Saas Breakthrough

Meet Kevan Lee, the Director of Marketing at Buffer, a social media management tool for brands, businesses, and marketers. In this podcast episode you'll hear the exact steps Kevan and his team took when they decided to pivot their blog's focus, how they set voice and tone in the content marketing and how they learned just how transformative that can be for marketing, for building a community and really getting the right people to look at your content. You'll find out about why content matters in 2018 specifically, and how they changed their blog to go from that 400,000 unique views to 1.5 million monthly uniques, which is one of the major, major traffic sources that they used to grow Buffer to the great company that it is. We also talk about which marketing experiments have worked, which failed, and where Kevan believes they are going in 2018 and beyond. 03:30 Why Working At Buffer Is Fun 04:53 From Content Writer to Director of Marketing In 4 Years 06:46 Pivoting The Entire Blog Focus To Social Media 09:44

Meet Claire Berge, the Director of Marketing at Brandpoint, a content marketing agency that gives marketing and PR professionals the tools and platforms to tell their stories. In this podcast episode you'll hear the exact steps Claire took to grow from the beginning their SaaS platform Brandpoint HUB, a content marketing platform and how they discovered the brand position, the customer profile, and a segment that would work for growth for both the agency and the SaaS platform. You'll find out about her winning strategy with networking and strategic partnerships that have been their number one source or number one winner for growth, learn from their failed marketing experiments with different channels and what Claire believes is changing with brand and how brand works and the wins for content marketers. 04:50 Joining As 1st Marketer with No Active Users 06:16 Digging Into Target Market Research 08:15 Brand Research to Unite Agency Services and SaaS 09:10 Starting With Paid Traffic to Generate Free Trials 10:2

Meet Kasey Bayne, part of the marketing team at Olark live chat, the most beautiful and effective way to talk to your customers for sales and support. In this podcast episode, you'll hear about the mindset shifts you need to make to create and build strategic partnerships, like Olark has been doing, as well as, re-thinking the experimental techniques Kasey's team been implementing to win in a super competitive market. We also find out how they were able to scale up from word of mouth marketing using automation and centralized communications and Kasey gives us her best tips on where to find the expert advise you really could use. 03:40 What Olark Live Chat Does 04:10 Joining Olark With 10k Paid Customers and Great Culture 06:27 The First 10000 Customers 07:36 From Word Of Mouth To Automation and Centralized Communications 10:08 Narrowing Down On User Problems, Case Studies and Website Redo 14:18 Paid Traffic: Embracing An Experimental Mindset 19:12 Defining Baselines For The Experiment and Data Analysts 21:20

Meet Rod Austin the Director of Marketing at Pagely, the premier Managed WordPress Host. In this podcast episode you'll hear the exact steps that Rod took to really streamline the marketing process for Pagely, to figure out the best channels to take their marketing forward and actually finding which ones were not as successful as they thought they would be, as they found a new niche to a new market to go after they made some really big changes based on what they learnt from their data in 2017. Now the big win from this episode is a new form of marketing that they're doing called Value Based Outreach - VBO that is a really really powerful way to reach out to your target audience. 02:31 Ron Joins Pagely 03:26 Focusing on Revenue and Leads 04:31 Low Hanging Fruit and Business Intelligence 05:57 Establishing a Formal Approach to Persona Identification 07:18 The 5 Weekly KPIs 08:41 What Happened When They Changed the Lowest Plan Price 11:50 The Question They Started Asking Themselves and Their Target 13:07 Moving

Meet Ty Magnin the Director of Marketing at Appcues. In this podcast episode you'll hear how Ty uses brand as a primary differentiator and than doubled down on content marketing early to grow Appcues (which is now at $8M in ARR). We also go over how they create a solid UX based on honest feedback from their drunk users testing events and the importance of their User Onboarding Academy. Find out also which the right moment to start hiring a marketing team. 03:40 How Ty Went From User To Team Member 06:31 Doubling Down on Content Marketing 07:59 An Acquisition Approach 10:16 Results Focused and KPIs Evolution 11:48 Laser Focus to Umbrella Expansion 13:49 Challenges Of An Evolving Brand 15:16 Segmented Sales 16:17 Drunk User Testing 19:00 Big Win: Building a Team 20:19 The Right Moment To Start Hiring a Marketing Team 22:52 Product Market Fit and Scaling 23:50 Bottom Up Focus Strategy 24:15 Lightning Questions

