Natalie Luneva is a growth and leadership coach for SaaS founders. She worked with over one hundred companies. Drawing from her 10+ years of marketing and team leadership experience, Natalie helps bootstrapped SaaS founders scale their startups, get unstuck and grow as successful leaders. PinterestOfficial Site
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10 of the best community platforms for online entrepreneurs
Facebook and Slack used to be the best community platforms for online businesses: they are free, everyone is using them, and they are easy to use. However, new online community platforms emerged to offer better interface, more customization opportunities, and the chance to create your own mini social network.
In this article, we will cover what online community platforms are, why software companies should build communities, how to get started, and which solution to choose out of hundreds of options.
What is an online community platform?
Online community platforms are tools that allow users to create profiles, share content and connect with other people. These platforms are often used for exchanging information about topics of interest, connecting groups with similar interests, or bringing the same product users together.
Similar platforms are usually used by community managers, marketing managers, customer support managers, and product managers to engage users, retain customers, facilitate the support process, and gather product feedback.
Why should SaaS startups build communities?
Online communities are a way for people to come together and chat about topics of common interest. They form a dynamic social network that is both engaging and informative, as well as users on online community engagement platforms are more likely to convert and stay loyal to the brand.
For users, communities are an ideal place to go and get advice from people who have been in their shoes.
How do I start an online community?
Starting an online community is more than just creating a Facebook group or a Slack channel. Online community platforms are designed to help you organize, grow and manage communities of people around shared interests. They come with the tools that can help you create and manage a community, like:
– A discussion forum with the ability to start new threads and reply to existing ones,
– Ability to provide incentives for members such as badges and points.,
– Opportunity to send private messages,
-Organize events, and more.
All you need to do is to pick a solution from the best community platforms we list below, sign up for a free trial or a demo, and understand which one meets your requirements.
Which are the best online community platforms?
Every business that is planning to launch a community is unique and gives importance to a unique set of features. Below we are discussing the 10 best community platforms and comparing them in terms of
key features,
onboarding,
support,
pricing,
free trial opportunity.
Let’s start comparing!
Further reading: How 13 SaaS Companies Use Community Marketing to Grow
#1 Higher Logic, Member and Customer Engagement Platform
Higher Logic is the best community platform software for membership organizations and software companies who prefer a highly customizable solution. They don’t offer fixed pricing plans but instead, they offer use cases and scalable solutions just for your industry.
Key features
Mobile app
Discussions
Libraries
Ads
Polls
Event calendar
Directory
Admin- and user-created blogs
Pros
Webinars on Youtube
Email, phone support
Cons
No free trial
No free version
Pricing
Customized pricing, no pricing plans
#2 Tribe, Customizable Community Platform
Tribe is one of the best free online community platforms that offers paid plans with advanced features as well. It’s for businesses in different industries and helps engage and delight customers.
Key features
Unlimited spaces
Theme customization
Custom domain
Analytics
Moderation
Pros
Free version
Email and chat support
Cons
No phone support
No live webinars
No onboarding for Basic and Plus users
Pricing
Basic $0
Plus $49/m
Premium $199/m
Enterprise
#3 Vanilla Forums, Online Community and Customer Forum Software
Vanilla Forums is one of the best community platforms for
customer support leaders who want to enable self-service and minimize support costs
customer experience executives who want to level up customer experience,
products managers who want to gather product feedback,
marketing and brand champions who want to build loyalty and increase revenue.
Key features
Pageviews
Staff users
Community Essentials Bundle
Integration Bundle
Developer Bundle
Analytics
Forums
Knowledge Base
Q & A
Ideation
Gamification
Themes
Moderation
Groups
Events
Pros
Email, chat, phone support
Cons
No free trial
No free version
Pricing
Customized pricing, no pricing plans
#4 Ning, Online Community Building Platform
Ning helps users create their own social network and stay connected.
Key features
Up to 100,000 members
Up to 100 GB storage
Drag & drop builder
Photo & video
Events & posts
Activity feed
Multiple blogs and forums
Customized groups and members onboarding
Analytics & GA tools
Broadcast messages
Integration with social networks
Social sharing
SEO tools
Ability to run ads
Custom domain mapping
Custom HTML design
RSS feeds on homepage
API access
Pros
14-day free trial
Feature demos on Youtube
Cons
No live chat and call support for Basic and Performance users
Pricing
Basic $25/m
Performance $49
Ultimate $99
#5 Mighty Networks, Community, Course, and Membership Platform
Mighty Networks helps businesses create communities, build online courses, run events, live stream, and more.
Key features
Native live streaming and video
Chat and messaging
Events and Zoom integration
Paid memberships
Live cohort course creation
Analytics and Member data
Zapier API & workflows
Pros
14-day free trial
Feature demos and workshops on Youtube
Cons
No analytics for Community plan users
Support mostly via Help Center
Pricing
Community plan $33
Business Plan $99
Mighty Pro
#6 Plush Forums
Plush Forums builds discussion forums for everyone.
Key features
Real-time everything
Integrated blog
Private conversation
Live notifications
Mobile app
Free SSL
Simple editor
Powerful search
Events
Questions
Polls
Smart history
Custom profiles
Member directory
Paid subscriptions
Image gallery
Document repository
Pre-moderation
Professional localization
Pros
Free 14-day trial
Email support
Unlimited pageviews
Unlimited members and staf
Cons
No phone or chat support
No webinars
Pricing
Small $49/m
Medium $75/m
Large $120/m
#7 inSided, Customer Success Community Software
inSided combines customer community content with a knowledge base and integrates across the platform.
Key features
Q&A
Knowledge base
Product updates
Gamification
Events and registrations
In-app embeddable
User groups
Ideation and customer feedback
CRM and ticketing integration
Pros
Webinars and podcasts
Email and community support for all plan users
Cons
No free version or free trial
No chat or phone support for Professional and Business Plan users
Pricing
No pricing information
#8 Hivebrite, Online Community Platform
Hivebrite is a solution for community managers and helps them build, manage, and engage their audience.
Key features
Import and export member data
Powerful search and targeting filters
Mass updates
Profile-update campaign
Profile update tracker
Full moderation
Integrated CMS
Visibility
RSS feed
Up-to-date content
Calendar
Invitation emails
Ticketing
Online payments
Social networks integration
Email campaigns
Powerful targeting
Automatic newsletter
In-app notifications
Mobile push notifications
Pros
Email support
Cons
No free trial
No free version
Pricing
No pricing plans
#9 Muut, Discussion system
Muut is a discussion system and allows businesses to organize lively discussions and make users happy. Muut is one of the best community platforms in terms of free trial as they allow you to try all features for free for 14 days without credit card.
Key features
Unlimited traffic
Unlimited users
28+ languages
Ad-free
Customized style
Private messaging
Additional admins
Pros
Free 14-day trial
Email support
FAQ / Forum / Demos / Documentation
Cons
No onboarding
No phone/chat support
No webinars
Pricing
Mini $16/m
Small $36/m
Medium $96/m
Large $486/m
#10 Panion, Community Engagement Platform
Panion helps businesses invite people to a private social network, build connections based on common interests and goals, enable activities and events. This is one of the best community platforms that offers a free trial with no credit card required.
Key features
Landing page
Activity board
Events and member gatherings
Member searching and filtering
Detailed member profiles
Direct messaging
Public and private groups
Pros
30-day free trial
Tech/community support
Platform onboarding
Migration assistance
Email support
Cons
No live webinars
No phone/chat support
Pricing
Starting $38
Growing $79
Scaling
Conclusion
Now you are familiar with the best community platforms in the market and know how they are different from each other. If you are a startup, you might want to get started with Ning, Panion, or Mighty Networks because they offer a free trial. Or if you don’t plan on investing in a solution for now, you might use Tribe’s free version for a while.
Growing businesses and enterprises will probably pay attention to other factors like support, onboarding, and a set of features.
If you don’t know where to start and don’t have time to try multiple products, reach out to me for a free consultation call. We will create a roadmap that will help you launch the dream community for you and your users.
The post 10 of the best community platforms for online entrepreneurs first appeared on Natalie Luneva.
from Natalie Luneva https://www.natalieluneva.com/blog/10-of-the-best-community-platforms-for-online-entrepreneurs/
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62 – Scaling SaaS Companies from VC’s View, with Arthur Nobel
On this episode of the podcast, I interview Arthur Nobel and we discuss scaling SaaS companies.
Arthur is a Principal at Knight Capital – an investment firm that specialises in B2B software businesses. He is the author of the best-selling book Leaders of Growth and host of the Leaders of Growth Podcast. He is passionate about enabling entrepreneurs to realize their vision.
Show Notes
The inspiration behind his book
I co-authored it with two people from our firm. We have all been entrepreneurs and now in our roles as investors we talk with many companies. What we discovered is companies sometimes struggle with scaling so we dived into the reasons for that. We found out that there is a lot of content surrounding product-market fit, there is also a lot of content around a company doing an IPO and the founder reflecting on the journey. We have seen that there is not a lot information on the stage of going from $1million – $25million ARR (annual recurring revenue).
The structure of the book
We interviewed about 47 founders, operators and experts that are well known in the SaaS community such as Sean Ellis, Mark Roberge and Nathan Latka. We looked at Tribes of Mentors from Tim Ferriss which is a really great book and we chose the Q&A format which makes the book easy to read.
Levers of scaling a SaaS company
We tried to come up with a framework where we set marketing, sales and finance which we call heavy burdens of the company. We then look at the dimensions you can scale as we examine scaling from the organizational angle rather than something like do more SEO or do more paid ads.
If you really look at it from the department or company perspective, you find out that there are six dimensions you have to plan ahead for. In our case these are:
1. Objectives: What is the main function of a department in a given stage. For instance, in an early stage company HR is focused on recruiting whereas if you are at a bit later stage you are more focused on HR process.
Umbr (5.15): What KPIs are important for a department and a company at a certain stage. If you are in a product-market fit stage or early scaling stage, LTV/CAC ratio is not so important whereas if you are a Series B or C stage company, it is very important.
3. What people do you need and for what roles: People in a Series A type of company are very different from a Series C type of company which is different from a seed company.
Documentation: You need standardized documentation so that everyone is on the same page. If you grow from 20 to 100 people, you really see companies getting more siloed and from there you will see the performance per employee really dwindle
The processes we need at the various states: When people think of scaling, it is often perceived as if you have to do scaling and there isn’t a lot of flavour in it so you need to know the state you are in the scaling continuum and do you need to have repeatable or predictable processes.
Tooling for each stage: If you are a customer success department you might need insights when you are in Series C state while if you are in Series A state you might do well with Slack for instance.
What triggers should founders be aware of?
You have to understand what makes sense for your business however I think there are some fixed trigger points such as the number of customers for instance. If you are in customer success you can do everything even in Excel or Google sheets for about 50 customers. When you move up to 100 customers, that is a trigger point that perhaps it is getting too complex and you need more people to manage it properly.
You also have revenue, if you cross the $10 million ARR mark, it opens different levers of growth for instance you can do acquisitions whereas if you are in the $2million ARR type of business, you can still acquire companies but it is not very logical. When you cross a certain level of revenue, you can hire different type of people, the really great people don’t usually want to join early type startups because they find it too risky.
The customer segments also matter for instance, if you decide to serve the enterprise segment, you have to be very professional right from the start as there is less room for trial and error.
How to enhance growth between the seed stage and the Series A stage
If you look into objectives, for HR it is very important to focus on recruiting because that is what you are going to need in the next 12 months. If you look for finance, you might need a controller because you want to start focusing on the reporting for the Series A. If you look from a sales perspective, it is very important to show some repeatable processes so that you can raise your Series A.
If you look into data, it is important not to put so much weight on certain metrics. If you are Pre-Series A, it is very important to focus on retention and on engagement. It is good to measure LTV/CAC but it is very hard to explain that if you are 2-year-old company, to say that you have a lifetime value of 8 years. Focus more on things that show you have product-market fit and afterwards go-to-market fit and some other metrics can come later.
In terms of people, one of the things I have seen is usually in the beginning you initially start with “T shaped people” which refers to people with a broad skillset but it is not very deep. Once you move across stages, the “T” gets really deeper and the roles are a little less broad till it eventually becomes like an “I shape form” which is very deep but not broad at all.
In the stage where most of the listeners are, I feel they should focus on the trailblazer type of people who have an entrepreneurial type of background and who have a broad skillset. Up to your Serie A, you start getting a few more senior people in your team who have done it before.
If you are in the seed stage, It is very important not to promise someone who is doing well in marketing that he is definitely going to be the CMO or the CFO because someone you need at a $5million – $10million ARR company is a different type of person with a different type of skills so take that into account with the titles you give.
Other important observations listeners need to be aware of
I think you need to define what you need to have in order to raise a Series A round because I feel there are some misunderstandings in what the entry points are. In your seed round, it is important to demonstrate product-market fit so you need to show minimal size of replicability in terms of sales. You should also be able to explain that if for instance you invest €5000, it will lead to X and Y in growth and you have a certain defined process for that.
You also need to show that you have a strong position to win in your niche going forward because that is important to raise Series A.
From Series A onward, it starts getting more about building replicability and expanding your market and really scaling.
I have seen that once you pass $1 million ARR and you start raising your Series A, there are usually lots of options and you get into the paradox of choice where it seems like you can do everything but you need to focus.
A simple growth framework is if you define your strategy, always start with a winning aspiration. What is your vision? What do you want to achieve? You need to define how you want to win and where you want to play.
