers (such as eBooks, webinars, etc).

Every organisation may have a slightly different series of ‘destinations’ depending on your goals, target market, business model, etc, but generally speaking for a SaaS product they will include:

• Marketing Website – The goal of the marketing site should be to provide a user with the information they need at each stage of their buying cycle and provide a clear path to conversion (signup, request a demo, etc).
• Blog – Depending on your customer acquisition model, the blog can serve many goals. For those with primarily an Inside Sales model, the main goal should be to drive traffic from channels like search and social and expose potential customers to your various offers (free demos, ebooks, etc) in an attempt to turn them into a lead. If you have a touchless model, the blog is largely a driver of traffic which you can convert into free trial signups.
• Lead Generation Pages – Generally speaking, lead generation pages are dedicated landing pages for different offers your business is utilising to generate leads, including eBooks, webinars, toolkits & more. Their purpose is to present offers in a clear and concise manner and convince the user to give up their details in return for the promise offer.

Conversion Paths

As the example diagrams show, conversion paths are the various pathways in which website visitors can convert. Depending on your acquisition model, this could either be into a lead through some sort of offer (demo, eBook, etc) or into a free trial/freemium user.

Successful SaaS companies have multiple conversion paths> They realise that 90% of visitors to their site aren’t yet ready to purchase so they attempt capture their details through some sort of offer so they can continue to market to them and convert them into paying customers at a later date.

Direct Conversion Path

If your product utilises a touchless acquisition model, than those that are ready to purchase will likely progress through your direct conversion path. Generally speaking, this path has the following stages:

A definition of each stage is below:

• Visited Marketing Site – Visited the marketing site (I wouldn’t count visits to your blog, but your call)
• Sign Up – Signed up for your free trial or freemium offering
• Activated – Reached the ‘Aha moment’, the point where they realise the value your product adds to their lives.
• Purchased– The first time they are billed for your service, usually by becoming a paying customer beyond your trial period or by upgrading to a paid plan from your free plan.

Activities to enhance conversion rates through your direct conversion path are generally outside the scope of this article, but ideas include:

• Optimising your marketing website – This could include the addition of prominent calls to action, creating persona-centric solutions pages, increasing social proof through case studies and customer testimonials, clearly presenting pricing and more.
• Implementing lifecycle emails – This includes the design and development of a series of email workflows that get sent when users complete (or don’t complete) certain actions in your app, and are usually aimed at driving users towards completing the steps needed to reach ‘activation’.
• Implementing in-app tours or a tailored new user experience – This includes having some sort of interface unique to new users of your product that guides them through the steps they need to take to realise the value your product offers and ultimately reach Activation. Dropbox’s getting started page is a great example of a very effective onboarding experience.
• Exposing self-serve help documentation – This includes the creation and implementation of a self-serve help portal with videos and articles showing users how to perform certain actions within the application.

Lead Nurturing Path

Those that are not ready to purchase do not have an immediate need for your product and therefore will not likely progress down the direct conversion path. In this case, you should attempt to capture their information (Name, Email, Company Name, etc.) so that you can push them through a lead nurturing process, educating them on the problem your product solves, the benefits of your product offering and ultimately pushing them back into the direct conversion process (either through the touchless conversion process or through the inside sales process, depending on your acquisition model).

Patrick McKenzie has a great course on deploying a series of lead nurturing emails and it’s really not a hard thing to do, particularly considering the results it can generate. Essentially, he recommends a series of 8 emails over 30 days that increase in ‘Salesness’ as time goes on:

A simple email lead nurturing campaign could be as follows:

• The problem email – Designed to break the status quo (remember; everybody is using something else to achieve what your product does, whether it be pen & paper, excel, email, whatever) and open the reader to the possibilities of replacing there existing process with software. This email should focus on educating readers on the problems associated with their current method and should barely mention your product.
• The benefit email– A look at the benefits of using software like yours to achieve whatever it is your product achieves. This email should focus on the benefits of using your category of product (I.e. person-based analytics tools as opposed to KISSmetrics directly)?and how it can help improve their lives.
• The transition email – As mentioned before, everybody is switching from something and the switching process itself is a barrier you need to overcome. This email should focus on outlining a simple and easy process for making the switch to using software to achieve the problem.
• The tools email – An overview of the tools available to achieve what your product achieves, almost a quick buyers guide. This is the first time you introduce your product and outline why it’s superior to your competition. Include a CTA to signup for your free trial/free plan in this email.
• The case study email – A case study on how one of your customers uses your product, what problems it solves for them (tied to the problems outlined in the first email and what benefits it bring them (tied to the benefits outlined in the second email). Include a testimonial  from you customer and a CTA to signup for your free trial/free plan in this email.
• The resources email – The final email. Suggest some other eBooks, blogs, templates, kits, etc for learning more about whatever it is your product does. Include a CTA to signup for your product with a discount code or special offer as if you haven’t converted from the previous emails, a special offer can help tip them over the edge.

