What's Working Now: a SaaS Marketing Podcast

Audience research can be challenging. Surveys only reveal so much, and it can be difficult to get folks in your target audience to commit to interviews. Kathleen Booth, SVP of Marketing at Tradewell has discovered that podcasts can be a goldmine of audience information if you know how to mine them. In this episode, we explore how she’s used podcasts to glean invaluable audience insights to guide her team.

Community is a hot topic at the moment. And for good reason — it's a strong and proven strategy for sustainable growth. Mark Kilens is the OG of community-led growth. He founded HubSpot Academy and has built Drift’s Insider community into the powerhouse that it is today. I’m thrilled to share this conversation with you.

Mentioned in the show:

Successful marketing is fueled by the ability to step into prospects’ shoes and the ability to generate fresh ideas to engage. Both of those things can be hard to do if you’re operating from your own perspective. Being intentional about seeking other perspectives can really help. I’m thrilled to bring Catherine Dummit on the show today to talk about diversity and inclusion. Catherine is the VP of Marketing at Narvar, and she’s sharing the story that brought her to value diversity and some practical tips on how leadership teams and individual team members can promote diversity and create inclusion.

We all know that much of the buying journey happens via word of mouth and on social media. Prospects see mentions of products in their feeds and they have conversations with colleagues who make recommendations. It’s really hard to track and measure this activity, which is why it’s called “Dark Social.” Steve Voith is a veteran of marketing in the software space, having worked in demand gen at Litera and PowerReviews. He’s now at Refine Labs, serving as Director of Demand Gen, and he has seen firsthand what Dark Social can do. I’m excited to share his insights with you in this episode!

Many SaaS companies offer a mobile app version of their product, which comes with an excellent opportunity for marketing. App marketing has its own set of challenges, however, and today I’m excited to bring you Eryn Lueders, Senior Growth Manager of Safesite, to talk about how her team at Safesite has optimized app marketing for exceptional results.

Supporting a product launch is a huge undertaking. But the process can be simplified by having a strong framework that gets the product and marketing teams working together. Today I'm talking with Jessica Shafer, VP of Marketing, and Michael Gonzales, Executive Vice President of Growth & Strategy at Marathon Health. Marathon Health launched a software product called Marathon Health Anywhere, and in this episode, we get to hear about the product launch process and the marketing the team is doing to support it. Jessica and Michael have several great tips to share, and I know you'll enjoy the conversation.

B2B is a bit of a misnomer since all marketing is people marketing to people. B2B buying teams are individuals with personal interests, goals, and needs who are also looking for business value to move their companies forward. The best B2B marketing is a blend of personal engagement and education, brand-building and demand generation. In today’s episode, I’m talking with Camille Trent, who is Head of Content at Dooly, a connected workspace for revenue teams. Dooly does an amazing job of bringing B2C tactics to B2B marketing, and Camille has plenty of insights for SaaS marketers looking to bring a bit of fun to their campaigns.

Messaging helps customers and prospects understand a company’s value and values—how it can help and what it believes in. It describes the brand promise and generates desire for the company’s products and services. The best messaging gets people excited and rallies them together around a common cause. Today I’m talking with Mark Huber, Director of Growth at Metadata, a demand generation platform. Mark led the Metadata team through a messaging process that has been really successful, and he has some fantastic insights to share. 

Season 2 of What's Working Now is kicking off with an insight-packed conversation with Devin Reed, Head of Content Strategy at Gong. Devin and his team have created an incredible podcast called Reveal: The Revenue Intelligence Podcast, and they're using it to build brand affinity, grow pipeline, and generate marketing-sourced revenue. Devin shares the strategy behind the podcast and offers practical takeaways you can use to get started with podcasting or improve the results you're seeing from your own company's podcast.

Links we mentioned in the episode:

Today, we’re talking about customer experiences as fuel for content. We all know the power of customer stories, but it’s sometimes challenging to come up with ways to weave them into different content formats. Alfredo Deambrosi, Content Marketing Manager at Perspectium, is doing some really interesting things with customer stories, and I know you’ll get some great ideas from what he has to share.