There are a couple of options to grow concerning where you want to play, given the audience is early stage, you can focus on organic growth and growth you can do yourself or together with raising capital.
You need to look at the industries you are in now and where you intend to go. You need to look at the customer segment such as SME, Mid-Market or Enterprise. You also need to look into distribution models such as how do you do sales, are you more marketing focused or product-led growth or are you more channel sales and map those. In terms of products, do you perceive you will go more deep or wider.
After you have written these down, you start looking at how many things are you going to do. Investors usually expect you to keep doing the same thing and maybe add a few bets on top on that.
Resources
Arthur on LinkedIn
Leaders of Growth: 47 firsthand stories on Growing Companies Across Series A to C
Leaders of Growth Podcast
Knight Capital – We help founders from Series A to B and beyond
– Connect with Natalie on Facebook
– Join SaaS Boss Facebook Community
The post 62 - Scaling SaaS Companies from VC's View, with Arthur Nobel first appeared on Natalie Luneva.
from Natalie Luneva https://www.natalieluneva.com/podcast/62-scaling-saas-companies-from-vcs-view-with-arthur-nobel/
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61 – Fundraising 101 For Founders, with Michal Cardamone
On this episode of the podcast, I interview Michael Cardamone and we discuss fundraising tips for founders.
Michael Cardamone is the CEO/Managing Partner at Forum Ventures (formerly Accleprise) which is a B2B SaaS focused seed fund & pre-seed accelerator with locations in SF, NYC & Toronto
Show Notes
The type of companies that will benefit from raising rounds
Raising money and venture capital is not for most businesses. It makes the most sense when you think there is an opportunity to build a massive business such as a $1 billion type of business. If you have the ambition and desire to build that kind of business, often times you are going to need funding.
If you are also in a market where the dynamics is winner takes all or winner takes most and it is competitive, oftentimes raising money can allow you to move faster than other companies in the space and therefore can be a big benefit for you.
It depends on your personal ambition, the kind of company you want to build, how big the market opportunity is and the market dynamics.
The next steps for a SaaS Company that has product-market fit, lots of paying customers and is ready to raise a seed round
Every company does not need to be at that level before they raise seed round because we see everything from zero revenue to what you described raising seed rounds. It is less about a specific customer number or a specific amount of revenue rather it is more about if you can talk about how your market is evolving with clarity and conviction, how you can win in that evolving market and why if you win it is going to be a massive company.
You also need to think of the risks associated with your business or perceived risks that investors might conjure up in the conversation and the data points you have to make investors comfortable around those risks. Sometimes customers and revenue might be a big part of that but it doesn’t have to be that as it could be other data points or signals that get investors comfortable underwriting certain risks that they perceive around your business.
It also depends on the background of the founder, their execution in whatever they were in as well as the experience and connections they have in their industry.
Concerning tactical steps on how you go about it, you need to know how much you want to raise and why you want to raise that amount as this will determine the kind of investments and funds you go after.
You basically want to run it like a sales process. We have found on average that companies that want to raise a seed round have to do about 40+ intro meetings to get to a term sheet.
Then you can start to find investors that are a potential fit for your stage and company through your AngelList or Signal or Crunchbase so that you can figure out how to navigate to those investors.
I don’t recommend mass outbound emails because I find that they don’t get good response rates. Increasingly especially with COVID, I find that investors are more open to receiving cold emails but I think it needs to be a very direct and personalized cold email that is tailored to that investor. I think you will have a lot more success if it is a one to one email or you can navigate through an intro from someone in your network.
How to raise funds at a faster rate
We recommend a lot of our companies to put together a data room which has the things investors typically ask for such as customer contracts and pipeline reports. The more information you can share on demand, the quicker the process will go.
You can also condense the meetings in a shorter amount of time so that will inherently create urgency and momentum in the fundraising because you are having a lot of conversations. Take time after each conversation to think about the questions they asked, the things they seemed hung up on and the risks they are worried about. If you don’t think you nailed the answers, go back and write your answers down and run it by other people and get feedback so that you are constantly iterating and improving on the pitch as you go through the meetings.
How to come up with the amount to raise
One of the things I see a lot of founders do which is a good way to think about it but not the right way to portray or narrate it when you are talking to investors is, what do you want to accomplish over the next 24 months and what do you think you are going to need from a resource team, your marketing spend standpoint to get to those milestones and how much will it cost. That is hard to do for an early stage company that is still figuring out its ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) and you don’t really know what the sales funnels metrics look like.
A lot of times it is more of how much momentum do you have as a company, how big is the market opportunity and how fast do you need to move. You want to make sure you are raising enough to get you to the milestone for whatever that next step is such as Series A or it could be to get profitable.
The amount you are going to raise is going to dictate valuation more than almost anything at this stage. It sounds ridiculous that valuation is based on that at seed stage.
It is really like all of these rounds get done at basically 15% – 25%, on average it is about 19% – 20%.
If you are raising $2million, it will often get done at 8% – 12% on average around 10% (consider deleting). (11.31 – 11.47)
The more you raise the higher the valuation which has its own implications coupled with its pros and cons. The lower you raise, the ownership starts to break down a little bit because you are going after smaller funds and angels care less about ownership targets but institutional seed rounds and the funds that meet those rounds tend to care a lot about ownership and so a lot of the valuation is driven on the amount you are raising.
Ways to raise a seed round
There are multiple ways to raise a seed round, the most common way is you go out and pitch a bunch of firms and try to find a lead investor who is going to be the one setting the terms, oftentimes writing the biggest check and sometimes taking a board sit if it is a priced round and you can fill in around the lead investor.
If you are raising a $2million round, the lead investor might come in with $1million – $1.5million and you can fill in around with smaller funds or angels. That is the most common way to raise an institutional seed round.
A lot of times you can just raise what a lot of people call party rounds without having an official lead investor.
Fundraising mistakes most founders make and how to avoid them
It is an interesting time right now in early stage and you read about all these crazy rounds on TechCrunch and founders often get fixated on how did that company raise that with that revenue and I don’t understand, I have more revenue than them.
They need to realize that it is not a specific revenue number and you will be able to magically fundraise, it is more nuanced than that. Founders need to think about the narrative, every investor says they want to invest in a great founder but what does that really mean.
The way I think about it and the way I a lot of investors think about it is would you like to work for this person, would this person be really good at recruiting great people around them and a lot of that comes down to can you talk with clarity and conviction around how your market is evolving, why you are going to win and so on in a way that gets people excited about what you are building and how big it can get.
They also want to look for someone who is obsessed with the business and that doesn’t necessarily mean you are working 90 hours a week but it means you think about the business a lot and can answer questions related to the business.
A lot of founders think that because they have a certain number of customers and revenue that they would be able to fundraise so they don’t put enough effort and energy into all the other things that investors care about and will judge them and their companies on.
Another mistake they make is they go in and say we are raising X amount to get 24 months of runway but they haven’t really thought of the milestones you can get to with that money and how you are going to get there and frame it in that way versus saying it would cover our cost for 2 years without any clarity around here is what we want to proof out with this money and how we are going to get there.
How his company helps SaaS founders with raising funds
We have a pre-seed program where we basically act like an extension of your founding team. It is a four-month program and we do an initial $100k investment and then we work really closely with you on your go-to market strategy, pipeline reviews, ICP and we bring a lot of mentors to talk about different topics. We work closely with you on your fundraising strategy and the narrative around that, getting your dataroom ready and getting prepared for those meetings.
We will also do an investor week where we will line up about 30 – 60 meetings with investors when we feel like you are ready to fundraise. We also have seed funds that allows us to invest in companies that are coming out from our program and also outside our program.
Resources
Michael on Twitter
Forum Ventures (formerly Accleprise) – Early Stage Fund & B2B SaaS Startup Accelerator
AngelList – Invest deal-by-deal in world-changing startups
Crunchbase – Discover innovative companies and the people behind them
Signal – The investing network for Founders, VCs, Scouts, and Angels
TechCrunch – Startup and Technology News
– Connect with Natalie on Facebook
– Join SaaS Boss Facebook Community
The post 61 - Fundraising 101 For Founders, with Michal Cardamone first appeared on Natalie Luneva.
from Natalie Luneva https://www.natalieluneva.com/podcast/61-fundraising-101-for-founders-with-michal-cardamone/
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60 – Sales Support for SaaS Companies, with Manuel Hartmann
How he founded Sales playbook
I founded SalesPlaybook after getting frustrated by the lack or absence of sales support for startup founders.
What are the major problems founders under $1million ARR have?
Very often until about $500k – $1 million, it is still very founder driven. A lot of these companies have never done outbound sales and they don’t have a repeatable process in place and they haven’t really nailed down their ideal customer profile. They might have 10+ customer profile in a certain niche or micro-niche but are they really able to say we sell to the head of marketing of industrial equipment companies with 1000 – 5000 people in the West of North America that have these three major problems and are looking for these metrics.
How founders can identify their ICP and clearly define the industry they are serving?
If you are listening to this and you already have your first five customers, dig deeper on these customers. Have a virtual conference with them and get open feedback. Record and publish video testimonials so that other people can understand how clients benefit from you and where they have been before and after working with you, what problems they have and what they found when working with you because that makes it easier to have a dial with other customers and to search for lookalikes.
For example, if you work with BMW, you might ask your buyer persona about their buyer journey and then you reach out to people at Tesla, Porsche and other automobile OEMS and ask them if they have the same challenge.
If you don’t have any customers, you just need to do the same thing but by using problem interviews.
A common issue with founders is they want to go for this big six figures ARR users straight away but they don’t have the trust and credibility for it unlike the larger companies. It is important to be humble, ask for problems and do more of discovery initially.
Now that LinkedIn has capped the weekly connection requests to 100 invitations per week. You can join events as a way to circumvent it and message everyone even if you are not connected to them. You can ask them questions like last time you invested in something in this space, how much did you invest? What results were you looking for? And how did you evaluate the solution? How did the buyer journey look like?
Don’t sell your own solution, rather just go in and ask them how they do it. Imagine going to a Doctor, the Doctor won’t immediately tell you here is the prescription I have painkillers and covid test and if you buy both at the same time, I will give you a discount. That is not how a Doctor works because prescription without diagnosis is mistreatment and you can get jailed for that.
Ask questions first, don’t start the dialog with “we have”, “we do”, “our technology”
Another problem SaaS founders face at this stage is tremendously long sales cycle of 6 – 18 months and not only am I running out of cash which is killing my business but I am not learning quick enough.
Reaching out to more people and having more conversations quickly instead of sending out two hours workshop, you can have 5 minutes calls. I think I attended like 5 startup weekends where you start Friday night and you need to get 20 – 50 feedbacks from real potential users by Sunday.
There is no excuse like people are at home or they don’t have time. Startup weekend people do this on a Saturday and you can get things done by calling them or sending a voice message or a video via LinkedIn native message. Don’t overthink things but go out and ask them for insights on their journey.
How can you identify a predictable sales funnel?
This is a great time to look at both unit economics and customer goodness.
Unit economics in the sense of which channel works best for you. Does LinkedIn work better for certain cohort than email? Does email work better on the conversion or effort per hour? Do you get tons of lead and you struggle to convert them from free trial to paid? Do they stay for a long time or do they churn at higher than desirable rates?
Customer goodness looks at who is getting the most value. I had in the same week a sales workshop where someone offered me $2.5k for a three-hours sales workshop and another said could you do a three-hours sales workshop for free and you will get leads and another said will you could host a three-hour workshop with us and you will pay us $3.5k and we will get you an audience . It was pretty much the same slide deck but completely different perception of value.
After you hit about a 100 customers, you want to dig deeper into who is getting the most value from this, who is willing to invest and do these people have friends who are the same type of customer.
Other important observations listeners need to be aware of I am tinkering with a short e-book on 25 B2B Sales Myths debunked. A lot of SaaS founders are very successful professionals before starting a company so they assume that if they build it, they will come so they don’t bother to do selling or fundraising first, rather they focus on only product driven growth which they see happen with successful companies such as Slack or Dropbox but that is not how it works behind the scenes. They look at a 16 year overnight success and think they are just going to start on day one with the same thing.
People always underestimate messaging, lead generation and customer centricity while they overestimate technology and the value of the solution perceived by the customer without them doing outbound sales.
I would recommend that you do the first 10 sales videos by yourself then make the process repeatable then bring in sales people once it is repeatable and you know the process work.
Which category or characteristics of sales people are you referring to?
I think in the beginning, you need hunters because there isn’t so much to close. I see a lot of SaaS founders recruiting people from established SaaS companies such as salesforce which can cost you a fortune and they essentially recruit closers but there is not enough for them to close. These account executives are typically not good sales development reps and in the end you might have 3-5 people sitting around not having enough deals to close and not able to generate proper ROI for their pretty high salary.
In the beginning hire SDRs (sales development representative), hire people who can fill your funnel, who can grow with the journey and do the discovery calls themselves then maybe grow into closing deals themselves.
Don’t also underestimate investing into customer success early because customer lifetime value is one of the key metrics to look out for in SaaS.
Tell us more about SalesPlaybook?
Right now 50% of the companies we work with are from Switzerland, 25% are from Germany but we have customers from all over the world such as Argentina, Romania, Holland, Sweden, UK. Covid made everything remote but we did that before Covid so there is no limitation on that. That being said, we won’t feel very comfortable saying we are the best Sales Acceleration Enablement for a Chinese startup because sales is also a very local thing.
