Episode Transcript
[00:00:05] Speaker A: What's up, founders? And welcome to the In Demand podcast where we talk all about how to troubleshoot growth for your PLG SaaS. I'm your co host, Asia Arangio, the CEO and founder of DemandMaven.
[00:00:15] Speaker B: And I'm Kim Talarczyk, client services manager at Demand Maven, where we help SaaS companies reach their toughest growth milestones.
[00:00:22] Speaker A: All right, Kim, let's get into it.
All right, welcome back to part two of our deep dive into choosing the best marketing channels for your SaaS. So in the previous episodes, if you haven't listened to that yet, I would be extremely cautious about listening to this without context because I went on this very long rant about how we have to be strategic about what channels we evaluate.
But I understand that a lot of people still just want to hear my thoughts about channels. So that's exactly what this episode is going to do. We have a big master list of channels. We're going to go channel by channel and I'm going to give my rapid fire thoughts about each one. We have a big list because there are a lot. But overall, if you haven't listened to part one again, I'm going to highly encourage that you listen to that first. Because part two, what's not going to happen for, like, what you're not going to ever hear from me in a million years is, oh, this is the best channel ever. I'm lying. Actually, there is a channel that I do feel that way about, but what I'm never going to say is like, oh, this just works for everybody. Except for this one thing that I'm thinking of.
You're. You're not going to hear from me, oh, 2026. This is where your energy should be focused. That's just not my. That's not my vibe. Because I've worked with hundreds of SaaS companies. I've advised even more. And I can tell you one size does not fit all. One person's marketing mix is just not going to be the same and, like, work perfectly for you. What I am going to do, however, is how should you be thinking about this? What is, what do I consider that to be?
And what types of businesses would this work really well for? Okay, so without further ado, I'm going to pass it actually over to Kim and we're just going to go top to bottom.
[00:02:09] Speaker B: So, yeah, we'll go top to bottom on this list.
This is like a lightning round.
[00:02:14] Speaker A: I know. AKA Asia. Don't talk too much.
So, right.
[00:02:18] Speaker B: This is lightning round by channel pack as Much value for folks as you can for each.
And we'll try to knock all this out.
[00:02:27] Speaker A: Yes. Are you ready for the first? Let's do it.
[00:02:30] Speaker B: Okay. The first is word of mouth.
[00:02:32] Speaker A: Okay. Yes. Okay. Remember when I was like, I'm never gonna be like, oh, this is the best channel ever. This actually is the best channel ever.
But the thing about word of mouth is, it is. So word of mouth is basically talking about your customers telling other people who maybe aren't customers that your product is the best or that they love it or whatever. They recommend it. There's a more formalized version of word of mouth, which is called referrals. So this is like you create like a referral link or like an affiliate link or whatever so that people can share it with their friends and get, like, a little kickback or whatever it is.
Referrals. Your mileage may vary, I find. Like, it makes sense for industries where people are relatively shameless about using, like, a promo code or like an affiliate link. What I find is people who really, really, really love your product probably wouldn't use this, but just because, like, it, they would want to recommend it from, you know, from their heart, so to speak. But word of mouth is actually the best channel in the world. But the thing about word of mouth is you can't manufacture it. It's the outcome of doing incredible work on the product side. You have it very dialed in. That product creates value for the customer, and they fucking love it. That's how passionate they are about the thing. To me, this actually is the best channel. But you can't just, you know, wave a magic wand and do it. You have to do the hard work and due diligence of creating a product worthy of people bragging about. That's what I'll say on that. This is true for literally any product. I don't care what market you're in, what industry you're in, people are raving and ranting about what you do and, like, how you do it for them.
That's the best channel ever.
[00:04:03] Speaker B: Okay, our next is SEO.
[00:04:06] Speaker A: Yeah.
Okay. So I would say out of all the channels that are probably most applicable to most SaaS companies, organic search is going to be one of them. And I would actually bundle into that AI search. AI search is changing so rapidly, though, that, you know, there's not going to be a one size fits all playbook here or. Or even, like, you should be paying attention to this because data has shown, you know, the data that Rand, Fishkin, SparkToro, and Dados provide suggests that AI search actually is still a fraction of overall search. But in the organic search world I would say this is probably one of the most scalable. Scalable. Ooh, new word. Sustainable and scalable is what I combined in my brain. They are. It often is the most sustainable and scalable channel for most businesses. This is only true however, if your audience actually searches online, whether they're searching for problem aware solutions. This is why I mentioned part one is more more helpful if you because I'm going to be mentioning and referencing things from that episode if you haven't listened to it. But like I said, organic search makes the most sense when your audience actually searches for problems or they search for solutions to their problems. But if they do neither of those organic search, your mileage may vary. Like it may be very top of the funnel stuff and that might not be super valuable for you, but most companies actually think this does apply and it also is one of the most cac efficient things to use as well.
[00:05:25] Speaker B: If you can SEM or Google Ads as an example.
[00:05:30] Speaker A: Yeah, search, yeah, search engine marketing, Bing ads would be included in this. So search ads, it's similar to organic search. The difference is that you are paying for the traffic versus ranking for it organically or naturally without like you know, directly paying for it. There's a cost, but it's just a different type of cost.
This, it's the same application as organic search.
If your audience is not actively searching for problems or searching for solutions to problems or products that relate to the solution, then search ads are not going to be effective. What I find also is true is even if they are doing that, you have to have a certain amount of ARPU or LTV for this to be cost effective. If it's really small, like people are paying like 8 bucks a month or 20 bucks a month, search ads might be really tough for you to make ROI efficient or ROI positive. Even if they do, it really becomes a game about optimizing it to where it does create ROI for you. But again, your mileage may vary. If you have a super competitive market, this might be really tough. It's not something I would say no to though in the early days, but you would have to be very, very diligent about how you execute this and how you manage it.
