Transcript for: Principles of Scaling SaaS Marketing
If you're wanting to
generate more pipeline, if you're looking to scale
revenues for your SaaS business, chances are you're now
getting really serious about investing in marketing. Now here's the thing with SaaS marketing. SaaS marketing and marketing in general is a very, very broad body of knowledge and broad body of practice. There's brand marketing,
content marketing, demand generation, community marketing, customer marketing, and more. And when you are at a large scale company, you can have hundreds of people actually doing all this work. But if you're in the early stages, then you have to be very, very thoughtful about what are the essentials that you really invest in,
because you cannot do it all. You have to make certain bets. Based on all of my
experience in being in SaaS, and actually scaling SaaS companies, and being in the MarTech category, in this episode I'm gonna walk you through the three principles you
absolutely need to know to pick the absolute most important aspects of SaaS marketing, so that you can accelerate the
growth of your SaaS business. Intro. (upbeat music) What's up everybody? Welcome to Unstoppable. I'm TK, and on this channel
I help SaaS founders like you grow your SaaS businesses faster with an unstoppable strategy. Now, if you are new to
this channel, welcome. I drop an episode every single Sunday with actionable strategies and tactics on how to actually accelerate the growth of your SaaS business. If you haven't already, be sure
to hit the subscribe button and that bell icon, that
way you'll get notified every single time I drop an
episode with the TK energy. If you are already part of this community, my people, welcome back. I really wanna thank you, we just hit a million
views on this channel. We just hit 28,000 subscribers. Seriously, from the bottom of my heart and from my entire team,
thank you for being with us and thank you for giving us the privilege to support you and to
serve you in this way. It's been an incredible journey and we have so much more planned for you. Now, back to business. I remember when I was SVP
of strategy at Marketo, they had just acquired my company ToutApp, and Marketo is a marketing
automation company, and so obviously we took
marketing very seriously. I remember seeing the overall org chart for the marketing team alone, and it was nearly a hundred people, and there were about 450 million ARR, so rightfully so, but it was huge. And I was like, oh my God, there's so many people doing marketing. And it was eye-opening for
me because I was like, wow, there's people that are going so deep into product marketing, into pricing, into SEO, into demand generation, customer marketing, and the list went on. I contrasted that to ToutApp when we were building out our mini brand, when we were driving to scale revenues, we were a small crack team of
bad asses running marketing. And we were actually doing so
much above our weight grade. It made me realize just
how important it is for founders to pick the
right essentials of marketing instead of getting overwhelmed
on trying to do everything and being neither here nor there. So in this episode, I'm gonna walk you through the three key
pillars of SaaS marketing, the three principles you
absolutely need to know, so that when you're in the early stages and you're starting to
invest in marketing, you don't get overwhelmed and you prioritize the
right aspects of marketing to drive growth, so that you can scale, so that you can raise that next round or get to profitability, and so that you earn the right to one day have a hundred person marketing team doing all of it perfectly. So if you're excited to dig in, go ahead and smash a like button
for the YouTube algorithm. It really likes it when you do that. Let's go to principle number one. So principle number one, the most important aspect of marketing that applies to SaaS today, no matter what anyone else tells you, this is the most valuable thing that has worked for me
for nearly 15 years, continues to be the
workhorse is direct response. And a lot of people don't quite understand what direct response is
or think it's old school, but direct response
marketing is essentially where you are signing people
up and they're becoming leads. They're going into a mailing list. So whether it's through ads,
or you're posting on LinkedIn or on Twitter, you're providing value, and then you're saying, hey, by the way, if you want more, sign
up for our mailing list, or sign up for this lead magnet. This is by far the best way
to actually drive demand and actually build
momentum in your marketing, and actually focusing on this, getting the right lead magnet in place, building out that mailing list
is super, super important. And the reason for this is there's a stat where someone has to look at your brand at least seven times for
them to actually take action and think about buying. If you are just posting and
you're doing brand marketing or maybe you're doing a
little bit of advertising and you're saying, come join the trial, unless they see it seven times, unless they hear from
you at least seven times from different angles,
it's never gonna happen, which is why getting direct response, where people actually take a response on whatever they're seeing
in terms of your marketing getting on your mailing list so that you're actually nurturing them, and you're getting back to them at least seven times and providing value, that is the best way to actually
do marketing in SaaS today. And so that's principle number one. And the power in this is whether you are
product led or sales led, it doesn't matter, when you are nurturing the people that become leads,
you can either direct them into the product and provide value, or you can direct them into
sales and provide value. Either way, it's super valuable in actually getting that
attention and nurturing them, getting those seven touches and getting people to pay attention in a very, very crowded market. And so direct response still
continues to be the best way. And I've seen a lot of people make mistake where they just go into brand like, oh, let me just post and give a lot of value. Yes, it will give you a lot of value, but you will not be able to
get to those seven touches. So direct response coupled with
getting your brand out there is super powerful, so you wanna
make sure you stay grounded in direct response marketing. So that's pillar number one. Pillar number two is what
I call content marketing. Well, everyone calls it content marketing, but I really think of it
as education marketing. And I believe that, especially
in the early stages, there's gonna be competitors,
it's a noisy world out there. And so you are likely, no
matter how much you've raised or how much capital you have, you are likely not going to be able to outspend the competition, whether it's a competing
product or just mind share, your buyers are being sold
to by multiple companies from multiple problems. So you will not be able to outspend them, that is a default truth in
being in an early stage. And so I believe that if you want to compete
and get their mind share, you need to rise above with
a differentiating message, you need to out teach the competition. And so I'm a big believer in putting educational content out there, whether it's teaching them about
the problem you're solving, the macro trends that are there, the impending doom that's happening, like how others are actually using your product to get success, and using that as a form
of education marketing, all of these can become pieces of content where you educate your buyers. And posting that on LinkedIn,
posting that on Twitter, posting that into communities,