Resources
Manuel on LinkedIn
Sales Playbook – Startups that sell are startups that scale
The Four Steps to the Epiphany
The Mom Test: How to talk to customers & learn if your business is a good idea when everyone is lying to you
– Connect with Natalie on Facebook
– Join SaaS Boss Facebook Community
The post 60 - Sales Support for SaaS Companies, with Manuel Hartmann first appeared on Natalie Luneva.
from Natalie Luneva https://www.natalieluneva.com/podcast/60-sales-support-for-saas-companies-with-manuel-hartmann/
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59 – How to find a co-founder + Natalie’s new venture – AI writing Tool, with Pankil Shah
I am back! In this episode I’ll share more info about my new company Outranking, what my co-founder and I been working on lately and how to find a co-founder these days (while never actually meeting each other face to face).
We talk about the state of AI writing tools and how Outranking can help SaaS companies produce 10x more content. Tune in and check out www.outranking.io. If you like what you see and want a special bonus on the tool, reach out to me at [email protected] and I’ll get you all set!
Connect with Natalie here:
https://www.facebook.com/natalialunevaspeaks
https://www.linkedin.com/in/natalialuneva/
Join SaaS Boss group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/saasboss
The post 59 - How to find a co-founder + Natalie's new venture - AI writing Tool, with Pankil Shah first appeared on Natalie Luneva.
from Natalie Luneva https://www.natalieluneva.com/podcast/59-how-to-find-a-co-founder-natalies-new-venture-ai-writing-tool-with-pankil-shah/
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Internet challenges: 20+ tested and proven examples from SaaS companies
As a growth coach and strategic advisor for SaaS founders, I get hundreds of requests from founders to launch internet challenges/hackathons for their users.
While the interest in this growth tactic is increasing, there was no one centralized resource that could help SaaS marketers and founders research the best practices of launching an X-day challenge.
At the time of preparing this swipe file, this is the only resource available created specifically for SaaS companies.
So should you read this swipe file? Yes, if
You are a software company trying to find a low-competition growth tactic,
You want to get acquainted with internet challenges already launched by other SaaS companies,
You want to learn from the experience and tactics of successful companies and create your own viral challenge,
You want to build (or grow) your community of users and fans,
You want to increase your brand awareness, generate leads, find new partners, and receive a ton of user-generated content.
What’s included in the swipe file?
25+ tips to help you create a viral challenge,
20+ challenge/marathon examples,
10+ niches.
Whether your software company operates in marketing, management, real estate or another niche, this is the only resource that can help your challenge go viral. Here is the full list of niches that we have covered:
Email marketing,
Lead generation,
Customer service,
Food,
Compliance,
Sales,
Healthcare,
Design (including photo and video editing),
Text messaging,
Music,
Business operations,
Real estate
Let’s begin.
#1 AWeber, Email Marketing App
In 2019, AWeber launched the “7-Day Challenge to Jumpstart Your Email Marketing in 2020”.
The steps of the challenge were published as a post on their blog and each step required 10-30 minutes to complete. They were also posting each day of the challenge on social media so their followers could also learn about it.
At the end of each step, AWeber was sharing a resource for the participants and assigning a small homework assignment.
Here’s what the challenge schedule looked like:
Day 1: Choose your email template and brand it. (30 minutes)
Day 2: Customize your confirmation message. (15 minutes)
Day 3: Create a signup form. (30 minutes)
Day 4: Write your welcome email (30 minutes)
Day 5: Automate your welcome email. (10 minutes)
Day 6: Publish your form on your social media channels. (20 minutes)
Day 7: Share your sign-up form with your connections. (20 minutes)
Tip: Let your participants know how much time they need to invest each day.
#2 ClickFunnels, Lead Generation Platform
ClickFunnels’s 5 Day Lead Challenge was unique because the company’s CEO Russell Brunson was discussing each day’s topic in a video and introducing it to the participants.
Here’s an episode from his speech:
The challenge was also unique because ClickFunnels built a website dedicated to the challenge https://5dayleadchallenge.com/, and you can find all 5 videos and steps there. Besides, you can find the speech recordings on Russell Brunson’s Youtube channel.
Here’s what the challenge schedule looked like:
Day 1 – How to grow your list
Day 2 – How to create a lead magnet
Day 3 – How to create a lead funnel
Day 4 – Build a community of fans using email
Day 5 – How to get organic traffic to your funnel
Tip: Involve your company’s founder or CEO in your challenge to help it look more authoritative.
Tip 2: Create a website for your challenge to bring all resources, reviews, and materials together.
#3 Wiremo, Customer Review Platform
Wiremo launched a 7-day Customer Review Challenge promising at least 10 reviews if the eCommerce stores follow the instructions. To quality the participants, Wiremo set a few requirements:
Wiremo used email as a challenge platform and was sending emails with steps and tutorials for 7 days.
Here’s what the emails looked like:
Tip 1: Set clear and attainable expectations (e.g. at least 10 reviews in 7 days).
Tip 2: Attach supporting resources to each day of the challenge (increase traffic to your website and Youtube channel)
#4 OneThird, Food Waste Prevention Solutions
OneThird published their 30 Day Food Waste Challenge on the Resources section of their website and it’s available for everyone to start with.
OneThird published this free calendar and attached supporting links so people can complete each step with instructions. To increase awareness about the challenge and the company, OneThird is asking everyone to use a unique hashtag #30dayfoodwastechallenge and mention their profile on Instagram.
Each day of the challenge has been published on Instagram as well as a separate post.
Tip: Regard your challenge as a resource and make it easily available to your audience.
Tip 2: Publish your internet challenges publicly only when you have officially launched it and the first group of users has already completed it. Otherwise, everyone will see what’s coming next right from the beginning and no one will have a sense of anticipation.
#5 Obsidian Data, Compliance and Collaboration Tools
Obsidian Data organized a 7-day challenge for childcare directors and their educators with the aim of training them about Acecqa’s National Quality Framework. NQF components regulate how early childhood education and care should be organized in Australia.
Obsidian Data also created a Facebook group and sent a free handbook to the participants so they learn the policies of how to work with children.
Tip: Use your challenge to explain a complex document (or feature or idea) in a simple way.
#6 LevelJump, Outcome-based Enablement Solution
LevelJump launched a challenge that’s more like a mini-course teaching a skill. The value proposition of the challenge reads “Learn how to build outcome-based enablement programs that supercharge your revenue results.”
Every day their Marketing Manager sends an email with 10-15-minute videos included. If you want you can get access to all videos with one click and complete the challenge quicker.
As you can see below, each video is accompanied by a list of resources that will help sales professionals get more profound knowledge on the topic.
Here are the topics for the course:
Revenue outcomes
Changing habits
Program + certifications
Engage your managers
Reinforcement
When it all goes wrong
What’s next?
Tip: Build your challenge in a video format and let a real person teach a mini-skill.
#7 Digesto, RSS-to-Email Application for Marketo
With this challenge, Digesto promises to help users engage their subscribers and automate their email newsletter process. However, unlike the previous examples, this one isn’t free and Digesto charges $99 for the 5-day challenge.
While the challenge is paid, Digesto doesn’t want everyone to join it and has a few questions for interested people.
Digesto sells not only the challenge but a package where multiple benefits are offered. Here they are:
Five days of video coaching with Market experts
Thirty days of live support and coaching from an MCE
Nine master Marketo templates (emails and landing pages)
Sixteen Digesto email templates
One month Digesto subscription
Attribution and reporting training
Tip 1: Qualify participants with questions.
Tip 2: Offer a package, not only a challenge.
Want more examples of internet challenges that SaaS companies launched? Shoot me an email at [email protected] and I will send you the full version!
The post Internet challenges: 20+ tested and proven examples from SaaS companies first appeared on Natalie Luneva.
from Natalie Luneva https://www.natalieluneva.com/blog/internet-challenges/
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Viral challenge: An underutilized growth tactic for your SaaS company
From the marketing perspective, a challenge is an activity that takes a fixed time to complete and takes a user from point A to point B.
As a SaaS company, you might think using this or that tool is already a difficult task and it’s not worth overwhelming your users with another challenge. However, challenges or hackathons are meant to simplify the life of your users, help them achieve something meaningful, and do it in a fun way.
And in case, humans tend to welcome challenges and participate in them as they help us understand our potential, become confident and accountable, and have that nice feeling of reaching a goal.
So today we will cover the following sections in our post:
How to start a Facebook challenge? (or not necessarily Facebook)
How to market a challenge and make it go viral?
What do SaaS companies share about challenges they have organized?
Checklist: Your 7-step guide on how to create a viral challenge (+ BONUS example)
Source: Unsplash
A challenge is a marketing campaign. You need to have a clear plan for organizing and managing it, be specific with what you are trying to do and achieve. Here is a 7-point checklist that will help you make sure your challenge is ready to go live:
An attainable, specific goal – For example, I organized a 7-day challenge for Wiremo, a customer review platform for eCommerce and we promised a specific outcome: “Start getting customer reviews in 7 days”. Depending on what users can do with your software, you can promise to teach them a new mini-skill, help master your software, build habits, etc.
A target audience – As a software company, you might target different buyer personas. But a challenge that is useful for a beginner freelancer will probably not be relevant for an agency. That’s why you can ask qualifying questions and make sure only people from a certain group accept the challenge.
Contest or a challenge? – Now it’s important to understand whether what you actually want to organize is a contest or a challenge. Well, if you consider assigning daily tasks to the participants and helping them achieve a specific goal, then you want to organize a challenge. If you want to organize a competition, choose winners and reward them, then you want to organize a contest. For example, if you assign your participants to design a landing page with your design software and compete with other designers, then it’s most likely a contest, not a challenge. Though the formats are different, the context is the same – challenge participants and make them work hard to achieve a result.
Timeframe – Some of the most popular challenges I have seen have lasted for 7 days. But you are free to make it a 14-day, 21-day, or 30-day challenge. However, the longer the commitment period, the fewer people will complete the challenge.
Daily tasks – A challenge requires you to take the participants from point A to point B by posting or sending them daily tasks. You can do it using different platforms, from email to Twitter and a Facebook group. However, emails or text messages are the best ways to connect with users as they allow one-on-one communication while Facebook or Twitter posts can’t be personalized.
Resources – You can’t simply assign tasks without guiding the participants. They will give up if the challenge takes more time than it provides benefits. Attach links, pdfs, screenshots, and other resources that will help them save time and complete their daily tasks without obstacles.
Free or paid? – If your goal is to increase brand awareness, build a community, and have more users try your product, your challenge should be free. If you are an established brand and want to create an additional source of revenue or attract only highly qualified participants, you might charge a participation fee. For example, Digesto, an RSS-to-email application for Marketo, charges $99 for their email challenge where they teach how to automate your blog emails.
Now it’s time for the BONUS! I am bringing a practical example of what a 7-day challenge will look like. Imagine we are organizing it for an SEO and content writing tool.
The goal of our challenge is to help writers create an SEO-optimized blog post in 7 days.
Our target audience is limited to freelance and in-house writers who want to create content that ranks.
Our challenge is free and will last for 7 days.
A company could launch a 7-day challenge like this:
Day 1: Sign up for the software and create an account (with screenshots, short demos, and instructions)
Day 2: Do keyword research and decide on primary and secondary keywords (keyword research tool and process recommendations)
Day 3: Create an outline for the post, understand the optimal word count, optimal number of sections (+tips/templates for a perfect outline)
Day 4: Research the topic and all the sections you have decided to include
Day 5: Write the article
Day 6: Optimize and finalize the article (meta description, URL, title, improve readability, add images, etc) Day 7: Publish the article
7 tips to promote your challenge and make it go viral
You decided what your challenge will look like and now is the time to think about promotion strategies. Here are a few ideas:
Ask to add your hashtag – In 2020, Adobe XD, a design tool for web and mobile apps, organized a contest for designers. One of the requirements was to add #xdcreativechallenge on Behance to enter the contest.Behance won’t be a perfect platform for every SaaS company’s challenge. You can ask participants to add your hashtag to an Instagram, LinkedIn or Twitter post.
Ask to challenge a friend – One of the secrets behind a viral challenge is having the participants spread the word about your initiative and inviting their friends. When you promote your challenge through a Facebook post or an email message, ask your audience to tag their friends in the comments or forward your email to a person who might be interested.
Reach out to niche influencers – Imagine a niche influencer joining your challenge and telling about it in his/her Youtube video, Instagram story or blog. Thousands of quality participants will learn about your challenge quickly and get closer to testing your product. Financial rewards still remain the primary source of compensation for influencer services but you may try offering other options. For example, free access to your product for a few months, brand association or status (e.g. official badge, partner badge), invitation to an invite-only community, etc. Your company co-founder, CEO, other C-level executives can also play the roles of influencers in your viral challenge strategy as they probably have a large social media following.
Launch a PR campaign and contact journalists – This tip won’t work equally for everyone. If your challenge can make a social or global impact, your chances of getting media coverage are higher. For example, if you are a restaurant management software and launch a challenge to reduce food wastage, food and climate-related blogs, magazines might be interested in covering your initiative very actively.
Create a sense of anticipation – When your challenge is already live, the mystery is gone. Everyone can see what it is about. However, when you give a hint about your challenge and pick people’s curiosity, you might be able to build your participant list even before the challenge is published. Start building your waiting list 1-2 weeks before your challenge launch and once it’s live, notify interested users.
Change your social media cover photos – Your page visitors might not see the post you published a few days ago but they will definitely notice what is on your cover photo. Update your cover photos on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook with your challenge banner and pin your post that is inviting people to join your challenge. In the description/caption, include a CTA that leads to your challenge landing page.