And also too, the budget for this can also be pretty considerable and sizable. Chances are you're going to spend at least 30 to 50k before you know if this channel works.
So before you execute this and pull the trigger on this, make sure you're Committed to at least 2/4 of really testing and optimizing it before you decide to turn it off.
[00:07:04] Speaker B: Organic social media.
[00:07:06] Speaker A: Ooh, I used to kind of poo poo on organic social, but I've come across companies that have really been able to make like big waves on this. But organic social, I want you to imagine, you know, you are posting yourself, you know, using.
It could be AI, of course, but like you are manually posting in some kind of way. Not using ads, but like on a social channel. Could be like Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Blue sky, whatever it is.
Some people would consider YouTube to also be social media. The definition of social media varies. TikTok is, you know, the super popular one right now. Before that Snapchat. But that's like the vibe. And what's interesting about organic social is if you can prove it, it usually has a really high conversion rate into like becoming a paying customer, but it has a very low conversion rate of like impressions to trials or impressions to signups. So what I find is like people who come from organic social tend to be like really high value customers, but the volume is usually low and really tough to get people to actually become a trialist or like a user. But your mileage may vary because if you're consumer based, this probably does like work super well for you. Like if you're consumer based, like if you're selling, if you're B2C, organic social media is probably like one of your greatest lovers if you can like really get it dialed in and make it work. But for like B2B SaaS, I do think this is harder. But I have seen companies do this well. But like the ROI is questionable but just because they're just not getting enough customers from the channel to maybe make the investment, you know, finger quotes worth it. But like is it a good long term strategy potentially? It just depends.
[00:08:43] Speaker B: Makes sense.
Social and display ads. Yeah.
[00:08:48] Speaker A: So social, social, social.
Social ads would be like, you know, you're running meta ads or you're running display ads are in here as well. This could be like retargeting ads on, you know, AdRoll is like a really popular display ad and like retargeting platform.
It's similar to organic search or sorry, organic social. It's similar to organic social but the caveat is the algorithms for social ads tend to be very powerful. So like meta, for example is one of the most. Is one of the most popular social ad networks. And if your audience hangs out on social channels, this is a great option.
Your mileage may vary though. Depending on if it's a decision channel for them or if it's like just like a passive channel.
So most of us probably use social media, but most of us probably aren't looking for software through social or are open to considering software through social.
So this is kind of where again your mileage may vary. And then also too it has the same thing with like search ads where if you don't have the right or like if you don't have a palatable ARPU or like ltv, it's, it might be hard to make this profitable for you, but I do think it's great for promoting things that are maybe more consideration or like, like top of the funnel, middle funnel. So like promoting webinars through ads or promoting like lead magnets or steps higher up in the buyer journey. I find social ads are great. But if you're like trying to run direct acquisition ads like, you know, sign up for my product or buy my product and you're not like e commerce or you're not, you know, B2C and you're like B2B software, social ads might be kind of tough. So you're going to have to play with it. And again, the math still has to math on that one. Like it still has to be worth it.
[00:10:29] Speaker B: Yeah.
Content marketing.
[00:10:33] Speaker A: Yeah. So this is kind of like a catch all. I find content marketing, what a lot of people mean whenever they say this is like you are creating some type of content and you are distributing it through channels. A lot of the times through channels like in this actual list. Content marketing to me is more of a practice than it is like a pure channel. But when you think about it more as like a marketing practice or like a program, it in theory would support organic search. It would also support email marketing, which I think we're talking about next. It would support a lot of these other channels that we're going to talk about. I find content marketing to be one of the most common and popular ways for businesses to get their very first customers. But again, content marketing to me is like a bundle of channels. It's not just one channel. What's interesting though is that depending on the audience and depending on the journey and depending on all the things that I talked about in part one, you may, you may decide like actually scaling your YouTube channel is the best because and like that's content marketing, but it's also YouTube as a channel and blah, blah, blah, you might also decide building your newsletter list is the best. And you know, content marketing is a part of that story. It Applies, I would say, to most businesses where it's hard for me to actually imagine examples where this doesn't work because a lot of things are con. Like everything is kind of content.
What makes content work though, is that again, you just, you have very clear priority when it comes to the other channels, which again, a lot of them are in this list actually. But yeah, you're just really dialed in on like what that should be and also like what the content should be.
[00:11:55] Speaker B: Email marketing.
[00:11:57] Speaker A: Yeah. Okay, so email marketing, I mean, this is a straightforward one. This could be cold, but it could also be like you're building a list more inbound, so people are giving you their email address versus you acquiring the email list and then now you're kicking out a bunch of emails or whatever to folks.
This is another scenario where like your mileage may vary. So on the inbound side, so meaning like you've created content or you, you've created a campaign where you're getting people's email addresses and now you're emailing and marketing to people unironically. Email marketing still to this day is one of the best performing channels because the lift is relatively low. And also people do still generally pay attention to email marketing. Where it falls apart is if you don't have a really dialed in understanding of your audience. You don't have a really dialed in understanding. Like you don't have the right trigger or like when you're reaching out to them. So for example, at Kinemat, I can't tell you how many times I get emails about like, we are a website development agency or like we have dev resources in other parts of the world and we'd love to get in front of your clients and there's no real trigger. Like they're just emailing me like, there's no, I don't actually have a need. They don't know that. But there's no, there's. I haven't indicated that I have a need. So with email marketing, you've got to be discerning.