Whilst this is just an example campaign, you can see that the focus is on educating prospects rather than making the hard sale. Only once they have been sufficiently educated on the problems of their existing approach and the benefits of replacing it with software do you introduce your product and make an offer, at which point they are much more likely to signup for your free trial/free plan.

Assisted Conversion Path

The assisted conversion path is designed to provide those who require more information a pathway in which to get that information and ultimately convert. In most cases, this is an offer of a free demonstration of your product or in some cases a free evaluation of something (their workflow, their existing marketing, etc) where you can showcase how your product can help them with their specific use case

This path generally has the following stages:

In terms of optimising this conversion path, it is obviously possible to devise and run A/B tests in an attempt to improve the conversion rate but before you start, I would ask yourself whether the volume of demo requests warrants optimisation of this path? Unless you are receiving hundreds of demo requests each month it will likely take months for your tests to reach statistical significance and even if they do the lift in the actual number of demo requests would likely be minimal.

Retargeting Path

In order to capture users who visit and leave the website without progressing through any of the previous paths, it can be effective to implement a retargeting system that serves advertisements to users as they move across other sites on the web.

Considering these people have already visited your site and not converted, it is likely that they are not yet ready to purchase and blasting them with ads right after they leave the site isn’t likely to change that. Instead, use retargeting to promote a top of funnel content offers (like an eBook or an email course) and drive people to landing pages where they can download your content and be entered into the lead nurturing path.

Customer Success

As the example diagrams show, the work of the Growth Engine does not stop once the user has upgraded and become a paying customer, the focus then shifts into making sure sure they become a happy, paying customer.

There is a two-fold focus here; retain paying customers by preventing them from churning and activating your most engaged customers and turning them into evangelists.

Retention

Customer Retention (or Churn) is one the key factors of a successful SaaS business. As per the goals, it is one of they key ways to increase MRR and also has a significant effect on the CAC – LTV ratio, which is another critical success factor tied to the unit economics of your SaaS product.

Consider this example: If you have 10,000 customers with an annual ARPU of $500 and your Churn rate is 15%, you are losing $750,000 worth of potential revenue every year. If you can reduce that Churn rate to 5%, the lost revenue drops to $250,000, netting you an extra $500,000 per year. 

I have previously written a post outlining some ways to help reduce churn in your SaaS product, but as an overview:

• Implement customer marketing – Using your analytics tool, find out what features of your product are being used by your most engaged, happy customers and build a profile of a ‘happy customer’. Next use the marketing channels available to you (triggered emails, customer focused blogs, support sites, transaction emails, etc.) to promote the use of these features and drive people towards becoming a ‘happy customer’.
• Utilise your pricing structure – Most people look at their pricing structure and try to optimise it to get people to signup or upgrade to a higher plan, but there is also a great opportunity to utilise your pricing structure to reduce churn. I see so many SaaS companies who base their pricing tiers on product usage (# of contacts, # of emails sent, # of projects, etc) and while value based pricing is definitely a smart idea, I would suggest introducing more axes to your pricing structure in order to prevent people from downgrading their plan just because of changes within their business. Is there a feature that people absolutely love and couldn’t do without? How could you structure that feature in your pricing plans to prevent people from downgrading their plan? Worth thinking about.

Referral/Evangelism

Word of mouth and referrals are one of the most powerful customer acquisition channels you can activate, not only because of their ability to scale at a low cost but because of the persuasion ability of a referral from a friend or trusted source.

The idea of activities in the Referral/Evangelism part of the Growth Machine is to activate those customers that love your product and get them to refer others.