Partner up with other companies – Regardless of how big your audience is, there’s always room for making it even bigger. Partnering up with other companies will help you reach a wider audience that you otherwise might not be able to get to. For example, if your software is a video editing tool, you can partner up with companies who sell or rent video equipment. You target the same audience but your products aren’t competing.
Use these promotion ideas as they are the answers to how to create a viral challenge.
6 SaaS companies advice on how to create a viral challenge: Key takeaways
This post wouldn’t be practical if we didn’t interview SaaS companies on this topic. We asked them what challenges they organized, what results they reached, and what is behind a successful challenge campaign.
Our first contributor’s company operates in the health technology sector. They organized a challenge to help people build a positive attitude.
#1 Joe Stafura, CEO at the Affective Health, Software solutions for healthcare
“At the time we launched the Happiness Challenge we felt that some people might benefit if we gave them a “window” into the good things that were going on in the midst of unsettling times.
We approached it like most programs on our GoThrive.io platform, developing a program that generated thoughts and perspectives that might typically remain uncovered, using the principles and process of cognitive psychology and neuroscience.
The Happiness Challenge program was sent to a variety of groups, with a completion rate of 71.43%. We didn’t drive new business as much as awareness of our company during a time where marketing new ideas were particularly difficult due to the uncertainty and palatable risk that everyone was feeling throughout 2020.
In summary, we set out to show that Affective Data can provide a useful understanding of your situation and the options that provide the greatest opportunities for one chance of achieving “Better Days”.
In our view of our new rebranding as Affective.health, the reason to have a challenge is to create a new way for customers to see the benefits of what you do in some way that delivers perceivable value or benefit.”
Our next contributor’s company frequently organizes challenges and contests for their followers on social media.
#2 Alina Clark, Co-Founder & Marketing Director at CocoDoc, Online PDF editor
“We often run monthly challenges on our social media platforms to push for more engagement, and more onboarding. Our most frequent challenge has been the eye-pretzel challenge. Essentially, we print a full graphic on our social media platforms, Facebook and Instagram. The users simply have to find the candy nestled somewhere within the graphics.
We’ve also tried our hands at social media challenges. For instance, we offer free lifetime subscriptions to users who creatively use our Saas tools in their daily jobs. Such a challenge is often based on the amount of engagement that a user can get to their idea. Works great for our engagement and brand positioning too.
So far, similar initiatives have driven valuable user feedback, new sign ups, increased user loyalty.
To succeed, your marketing challenge should be simple enough, yet still interesting enough to attract users. A complex system will confuse and push away prospective participants. The easiest challenges are those which engage them.
Besides, there’s no point in having people participate in a challenge on your site if they complete the challenge and leave the site. A game should always direct the participant to other pages of your site. This will drive product awareness to the side of the customer”.
Our next author talks about the role of incentives in participant activation and engagement.
#3 Emilia Korczynska Head of Marketing at Userpilot, Product Growth Platform
“Postfity, a social media marketing tool, has A/B tested an onboarding checklist built with Userpilot with and without an incentive.
The new users have a challenge to complete all the onboarding tasks (leading to key activation points) within 2 days in order to get a 50% discount for any plan they choose.
The checklist completion rate went up from 27% to 40%. This shows offering an extra incentive to complete a task has a positive impact on user activation.”
Our next author shares a quick but important tip on how to bring your challenge participants together.
#4 Timothy Robinson, CEO at InVPN, VPN reviews
“I recommend making a private Facebook group for your challenge. It’s a great method to connect with participants throughout the challenge and stay in touch with your community after it’s over.
Make a catchy name for the group that corresponds to your brand or expertise. Make sure the privacy settings are set to ‘closed’ so you can restrict who has access to the group and protect your members’ privacy as much as possible.
If you’re concerned about a lack of participants, keep in mind that you can encourage friends and relatives to join the challenge and group! People who support you will usually be delighted to be a part of your community.”
Our fifth author���s company organized a challenge where business/tech experts helped nonprofits with free advice and showed some ways to improve their operations.
#5 Frank Bauch, Director of Communications at Tonkean, Adaptive business operations platform
“Tonkean users include some of the most advanced biz operations professionals in the world. They tend to work at big, enterprise companies, helping them reshape business processes to run more efficiently. Their knowledge of systems and workflows is elite.
Unfortunately, nonprofits, despite their passion and amazing work to affect change, never have access to these expensive biz professionals. So, we decided to inspire our community of users to help those smaller orgs in our communities who are making a true societal impact.
That’s why we helped to create “Changemakers”, a week-long hackathon where we (along with our other sponsors) connected some of tech’s smartest minds with the nonprofit projects that needed their help to run efficiently.
Nonprofits who needed operational/technical help were paired with ops experts from tech companies to work with them for a week to revamp their operations. It became a big success, with dozens of ‘makers’ helping 17 nonprofits from around the world. It was so successful we decided to make it an ongoing event to connect nonprofits with the operational experts they need, for free.”
Our last contributor talks about a contest that helped their client get user-generated content and increase Facebook engagement.
#6 Brenton Thomas, Founder at Twibi, Digital marketing agency
“At Twibi, we’ve run a number of challenges for our clients. Most notably, we ran a challenge targeting business owners on Facebook.
We challenged them to share a snapshot of a reporting dashboard they created using our client’s software. We then reposted the most impressive dashboards.
The outcome has led to some of the most liked social posts of all time on our client’s Facebook page.”
Final thoughts
The success of your challenge, like any other marketing campaign, needs to be measured. And you can do it by tracking
user-generated content,
participant feedback,
increase in your group members and engagement,
new software signups, and
completion rate of the challenge.
Would you like me to help you create a viral challenge for your users? Let’s chat.
The post Viral challenge: An underutilized growth tactic for your SaaS company first appeared on Natalie Luneva.
from Natalie Luneva https://www.natalieluneva.com/blog/how-to-create-a-viral-challenge/
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How and why to use podcast marketing? 7 SaaS companies advise
Hosting your own branded podcast comes with many benefits, including:
Positioning yourself as a thought leader and building your personal brand
Starting relations with guests – experts, potential customers, partners
Reaching your guest’s network and expanding your audience
Generating different formats of content from a single episode
Monetizing your podcast and generating extra revenue
But do people really listen to these podcasts? The percentage of Americans who listen to podcasts has grown from 44% in 2018 to 57% in 2021. Plus, podcast listeners are loyal and mostly listen to all or most of an episode.
Many SaaS companies have already acknowledged the growing and lasting trend of podcast marketing and launched their own podcasts. And recently I interviewed some of them asking a few essential questions:
What marketing goals are you pursuing with your podcast?
What results have you seen?
What’s the ONE most important thing to make a podcast successful?
What’s your most popular episode and why?
These 7 SaaS companies reveal their podcast marketing tips, goals, and are ready to inspire you to launch your own show.
7 SaaS companies hosting branded podcasts: Key takeaways
Our first guest’s company has seen high engagement and brand mentions on social media along with reaching tens of thousands downloads:
#1 Kendall Aldridge, Marketing Manager at OnePitch, Tool for connecting PR professionals and tech journalists
“OnePitch hosts a podcast called Coffee with a Journalist. With the podcast, we wanted to give journalists a moment to showcase themselves while also giving PR professionals tangible tips to lead stronger PR efforts.
Our goal is to continue to expand our audience and the OnePitch customer base through listenership and education.
We recently hit 33k downloads and have seen tremendous traction through social media with brand mentions since its start in 2019. We’ve also seen over an 80% increase in loyal email subscribers since inception.
Podcasting is a tremendously hard space to break into, so the most important thing is to combine entertainment and education in a way that no one else is doing. Get creative with your format, go after strong guests, and create a unique community. You have to be different to breakthrough in this space.
Our most popular episode was with Sophia Kunthara, formerly at SF Chronicle and now a reporter at Crunchbase News, back in June of 2019. She’s a force within the industry and shared her unique background with fellowships in the journalism field and discussed a plethora of tangible takeaways for PR professionals. It’s a great episode for PR professionals to learn about building relationships with journalists and the best tactics for doing so.”
Our second guest uses podcast marketing to connect with potential buyers and to support their content marketing efforts:
#2 Justin M. Nassiri, Founder and CEO, Captivate.ai Content repurposing platform
“Our podcast goal is different from most. I use my podcast, Beyond the Uniform to:
(1) create relationships with a sales prospect. It is easier to schedule a podcast interview with my target customer than it is to schedule a sales meeting. The quality of the relationship is far deeper after an interview than a demo .
(2) create a content marketing engine. Each episode produces
3-5 blog posts,
5-10 videos for LinkedIn,
3-5 Instagram Reels,
3-5 YouTube clips, and
5-10 graphics for Twitter.
I get a whole month of social media content from a single podcast episode. With this approach, I’ve closed over $20k in monthly recurring revenue in the last three months, and it’s a lot more fun than traditional sales.
The most important aspect of a podcast is guest selection. Guests should be selected for either having:
(1) unique knowledge valuable to your Ideal Customer Persona
(2) a large network of Ideal Customer Personas (ie. their sharing an episode will provide you with exposure to your target customer)
My favorite episode is the interview with Jocko Willink (author of Extreme Ownership). He has a cult following and his episode attracted a large new audience to our show.”
Our next guest talks about the importance of research prior to the podcast launch and mentions that you can grow with podcast marketing organically:
#3 Madhurima Halder, Content Specialist at Recruit CRM, Applicant Tracking System for Recruitment Agencies
“Recruit CRM started its own podcast named Recruitment Entrepreneurs back in 2020.
We had researched a lot about podcast marketing prior to its launch. Our main marketing goal as a SaaS company was to attract our guest’s audience and leverage it to help recruiters and recruitment entrepreneurs know about our product.
And since the launch, we have seen a growth in our ROI organically. We never did any sort of paid marketing with regards to our podcast and the traffic that we generate on a daily basis via these episodes is extensive.
The ONE most important thing to make a podcast successful is to be original. A podcast host plays a crucial part in its success. And Recruitment Entrepreneurs today is successful because of Sean – our CEO and host of the show. He takes it upon himself not to stick to a questionnaire and to help the guests bare open their recruitment entrepreneurial journey. Originality is always the key.
Our most popular episode was with Dandan Zhu, Founder and CEO of DG Recruit. As a company we always believe in diversity and bringing a collective global voice of recruitment entrepreneurs on our podcast.”
Our fourth guest talks about partnerships and customers that their podcast has helped them gain. Besides, he recommends being confident when approaching your potential guests and being open to discussion:
Read more round-up posts with SaaS companies below:
How 13 SaaS Companies Use Community Marketing to Grow
SaaS Companies That Organized Online Summits/Events: Key Takeaways
#4 Neil Thacker, Go To Market Manager at PlayBox Technology, Communication and information technology company
“Our main goal with our podcast is to create brand awareness and strengthen our ties with the broadcasting industry. We achieve this by speaking to like-minded industry experts and our own partners & collaborators. We learn a lot and have a great time doing it!
We have created some fantastic new working relationships and partnerships from our podcast. It is a hugely important tool for reaching new people and businesses – whether that be in a customer or collaborator capacity. As such, the podcast has helped us gain new business, form beneficial partnerships and expand our digital content library.
The ONE most important thing that makes a podcast successful is guest selection. Guests are the people who will help you reach new communities and audiences, if that is your goal. Don’t be afraid to reach out to potential guests, no matter how popular they might be. You would be surprised how open they can be to doing podcasts!
It’s a good idea to focus on production quality. Purchasing a decent sound setup and utilising applications like Adobe Audition will ensure you hit the ground running with your new podcast.
In our most popular episode, we speak to Gareth Jones from Host Broadcast Services (HBS). HBS is most well-known for taking on the role of being the Host Broadcaster for the FIFA World Cup tournaments. It’s a short episode and our promotion of the episode garnered a fantastic reception.
Furthermore, HBS did their part in sharing and promoting the episode amongst their employees and customers. It worked out really well and we’re very proud of that episode.”
Our next guest’s company quickly noticed how saturated the internet is with written content and decided to switch to audio content. And now podcast marketing helps the company to rank and generate leads and face less competition on Google:
#5 Paul Katzoff, CEO at WhiteCanyon Software, Cybersecurity software
“With our podcast, we are looking for unique content that goes beyond the typical tech docs, whitepapers, and case studies that are now published in large volumes.
The overuse of written material has caused Google to update their algorithm, and it is no longer a key metric. We looked at the situation and felt that to be a market leader, you must be out there in front. So we created the Data Management podcast and we use that as a means to reach a wide range of listeners interested in data management.
We’ve seen positive results both in terms of ranking on Google and getting new leads. Our web ranking has increased because of the legitimacy of the podcast and the links to/from the interviewees and organizations. And unlike Google Ads where we generate leads only when paying for ads, the podcast is a source that continually drives quality leads.
We feel the most important item to make a podcast successful is to make it ENJOYABLE. We mix important content with color – whether it’s soccer referees, school buses, you name it, we mix it in to keep it lively and a frank, honest chat. That is what people want to watch/listen to. Also, the content gets ignored if it’s too slow or boring.
Our podcast episode with Backblaze was very popular. They are a well-known manufacturer and have a very informed, passionate consumer base.”
Our next guest emphasizes the multiple benefits that podcast marketing helped their company reach and recommends having an amazing host:
#6 Liz Beechinor, President and Founder at Coefficient Marketing, B2B marketing agency
“JBKnowledge is a technology solutions company for insurance and construction businesses.
