The Playbook Series
Recently, I attended a six week speaker series for B2B growth marketers, graciously organized and run by Parul Singh of Founder Collective and Ryan MacInnis of Notarize. Each Thursday, we gathered in a small group, chatted over appetizers, listened to a short presentation from one or two speakers, threw said speakers into the hot seat as we peppered them with questions and watched those questions drive the direction of the conversation, and then broke for more chatting over appetizers. I feverishly wrote in a notebook through most of this.
I gained extremely valuable insights from the presentations, Q+A sessions, and conversations I had. Since writing seems to be my most effective form of processing, I am processing those insights here on paper. Or “on paper” I suppose, but that is an entirely separate conversation.
Session 1: Marketing Starts with Storytelling and Succeeds with Focus
Mike Troiano kicked off the first session as our inaugural speaker. He talked about messaging, and how the root of marketing is telling a good story and then gauging the responses you get as you tell it. This means that marketing needs to work with sales to get feedback on what’s working, what isn’t, and how prospects and customers are responding to messaging in real time.
To get useful insights from those responses, it’s important that whoever is telling the story tells it consistently and compellingly. Working in marketing is to be a student of human response. Messaging can be tweaked depending on the audience, but you shouldn’t be varying more than 30 degrees from the central story.
From a more holistic viewpoint, it’s about focus. Focus is deciding what not to do, so you should pick the three most important things and do those well. It is better to be specific and wrong than too broad and lack impact.
This applies to overall marketing strategy, but also to the detail of how to pitch your messaging. You want to give just enough in an upfront statement for a potential buyer to determine relevance so they want to dig deeper- so you need to pick one thing to put in the front window. If you throw everything you sell in the front window of the store, no one will come in.
Session 2: When You Find Something That Works, Go Deep
Session 2 started with Michelle Balaban, a marketing designer who shared key tips for using design to spur action. She used the landing page she built for the Drift Marketing Summit as an example- a particularly apt one for me since I had actually registered for that event from her landing page.
She explained that designs should be both emotional and human, and human faces and social proof are particularly impactful. It’s important to have authority, be consistent, and throw in something playful with the design elements.
Your job with the design and copy “above the fold” is to get attention- and to include at least one clear call to action. Next, you want to offer something in return for someone’s engagement, some sort of guarantee that will build good will like promising that sessions of a webinar will be recorded but only if you pre-register.
Finally, you want to convey a bit of scarcity to drive more immediate action, like holding something on only one day or having a registration deadline.
Our second speaker was Mike Filbey. He told us his story of dropping out of college for a startup that ultimately failed, and how he took that scrappy mindset to his next startup in the form of seven lessons learned. I won’t divulge them all here, but a few were particularly insightful and actionable.
Lesson 1: Start with the low hanging fruit.
He sent a product sample to an Instagram influencer who he knew would love the product and would have a following that wouldn’t need much convincing to try the product. The product was a meat subscription box, and the influencer was Chris Kresser, godfather of the paleo diet. Chris liked the meat and so he told his followers about it. His followers already knew why they should buy grass fed beef and were eager to try this product.
Lesson 2: When you find something that works, go deep and do it as fast as you can.
As soon as Mike realized that the influencer marketing channel was working for them, they became laser focused on getting as much out of this channel as possible. They set out to find more Chris Kressers.
Lesson 7: Signing up a bunch of customers isn’t enough.
You have to take care of your existing customers, especially long term customers. He learned to segment email lists based off their interest level, and actually found that a last chance email gets more signups than an initial announcement email.
For their referral program, the reward for referring was money off their next order, which meant a customer would buy at least one more box. He segmented emails that way too- people who had referred ten people got a different email than low-volume referrers or someone who hadn’t referred anyone.
A final piece of advice
His whole career story was about making seemingly unconventional choices. He knew what to do because he followed his energy and always made the choice he was most excited about.
Session 3: Marketing is About Depth of Connection, Not Breadth
Phil Nottingham made an excellent point about attention spans: if they’re really declining so much, how do we explain our collective binge-watching habit on Netflix?
Marketing is about building a deep connection with a specific, niche audience more than reaching the largest number of less specific people. He posits that it’s not about touchpoints or impressions, it’s about the amount of time a user spends on your site and their level of engagement with your content and your brand. This translates to depth of permission, meaning users that sign up for emails, show up to events, and are enthusiastically seeking out your content.
He’s at Wistia, where they’re going deep on long form content. He told us about a huge ad campaign they ran that did nothing- because it was focused on quick, trivial connections. The key is to focus on the knowledge that your company is uniquely qualified to share and put it into creative, long form content that a small, specific audience wants.
A content strategy is more than topics and formats. Who are you writing for? What are their pain points?
Session 4: Start with Personas
Ellie Mirman presented about competitive intelligence. She starts with building out robust customer personas- so robust that they have names and the team chats about them as though they are real people. Their stories are supplemented and informed by actual customers.
To differentiate from competitors, she focuses on showing rather than telling, having consistency of messaging across all channels from the website to the sales team, and using differentiators that are not copyable or desired to be copied, like puns based on your company’s name.
Since she’s built out marketing departments multiple times, I was excited to ask her about the first things she does when she arrives at a new company. She focuses on four things: making sure she has a CMS she can use to edit content and the website, gathering data on the website, researching and establishing personas, and doing an audit of the sales and marketing funnel. It’s important to figure out who the audience is, what converts to a meeting or a sale, the stages of the funnels, and where the biggest opportunities lie.
Another interesting point: her first hire is always a content generalist who can do a lot and go down different marketing paths as the team grows and individuals begin to specialize.
Session 5: Let the Numbers Drive Strategy
Lindsey Christensen came to talk about funnels. When developing a demand gen strategy, you need to find reliable audience-building channels, create touchpoints along the funnel that will engage the audience, and then turn them into customers. That corresponds to a funnel that looks like this: awareness, engagement, conversion, and customer.
When evaluating potential campaigns to run, Lindsey starts with deciding how much she’s willing to spend at each stage of the funnel. To decide if an opportunity will be worth it, she starts with assumptions about average deal size, MRR, and conversion rates. From there, she applies a payback time frame and then forecasts the outcome of a particular experiment she’s considering trying.
Basically, if she spends X, how many converted leads with Y value can she expect it to yield? If the numbers work out to a positive ROI, she’ll run the experiment.
Session 6: Run Experiments
That sounds familiar.
The final session of the series brought together some topics we touched upon throughout the series, and also brought us two speakers: Hannah Russin and John Pauler.
To run an experiment, we return to the scientific method we learned in grade school. Develop a hypothesis, create the change, and then track the metrics. Your company website and your product are great places to look for things to try to optimize. Especially at a fast-moving startup, it’s helpful to evenly split your A/B groups to see significant results sooner.
Drawing on some points from the conversation with Lindsey, part of what you can experiment on and measure is the ROI of a campaign based on money spent and the resulting leads. It’s important to look at the whole picture- Hannah gave a great example of a time that she ran a campaign on a channel that was delivering leads with a very low conversion rate, but the cost per lead was so low that the campaign was actually still ROI positive.
These were the specific learnings, but to me, the best part of this whole thing was that it was a series.
Ideally, the same people came back each week, allowing for what I believe to be the ultimate key to successful community and relationship building: repeated, spontaneous interaction with the same people. Not everyone was able to attend every session, but enough people attended enough sessions that I was able to build deeper connections with some of them than the superficial person-I-met-once-at-a-networking-event standard.