There are a number of ways you can do this to great effect but that’s for another post (or an upcoming eBook I’m creating), however here’s a few ideas:

• Implement a referral program – A referral program is a methodology that allows your existing customers to share your product with a friend, usually in return for something. There are a number of key factors in a good referral program, including:
  • Two way rewards – When implementing a referral program, you need to make sure there is a reward for both users. Dropbox’s infamous ‘refer a friend and get 2GB of storage free’ is a great example of rewarding the referrer, but you also need to incentivise the referree to take up the offer with something like an extended free trial, free projects, more storage or whatever.
  • Make it easy – Like any process you want users to complete, it is critical you reduce friction through the steps of referral. From my experience, giving people their own unique URL’s to share is the best way to do this as it allows them to share through whatever channels they feel most appropriate (email, Facebook, Twitter, etc) rather than having to try type people’s emails into some dialog box.
  • Optimise for conversions – Each step in the referral process is a potential dropoff point, so make you use all the tricks in the book to optimise conversions along the way. One company doing this really well is Freshbooks, who have created a personalised landing page for every unique referral URL generated that contains all the features of a great landing page, including a clear link to the referring source (Aaron Beashel has invited you to join Freshbooks), a clear value proposition, social proof, on-page signup form & more.
  • Instrument It – Depending on your product and how passionate people are, this can be a huge growth channel for you so make sure you have the ability to optimise it (if you can reach the illusive viral factor = 1 than you are laughing all the way to IPO). Make sure you have instrumented each step of the referral process (number of invites sent, invites converted, subsequent invites sent, etc) so that you can deploy initiatives to optimise the conversion rates at each stage. Depending on your scale, small gains in conversion rates at each of these stages can mean BIG gains in # of customers acquired through the program.
  • Implement channel sales – Whilst probably not traditionally thought of as a ‘referral’ tactic, in my opinion channel sales is a massive opportunity to create a one to many effect if you have the right market. HubSpot initially sold their product direct to customers like most SaaS businesses do, however an idea from a sales representative to implement channel sales changed all that. Initially shut down by CEO Brian Halligan, the employee was persistent and Halligan eventually agreed to let him work on it in his own spare time. He did, and these days 20% of new HubSpot customers now from the channel (which primarily consists of small marketing agencies selling the product and inbound marketing consulting and execution services on top of it). It’s worth thinking about who else is selling products and services to your customer base? And what value could you potentially add to these people’s lives that would make them want to sell your product as well?

As I mentioned in the introduction to this post, the point was not to provide an in-depth how-to of different growth hacks or marketing initiatives you should be implementing, but to provide a framework for understanding how all these different channels and initiatives all lead to that illusive ‘growth’ and how you can prioritise them based on the things that are going to return the quickest ROI with the least output.

I hope this has helped you achieved that.

I would love to hear your thoughts and feedback in the comments below.

The post How to create a Growth Engine for your SaaS product appeared first on Aaron Beashel.

However too often those responsible for optimising a Growth Engine focus on the best practices out there. They hear see the tactics and the stories listed on places like Growthhackers.com and think these are the things they need to be doing.

While all these stories are great for inspiration and can sometimes work for you, what works better is having an optimised process for uncovering what growth ‘experiments’ are most likely to work in your particular situation and carrying out those experiments in a minimal way.

To help understand this, I have documented and presented the framework I utilise for optimising Growth Engines.

1. Define a single metric to focus on

To begin with, a single metric to focus on must be identified. This is critical in order to ensure your limited marketing resources are highly focused on an area identified to return the highest ROI in the shortest amount of time. Using your analytics system you should be able to identify where the biggest blockage point is and make that the single metric worth focusing on. Often this is in your acquisition funnel (I.e. Signup – Activation Rate) but it can also be reducing your Churn rate or increasing referrals.

It is also important to set an exit criteria at which point in time you move on to the next key metric. This can either be by achieving the goal state or hitting the timebox limit.

• Goal state – A goal state must be set in order for you to map your progress. A goal state should be specific, measureable and attainable such as ‘50% Signup – Activation rate’.
• Time box – An exit criteria of a specific time may also be implemented. This is because testing and experiments generally suffer from diminishing returns, in that the closer you get to a perfect state the less effective your experiments become. Set a timebox limit that allows for enough experiments to be carried out but keeps progress in line with business growth projections. I know at HubSpot Brian Balfour and his team generally focus on 1 key metric in 30 – 90 day periods.

An effective way of setting goal state and timeboxes is to visualize the funnel in an excel spreadsheet and make modifications to the metric in question to see its effects on the rest of the funnel, and then comparing this to growth objectives.

2. Identify the blockage points.

Once a single metric is identified, the next step is to breakdown the steps/stages of that particular micro-funnel (For instance, if the Activation Rate is the identified metric then the ‘micro-steps’ to that would whatever steps you’ve identified as your activation steps).

By looking at this funnel (and deeper into the process if possible), you can identify the key areas where people are falling off and prioritize experiments in those areas.

3. Identify reasons for dropoff

Once the key areas for drop off have been identified, it is important to get feedback from customers as to why this is occurring rather thanjust devise experiments based on unfounded assumptions of what is happening.