In this episode, we're talking about a dilemma that's common to nearly every marketer: long-term brand building vs. short-term lead gen. My guest today is Andy Smith, who is the VP of Marketing at PowerReviews. And he’s sharing his team’s strategy for long-term vs. short-term, and also his insights on brand building. And I know that you're going to enjoy this episode!

Welcome to Episode Six of What's Working Now. Today we're talking about thought leadership and ranking content and search engines. We all know on some level that ranking content is not enough to land new customers. The search engine results are packed with competitors' content. To get prospects’ attention, you must stand out and give them a reason to dive in further. 

To do this, your content needs to demonstrate thought leadership and a compelling point of view. Today, I have Julian Alvarado joining us who is the senior manager of content marketing at Sigma, a data analytics software. 

(13:20) Educate for differentiation, and mold it with your company’s unique perspective.

We follow the Challenger Sales model, which basically is that you’re teaching for differentiation. You're using your knowledge of their business and molding it within your unique perspective to teach customers something new — and then, obviously, show them how you can help them solve their problems with your product.

(17:37) Use mid-volume keywords to develop better content than your competitors. 

You really need to find that Goldilocks zone. [The volume] can't be too high or you'll never rank. It can't be so low either — you need to find a term that has a good chance that you can develop content better than the other guy and it has to be relevant to your audience and value. 

(21:00) Know your audience when choosing SEO terms since terminology has different connotations for different disciplines. 

There's a bit of friction that exists between your SEOs and your content teams. And that's where the art and science of knowing your audience and knowing your customer comes into play. For example, the term “Big Data” is a term that we would all assume would be relevant to our industry. And in the analytics world, everyone's heard of it. You go in, you have every keyword and every one that's related to it has super high search volume. 

But, when you're using that term in relation to business intelligence and analytics, it's a no-no. Because of the connotations that it has with a failed period of analytics. So, basically, our team had to go back and work with our SEO to find other terms that would be accurate and relevant. Which is important, because we don't want to tarnish our credibility with our audience. So that's where the art and the science come into play.

(22:01) Demonstrate thought leadership with unique views and ideas.

Are you a thought leader if everyone agrees with you? To that point, I would say it's about discovering a unique point of view. How are you challenging the status quo? And that's not necessarily to say being controversial for the sake of it. But, it's just actually thinking about things. 

(24:25) Always be on the lookout for new and compelling ways to tell stories.

At its core, all marketing is storytelling. Human beings have been doing this since the dawn of time. If you tell a story, they will come.

Welcome to Episode Two of the What's Working Now podcast, which focuses on experimentation in marketing. We are getting meta in this episode — we're talking about the process of running experiments.

I'm very excited to bring Rebecca Flora to you, who is the digital marketing manager at Network for Good, a certified B Corp that offers a SaaS fundraising and donor management solution for nonprofits. Rebecca and her team have made some changes in their approach to marketing over the last year or so. And this approach has been guided primarily by experimentation. I know you'll come away from this episode with plenty of ideas for your own marketing experiment.

The campaign creative helped increase our impressions by 314% month over month. The new creative assets gave us the opportunity to offer a standalone single moment of consumption. What I mean by that is, I was able to start a story and end the story in the platform where prospects were viewing the content, as opposed to starting a story in an ad, and then finishing the story on the landing page. That also resulted in a 69% reduction in our CPM. 

We defined an experimentation matrix that fell in line with the purpose of what we were doing as a collective. And we took that experimentation matrix and we templatized it so that going into every experiment, we used that documentation as our North Star, and did not move away from that at any point. 

You have customers because you have a great product. And you've encouraged people to really lean into that. People aren't becoming your customers because it's their last resort, or there isn't any competition out there. So I really encourage SaaS companies to lean into what's working, identify those paths from prospect to customer, and then eliminate all of the friction from those paths.

Defining your initiative prior to launch allows you to best understand where your audience exists, which platforms to launch in, and what objectives to use.  Also, this allows us to use certain objectives to build into other objectives.