With The Content Crew podcast, we wanted to establish JBKnowledge’s CEO and consultants as thought leaders in the industry – not just solving existing challenges but talking about the future of the industry. We also wanted to align ourselves with the companies and influencers we admired in the industry by getting them on as guests.
The podcast has driven product leads, services leads, media invites, and speaking engagements since it began. It drove leads for the company but was also a revenue generator in and of itself. It was one of the first tech podcasts in the construction industry and so big construction conferences actually paid our team to come out to their event, record live and cover it!
I think the ONE most important thing to make a podcast successful is an amazing host (or in our case, three!) You can have all the fancy recording equipment and branding in the world but if your host isn’t someone people WANT to listen to and be interviewed by – no one will listen.
One of our popular episodes is the interview with Mike Rowe from Dirty Jobs talking about why more people should consider working in construction trades and how people underestimate the skills and compensation you can get! He was a big name from all his TV shows and beloved in the construction industry.”
Our last guest mentions that your podcast won’t succeed if you aren’t passionate about the topics you discuss:
Listen to SaaS Boss podcast episodes for SaaS founders
#7 Nick Gallo, Co-CEO at ComplianceLine, Compliance management, hotline & sanction screening solutions
“My brother and I first came up with the idea to record a podcast that served our companies’ mission, not our lead count.
Initially, our goal was to meet and share ideas with thought leaders in our industry and grow together. Once we started, we realized that because our products also served that core mission, our buyers had a chance to see and connect with us as fellow leaders who care.
I believe the reason we have been successful is that we truly believe we are making a difference through these conversations. And we love the growth we are experiencing with our audience.
If you are hosting a podcast and your interest in your guest or topics is disingenuous, your audience will feel that and wont engage with future content.
So it’s not a coincidence that our most popular episode was with Andy Hinton, Former chief compliance officer at Google. My brother and I teamed up to interview him and we have such a strong admiration for his work that I know it came through to our audience.”
Final thoughts
Source: Freepik
Podcast marketing is an underutilized tactic for SaaS companies who want to generate leads and build trust.
I will show you how you can get started with minimal equipment required, and have well-known experts accept your interview invitations for free.
I have already guided dozens of SaaS companies through this process and host my own show – SaaS Boss. It’s for SaaS founders and helps them get actionable advice on startup challenges, remote team building and grow as successful leaders.
If you’d like to know how to launch a podcast and ways to market it, contact me.
The post How and why to use podcast marketing? 7 SaaS companies advise first appeared on Natalie Luneva.
from Natalie Luneva https://www.natalieluneva.com/blog/how-and-why-to-use-podcast-marketing/
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SaaS Companies That Organized Online Summits/Events: Key Takeaways
Video marketing has developed into event marketing and now encompasses a much broader scope of content formats. From live Q&As to webinars and multi-day virtual summits, you can get as creative with your video format as you want.
I interviewed 10 SaaS companies asking them:
Why they use event marketing in their strategy;
What events they have organized;
What the organizational process looks like;
What results they have seen from their efforts.
See below 10 answers from CEOs, founders, marketing managers who share their event marketing best practices, real-life experiences, and results with you.
10 SaaS online event marketing examples
It doesn’t matter what niche your SaaS company is in. Virtual summits can work even in a complex industry such as compliance and regulations.
#1 Claire Milazzo, VP of Marketing at PerformLine (Regulatory and brand compliance monitoring) says:
“We launched the COMPLY virtual summit (The Compliance, Risk, and RegTech Conference) seven years ago.
Initially conceived as a client-only event for our users, we quickly learned that there was a real need for this type of content and connections in the regulatory industry. People needed to network, discuss and learn from each other.
Our goal for the conference was and still remains to empower compliance leaders with the most up-to-date knowledge to help their companies grow safely. By creating content and events that speak to our audience’s need for information, we attract the right people with a need for our technology.
Like everyone, with the shut-down of in-person events for 2020 and into 2021 we pivoted to an online summit. We made the events free, digestible, and easy to fit into daily schedules by creating 3 shorter events (instead of one overwhelming, day-long commitment).
By doing this, our registrations increased 200% from previous (in-person) years. While the in-person events lend themselves to impromptu discussions and demos that ultimately convert at least 15% of prospects to sales, it remains to be seen with online events”.
Why be dependent on third-party events if they can be cancelled or postponed anytime? Host your own virtual event and set your own rules.
#2 Dave Bennett, CEO at Mirus (Restaurant solutions) says:
“When all the face-to-face conferences we usually attend shut down last year, we started hosting our own events. And we recently hosted an event titled How to Analyze Restaurant Data in 2021.
During the event we
shared the trends we were seeing in our client data during the pandemic,
introduced some of the out-of-the-box ways our clients were using their data to make informed decisions during this unprecedented time to regain profits,
discussed the changes companies need to make in their reporting to compensate for the anomaly of 2020.
Our goals for the event were to introduce multi-unit restaurants to Mirus, become a trusted resource and teach different ways to use data to make informed decisions. The event helped us gain new leads that have been really responsive to our follow up nurturing campaign”.
As I already mentioned, sessions with different expert guests enjoy popularity these days. The co-hosts of Coffee and Content run their webinars in this format.
#3 Timothy Ludwig, Copywriter at Jorsek, makers of easyDITA (Collaboratively authoring, managing, and publishing solution) says:
“Last year, my company started an online talk show that airs every other week. It’s called Coffee and Content and is hosted by my organization’s CEO & Co-Founder Patrick Bosek alongside Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler.
We wanted to have short-ish talks with experts across the content industry over a cup of coffee. The goal? Take some of the formality away from typical webinars in the B2B SaaS space and have more engaging discussions with professional substance and applicable takeaways.
The purpose was education, expanding our brand, and adopting a different format to do so. Since starting in May 2020 we’ve seen a lot of engagement, too.
On average, we have ~70 attendees watching Coffee and Content live. When we post the recordings to The Content Wrangler’s channel on BrightTALK, we are able to double and triple the size of our audience. This has gained us an additional viewership of ~140 people per episode after a 2-month period. Of course, we continue to use these recordings for social media assets, further discussion, etc.
All in all, Coffee and Content has been successful, informative, and a joy to make”.
Putting your emphasis on educational content and featuring your software in a natural way is a perfect formula for success. Here is a comment from a company implementing this tacic.
#4 Phillip Livingston, Marketing Manager at Condo Control (Property management solution) says:
“Our marketing team hosts live and on-demand webinars to generate qualified leads. We select a topic that will appeal to most property managers and board members. Usually, it’s around an issue that impacts their productivity, growth, or both.
We advertise the event through email and digital ads and strive to keep the webinar as educational as possible. However, we also organically tie in our product but try to position ourselves as experts in the industry rather than hard sell. If in the end, the audience is interested in our solution, they can easily contact us.
The results have been positive in that we have had an opportunity to strengthen brand recognition through these webinars, connect with qualified leads, and reach about 100 live viewers on average.“
When influencers and well-known experts perform at your virtual event, that takes your brand and authority to a whole new level. Here’s a quote from a company that partnered with the big names in the industry.
#5 Emmie Hotwagner, Senior Manager of Events and Community at Betterworks (Performance management and OKR platform) says:
“In December, Betterworks hosted Betterworks Goal Summit to help CEOs and HR leaders learn proven methods to create, align and achieve Goals.
We used our heavy influence to line up tech legends including Chambers, Doerr, Bersin, and others to lend their knowledge. The full day virtual conference was designed for senior leaders looking to transform their organization through results-driven goals.
Goal Summit brought together hundreds of executives across business organization and human capital roles to bridge the gap between performance and strategy. Also, Jimmy Blackmon, author of Pale Horse delivered an inspiring keynote fueling the responsibility as a leader to cast the vision and shape the organizational culture within business.
Attendees learned how to identify the proper tools and methods to execute on strategy, how to create and align goals that feed into executive results and how CEO’s and HR leaders can work in tandem to change the game and come out on top.”
A quality, successful webinar requires proper planning and preparation. Organizing your regular online events even every other month is totally doable if you allocate enough time for topic/guest research and selection, plus related planning tasks.
#6 Josh Marsden, Co-founder and Wellbeing Director at Active & Thriving (Workplace wellbeing platform) says:
“We use virtual webinars as lead generation magnets for potential clients and run Zoom webinars roughly once every two months. Each webinar focuses on a different pain point HR professionals struggle with, such as securing funding for wellbeing programs, and tips for early prevention and intervention of mental health issues in the workplace.
We usually have anywhere between 60-120 attendees to these webinars, and end up with some strong leads as a result of them.”
Here is another quote about the benefits of virtual events, the reasons why people join virtual events, and how companies can help attendees achieve their goals.
#7 Harriet Chan, Co-founder at CocoFinder (People search and public information search engine) says:
“Virtual events are economical to host, and the right technology can expedite an immersive and unique experience for all stakeholders.
We as a SaaS company leverage these events to generate high-quality leads and form a relationship with clients through every stage of their buying journey.
Besides networking, education is the most significant benefit attendees anticipate from these events. A virtual event lets us showcase our product to a broad audience and utilize cool features such as share-screen, and give a live demo of the product. We can answer any client queries immediately and keep the audiences’ interest going”.
If your webinar doesn’t bring any new points of view and is simply the summary of a blog post published somewhere, your audience will probably feel disappointed. Here’s a quote about the importance of bringing a new dimension.
#8 Anatolii Ulitovskyi, Founder and Digital marketer at SEOTools (Marketing tools) says:
“People want to learn new directions of marketing to sell their products. The SaaS niche is overwhelmed. Generic methods don’t provide any results.
I am hosting an online event called Top Marketing Experts Share Their Secrets and most of my speakers cover topics about digital marketing, SEO, and advertising SaaS products.
We agree with our speakers to share something new and unique that others probably don’t know. The main goal is to lead the attendees in the right direction. And then I have plenty of time to extend the audience that has already counted over 12,000 attendees.”
Our next author again talks about the benefits of online event marketing and brings examples from his company’s experience.
#9 Eden Chen, Founder and Marketing Director at WeInvoice (Account and invoicing task automation) says:
“We have multiple benefits from hosting virtual summits. First, it promoted lead generation. This is because we often end up hosting dozens of experts and influencers in the industry. This usually ends up being a great incentive to attract new leads and increase traffic.
Second, virtual summits are a great source of revenue generation. Once you build enough buzz and interest in the event, it allows you to market some of the sessions and virtual meetings with experts. You can simply sell the recordings as well as PDFs/notes of the meetings to those who were unable to attend the virtual summit live.
Third, they help scale your authority and brand reach. In our case, we partnered with a number of influencers and experts in the industry. And the marketing power that each of these people had on their own was effective in putting us on the map with other audiences. This led to a massive surge in our user base even before the virtual summit took place.
Fourth, building relationships. For instance, the relationships we built off our first virtual summit allowed us to expand our reach and improved our credibility significantly, which made it easier to reach out to other professionals in the industry later on.
Fifth, finding sponsors. As there were a number of well-known influencers and experts attending the virtual summit, this led a number of companies to become interested in partnering with us to sponsor the event. In fact, some of the sponsors from our previous events ended up collaborating with us on other projects as well. This made it an excellent long-term growth hack!”
Knowing your event marketing goals is another great point you shouldn’t neglect. In case, it’s the very first thing you should do even before researching the guests or choosing a virtual events platform.
Below is an example from a company who has set clear goals and has clear expectations from their efforts.
#10 Miranda Yan, Founder at VinPit (VIN lookup and check) says:
“Most of the time, we interact with our clients through online means, and our relationship is primarily virtual. We recently hosted an online event that was appreciated by our clients and attended by various C-suite executives.
The main focus of the event was to educate the participants about our service and recent developments. Similarly, we also organize many online webinars and interactive sessions to create a community, know our clients’ expectations, clear their doubts, and help our service gain visibility. Virtual events make our relationship-building process too convenient and cost-free. We also live-stream these sessions to engage as many people as possible.”
Next steps
You may be wondering, everything sounds perfect, event marketing is great and it definitely works. But how to host a virtual summit and how to find a blueprint where to start? If growing your authority, partnerships, and revenue is in your long-term goals, start planning your virtual event with me today.
The post SaaS Companies That Organized Online Summits/Events: Key Takeaways first appeared on Natalie Luneva.
from Natalie Luneva https://www.natalieluneva.com/blog/saas-event-marketing/
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How 13 SaaS Companies Use Community Marketing to Grow
In my guest post on CustomerThink I talked about the benefits of community building and how it helps SaaS companies get a few steps ahead of their competition. To get more practical, I recently interviewed over 10 SaaS companies and asked them 4 questions:
Which platform(s) do you use to run your community?
How long has your community been running?
How does your community help your company grow?
How do you measure the success of your community?
If you are still unsure about the value of community marketing or are just about to launch yours, keep reading.
SaaS Community Marketing: 11 stories from software companies
Announcing new features, increasing customer satisfaction and retention are among the top functions of an online community.
#1 Matej Kukucka, Head of Marketing at LiveAgent (Help desk software) says:
“We run our community on Facebook because it’s where most of the SaaS communities are being hosted. We have been running our community for more than a year now.
Our community is the best way for us to inform our customers about upcoming updates and new features. We don’t necessarily think it affects our sales, but it definitely impacts overall customer satisfaction.
We measure the success of our community by the direct feedback to our posts. All we are are our satisfied customers and we tend to post mostly new features, which we feel will be beneficial for our users.