There are multiple ways this can be achieved, some of which are outlined below:

• Call – A customer lifecycle analytics package like Kissmetrics will allow you to pull up a list of users who got stuck in an identified state (I.e. Have done event ‘Signed Up’ but have not done event ‘Activated’). Assuming your recording your customers phone numbers at signup you can potentially call the customers to ascertain deep levels of feedback on what went wrong.
• Email – Using the same list, you can potentially email those who got stuck and either provide them a link to a survey or better yet, just give them one or two questions in the email and get them to simply reply to you.
• Qualaroo – Qualaroo is a micro-survey tool that can display a ‘mini-survey’ to a user somewhere on the page. I personally find Qualaroo great for capturing feedback from people who I don’t have contact details, like those who visited the website but didn’t signup.

The questions you ask are going to vary significantly based on the problem you are trying to solve, but some generic questions I have asked before that help give insights at different parts of the acquisition, retention, referral funnel include:

• What are you hoping to achieve by using <product name>? – Ask to people who have just arrived at your site. Should give you insights into what messaging & copy to use to appeal to their pain points & goals and increase conversions.
• Is there anything preventing you from signing up? – Ask to people who have viewed a few pages on your site but not yet signed up. Should give insights into missing information or points of friction in the conversion process which can be addressed to increase the visit site – signup conversion rate.
• What other tools were you considering before choosing our tool? – Ask to people who have just signed up as a way of improving Visit Site – Signup conversion rate. Should give you insights into whether people are comparison shopping, who they are comparing you against and whether you need to take action (create comparison content, refine messaging, etc) to stand above the identified competitors.
• What persuaded you to choose us over other tools? – Ask to people who have just signed up. Should give insights into the key choice drivers behind your product, and can help you know what content, messages, etc to make prominent on our site to improve Visit Site – Signup conversion rate.
• What prevented you from <insert Activation actions here>? – Ask to people who signed up but didn’t take the necessary actions to reach Activation. Should give insights into the friction points preventing people from activating which can be addressed to increase Signup – Activation rate.
• What prompted you to upgrade your account? – Ask to people who have just upgraded to one of your paying accounts. Should give into the triggers that cause people to upgrade which can help you devise initiatives to increase Signup – Billed conversion rates.
• What prompted you to downgrade your account? – Ask to people who have recently cancelled their account or downgraded to your free plan. This should give insight into the triggers that cause people to downgrade which can help you devise initiatives to reduce churn.

4. Develop falsifiable hypotheses and define experiments

Once the dropoff points have been identified and reasons are known, you can then create falsifiable hypotheses and design experiments that when implemented, should hopefully enhance the key metric.

If you’re not familiar with the term Falsifiable Hypotheses, they are hypotheses that are specifically worded so that they can either be ‘proven’ or falsified’. A good example would be ‘Adding customer logos to the signup page will increase trust and improve signup rate to 20%’.

As you can see here, this one sentence defines the experiment you are going to run as well as the expected result. Ash Maurya provides a brilliant template for creating and documenting falsifiable hypotheses and i’d thoroughly recommending checking it out over at his blog.

5. Carry out experiments

This aspect will differ largely depending on the problem you are trying to solve and the experiment you’ve devised, and could be anything from running A/B tests on your website copy through to revising the onboarding process of your application.

The key thing to remember here is to do the minimal thing you possibly can to validate your hypothesis and then scale it from there if it works.

A good example of this is AirBnB’s infamous photography hack.  Their initial hypothesis was that properties with professional photos would get more listings, but instead of going out and hiring a team of photographers to take professional photos of every listing, they recruited a few freelance photographers to snap some shots of a few places and put them on the listings. They then measured how many bookings these properties got against their booking history and similar properties in the area and found that properties with professional photography got 2-3x more bookings.

So when carrying out experiments, remember to not to go all out designing big, complex features and systems. Instead, think about whats the minimal thing you can do to test whether your hypothesis is correct or not. Often this may be unscalable things that involve manual processing, but these can always be automated and scaled later once you know it’s going to be worth investing in.

6. Record results and learnings

Regardless of whether an experiment returns a positive result in the key metric, it is important to document the results and any learnings you may have received from it. These learnings help you develop your customer knowledge, which in turn helps you create more insightful, knowledgeable hypotheseses that are likely to have a positive result in the future.

6. Iterate and repeat

The final step of the process is to use the learnings and results from the previous experiment to iterate on the overall plan, modifying any upcoming experiment or changing priorities based on the new information.

The post A framework for optimising your Growth Engine appeared first on Aaron Beashel.