📕 Your intro to cognitive marketing; A SaaS growth simulator; Boosting retention with intent data...
Happy New Year folks! Can’t believe we actually made it to 2021, we hope you have a great start to the year. We’ve been working on some of our new year’s resolutions and have a couple nailed down: to better understand our customers and thoroughly testing our acquisition channels. We’re touching on both (plus more) today, hope you enjoy! Â
🧪 The New Year is a great time to revisit your acquisition channels and see if there are more cost-effective options available. There are of course loads to pick from (we like Traction’s bullseye framework which offers 19 key channels), and we encourage you to not be afraid of retest channels that previously didn’t work – different tactics can be more or less effective based on your current stage. For those looking for some channel testing help, GoPractice’s growth simulator might be a good way to gain experience without testing your own business! Their 12-week simulator assigns you a hypothetical VC backed startup and forces you to make some tough product and growth decisions based on historical data they provide. Â
🔮 There’s a misconception that B2B customers are rational, probably because we assume professionals are logical. But it’s people that the decision to buy your product (about 7 are involved in the process on average) not entities, so a large portion of that decision making takes place in their subconscious minds. It’s why customer psychology has long been a part of the SaaS marketer’s repertoire, and we expect the best will take an even deeper dive into what many are calling cognitive marketing. Cognitive marketing aims to do more than just understand your audience’s pain points and what they value – it delves into their prejudicial, contextual, and experimental biases and explores how you can leverage them. We’re excited to up our game.Â
📊 When thinking about data-driven growth in 2021 and beyond, your goal should be to build out an infrastructure that allows you to create narratives behind your audience’s online behavior. This is where intent data can be helpful, which is the layering of first, second, and third-party data points to truly understand your audience’s motivations. Let’s use retention as an example. Your customer’s NPS scores and product usage data (first-party data) gives you a pulse of your customer, but tracking which competitors your customers are using via G2Crowd (second-party data) and monitoring which are engaging with their social channels (third-party data) gives you a clear picture of who is most at risk to churn.
🤑 When it comes to SaaS margins, the 40/40/20 is often used as a solid reference point (40% R&D, 40% S&M, and 20% G&A). Our friends at Blossom Street Ventures took a deep dive into 28 SaaS companies that went public from 2018 to 2020, and found that the 40/40/20 might not be the best target anymore. On average, these co’s spent 50% of their OpEx on sales and marketing due and less on their product and development. We aren’t saying to blindly dump dollars into GTM as this will vary from company to company, but it’s a good reminder that even the best products out there are focusing more of their dollars on selling and building.
💕 Value propositions are one of our favorite subjects, so we were excited when Hiten Shah sat down with Louis Grenier to discuss how to know when you’ve got the right value propositions on Everybody Hates Marketers. One great reminder discussed was that your value proposition is something your customers determine, not you! Especially when you’re just starting to validate your product and gain traction, you’re likely to have an automatic bias on the value your product provides. If this doesn’t match customer feedback, you could be killing growth or even targeting the wrong customer altogether. Another good one – value proposition is just one thing and one thing only – it’s how you get your customers in the door. Once you’ve lived up to the initial value proposition, you can then expand your product portfolio.