All-in-all, the community is the best way to keep users on top of the updates, and it certainly reduces the churn rate.”
Your online community may become your first destination for interviewing company representatives, turning those answers into articles, and improving your organic rankings.
#2 Joshua Wood, CEO and Founder at Bloc (SaaS platform for the hospitality industry) says:
“I run the Bloc community using Tribe. The community has been running for over a year now. We use the platform for our user base and advertisers to discuss almost everything regarding our software.
We also encourage our users to complete surveys that we can use for SEO purposes.
For example, we ask people an array of questions on ‘restaurant marketing’ and then use the answers and data to write data-driven articles. These are always very easy to get published by journalists and bloggers.”
From networking to having discussions and acquiring customers, your community marketing efforts may produce various benefits in one place.
#3 Laura Grand-Hill, Event Marketing Manager at Airbase (Spend management software) says:
“Our community, Off the Ledger runs on Slack. It has been running since November of 2019 and now has a membership of over 1,500!
It’s a finance and accounting community that helps Airbase grow by giving us a steady pipeline of guest bloggers and webinar speakers (which has included finance leaders from SeatGeek, Uber and more).
Also, the various 1:1 networking, topic roundtables and other programs we run for the community help raise awareness of Airbase. We have found that prospects are much more likely to convert to a paying customer if they’re also a community member.
Since our community lives in Slack, our #1 measure of success is member participation in the online discussions. We expect several member posts/answers per day in our main channels.
Also, we look for a steady increase in membership numbers (both organic and member-invited), and overall participation in our various community programs.
Overall, it has proven to be a valuable resource for the community members. As we continue to work remotely, often employees are losing that human touch or personal development. With Off the Ledger, we are creating a valuable resource that both engages and informs our community.”
Your community members will become your product contributors by helping develop new features and improving the existing ones.
#4 Jessica Traupe, Senior Marketing Manager at Zammad (Helpdesk or issue tracking system) says:
“Our community is mostly active on GitHub, although we also see some discussions and exchanges happen on Twitter.
The Open Source project around our code started in 2014 and has been growing ever since. We have received over 2.6k GitHub stars and seen thousands of fixes.
Our community members regularly contribute to our product by providing translations, fixing bugs, supplying workarounds or even laying the foundation for new features.
Amazingly, our community works very independently. Of course, our team is involved to an extent, and we have an external part-time moderator for support. But mostly our members help each other, and it works like a charm. We have 2592 community members now (and counting)”.
Here’s another example of how important community feedback is.
#5 Sebastian Schaeffer, CTO at dofollow.io (B2B PR SaaS) says:
“Our community is primarily on Facebook and Linkedin and it has been live for over a year.
We use both of our communities to spur conversation and get some of the many thoughtful and experienced people, including many in our target market, discuss the application. We actively encourage criticism so that we get feedback that helps us make meaningful changes to the product and constantly improve user experience.
For example, before releasing/starting to develop a new feature, we run it by our community first. A simple post asking ‘is this something that would make running your business easier?’ or ‘would this improve your experience with the software?’ is often enough for us to decide whether we should invest money in development or not.
Community success is a function of how many new beta testers we get regularly. If we can convince 3-4 new users to use the software each week and add their thoughts to our pool of users and commentators, then we are happy with how our community operates”.
Community marketing helps you reduce customer support queries and increase trust towards your product.
#6 Bryan Clayton, CEO at GreenPal (Online freelancing platform for landscapers) says:
“About three months ago we shifted all of the user support and community engagement for our lawn maintenance vendors over to a dedicated private Facebook group.
The thinking behind this was to create an ongoing central knowledge base where vendors can share information on how to grow their business on the GreenPal platform, and also a way for my co-founders and I could engage the community in a scalable way.
This has been a huge success for growing the GreenPal sense of community among our vendor base. And in most cases, our team doesn’t have to handle support requests anymore because other members help each other out now in the closed Facebook group.
Another side benefit is new vendors see the success of establishmed ones and it inspires them to stay engaged with the GreenPal platform and grow their business on top of GreenPal”.
The main purpose of an online community isn’t always customer support or user feedback. Sometimes it’s a place for people with similar interests to ask questions and discuss trends.
#7 Datis Mohsenipour, Director of Marketing at HeyOrca (Social media calendar tool) says:
“Our Life in Social Community runs on a Facebook Group. The community has been running for over 2 years now!
Our community is focused on social media managers and agency professionals.
It’s primarily built for people to have discussions about social media marketing and client management strategies, and to help each other troubleshoot any issues they may be experiencing. The social media-related issues are broad and not necessarily related to our tool.
We use the community from time to time to promote our services. But the focus of the community is for members to help one another out.
We also leverage polls and discussions in the community to help influence the content we are creating and other marketing efforts.
There are a few key ways we measure success in our community:
Number of new discussions started by group members
Volume of overall engagement
Membership growth”
Where will new trends be discussed and how will bugs be fixed if not with the help of your community?
#8 Grant Polachek, Head of Marketing and Branding at Squadhelp (Naming platform) says:
“Currently, our community spans from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and our own Forum section on our site. Our community has been running for roughly 9 years and continues to grow daily.
Our primary platform where we actively interact with our community is Twitter. User engagement is a primary growth source for our page, and many people will post their domain sales connecting with Squadhelp. This helps drive their own domain but also increases Squadhelp’s visibility throughout the platform.
Our community forum is also a popular platform because it actively allows members to communicate and interact with each other in real-time. Not only does this section help with troubleshooting, it allows users to share current trends and habits within the market.
Success within our community growth is largely measured by follower increases, engagement numbers, and consumer satisfaction with our services.
Keeping up with market and community trends has helped the company experience exponential growth, even through the pandemic.”
What’s the most essential thing for an early-stage startup? Of course, “real feedback from users”.
#9 Gonçalo Martins Ribeiro, CEO at Ydata (Development platform for data quality) says:
“Our community was founded in January 2021 and runs on Slack.
Real feedback from users is the most important information for an early-stage startup. Also, when developing an innovative product and creating a new category, it is needed to focus on the early adopters that usually are the ones looking for the niche communities.
Number of GitHub stars, number of members in Slack, number of downloads on the open-source repository, activity in the Slack channel are our top metrics to measure success”.
Providing expertise, giving value to customers, and ultimately acquiring new users: here’s how community building online can work.
#10 Andrew Cabasso, Head of Customer Success at Postaga (Marketing platform) says:
“Our community has been running on a Facebook group for almost 1 year. The Facebook community helps in a ton of different ways. It helps us share new features with our users. It also helps us get a lot of feedback at once related to our products.
Also, the community has helped us find new customers (some of our members have stumbled across our group even though they were not familiar with our product, or they were referred by friends).
Mainly though, the community has helped us provide more value to our customers. Aside from using the community just for our benefit, we also post relevant content regularly and facilitate networking in our space that has been tremendously helpful for community members.
For example, we regularly provide expert advice to our community members asking questions related to our industry, or provide them with feedback to help them get better results with their marketing efforts.
My main metric for success is engagement. If people are engaged with our content, interact with our posts, commenting, replying, and reacting, then I see that they are getting value out of it. If posts are getting no comments or reactions, then our efforts are not helping”.
Here’s one more company that uses its community for multiple purposes, from announcing new features, to sharing knowledge, and collecting user feedback.
#11 Olek Potrykus, Head of Customer Success at Tidio (Live chat, chatbots, and email marketing solutions) says:
“We’ve got a Facebook group that has been running for almost 3 years now, we started it in September 2018.
Community marketing provides a safe and friendly space for our product users to connect and share knowledge about bots, automation opportunities, and live chats.
Our support team is always present in the group, ready to answer any questions our users may have. We share all our product updates there and encourage users to share their ideas on how to make the product better.
What’s more, we also post our blog content to the community, which raises a lot of fruitful discussions and provides us with unique feedback on what topics our users are most interested in. All in all, our community is a great environment for knowledge sharing, additional customer support, and mutual growth.
Currently, all our community metrics are in the test mode, and we are not measuring the activity there. Soon enough we are planning to start measuring the number of interactions that our users have there that would otherwise create a support ticket.
This could highlight the potential of further growing the community and guide us towards a more clear understanding of users’ communication preferences.”
#12 Lilia Stoyanov, CEO at Transformify (Freelance management system)
“An online community helps us build relationships between Transformify and our customers directly. The major platforms where we have an online community is our own blog Facebook Group, Instagram, Twitter, Linkedin, Reddit.
Being involved and engaged in the community is not only beneficial for Transformify but for its surrounding communities as well. It helps us create a positive outlook for our company in the community, and at the same time our employees also enjoy their time with the company and are more loyal. For instance, if a customer is in-between two businesses that offer the same Freelance Management System, they are more likely to choose Transformify.
Besides improving your reputation and increasing awareness for your business, being involved provides great benefits to the community as well.
We measure the success of our community by the engagement and the responses of our customers. There must be a deep understanding of the importance of building and maintaining a digital community in this era.”
Last but not least, this is a classical example of a community where users ask questions, help each other, provide feedback.
#13 Petra Odak, CMO at Better Proposals (Online proposal software)
“Our biggest community is on Facebook, where we have a group for our users, followers and fans. We’ve had the group since 2017.
The group is super useful because we have users asking questions about the product, other users helping them, some of them sharing best practices, tips and tricks and so on. We use the feedback from this group to make our product better and to give our customers a space to ask questions and discuss.
We measure the success of the community by the number of new discussions and comments, as well as new signups that we get from there.”
Final thoughts
Every SaaS company has its unique community and its special approach to growing it. No matter what goals you pursue with your community, it’s an asset that no one can steal or copy.
The post How 13 SaaS Companies Use Community Marketing to Grow first appeared on Natalia Luneva.
from Natalia Luneva https://www.natalieluneva.com/blog/how-11-saas-companies-use-community-marketing-to-grow/
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58 – Community-Led Growth, the book pre-launch by Natalie Luneva
Check out the book pre-launch campaign that I launch on March 15th here: https://publishizer.com/community-led-growth/
In this recording from a session I hosted on Clubhouse I’m joined by Preston Clark, Red Russak, Johanna-Mai Riismaa, Christina Kehoe, Luke Tucker and we talk about Building a Community for Your Startup/SaaS.
Connect with Natalie here:
https://www.facebook.com/natalialunevaspeaks
https://www.linkedin.com/in/natalialuneva/
Join SaaS Boss group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/saasboss
The post 58 - Community-Led Growth, the book pre-launch by Natalie Luneva first appeared on Natalia Luneva.
from Natalia Luneva https://www.natalieluneva.com/podcast/58-community-led-growth-the-book-pre-launch-by-natalie-luneva/
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57 – SaaS Bosses introduce thsemselves in under 60sec on Clubhouse, Recording from the session on March 10.
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Join Natalie Luneva for a weekly session on Clubhouse where members of SaaS Boss club introduce and share what they are working on in under 60 seconds, connect with other founders and build meaning relationships.
Join weekly sessions on Wednesdays at 9am CST on SaaS Boss club on Clubhouse.
This week’s founders:
Yuriy Sorochev Driss Jabar Cloudfret Optimizing empty truck returns in Europe and africa Ankit Rihal usetada.com Saad sharif remote property management crm, remote door lock, exploring us market therecrm.com Alicia Druk online course platform and integrate clubhouse Jana Filipovic Storifyme Zoran Nasteski Qpick malls Grace Kadzere Saeed Ezzati wfh.team Marco Zocca unfoldml for complex enterprise data problems Varun Varma wobo.ai Sam Tucker commonsurface.com Neil Emmack app for cancer patients – financial risk analysis tool for cost cancer care Edmond Maurin VR experience minsar Christian Cox dev team help Curtis Boyd Objection.co Dennis Berg ukrain logistics & pricing sovt.es Bradley de wet tastingclub.app Gregor Abt Germany amazon PPC services Tanner Muller Sales automation CRM for home service
Connect with Natalie here:
https://www.facebook.com/natalialunevaspeaks
https://www.linkedin.com/in/natalialuneva/
Join SaaS Boss group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/saasboss
The post 57 - SaaS Bosses introduce thsemselves in under 60sec on Clubhouse, Recording from the session on March 10. first appeared on Natalia Luneva.
from Natalia Luneva https://www.natalieluneva.com/podcast/57-saas-bosses-introduce-thsemselves-in-under-60sec-on-clubhouse-recording-from-the-session-on-march-10/
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55 – SaaS Onboarding, with Étienne Garbugli
youtube
In this session Étienne and I discuss email onboarding strategies with Product and marketing consultant Étienne Garbugli.
Étienne helps entrepreneurs & innovators leverage customer insights to build and grow businesses.
Why is onboarding difficult?
Their might have different roles especially if you are in B2B or enterprise because you might need to sell to multiple stakeholders. Some people might just be curious to check out what your product is all about.
When you are starting up, it is easier to appeal to one target which is actually a group or a subset of people.
As your product grows, you will inevitably end up targeting different profiles which makes everything complex because you will need to consider their different worldviews and their different ways of understanding the value that your product provides.
The reality is that Averages creates imperfect solutions, so the idea of trying to create an onboarding process that works for everybody doesn’t work because people come in at different speeds with different expectations, understanding and goals.
This led to the creation of the train track approach which is a way of figuring out the most appropriate station where people can get on your email program and how you can get them to their objective.
To create the train tracks, two things are required:
1. You need to understand the product 2. You need to understand the specific people you are targeting your product for
You need to understand the natural cadence of use. If you are building tax software, you can expect people to use it once or twice a year. An invoicing software might be used two to three times a week. Different kind of cadence will create different kind of onboarding and expectations in terms of engagement.