It's a numbers game. If you have a more inbound approach, you can get a bit more strategic about this based on like what they convert on or you know, what data they give you. But if, if it's a outbound approach where like, maybe they didn't opt in to get emails from you and you've like acquired a list and you're about to like direct email, we're going to talk about cold outreach later, but maybe it's like more like cold outreach. It's A numbers game. And, like, you've got to hit a certain conversion rate for that to make sense. So. Tbd. But I do find email marketing to be unironically one of the best converters if you do it well, as most channels are. But if you do it really well, typically, yeah, it usually ends up working really well because cost is relatively low.
Yep.
[00:13:54] Speaker B: Affiliate marketing.
[00:13:56] Speaker A: Yeah. So this is a. You know, it's funny. Rob Walling actually has a book called the SaaS playbook, and he. He has like a whole list of channels just like this one, and he talks about affiliate marketing. There are different types of affiliate marketing. The one that I'm most familiar with is like, the kind where you might have, like, an ad set or, like, set of ads on someone else's site that gets, like, super high traffic.
There's also, like, affiliates, people who. They're kind of like partners almost, but they have, like, referral links or promo codes that they distribute through their channels.
And, like, that kind of gets you customers that way. And there's even, like, another type of affiliate marketing that I never remember that Rob always talks about. I have less experience with some of the other types of affiliate marketing, and I have more experience with the more, like, organic forms of affiliate marketing. I find, like, unless you just have access to, like, a giant list or, like, a huge audience and that audience is super engaged, or like, you've picked, like, a few affiliates that are, like, really, like, they have really powerful audiences and, like, they're super highly engaged.
This to me is like a slow trickle. But also, like, you need to have a brand, in my opinion, like, you need to have a brand that has been around for a minute. Most affiliates don't take risks on, like, new businesses. Like, they want to know, like, you've been in the market for a while. And in my part one, I talked about how, like, that's actually a big consideration factor for a lot of why channels are slow. But anyway, affiliate marketing, tbd, your mileage may vary. To me, it's more like, for mature audiences or mature businesses.
[00:15:25] Speaker B: So I don't think we have this separate analyst. Would. Would you bucket, like, influencers, like, influencer marketing under here?
[00:15:32] Speaker A: I would actually put influencer marketing maybe more under partnerships. But, like, influencers could. We are talking about. Okay, yeah, influencers could be like affiliates. But again, like, you. You do need, like, a pretty big reach. You need good relationships, and you need. It's kind of like a partnership. But some. Some affiliate marketing experiences are more like advertising experiences. So, like, that's Kind of where like affiliates is a big word. It means a lot of different things, a lot of people. But from what I've experienced, this makes more sense when you're a bit more established and also your mileage may vary. It's gotta be pretty dialed in.
[00:16:04] Speaker B: Yeah. Next is offline ads.
[00:16:09] Speaker A: So I'm gonna say offline ads slash traditional media.
Yeah, you got, I mean the assumption is like you've got something consumer based or you have a gigantic budget.
One of the ads I was in, I was in the Hartsfield Jackson Airport. Cause I'm based in Atlanta recently and I remember seeing an ad for like it wasn't Treasure Data, it was like a. There are a bunch of like Salesforce ads. Usually there were some like anthropic ads. Like you've gotta have a giant budget. Like the assumption is like you've got a huge budget and yeah, like that's kind of, that's the vibe. I have seen some SaaS, it's extremely rare, but sometimes they do invest in like print publications, like magazines and also like you can do like local television ads. But it depends on the SaaS and it depends on the market. Like it just. So there's so many dependencies here.
All that to say this is not a very common thing to invest in until you do have like a big ass budget. So maybe no traditional media unless like you just have a really specific use case to do it. And like you think the ROI would be positive, but chances are probably not. You've got to have a pretty impressive draw slash like offer for people to, you know, engage in your ad.
Yeah.
[00:17:17] Speaker B: Existing platforms.
[00:17:19] Speaker A: Yeah, so existing platforms would be like scenarios where it's not quite like a marketplace but almost like, almost like an integration, like relationship.
So integrations as a channel is something to kind of think about. There are some businesses that are very highly dependent on the platform. So for example, Shopify is a really popular e commerce tool. There's like a whole Shopify ecosystem that like you could tap into if you wanted, like if you wanted to build on top of that platform. I mean apart from platform risk, which I know Rob Walling talks a lot about, apart from platform risk, there's really nothing wrong with this. It obviously this is highly contextual to the product into the market. This is going to work for everybody because some of it just won't make sense. But like in the Shopify example, the existing platform would be Shopify in this scenario. And I know Shopify has like a whole ecosystem and like slash marketplace where people can find Solutions and discover like your product, for example. Technically it's free finger quotes unless you pay for that relationship or that integration or the API or whatever. And yeah, you just have to decide like if it's worth it and if it makes sense. But there are most products, my guess is won't have this like existing platform dependency.
[00:18:30] Speaker B: Yeah.
Forums like Reddit.
Yeah.
[00:18:35] Speaker A: Okay, so these are, we would consider this to be like an organic channel. It's not something that you own, it'd be something that you invest in. So this is another one of those like highly contextual, your mileage may vary type things. It really depends on your market what makes this work. And it's, it is kind of funny because I actually did work with a comp, with a company. It was actually uplifting. The founder literally would, had, he had like a some kind of like ticker or like notification alert thing that would, that would scour Reddit. And the second someone asked about vacation rental management software, he would get a notification and he would, he would stop everything and go to Reddit and like answer the question.
And that worked for like the first two to three years. It worked extremely well actually. This is one of those, like your mileage may vary. It's really about time and energy and if your audience is even there. Reddit is one example, but there are tons of other forums out there.
Sometimes this is like one of the cheapest, easiest things for you to do. But again, your mind will vary. Like you gotta do the research, you gotta go and see, like, do they exist? Are they active? Doesn't matter. Do people post questions enough?