Meet Jon Malmberg , the Director of Growth and Demand Generation at Hotjar. In this podcast episode you'll hear exactly how Jon builds the marketing initiatives for a growing SaaS, including the steps to build the RIGHT marketing team at the RIGHT time. We'll go through his powerful strategies, starting with understanding the customer and the customer journey by learning what he's doing to get customers on a call to reach most important details from them. We also discuss the specific acquisition strategies that have taken them from 400K MRR when John joined to over 1 million MRR in just about a year a year and a half. 03:18 - Joining Hotjar Team 06:13 - First: Building a Marketing Team and Understanding the Customer Experience 08:15 - Talk About The Story or Benefits Not Features 11:57 - Improving User Overal Experience Using Feedback From Customers 13:39 - Acquisition Channels and Initiatives 14:42 - Frictionless Starts 15:69 - KPIs Jon Tracks 17:32 - Retention: More Educational Content and Training to Incr

Meet Alyssa Ackerman, the former Director of Marketing of EverThere, a SaaS company that allows brands to get in front of more audiences and create a unique experience for event audience members. It helps to create MQL or marketing qualified leads from live event audiences around the world. It also helps event organizers make more money from every single event. During this episode, we talk about Alyssa's big breakthrough in understanding the customer avatar which lead to huge breakthroughs in the User Experience of their target customer. This created big wins in marketing, utilizing new marketing channels and initiatives. 04:14 - How Alyssa Started with SaaS Marketing 06:68 - UX and Marketing Research 08:36 - EverThere Digital Swags/ Digital Gift Bags 10:29 - Her First Marketing Initiatives at EverThere 11:54 - Research and Email Strategy 13:40 - Finding the Right Segment to Target 14:23 - Lead Qualification 16:16 - Filtering vs Changing Their Behavior 16:40 - Lowering Prospect Education Needs 19:12 - Using

Meet Aaron Krall, an onboarding expert and founder of the SaaS Growth Hacks Facebook group (one of the top SaaS groups for founders). Aaron's past work as a marketer helped him surge into the SaaS space finding a big hole for most SaaS marketing teams - onboarding. He was able to bring his understanding of customer research, benefit driven marketing, and powerful email testing to create high converting onboarding and activation campaigns for SaaS companies. In this episode, we take a look at what exactly his system looks like and why he has created it the way he has. There's a TON of actionable items in this episode and highly recommend you listen a few times to notate all the nuggets of wisdom. 02:57 How Aaron Found His Way into the SaaS Space 04:19 From Local Hands-on Sales to SaaS Hands-off Sales 05:21 First Understand Your Audience 07:01 Onboarding is More Than The Emails Text 09:00 First Figure Out the Foundation 10:36 Getting Really Good Feedback from Ideal Paying Customers 12:28 Keeping a Pulse on Wh

Meet Ed Shelley, the Director of Content at Chartmogul - a software built to help people build a better subscription business, through data. The Chartmogul team decided early on to double down on content and create campaigns that have paid off huge dividends as they grew. Ed joined as the first full time employee and together found strategic KPI's that drove their huge revenue growth. 03:22 Joining the Team at ChartMogul 04:06 Evolving Product with Same DNA 05:03 Graduating Target Customer with Features 06:05 Changing Marketing from Targeting One Persona to Different Personas 09:09 First Investors Advice: Hire First a Content Focused Person 10:05 Content Marketing Process and Building Momentum 11:33 The Library Of Content that Keeps Paying Back 12:39 Focus on Metrics Around Engagement 15:00 Wins: Downloadables and Pretty Large Analysis Posts 17:53 Guiding Principles: Got To Be Useful for People 18:49 Strategies for Syndication for Content Generation 20:46 Email Marketing and the "SaaS Roundup" 23:

Meet Spencer Mann, the VP of Growth responsible for all areas of marketing and growth at LucidChart. In this podcast episode, we go through a variety of different tests that were ran over the past few years (they literally run up to 200-300 marketing experiments per year), the challenge to find the proper customer segments and personas for maximum growth, and the system they use to create dialed in hypothesis for all their new marketing experiments. This is an amazing episode, enjoy! 03:58 Jumping into Early Startup Mode with Two and Half Million Customers 06:06 The Challenges of Prioritizing Activities Without A Customer Persona 08:34 Segmenting and Optimizing for Regions, Persona Types or Channels 09:39 Initial Wins: Integrations and Nailing SEO and PPC 10:36 What Makes a Great Hire for SEO 11:01 Forecast and Goals 14:19 Success Rate On Experiments 14:45 Experimenting with Local Currencies for Regions and Pricing 18:20 Experimenting with Positioning Pricing on a Page 20:57 What Growth Initiatives You Shoul