You need to understand your “Aha moments”, you need to understand what causes people to realize the value that your product provides.
Inconvenient Truths
It is important for you to focus on the must have experience which is commonly referred to as the minimum path to awesome and front load that experience.
The idea is to be able to understand the behaviors by creating different points where you assess the performance based on what people have done and not done. After you have done assessed their performance, you will then send them on different paths.
The Objective of Onboarding Emails
You can use case studies or customer stories that show the value people get from using your product to encourage other users to increase their engagement with your product.
The image below is a welcome email that gets people excited about the product, gives people an overview of the actual value of the product, provide a clear call to action, get them to complete their actions in the product and get them their first win with the product.
This email opened at 70% and about 20% click-through.
We ended up resequencing this email sequence a couple of time just to make sure that we got the right wins at the right time in the right sequence.
It is really important to ensure that what you are putting in place is actually driving the results that you want to get. If you are just sending emails and they don’t have an impact on what people do in the product, then you are just sending emails that are not doing anything.
That is why I recommend you to start with one sequence, keep it simple and progressively get the impact. When you setup the first email, you see the difference in terms of behavior, do people that open this email and click on the link behave differently than the people that do not. Based on this are you actually having an impact on your activation metric or whatever it is that you are initially checking against.
Best Practices for Onboarding Email
If your welcome email is pushing in so many different directions, when people read the emails, they won’t know what the next step is and they will get confused.
When users click on the links in your onboarding emails, it should set them on the right modal window with the right information already populated so that the friction of starting to use the product is reduced.
Email Pacing
It can be a good idea to initially look at your chords and try to overcome the drops, in that case you could send emails on the first day, second day, fourth day and seventh day. Alternatively you could just test it out and see what happens as well.
That is the basic setup of your onboarding process where you tried to figure out the minimum action that you tried to get people to do within your product and see how people react while addressing the behaviors to make sure you reinforce the right behaviors.
Understanding People
As you move forward you can get a lot of value by understanding the subsegments within your onboarding.
Once you start getting enough volume, and you start getting some performance in terms of your onboarding sequence, you need to address more of your need to get more people to perform with your product.
One way of doing this is by looking at what is the main segmentation criteria you use in your product.
You want to be able to split your user base in a way that makes it easy to understand that these group has a different behavior than that other group and by speaking to them differently, you are going to get different performance and different behaviors.
One of the ways MailChimp segments people is by list size, the behavior of someone with 5 subscribers will be very different from someone with 3 million subscribers. They will most likely have different expectations from the product and be interested in different functionality. At Slack they differentiate based on company size and at Landr we differentiated via job profiles.
To improve the performance of your onboarding sequence, make sure your communication caters to the realities of the different user segments.
A major issue this approach brings up is complexities multiplies quickly. If you start with your first onboarding sequence, you split it up into five different personas then all of a sudden you end up with 25 emails and then suddenly 50 emails so it is not something you should use lightly however there is a lot of value in it.
One of our examples from those days is when we broke up our onboarding sequence by persona, we had one email that jumped to 78% open rate with 25% click rate. This is just by splitting up the right behaviors and speaking to the right words that people are using. Research shows that 80% of conversations in SaaS will be within the first 40 days so the first 30 to 40 days are very important. This is part of the reason why MailChimp sends 11 emails for onboarding specifically.
The important thing is to get people off your train track, your onboarding sequence. Once they have activated, once they become buyers, you need to get them to their next win. You need to create the right structure so you can actually keep on growing and pushing people to the right goals within your email program
Resources
Étienne on LinkedIn
MailChimp – Marketing smarts for big ideas
The SaaS Email Marketing Playbook
Connect with Natalie here:
https://www.facebook.com/natalialunevaspeaks
https://www.linkedin.com/in/natalialuneva/
Join SaaS Boss group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/saasboss
The post 55 - SaaS Onboarding, with Étienne Garbugli first appeared on Natalia Luneva.
from Natalia Luneva https://www.natalieluneva.com/podcast/55-saas-onboarding-with-etienne-garbugli/
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54 – Revops and SaaS
Today it is my pleasure to introduce Jason Reichl, the co–founder of Go Nimbly, whose mission is to eliminate operational silos within go–to–market SaaS teams and how the sales communication process greatly impacts revenue.
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Go Nimbly is the revenue operations company. Our job is to help SaaS and high growth companies really understand how to maximize the value of their customer. We do this through a revenue operations methodology that we have created, which looks like consulting coaching and software that we put into the marketplace in order to help operators maximize on their customer. We have worked with some of the biggest names in SaaS like Zendesk, Twilio and Coursera.
We are going to talk about how revenue operations specifically at early stage companies can really make a difference between having the growth and scalable business that you want to run and not having it.
Business typically breaks down into two flywheels. The right side of the flywheel which is your product team, your business operations, and they are really about growth or margin of your product. The left fly wheel is your go–to–market team, which is all of your operators, your sales and marketing team as well as your customer success team. They are focused on increasing revenue for your business.
Go Nimbly focuses all our energy on the marketing side of the business.
The Level of RevOps Intentionality
At Go Nimbly we are basically finding the gaps the customers experience, the customers don’t care about sales, marketing, customer success, they care about the experience of buying your product and every time they find a gap in your process, what they do is spend less money or you lose political trust with them which usually means they are not going to bring it across their org, they are not going to sign a long term contract and other things that hurt the LTV of the customer.
We usually look for these gaps and we prioritize our operational work based on the customer.
We will be looking at how to find gaps that you can close which are scalable and we have invented a model that anyone can use called 3VC.
Anyone that has HubSpot, Salesforce or any kind of CRM, you will be able to get these things from your opportunity pipeline data.
Volume is the volume of opportunity going through the pipeline. Value is the $ amount while velocity is how fast they are moving. Conversion is your conversion.
Go Nimbly does two things, we always measure our customers against themselves for the last six months so that we can get how well you are doing. We also measure you against all the customers in the industry of SaaS that Go Nimbly has.
For example, in the image above as at August 2018 SS2: Discovery (19.8%) in discovery we found out that they were having an issue, we were able to think of operational projects that would target that area and potentially move it up. By December 2018 it was at 25.7%. The issue was they had hired a bunch of BDRs that were not good at discovery calls so the customers were not seeing the need to move forward.
We did enablement which is part of the RevOps skillset to teach the BDRs how to run proper discovery calls and if we go further into 2019 and 2020, the numbers are around 40% and they have a total conversion rate of about 4%.
If you had a velocity-based business and then you had an enterprise sales track, those will be two different 3VC pipelines you will be looking at.
A common question people have is how do you find marketing automation gaps.
If you look at stage zero which is the first sales meeting, anytime in the very front of your funnel there are issues, it is typically a marketing automation issue which could be something around MQL or something around scoring.
We think of ourselves as holistic operators that are going to solve the problems that are going to push the customer towards closing bigger deals with us.
The coolest thing about 3VC as a practice is that you don’t need to have good data to measure against yourself as long as you have a consistent data pattern.
If you have shitty data, and your team is bad at putting information in, you are still going to be able to find the gaps because you are still going to see them in this model.
If you want to compare yourself to others SaaS organizations like Go Nimbly does, we actually take people’s data, clean it up and we put a meta layer over it.
We recommend the proper five step process for most SaaS companies and they are: 1. Intro
Discovery
Demo
Proposal
Close one or close lost
Rev Ops is just taking data, using it and finding the biggest bang for your buck.
On average is 1% conversion rate a good benchmark for SaaS founders
With revenue operation you can get to about 3% to 4%, while standard operations is about 1%. If I showed you the 2019 numbers of the organization that implemented RevOps, they got to about 2.5% to 2.7% by the end of 2019, so we can convert about 4% of our visitors to sales at this point using the robust methodologies for most velocity-based businesses.
If you are talking about enterprise businesses it might stay around 1% but you will see an increase of about 10% to 15% of value so you will see bigger deals closing.
Resources
Jason on LinkedIn
Go Nimbly
Connect with Natalie here:
https://www.facebook.com/natalialunevaspeaks
https://www.linkedin.com/in/natalialuneva/
Join SaaS Boss group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/saasboss
The post 54 - Revops and SaaS first appeared on Natalia Luneva.
from Natalia Luneva https://www.natalieluneva.com/podcast/54-revops-and-saas/
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10 books
Apparently I’ve consumed more than 100 books in 2020. Wasn’t my goal. Didn’t try hard to. It just happened. This is almost twice as many as last year. I previously shared my top 10 business books from 2019.
Excited to share with you my top 10 picks for this year.
1. Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies
For some readers, it might seem confusing what a physicist’s book has to do with marketing and business at all. But the main idea of Geoffrey West’s book is that laws in completely different fields are interrelated and living organisms are governed by the same universal rules.
The author compares plants, animals, companies and even cities, identifying similarities and parallels and makes a point that they all have a natural limit to growth. The more an organism grows, the more energy it has to invest into maintaining its size and further growth becomes harder.
This principle applies to companies as well. When resources aren’t allocated to scaling a company in later stages, all existing resources and energy goes into maintaining an existing structure and operations and so growth stalls.
2. Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance
One of the most cited books for me this year, something that can be applied in business, personal life and something to teach your kids.
Angela Duckworth, the author of the book talks about her perceptions and findings on how success happens and what leads to its achievement.
After teaching math at school, comparing her students, and studying psychology, she came to the conclusion that IQ tests and quizzes aren’t the best way to measure a student’s success. People succeed not when it’s easy for them to learn (high IQ) but when you are motivated and ready to work hard, even if IQ is lower.
Simply put:
(Grit + Average IQ) > (No Grit and Highest IQ)
“Grit is passion and perseverance for very long-term goals”, says Duckwoth. When you fail, you shouldn’t think that it’s because of lack of talent or luck, it’s because of lack of hard work and grit.
Fixed mindset vs growth mindset. Reminds me of another book by Carol Dweck called Mindset.
3. Building a StoryBrand: Clarify Your Message So Customers Will Listen
With so many ads and promotions, your company’s brand message probably gets lost in email boxes and social media feeds. These days businesses are fighting for people’s attention first and only then for making a sale.
Donald Miller says that a storytelling formula can help businesses stand out and make customers listen to their message. Storytelling doesn’t mean describing how and when your company was founded or why it’s the best among all alternatives. I never really understood why people would brag that their company was founded 30 or 40 years ago – who cares!
A selling story is one that is centered around your customers and invites them into the story.
Your product or company is not the hero of the story. Your customer should be the hero.
The role of a brand is to be a guide. Choose a hero for your story, describe the hero’s problem, and guide him/her towards the goal. Simple. Brilliant.
4. The 5 Love Languages: The Secret to Love that Lasts
I recommend this book a lot. To struggling spouses, to parents and especially to company leaders. While there’s another version of this book meant just for companies, this one is good enough to understand how to apply it in different settings.
The author claims that in order to have a happy, long-lasting relationship you should understand which love language your partner expects from you.
According to Gary Chapman, 5 love languages include words of affirmation, quality time, receiving gifts, acts of service, and physical touch.
The idea of 5 love languages can be easily translated into the business world. Employees aren’t happy at work because they don’t feel appreciated at all or don’t feel appreciated the way they want.
I often see companies give monetary bonuses for a job well done. There’s a salary threshold beyond which monetary bonuses aren’t as important (similar to the Maslow’s pyramid) and other ways of appreciation are much more valuable.
For example, I recently observed how a founder praised a developer with a $2000 bonus. And the founder was slightly discouraged because he didn’t see excitement in the recipient’s eyes. While that employee is spending his own money buying a mug or a tshirt with the company’s logo. Would a more thoughtful, non monetary gift make more sense? You bet!
For some employees, a thank you letter (love language – words of affirmation) will be enough to feel motivated. Others might be unhappy with their salaries and expect rewards or higher compensation from the company (love language – receiving gifts). Others want to be praised publicly.
To make your team a better place to work, try to identify or just ask what “love language” your employees speak and what makes them feel appreciated.
5. Creating a Done Done Culture: The 12 Habits of High Performers & What it Means for You as a Leader
Gathering and maintaining a team of high performers isn’t easy. You should learn how to avoid losing your valuable employees, how to help them work together and accomplish the goals.
According to Chris Lema, there are 12 habits that will help businesses create a strong culture and grow the company. Habits include making decisions and taking actions, doing only one thing at a time, having a clear purpose, valuing time, developing their communications skills, etc.
In the end of the book, the author explains what’s the leader’s role in creating those 12 habits and what steps they should take. Chris Lema recommends 7 steps that include discussing failure, destroying toxic situations, delegating decision making.
6. Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones
You probably heard about this book as well. Highly recommended.
Small habits that don’t seem significant at first can change the outcomes and the way we operate. The problem is that most people give up when they don’t see remarkable results after a short time. They think that success will happen overnight and if it doesn’t, then grinding to achieve it doesn’t make sense.
In reality, we can achieve our goals by breaking them down into steps and introducing habits that will help achieve them. When the habits can’t be broken down any further, they become atomic. And that’s why the author has chosen this title for the book.
7. The Compound Effect: Jumpstart Your Income, Your Life, Your Success
Every month thousands of people are searching for keywords “get rich quick”, “get rich quick schemes”, etc. We love quick results and success with no efforts.
However, success is only the combination of our decisions, actions, habits, and time we invest. And “compound effect” is only a principle that promises rewards after small yet meaningful choices. Think 1% daily improvement.