Reddit is a good example. And yeah, like, this is a, this could be a potentially like very easy way to invest in a marketing channel. But again, your knowledge may vary. If it doesn't exist for you, skip it, move on to something else.
Marketplaces, I'm going to say it's highly contextual, probably a lot. Marketplaces are also a super highly contextual thing. It depends on the type of marketplace. Like there are some marketplaces that are very highly active that people are using a lot from like a discovery perspective.
So like Mind Body Online, for example, has a discovery like marketplace where you know, studio goers and you know, clients can look for other studios through the Mind Body discovery platform.
Now what's interesting is like that marketplace is not a super popular one in my opinion. Like Class Pass to me would be more popular. So like you can invest in the Mind Body discovery marketplace or you could invest in like Class Pass, which is, you know, studio goers Looking for classes to book or services to book, because they do services now and businesses opt into that marketplace, they can get found.
That would be a much more popular one. Even though I know people don't love class Pass, like on the studio side. But that's an example of a marketplace that like your mileage may vary because it depends on how much adoption that marketplace has with your audience. If it's a highly adopted marketplace or directory, so like Capterra for example, is very highly adopted in a lot of industries. If that's the case, then like, that could be a good one for you to look at. It often tends to be a little bit cheap too, just to have like your profile there or to have like a presence there. So sometimes it's pricey and then you gotta decide like if it's worth the price. But again, the question for you should be, is that a marketplace that is very highly adopted and used by my audience and how much is the reach there? Like, how much reach would I realistically have there and is that more or better or less than like another channel that I can invest in? So that's the math that you have to do. But it's great if, if it, you know, if it checks all the boxes.
[00:21:37] Speaker B: Products led growth.
[00:21:39] Speaker A: Yeah, it was funny. I was kind of surprised to see this on the list. And then I, and then I thought about it some more and it made sense. So product led growth, it's, it's really a go to market strategy. It's kind of like content marketing because product led growth depends on other channels to feed it. But PLG itself is a channel. So if you think about it, the act of finding your website and signing up is its own channel, but that needs to be fed by other channels. Plg, I will say, is one of the most effective channels. And really to me, it's a go to market strategy. It's one of the most effective go to market strategies because it doesn't require the friction of talking to a salesperson, except for when your product is maybe too complex to buy on its own. And then a salesperson actually would be more effective as like a channel. But plg, obviously, I'm super biased. I love plg. It's one of my, you know, it's my bread and butter when it comes to SaaS growth. But I'm also familiar with all the others because I've worked in those contexts as well and helped clients in those contexts. But I would say PLG is pretty particularly exciting to me. But, but it does need feeding. Like you gotta feed the beast. So you have to have other channels that support it. Otherwise it, on its own, it's like the, you know, if you build it, they will come. No, they will not. So like you have to like feed this. It won't just like exist on its own.
[00:22:49] Speaker B: Engineering as marketing.
[00:22:51] Speaker A: Engineering as marketing. Yeah. So this is actually one of my favorites, but it's actually, it's not super applicable to most businesses because not everyone is going to need to do this. Engineering as marketing to me means two things. The first is displaying and showcasing your engineering prowess through assets like GitHub repository like commits. It could also be showcasing your gosh, like your, your documentation, like your support and like tech documentation.
Amplitudes, like documentation for example, makes a lot of developers happy. There are other examples of this out there in the wild, but these are considered to be marketing, particularly if you are targeting engineers and technical folks. The other form of engineering is marketing is when you're not necessarily targeting a technical person. You're actually, you're targeting, you know, like an ICP that's not in engineering, could be anybody. But the application here is like you have built like a calculator or like a tool or like a thing. Could be like an open sandbox, but the application for you, like the investment was the engineering investment. So there's two ways to think about that.
This is obviously a huge. Your mileage may vary because in the first example where like maybe you're trying to attract a technical audience so you use engineering as marketing. So like you, you're publishing on your GitHub, you're and you're talking about it and writing about it and maybe you're super active in certain forums and like Reddit and blah blah, and you're, you're kind of like showcasing your engineering prowess in hopes of attracting that audience. Vercel is the best example I can give of engineering is marketing and like all the things that they did to kind of, you know, build their network and build their audience, all that to say that's one form that obviously only matters in the engineering context and like the tech context. So, so like if you're not, if you're targeting like mom and pop restaurants in the US you're probably not going to do engineering as marketing. The other format or the other way to think about it is like you're maybe building tools, calculators, et cetera to help build buyers, make a decision or attract buyers. Some have even like launched like microsites with those tools.
This is another scenario where like I don't recommend it to most bootstrappers, but just because it is it and it ends up being a distraction, you end up managing like two sites or like, you end up managing like these little mini products.
And I don't recommend it unless, like, you have the bandwidth actually to do it. But my guess is, like, if you're in that camp of engineering as marketing, my guess is you probably have other opportunities that are better. But this is a cool one. Like, if you have the budget, the bandwidth, time and the energy to, like, invest here, it is a cool one if you can make it work. There are examples of engineering as marketing in pretty much any industry, but what's functional here is that it actually, like, applies to your context and it wouldn't be too much for you to manage. And I think, like, bandwidth here is the issue. The best example I can give is a founder asked a question around, like, they have, like their main SaaS product, they want to put their community slash, like, like, they want to create like, almost like an editorial slash, like community experience, like on this other site. And they were like, you know, should we just put it on our main SaaS website or should we create like a whole other website and brand it and like, give it its own thing? And I was like, that's the second company that you've just built. Like, I understand that you want to make it sell to your SaaS or whatever, but, like, if you don't put it underneath your SaaS website, you are now managing a whole separate brand and a separate product. And. And yeah, like, you've coded it and like, you've built it and it's cool, but, like, now you have like a whole other thing you have to manage instead. You should just umbrella it and not spend the extra energy still maybe invest in that tool. That's really cool. But like, yeah, like, it, it. You don't want to accidentally end up managing like three separate websites and three different brands. And like, now you've got three different. You really have three different companies now. So anyway, so your mileage may vary. Yeah.