Meet Shayla Price, the Growth Content Marketer at Customer.io and previously part of Drip, Kissmetrics and a number of other amazing SaaS Companies. In this episode, Shayla breaks down her hub and spoke approach to content marketing for strategic iniatives with content, how to align your goals with your content, and the true power of "user generated" content that most marketing teams totally miss. This is super helpful for anyone planning on creating content and wants to super-charge their content to the next level. Shayla's years of experience shines through as she drops nugget after nugget of great content! 02:40 How Shayla Started in The World of Content Marketing 05:41 Initial Goals for Campaigns 06:19 Writing Content for a Purpose 07:25 Being a Muse for User Generated Content 09:11 The Real Magic Happens After the Campaign Is Over 09:44 Strategic Content Generated Post vs User Generated Content 10:56 Mapping Out the Pieces 13:14 Placing Content Along the Customer Journey 14:00 What Exactly To

Meet Sançar Sahin, the Director of Marketing at Typeform, a conversational, engaging data-collection platform (but they are so much more) now sitting at 1.3M/MRR. In this episode, Sançar drops a TON of value, explaining their unique culture and long-term thinking around content creation, conversations, and marketing initiatives. It all stems from what Sançar has dubbed the SURF method, but explodes into all areas of the company and has been one of the driving forces for the huge growth over the past two years at Typeform (growing from around 200k/MRR to 1.3M/MRR). We also explain how they use Marketing as an MVP, what the new alignment is for marketing and their KPI's, and finally, where he feels marketing is going in 2018. Enjoy. 03:13 Sançar Joined Typeform With Marketing 100% Driven By Virality 08:09 First Goal: Create a Brand Ecosystem 09:41 Creating a Blog With Thought Leadership Style Content 10:33 Learning By Experimentation 12:32 Defining First Your Values as a Content Team 13:53 The One With The Or

Meet Sid Bharath, previously the VP of Growth at Thinkific (a membership site platform for coaches and consultants), but who now works for himself consulting other amazing SaaS companies. During his time at Thinkific, he solidified them as a true leader in the online course community online course marketplace taking the company from a young startup with zero marketing people all the way to a scaled seven figure ARR company. He has done an absolutely amazing job there and now took his experience to bring it to other software companies to help them grow. We go through a variety of different topics including the first initiatives that Sid did coming in as the first marketer, the exact advertising campaign that he chose, why he chose it and finally we'll talk about why it's so critical for you to know your customer persona in-depth so you can make the right decisions on what marketing avenues to go after. 02:44: How Sid Become VP of Growth at Thinkific 06:04: Balancing Long, Medium and Short Term Strategy 06:32:

Meet Austin Distel, the Director of Marketing at Proof, a social notification app to build trust on your website that dramatically helps increase sales. As employee #1 and the Director of Marketing, Austin explains the steps they took to go from launching with zero funding in March 2017 to a projected $1.8m/ARR (and growing) as a completely bootstrapped company. Now as part of Y-Combinator, the team is expanding their marketing and working on their ultimate goal which is to humanize your online experience. On this episode, we discuss a ton of great content. We deep dive into the initial steps to get Proof off the ground, their initial customers, the one tiny change that caused explosive growth early, and their unique approach to paid advertising that has scaled their profits through the roof. 03:20: A Quest for Authenticity in Online Marketing 06:11: The Master Plan Behind Proof 08:31: Your Persona Evolves Along Your Business 10:06: Achieving Focus For Growth By Merging Companies 12:19: Creating A Product to

A unicorn, turtle, and a Marketing Director? There's gotta be a good joke lying around here somewhere. Welcome to the SaaS Breakthrough podcast hosted by Demio where we take an inside look at what is working in marketing for growing SaaS companies today by the marketers who are in the trenches, experimenting on a daily basis to grow their MRR and build amazing products. In this episode, David Abrams explains the podcast and what's to come in the future. We discuss: Why the move from Demio Discover to SaaS Breakthrough What the new focus means for you What's to come and why you NEED to make SaaS Breakthrough a weekly listen How to join the conversation and connect with us Enjoy :D