building your own community where you can post that and share that, starting a YouTube channel even, all of that is a form
of education marketing and content marketing. And the best piece of this
is when you start doing this in the right way, instead of just saying, here's
much educational content, you can actually say, oh, by the way, if you want more, then sign
up for our mailing list, and then we'll send you more info. And so this actually
builds on top of each other where you can actually use the content and the education you are providing to actually drive them to generate leads, which you can then nurture them on, and eventually get it into your product or into your sales team, whichever makes sense for your motion in the market that you're serving. So that's principle number two. There's so many different
ways to get growth, so many different ways to do marketing, and when you have the
a hundred person team, you will likely do all of them,
'cause all of them matter, but if you're starting out
and you starting to say, cool, let's invest in marketing,
let's pick the right pieces, first one is direct response, generate the leads and nurture them, get to those seven touches. Second one is put content out there and use the content to generate leads, and they can build off of
each other and compound. Now I do have a third one, but
before I go to number three, let me just pause here for a second. Are you starting to see the power in this? Are you starting to see the
power in actually focusing on these key essential
components in your SaaS marketing so that you don't get overwhelmed and you don't end up being
neither here nor there by splitting your attention on 500 things that may not yield results,
but focusing on the tried and true pieces to really
punch above your weight grade? If you start to see the power in this, can I just get a yes
in the comments below? Also, smash our like button
for the YouTube algorithm, it really likes it when
you do that, it's awesome. Also, if you are in the
stages of figuring out how to drive growth
for your SaaS business, I have a completely free, five point SaaS growth strategy guide. You don't have to go anywhere right now, I'll link to it below, and
I'll tell you more about it at the end of this episode. But let's go to principle number three. Principle number three,
this is one of the things where I wish more people
used this more often. So if you're doing content and
you're putting it out there, and then you're doing direct response where you're generating those leads, and then you're nurturing them
and getting them into sales, or your product, or more education and value, right, eventually they are going to buy. That's what we're looking to do, and so the content drives the leads, the leads drives the revenues. And this is a piece where people don't take advantage of this, but when you actually
get intentional about it, it's even in the early stages
and in the late stages, it is incredibly powerful. And principle number three
is referral marketing. Referral marketing is basically taking all your happy customers and
programmatically going to them and saying, hey, if you like our product, if
you like what we're doing, can you please take
this educational content and share it with someone
that's a peer of yours or someone that would
like our product as well? Because the thing is, while
you're going out there and putting out your
content under your brand or under your own name, while you're trying to generate leads, there's a certain amount
of trust that's missing. So you're gonna have to
get those seven touches, you're gonna have to
do a lot of iterations to really get people to take notice. But if a person already using your product takes your educational content and shares it with a peer in the industry, someone that already
trusts them and say, hey, you gotta check this out,
this is really powerful, these guys are really thinking about this problem differently. Then all of a sudden this is
going to move 10 times faster. And so this referral marketing
piece will drive more traffic to your content, that
will drive more leads, and these buyers will buy more. And that's the third piece that I don't see enough companies using, but when they do, it's so, so powerful. So to summarize, if you're
in the early stages, you're investing in
marketing, it's overwhelming, you don't have a 100 person team, nor should you at the early stages, you just can't justify that spend, even if you have the money. Well, you should focus on, principle number one is direct response, generate those leads, nurture them. Number two is put out educational content, out teach the competition. And number three, as you are
starting to generate customers, take their success stories, mobilize them, give them the educational content, and get them to share it on your behalf so that they can educate the market, build that trust faster for you, and get you more leads and more customers. And you follow these three
things in the early stages, what I did at ToutApp, this is what so many companies
that I advise and coach do, it is incredible in
mobilizing your growth. And now, you know exactly
the three pieces to focus on. What you may not know is how
all these pieces come together or what are the other
ways you can drive growth for your SaaS business. This is why I credit my five point SaaS growth strategy guide that's completely free. Just go to getunstoppable.com/strategy. Getunstoppable.com/strategy, you go there, just fill out your email, and boom you'll get
access to it right away. It is an incredibly powerful guide and highlights the five key
ways you can drive growth for your SaaS business
to accelerate your path to next stage of growth. Also, if you got value from this video, please smash that like button
for the YouTube algorithm. It really likes it when you do that. If you have a fellow founder,
a fellow team member, a practitioner, like if you're part of a
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serve the community, so like I can just share in
the journey of the things that I learned, and the mistakes I made, and the things I broke through, so that you don't have the
same issues, is why we do it. And also, I drop an episode
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getunstoppable.com/strategy for that five point guide. Will go much more into detail on exactly how to drive growth
for your SaaS business. And as a meta item, if you're still here, right, you're probably thinking, wow, this guy actually
practices what he preaches. You're right, I am all about out teaching anyone else in the market, I'm all about sharing
everything that I've learned. So I do the content, I run this channel, and at the end of the videos, I say, hey, if you want more completely free, go get my five point guide,
which where you become a lead and we'll give you even
more educational content, we have over 200 episodes, so we'll share some of those with you, we'll link to the most important ones, we'll keep giving you value. And then down the line, if
you wanna work together, then you'll be able to do that. And of course, all of our
clients that we work with, we ask them like, hey, do you have other founders that will get value from the program? And they refer us all the time. So I practice what I preach. So maybe you're seeing the meta, you stayed all the way to the end, so I thought I'd include that in there. Anyway, go and grab a copy of that guide. Smash our light button,
hit that subscribe button. And lastly, remember, everyone needs a strategy for
their life and their business. When you are with us, yours, it's gonna be unstoppable. I'm TK and I'll see you
in the next episode. (gentle instrumental music)