[00:26:38] Speaker B: All right. Speaking engagements.
[00:26:41] Speaker A: Yeah, this is one of my absolute favorite channels, actually, for most SaaS businesses, because there's a really good chance that there's a conference, which we're going to talk about events here in a second, but there's like a conference or something that you could be speaking at that would be in front of your exact ideal target market and it would actually be very beneficial for you. I find most industries have trade shows, conferences, events, and if you can Speak. That to me is the absolute best case scenario. It's better to me than just investing in a booth. But not all, and I will say speaking engagements, not all of them are in person, offline. Some of them are, are online. So like you can do webinars, you can do podcasts, etc.
All of these are just gonna ask
[00:27:25] Speaker B: this podcast fall under the, under that?
[00:27:27] Speaker A: Yeah. You know, it's funny, I, I, yeah, I think if you're being invited, it's a speaking engagement. I think if it's something that you host, it's content marketing.
It's like, if it's your podcast, it's content marketing. But if, if you've been invited to speak on someone else's podcast, that's a speaking engagement in my mind. Even though it's not like, you know, it's not like super, it's not as fancy as like you've been invited to speak at a conference or maybe you submitted a proposal for a talk and it got approved. But I do still think that it kind of counts.
But yeah, I, I love this. It's honestly one of the most cost effective ways to engage an audience, especially a captive one.
[00:28:05] Speaker B: Industry media and trade publications.
[00:28:08] Speaker A: Yeah, highly contextual to the industry. So if you are in a more, I don't want to say, like, if you are in a very verticalized industry like wood products manufacturing or nail salons or yoga, whatever it is, chances are there are industry and media trade publications dedicated and specific to that exact audience.
What makes it work for me is again, you've got to have the right LTV for this to be cac efficient. What makes these work to me though are you can afford to invest in the awareness building of this even if you don't get like paying clients or customers at the end of the day.
I say that because I think that these are great for awareness building and like getting your brand out there and making, making people kind of like, oh, I don't know about so and so. Oh, that's kind of cool. I don't know what you guys did. That's awesome. But I will say depending on the type of trade publication or media, some of it's just very ignorable and like it doesn't actually move the needle much. So like examples would be maybe you can pay for like a full page ad in a trade magazine or maybe you can pay for like a dedicated or sponsored email or you can pay for like a dedicated or sponsored like webinar or maybe like you host the webinar for their Audience, we're going to talk about partnerships here in a second. But yeah, like those you're. Again, your mileage may vary on like, what's going to work there. Like, you might just have to test things. But the what makes this whole category to me work is if you can afford to spend without maybe getting much back so you can learn. So I think it's a great testing opportunity. I would not do this. Expecting perfect ROI right off the bat.
[00:29:47] Speaker B: Conferences.
[00:29:48] Speaker A: Yeah, this is another one. Very similar to industry media and trade publications. Most industries have conferences or like trade shows.
You certainly could pay the money to have a booth. I do not recommend doing that unless you have a sales strategy. Like you have a way to get prospects to talk to you. And you should not do this to me if you don't. If you also don't have a way to follow up with people at the end and kind of, you know, make sure that like everyone who you visited or talked to, you've got like a strategy for how to engage them after. I do not recommend going into conferences blind or at least like unprepared. Don't go unprepared. Go prepared. Um, the next thing is you are definitely gonna have to do the math on if it makes sense to pay the money to have a booth. There are some where like the average lifetime value for your product. If your product is like 10, 15k a year, yeah, conference is probably gonna work for you. But if it's like 3k a year, TPD like it depends on the type of conference. If it's like a big giant, some again, your mileage may vary. It depends on your context. There are some conferences and events that are more low key and there are some that are like, like Dreamforce I think is like a hundred K for a booth or something crazy. That's like it just so again, your mileage may vary on the conference type, but you should be able to crunch the numbers. This is another one where I would recommend you don't invest in this unless you are okay with just testing it and not seeing anything come back from it. Um, like, if you just want to flex your muscle, like your sales muscle, go for it. But if you are kind of little. If you're a little shy of that muscle and you're like, I don't know, don't do it. There are other channels that you could probably prioritize that a little bit better. Fit.
[00:31:18] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:31:19] Speaker A: But I love it if you do offline events.
Yeah. So offline events. So this is like us like a step down from conference. So this to me would be like you host like a local dinner or like you maybe you attend like a local event.
So these aren't like the big giant conferences usually. These are, these actually could even be like associations that have local events or like local chapters.
And then also these are like you could host them yourself. Like you could host a dinner in a city or like you could you know, host like a get together or like a soiree where like you invite prospects that are in the same location. Again I love this if you can have. If the math, maths but this is another one of those things where again you are going to have to. This is not a super scalable channel and it's one of those things that like it's great for like awareness building and closing deals. It's not, not great for like optimizing reach. Like it's just not great for that. Um, but it is a cool way to kind of give you an excuse to talk to people to invite them to the event. So it's, you know, again it's another. Your mileage may vary. It's best if you have higher LTVs, not as ideal if your LTV is low. So like if you're less than 3k a year offline, events are going to be a little tough. I find you don't do this kind of thing until like you're more established anyway. But if you have a very high LTV or high average contract value, yeah, this is a great one.