“It’s the principle of reaping huge rewards from a series of small, smart choices. Success is earned in the moment to moment decisions that in themselves make no visible difference whatsoever, but the accumulated compounding effect is profound.”
The secret isn’t in lifehacks, shortcuts or luck, it’s about how you get organized and what you do every day to achieve success.
8. To Sell is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others
We sell every day even if we are not a salesperson. We sell our idea when we hire a new employee, offer our spouse to go out, when we decide what to eat for dinner, etc.
When it comes to selling products and services, Daniel Pink argues that traditional sales methods don’t work. “People learn about your company from the internet and the salesperson’s role is to “move” them and encourage them to follow a CTA”.
As consumers are informed like never before, salespeople should skip aggressive selling methods and focus on asking relevant questions, standing out with service quality, and looking at things from the consumer’s perspective.
9. Finish: Give Yourself the Gift of Done
A great read for early 2021.
Jon Acuff has dedicated his book to speaking about why people don’t finish things they started and what they can do about it.
The first step is acknowledging that no plan is perfect and if something goes wrong you shouldn’t feel depressed. You should acknowledge from the start that things might not work exactly the way you planned.
Perfectionism and “all or nothing” mentality can ruin your goals. It’s ok to be bad at certain things, fail at some point, and move forward.
To help you stay productive and continue working to reach your goal, Acuff suggests cutting your goals in half, setting rewards and penalties, lowering your standards for a while is what will help.
10. Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less"
Another great read to start a new year. Being busy doesn’t mean that we are productive or completing the most essential tasks. Sometimes we are just filling our schedule with more and more things but they are not necessarily the most important ones.
We avoid saying “no” because we feel obligated. By knowing our goals and prioritizing our lives, evaluating all the incoming opportunities, and getting involved only in those projects that will really bring value to us is at the core of essentialism.
The post 10 books first appeared on Natalia Luneva.
from Natalia Luneva https://www.natalieluneva.com/10-books/
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Virtual Summits: Why you should host a virtual summit in 2021 for your SaaS
Virtual summits are one of the most unsaturated methods to rapidly generate leads in 2021. Just hosting 1 virtual summit event can rapidly propel your brand to the big leagues with great new partnerships, new leads & referrals, authority boost, content that can be used for years to come and so much more.
In this guide, I will cover all the main benefits of hosting a virtual summit. Next, we will take a look into how to organize a successful virtual summit for your SaaS company.
But first, let me share my own experience on how a single virtual summit helped me scale a few SaaS companies while increasing brand authority.
Virtual Summit – Wiremo case study.
Wiremo.co is a customer review platform for e-commerce.
I work with wiremo.co as a growth coach and consultant.
2 months ago, as part of my growth strategy, I decided to organize a virtual summit for Wiremo. The aim was to use this summit as a platform to build brand awareness, establish strategic relationships, create influential content, and get leads for the SaaS.
I decided to organize a summit around Black Friday and invite top influencers in the industry to share their best Black Friday growth hacks.
I just finished running this summit here – https://ecommerce-event.wiremo.co/
Here are the results from the event:
1) 400+ registrants for the summit.
2) Got 2 lucrative sponsors that covered the entire cost of running the summit! As a direct result of this, we not only broke even but actually made a profit before even starting the actual event!
3) Generated valuable industry-specific leads that we funneled into our drip campaigns.
4) The summit helped us share our brand name with some of the top minds in our industry. This helped us rapidly scale our authority and influence in the niche.
5) The summit helped us build strategic relationships with potential partners that were previously inaccessible to us. This summit helped us leverage the platform to get connected with them and discuss business opportunities. And in fact they referred their contacts to me to become speakers, they did the hard work for me!
6) A very well known agency in the Ecommerce world asked Wiremo to speak to their team during their weekly educational internal sessions – score!
7) We generated 9+ hours of high-quality informational content that we will be able to repurpose on social media for the next 12 months.
8) We got high-quality interviews that we later transcribe and publish as blog posts, leveraging the thought leader’s name on our blog articles. This can also be used as a tool to build further relationships.
9) We generated a bunch of organic backlinks from high authority blogs in our industry. This will boost Wiremo’s SEO. 10) We were able to get exposure for our product in front of thousands of ideal clients via the followers of our guest speakers and industry experts.
All this makes virtual summit one of the smartest growth strategies and lead generation tools on the market today.
But can you really pull it off?
Who should run it?
How should you organize a summit?
Hold your horses, here we go!
The post Virtual Summits: Why you should host a virtual summit in 2021 for your SaaS first appeared on Natalia Luneva.
from Natalia Luneva https://www.natalieluneva.com/organizing-virtual-summits/
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7 Deadly SaaS Copywriting Sins Killing Your Conversions + How to Fix Them 🔥 with Helen Peatfield
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Helen Peatfield helps SaaS B2B companies by improving their conversion copy and customer flow so they win more customers and keep them too.
The 7 Deadly Sins That Kill Your SaaS Website Conversion
This session focuses on the seven deadly sins that are killing your conversions and how to fix them.
Seven deadly sins that are killing your conversions and how to fix them
1) Poor positioning:
There is no point in performing any kind of copywriting exercise without getting the foundations right.
The first thing you need to figure out is your unique value prop (UVP). There are three circles in the diagram above and they comprise of what you do well, what your customers want and what your competitors does well.
Your unique value prop (UVP) is what you do well and what your customers want. There is a tricky zone represented by the sad face which is what your customers want and your competitors excel at but you are left out in the cold.
The red UVP represents what you and your competitors do well at but nobody wants it, it is the useless value prop you need to avoid. This occurs because one of the first things SaaS founders do when starting their company is checking out their competitors’ websites however the way you look at your competitors’ websites should be in line with what the customers wants.
There is a central region denoted by ??? which represents what you and your competitors do well and your customers also want it. It is necessary to focus on your UVP but there is also an opportunity in the central area which must not be ignored. You need to find a way to harness it and you can do this by adopting clever messaging.
A prime example is Drift which has very clever messaging which they have tapped into better than their competitors. Although their features and benefits may not be as good as some of their competitors, they are winning on messaging.
You need to understand the awareness levels of your customers, this can be explained using the five stages of awareness highlighted in the image below.
The easiest people to market to are people who know your product, they know what it can do and what they need it to do. They just need to know the offer.
The completely unaware are not ideal to market to because it would be very expensive.
2) Logic vs Emotion
Technical people have the tendency to reel off a load of stats and facts while ignoring the fact that humans actually buy partly on emotion and it is difficult to admit it because we like to think of ourselves as highly evolved beings who bring logic to the table whenever we make a buying decision.
We still apply logic before we make the purchase, in most cases, especially in B2B, but we have to make sure we don’t ignore the human emotional side.
There are three main buckets you need to consider to help you understand your customers mindset
You need to understand your customers pain points and your copy needs to reflect the fact that you understand their struggles. When they find your copy and your brand, they will feel that they are in the right place and your product can solve their problems.
When looking at desires, it is important to go beyond surface desires. If you are producing a CRM, it is easy to think people need it to get their jobs done quicker or they want better reports but often times there are underlying reasons why people want to buy which could differ for different personas or different use cases within your audience.
A person might just want to get out of work on time to go and read to their kids while another person wants to buy a super yacht so that they can boost sales and get more revenue.
It is important to have a picture of that person in your head and how they are feeling when you talk about the pain points they want to avoid and where they want to be while you are writing your copy.
Triggers has to do with the events that made them go and look for a solution like yours. Conducting one on one interviews is a great way to discover what triggered people to consider your product. Showing them a special offer at the right time might be a trigger if they are in the highly aware segment.
Asking for interviews
If I’ve got somebody who’s lucky enough to have a few thousand users, then I will start with a survey, and one of the questions I would ask at the end is are you be open to a call, but not everybody has that luxury.
You usually want to pick people that have purchased from you in the last few months, or signed up in the last few months because they are more likely to remember the triggers and the pain they had.
You just need to ask, I’ve got an email template that I give to my clients that they can send out.
You can also incentivize people, you can offer them a little treat for talking to you, perhaps there is something you can give away that’s part of your product or sometimes you can just give an Amazon gift card,
Alternatively you can also frame it as we want to hear from you, because we want to make the product better for you, we’re not just grilling you because we want to write really good copy, we also want your feedback about the product, this is your chance to tell us everything you’ve wanted to tell us about our product.
It is advisable to keep the interview short so you should make it about 20 minutes.
3) Unhelpful headlines:
One of the wonderful things about working out your unique value prop especially if you are at an early stage is rewording your value prop can give you a headline.
There are also some headlines that work really well, they include:
Achieve X desire – which you have already spoken about and found out what it is
Achieve X desire without painful outcome you are dealing with
Your headline and hero section has to answer these questions that your customers have in their head. The supporting copy that you’ve got underneath also counts as headline copy.
4) Sucky CTAs
This is really problematic because there are so many suggestions in various blogs and among your peers about what makes a good CTA.
There is going to be a different answer for everybody based on different situations however one underlying thing you must do is to think of it from your customers perspective.
For the majority of SaaS companies, you are giving something of value such as a free trial or a demo or you might ask them to watch a video.
You need to flip how you think of CTAs, you need to stop seeing it as a call to action or an ask, you need to start seeing them as something you are offering to the reader. You need to see it as you are giving them something instead of you are asking for something from them. Thinking about it in this way will change the way you write CTAs.
The image above is a variant I’ve worked on with a client and strategist. We reminded people of the pain that they told us in the that they felt. This is for a tool that helps you manage revision requests with clients, and communicate with your clients.
Ready to stop fighting fires and get back to wowing your customers, which was one of their desires, they wanted to impress their customers and feel good?
The CTA isn’t just the button, you can make big waves by reminding people why they should start the free trial. It is also ideal to add in a risk reducer such as there’s no credit card required because that will help you to overcome hesitations.
The ultimate goal is to give them value and tell them why.
5) Wasted imagery:
There are two camps people generally fall into, they are either sort of design first people or copy first people. Your ideal situation is when you’re writing your copy, you are thinking about the designs as well or you are working with somebody who’s really good at that and helping you make things look nice.
It is not just about making things pretty, there is the sin of sameness you need to avoid. The images below are all shot in different places with different people however they all look the same. Stock photos do not do help your brand, they look like stock photos, everyone knows it’s a stock photo and you are using prime real estate at the top of your website.
Unique imagery – Supports your message
Hotjar
Hotjar is showing a product image and it is a really lovely idea to it see inside the tool like this. An easy thing for you to do especially for startups is to show somebody your tool by taking a screenshot of your tool, you don’t even necessarily have to animate something.
Hotjar shows something inside the tool that backs up their headline and unique value prop.
Slack
Slack have got this kind of hybrid thing going of having nice friendly human faces. We’re kind of programmed to like seeing faces on a page. It makes us trust something even though these faces have nothing to do with anybody at slack but we’re just hardwired to connect with that immediately.
They’ve got little animation here as well, which shows you a conversation in action. It is a way of showing their products, the experience of the product and some of the value of the products without having to do the whole usual block, image or video tour that I think is quite cool.
Drift
You won’t just have a big person there because we are talking about tech and it feels as if Drift is breaking the rules but it is not. If you work your way back to their unique value prop, everything about them is being human and the conversational marketing thing that they talk about.
This friendly face with the Drift shirt who is looking super approachable actually plays into the brand. Now, they’ve got the advantages of being very popular because a lot of people already knowing what Drift is and what the tool might be like before they get here because their marketing game is strong but there is a certain charm to this and it still fits within the brand.
6) Problematic Promises
You need to make promises in your copy, but people are a little bit scared of doing that. It’s good to make big promises, as long as you can back them up and by big promises I’m talking about the outcomes you’re going to deliver and you need to be as specific as you can be. If you know that you’re saving people 10 hours a week, say 10 hours a week.
The bigger the promise, the bigger the proof is going to be and that could be very difficult especially when you are at an early stage so you need to start collecting it as quickly as possible. Proof doesn’t have to be limited to testimonials, case studies etc, it could be something transactional. If you have a social media tool and you helped your clients schedule 1000 or 2000 messages that week, that can also serve as proof as well.
The image below is an example of a very short video testimonial we used at Product Onboarders. It’s got a number in it and that number means something to my ideal customers. You can ask people to just shoot a really quick video on loom, if they are not camera shy and they will do it. If you are making a testimonial about how amazing they are and you make your customer, the hero, they will be willing to do it
The sooner you can start getting case studies, the better. Don’t be intimidated by the idea that you need to have these big numbers. There are other outcomes that people want to know and you can write a case study around them. This could include increasing customer satisfaction, if that’s what your ideal customer wants.
7) Value gaps
You need to make sure that what you are promising in the copy aligns with the experience inside your product. If you promised that it is so easy, it can be setup in five minutes or it is so easy there is no code. You need to make sure that someone with no technical know how has done it within the timeframe you promised.
Resources
Helen on LinkedIn
B2B SaaS Product Onboarding Review
Join the private community of SaaS Founders on Facebook to get access to bi-weekly LIVE Q&A sessions with SaaS experts.
Learn about SaaS Boss Mastermind weekly meetings for SaaS Founders.
The post 7 Deadly SaaS Copywriting Sins Killing Your Conversions + How to Fix Them 🔥 with Helen Peatfield first appeared on Natalia Luneva.
from Natalia Luneva https://www.natalieluneva.com/7-deadly-saas-copywriting-sins-killing-your-conversions-how-to-fix-them-%f0%9f%94%a5-with-helen-peatfield/
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