gritty tactics that SaaS co’s can use to scale
COVID-19 related layoffs continue to surge and tech is one of the many industries that have been hit hard. A number of our companies are still looking to hire right now so if you or anyone you know is looking for a new opportunity and open to moving down south, give us a shout. There are a few open recs on this page and if none of those are a fit, we’re happy to sift through the network to see if anyone we know might be interested.
Thanks, and enjoy the weekend!
💎 Content has been getting lots of attention over the past weeks because it’s a low cost, high return strategy if done right, but our fixation on content seems to go in and out of fashion quite frequently. We stumbled upon a 1996 essay by Bill Gates discussing the role of content in the success of companies as the internet gains traction. He had a great point, but as shiny new channels like paid and social ads arose, they stole our attention. One new subset of content you know we’re bullish on is community content, which adds some flair to one of the oldest genres of marketing. Just look at the early success of UGC, where marketers are able to utilize organic content posted by their customers—it converts at a significantly higher rate and is even cheaper to produce because you’re not the one making it!
🤖 When David Cancel founded website chat software Drift, chat was already a crowded industry, making their meteoric growth all the more impressive. They claim their GTM centered on building “6-star content” (basically really good reads) is what spurred their growth. SEO tool SpyFu did an analysis of Drift’s content to see if that was, in fact, their secret sauce. They found that the Drift blog’s bounce rate was a ridiculously low 26% (the average is 41-55%), which is pretty solid proof their high keyword rankings led to engaged web visitors. Relatively self-centered topics like product, branded, and case study account for 36% of Drift’s most popular posts (pic below), so don’t think that all of your best work will be broad top-of-funnel content.
🐙 Social scheduling tool MeetEdgar took a much different approach than a hyper-growth startup like Drift, starting as an agency and even moving to info courses before selling through a SaaS model. This case study looks at more granular tactics they used to grow over time, including the use of low commitment CTAs. Nearly all the CTAs you see on SaaS sites are “Start Your Free Trial” or “Book A Demo”—MeetEdgar instead asked web visitors if they wanted to double their traffic (because who doesn’t), and used “Get Your Invitation” as the call to action. While the process is probably the exact same as signing up for a free trial, it sounds less burdensome and led to an insane 10% conversion rate from web visitors.
📈 Last week (and plenty of times before), we discussed the importance of tracking metrics during these unique times, and luckily there are a few platforms that are doing just that at an aggregate level. Hubspot recently released a cautious notice that they have seen some positive signs over the last week with more customers closing sales in the final week of April than they have since the middle of March. Some more high-level positive indicators they saw were increasing web traffic and higher email open rates. Of course, this doesn’t mean the effects of COVID-19 are over, but it is refreshing to see signs that a recovery will be possible.
The Origin of Brands approaches branding the same way Charles Darwin approached evolution, using the “Tree of Life” as a metaphor for itssubject’s evolution. Take computers for example. The first were mainframes but further down their “branches” we find newer categories like personal laptops and workstations, which were inspired by competition between brands fighting for survival. The book encourages marketers to diverge from branches on the tree rather than converge different categories into one. Directly competing with a dominant player in your space is unlikely to work—just look at the established brands who tried to take on IBM’s mainframes and failed. The winners were the ones who advanced the world of computing into new areas were able to own those new categories.