Cold outreach, probably one of the most, probably one of the cheapest channels actually. So we talked about email marketing earlier. Cold outreach makes sense and there are different ways for you to deploy it. If you have a sales team, obviously like you would have to justify the cost of a sales team and make sure it makes sense. So like if you have an average contract value for example of like more than call it 7 or 8k then like yeah, sales team makes sense. If it's less than 5k, sales team might not make sense. But there are still ways for you to scrappily do cold outreach. So cold outreach to me means it could be cold calling, cold email, cold DMing or like social private messaging. It could also be like, you know LinkedIn is a really popular one. A lot of people will send DMS on LinkedIn.
That's Cold Outreach. So it's basically you are reaching out to the ideal prospect or ideal customer through a channel. And it could be any channel. Again, email, cold calling, social, whatever it is. It could also even be mail. I cannot Tell you how many letters I get, handwritten letters I get from Jehovah's Witnesses trying to get me to join their movement and I'm like, I'm good. Okay. All have varying effectiveness. Statistically speaking, you're gonna only really realistically convert 1 to 3% of the people that you reach out to. And I think like the actual like paying customer conversion rate is, is lower than that.
So this makes sense when you have a very compelling offer, when you have a very in need market. And it's best when you can identify clear triggers for when it's the right time to reach out if you don't. So we call that sales intelligence. If you don't have that kind of sales intelligence, this is, this is another one of those. Like this could fall super flat. But the cool part is like you might not pay that much for it to fall flat.
I think like there are outbound agencies that are like 2k per month, maybe like, maybe a little more, maybe a little less. And then tools like Apollo and Clay just make it extremely easy now to get a, you know, get a list of leads and do your outreach. And there are all kinds of, you know, outbound, cold, outbound platforms that help with the cold calling, cold emailing. There's just, there's, you can do this pretty cheaply. But I would say it's most effective when you have a super compelling offer and a very clear set of triggers to warrant an outreach. If it's just spray and pray, I don't, I just don't think that works as well these days. Our inboxes are very full and it's full of like other people doing the exact same thing. So you gotta be, you gotta be strategic about that one. But it is technically cheap to execute.
[00:35:10] Speaker B: Yeah, and strategic about your messaging too.
Account based marketing.
[00:35:16] Speaker A: Yeah. So back in the day they used to call this enterprise marketing, account based marketing. Basically it's enterprise marketing, but just applying it to maybe smaller segments. So Maybe you use ABM to acquire like you could use it to acquire SMBs or like mid market companies. Account based marketing to me is a mo. It's a, it's a multi channel approach. But usually it's pre qualifying a list of accounts.
So instead of like spraying and praying, you actually go and you build a list of all the people that you would love to have a customer. And you, you've done the hard work of like identifying like the trigger that, you know, warrants you reaching out to them and you have a good sense for why they'd be A good fit. And it usually incorporates some form of direct marketing or direct outreach of some kind. Direct marketing is a fancy term for you've mailed them something, whether it's a postcard or like a pineapple or we've heard that before or like you, you've sent them something that's worthy of a conversation. A personalized bottle of whiskey. Like it could be anything. It could be anything. Ideally though, it's relevant to your audience, market, et cetera. But you've sent them something that warrants a conversation. And there are other elements of the campaign such as sales, outreach, ads.
So usually it's like a bundle of things, but the, the centerpiece oftentimes is like a direct marketing outreach campaign.
My favorite example of this is Mango Mint actually. So they scaled 25 million in ARR by really dialing in a direct marketing strategy, AKA account based marketing. And they sent like swag boxes and personalized, like branded, I should say like tools to like nail salons and what have you. And they actually even like bought a warehouse. So that way they could take the direct marketing in house and they use that to scale to 25 million ARR among other things. But this makes sense when again the average contract value or annual contract value in the LTVs makes sense when the average revenue per user makes sense. But again it's one of those things where like you can kind of scale up or scale down depending on how much you're able to afford to spend. It's also most effective when you are able to get the data ahead of time on exactly which accounts make sense for you to reach out to. It's different than cold outreach. Cold outreach is like you're building a list and you're kind of spraying and praying a little bit on you know, who is going to be a good fit. Account based marketing kind of flips on on its head. Instead it says start with your most likely buyers and if that's a list of 50, you figure out how to maximize that list of 50. And how do you do that? Send them something that they just simply cannot ignore that they have to talk to you about.
That's how you think about account based marketing. This works extremely well as you can imagine for like mid market to enterprise.
And it can work really well for smaller businesses. So Mango Mint for example, I think their average plans are like 150amonth.
So customers are easily spending 2 to 3k a year. So like they figured out how to make direct marketing work for them and it kind of, it what I like about it is, it cuts through the noise of just running ads by itself or just cold calling by itself.
It kind of forces you to bundle things together in a way that people have to pay attention. And I, that's what I like about it. But the math has to. Math. And also you gotta get creative. You cannot be boring. If you're boring, you might as well do something, do another channel and be boring. But account based marketing needs to be fun. And that's the part that makes it work. If you're not fun, skip it. But if you want to be fun and if you want to have fun,
[00:38:43] Speaker B: do ABM viral marketing.
[00:38:46] Speaker A: Okay, so this one is all about.
You are hacking an algo. Like you're basically, you're doing what we used to call growth hacking back in the day. But what you're really doing is you're. You're kind of, you're betting a little bit on what will go viral.
People who do do do viral marketing consistently usually have it very dialed in on the audience that they are trying to capitalize on and also like what they're most likely to react to.
We do get into rage baiting in viral marketing and rage baiting. I would say this does work for some companies, but a lot of the times you just get lucky. Dollar Shave Club, for example, back in the day did this like video of like hi, I'm Joe or whatever and I'm gonna do, I'm gonna sell you this blade and do you wish your razor blade didn't do these things? And it's like, it was like this super cheesy video that everyone loved. And I remember it went super viral. I think it's still on YouTube actually. And they didn't plan for virality. It just happened. And then there are some. I show speed. For example, he's like a viral youtuber. He consistently goes viral on certain platforms. Mkbhd. I don't think plans for virality, but I think a lot of his stuff just ends up going viral. There are ways. Like I don't. It's like capturing lightning in a bottle. It's really volatile. It's really hard to predict.
I don't know of any agency or company that has this completely figured out because I do think a lot of it is luck. Is it cool? Yes. Does it translate to SaaS sales TBD? I think that's the hard part about viral marketing. Your thing might get 20 million impressions. But did it sell software?
Don't know. I think. And I think that's kind of where like not something I would Recommend to most SaaS owners, but it is an option technically.
[00:40:36] Speaker B: About community building.
[00:40:38] Speaker A: Yeah. So this to me is you are either building a community. No, you're building your own community is what I take that as. Because forums and Reddit and stuff we talked about earlier, not to me would be like participating in someone else's community, but community building on your own. This is if it's used for acquisition, then the implication is that anyone can join who's finger quotes qualified.
Community does take full time resources so you're at least paying for one person full time, maybe part time but if it's less than part time then it's probably not going to go very far because communities do. Until you hit.
Every community has a threshold that you need to meet before it runs itself, but even then it never actually does. Like you still, like you still need to have someone involved but the amount of people that need to be in it before it kind of takes off on its own is, is part of this configuration.
Inbound, the inbound community is I think a really good example and I would say this was HubSpot's community because it was part of the inbound conference. I would say it probably did wonders for HubSpot but HubSpot didn't execute that community until several years after they've already been established. So all that to say it's not something I recommend for early stage companies. It's not even something I would recommend. Like if you're just starting, if you're less than a millionaire, are. I wouldn't recommend community.
Uh, it's extremely slow and it's not gonna be super effective unless you use it for acquisition. And even then you've gotta have, and you've gotta have a market that actually wants to commune online.
If you don't have a market that wants to commune online then this isn't gonna do well for you. But it, it could be something but it's not great for acquisition. I find it's great for like retention but not for like getting new people through the door for your SaaS unless you're established and, and your market actually wants to do that.
But it does require extensive resources. Like you need at least a full time person to do that well and
[00:42:31] Speaker B: the like platform or software or whatever to run it.
Partnerships.
[00:42:37] Speaker A: Okay, partnerships. So partnerships mean a lot of different things to me. It could be you partner with another business that has a similar audience to you, but you're non competitive and you like co market to each other's audiences or lists or whatever. You could Have a formal partnership program where maybe like in your industry or ecosystem there are many different types of providers that target the same audience and you all partner together to again get in front of each other's audiences and co market together.
Partnership could, you know, we're going to talk about business development and like strategic product partnerships here in a second. But it could, you know, partnerships would fall under that as well.
And then you could also partner with like influencers or other, you know, I mentioned other brands already. But you could also partner with like individuals who target again your audience. I hear a lot. Sometimes I'll talk to founders about their products and they're like, oh yeah, you know, I've thought about partnering with like law firms or like accountants because they target, you know, they talk to my customer too. And, and I would say the best partnerships are the ones that are just as laser focused on your audience as you are. So, so lawyers and accountants, for example, have many different types of customers. Unless they were exclusively focused on your market, like we're a law firm only for e commerce companies or whatever, then yeah, but chances are that's not true. So partnerships do have to be very tightly aligned for it to work. The other thing for it to work is that they have to be active and engaged. Partnerships fall apart in my opinion if the partnership ecosystem is not very active or mature.
In my fractional CMO work, for example, we are in an industry where the other like we have lots of partnerships but they're not very mature in their partnership programs. Meaning they often don't have like a full time partnership manager and they often don't have like a lot of stuff that they're doing that like another partner could engage in. So that automatically kind of limits the amount of activity and reach that we're going to have with that partner because they're not super active or organized or like structured in a way that is going to be conducive to all parties involved. But there are other industries where that is not true, where like the partners are super engaged and involved and like there are a couple in the SaaS world that I can think of that I could go partner with right now that would be like, yes, Asia, give, give all the content. Yes.
Speak at our conferences, host webinars, do all the things. Like there are a couple that would love it if I did that because they're like super engaged and they also have like a really strong like partnership program. What you're looking for is again, you're really looking for other partners that are just as focused on your market as you are and also that are active and engaged. But your mileage may vary if those aren't true. So I find partnerships don't infinitely scale also unless your product is also growing.
So if your product is very tightly defined and you don't ever change anything about it, then your mark, your available market is also going to be relatively defined.
So all that to say, I find this is not a very fast channel. It's very volatile depending on again how active and engaged your partners are. I do think it requires a partner manager to get the most out of this. So it's kind of like community. It requires resources that maybe are beyond like what you're able to invest in in the early days. But once you're beyond, I would say like 3 to 4 million in ARR partnerships I think becomes more realistic and it becomes more, it becomes a more effective way again depending on your market.
[00:45:57] Speaker B: Okay, we have a few more business development.
[00:46:00] Speaker A: Okay. So this is, it's kind of like a cross between cold outreach and partnerships. So biz dev to me is you are creating very foundational strategic relationships. I usually at the product level. So if we're, if we're thinking SaaS, like usually it's at the product level that we have like a deep partnership like this. So basically it's like it's a partnership, but it's like, it's even deeper. And usually it kind of is like a, it could be like a rev share type thing. It could also be like a strategic part like product partnership where you are going to like provision a part of the product to like, to leverage like another, like another brand's part of the product or data or whatever.
I'm trying to get like a good example of like a very clear biz dev opportunity, like a public one at least that we all know about.
But think about like Anthropic and Claude. And Claude has a deep relationship right now with the government. If you go to the status Claude API page or whatever, there's like Claude for government and like it's uptime.
Someone had to secure that relationship and it's, it's a deep strategic product relationship. So basically the government is paying Anthropic to have their version of Claude or whatever. And it might not be like a true strategic product partnership, but there was a biz dev element to, to that like I guess, I guess I will call it a partnership. There was a strategic element to that partnership and it was definitely larger than just like a typical, like oh yeah, you want to use our product or cool, like we'll do some like rev share or whatever. Like, clearly the government has taken a part of the cloud product and like embedded it into their ecosystem and Anthropic has made it possible to that it's kind of like an enterprise deal in some ways, but there's like something mutually beneficial there. But I want you to think about biz dev as like, these are like big partnerships. They're not just like small with like associations or whatever. Like, these are like you are deeply embedding some part of your brand with another's brand.
And again, this makes sense if this makes more sense, like if you're targeting the enterprise space or if you have like very compelling levers to pull. So I guess this is maybe, I'm not sure all the details here, but like I know SparkToro and Dados partner quite a lot on like data resources, but also I do believe Dados powers parts of SparkToro with its data.
That's a biz dev partnership.
That, that happened because, you know, Rand formed a relationship with DDoS and you know, they've figured out mutually beneficial ways to support each other. And like that's, that's kind of like a one of the examples, but there are others basically like a really deep embedded partnership. And yeah, it could be at the product level for sure. It's usually. It usually is at the product level.
[00:48:56] Speaker B: I find I'm going to combine these last two. Unconventional PR and regular pr.
[00:49:03] Speaker A: Yes, I.
Okay, so like regular pr, in my mind that's like, you know, like appearing like. So like traditional PR would be like. If you think about like how celebrities promote their movies, you know, they're going on, they're going on talk shows and they're like recording YouTube videos for various channels. Articles are getting written about them. Like they're appearing in magazines. I kind of think about like a regular PR as the same for SaaS. Back in the day, getting featured on TechCrunch was like the pinnacle of, you know, SaaS PR. I think that's still kind of true. There are others, of course, out there now, like Forbes. There's like the Forbes 30 under 30 curse where like, if you're on that 30 under 30 list, you're probably a scammer.
There's like a lot of like regular PR type things. This is, I think, really tough to do if you are small and early. I think it's great if you're established. Unconventional PR is a bit more approachable, but it is unconventional. So like, gosh, I'm not Even I'm gonna have a hard time thinking of examples in the SaaS world. I would say do a quick cloud prompt to understand unconventional pr, but it's basically just like there's traditional PR and then there's like non traditional PR things that you can kind of create or manufacture for yourself.
Some people would consider unconventional PR in the SaaS world at least to be like you do like you go like on a speaker tour and like you speak at this conference, you appear on these podcasts, you get mentioned in the same article as like Lenny Ratchet ski and like you like you go and do all these things that it's, it really is kind of like press, but it's not like traditional press. Again, unconventional PR to me is more approachable but you're, it's just so dependent on your market and like what's available to you channel wise that it's just not going to be realistic for everybody. But it would be really, really, really cool if you could do it. It does tend to have a relatively low cost. Usually it's more about your time and your investment and your ability to create quality materials and resources.
Um, regular pr, definitely a price tag associated with that. I don't recommend it in the early days, but once you again, once you become more established, it does become more approachable and even then it again it just depends on the market. But if you are consumer based like B2C or like you have like a app or you sell like physical goods, regular pr, especially in the health space or like beauty space. Can't tell you how many articles there are about like the AG1. Remember like when AG1 did like their PR tour of like oh, we're, we're like greens but we're like different. And they did this whole PR tour about what that looked like. So anyway, that's what you should be thinking about when you think about that.
9 times on 10 or I would say 7 times out of 10. Probably not applicable to most SaaS companies, but it could be.
I find it's more applicable if you're a consumer.
[00:51:44] Speaker B: We reached the end of the list.
[00:51:46] Speaker A: Oh my God.
[00:51:47] Speaker B: That's the lightning round.
[00:51:48] Speaker A: That was a lightning round. I'm only 10 minutes over.
That's not bad, not bad.
[00:51:54] Speaker B: Think we missed anything.
[00:51:56] Speaker A: I'm sure there probably are like really nuanced specific channels, but they probably do fit under one of these larger buckets. But I guess, I mean you probably heard me say this a lot but like there are a lot of channels. However, if you Listen to Part 1 this list should not be that scary because if you actually do the work, this. While this is a big list, you're actually only going to be able to focus on three, max.
All that to say again, if you do the work, you're going to whittle this list down to just literally, like, one to three things, and it's going to be pretty obvious, like, what you should focus your energy on. Listen to part one. If this was overwhelming.
And if you have any questions, I'm an open book, so, like, please ask questions. I'm happy to answer them, even though I want to cry sometimes. But I'd rather. I'd rather share the knowledge and teach, then be mad about the outcome in the world, which is that I think there's this pervasive belief myth that, you know, there's a secret playbook of channels that everyone else is using and not me, and that's why I'm not growing. But actually, no, it's like they're. No, they're just really dialed into their customer or they got lucky. So get dialed into your customer, listen to part one, get strategic. Feel comfortable in the strategic space and not looking for the silver bullet, and then come back to this list, and then chances are you are going to be, like, 2 to 3 that are really clear.
[00:53:11] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:53:12] Speaker A: Cool. Thanks, Kim. Thanks for going through it.
[00:53:15] Speaker B: Thanks for listening.
[00:53:16] Speaker A: Definitely. Definitely. All right, bye.
