I remember my first attempt at marketing back in 1983. We had just finished our first product, tying PCs to a Burroughs mainframe, and we were ready to sell. We took an ad out in the main industry publication and even added extra phone lines to handle the inevitable demand. Nobody called. Marketing turned out to be way more challenging than we assumed. This is a common theme within most startups.
When Dwight Merriman and I started DoubleClick, we knew virtually nothing about marketing. I bought two books on Branding and Direct Response and discovered we could turn these theories into our DART product. With DoubleClick, we worked with thousands of marketers and learned what worked and what didn’t.
I too often see marketing plans “focused” on everything: podcasts, site redesign, name change, conferences, awards, etc. When you focus on everything, you are clueless; you will fail at everything and spend all your money. FOCUS. Get one thing working, then move on to the next high-conviction item.
Below is a very brief overview of the three pillars of marketing.
Brand Marketing
Some branders believe “good art is the art that wins awards.”
The best definition of a brand I’ve heard is a “promise” to your customers. If you go into a McDonald’s anywhere in the world, you’ll get over-salted fries and a reasonably clean bathroom. Your promise should be to solve your customer’s problems.
People are hit with 10,000 ads/day. You must target your ads to prospective customers; everyone else is wasting money. You won’t sell with branding; you want them to remember you favorably (i.e., you’ve identified their problems). I like to think of brand advertising as artillery. Artillery never wins battles, but it softens up for the assault. You want people to recognize you favorably when they receive an email or a phone call from one of your AEs.
Brand marketers tend to be creative. At DoubleClick, Lee Nadler was a master at guerilla marketing (a term used to describe clever, often inexpensive forms of advertising that reach people unexpectedly). Everyone had heard of “Silicon Alley” (a made-up place), but nobody knew where it was. Lee bought a billboard adjacent to the FlatironFlat Iron building on Broadway near our office, welcoming people to “Silicon Alley.” Many “Silicon Alley” articles would include a picture of our billboard.
Lee also hired “sidewalk chalk artists” to create beautiful DoubleClick ads in front of ad agency buildings. When it started to rain, he had a person handing out DoubleClick umbrellas at those same agencies. Where did our prospective customers go on the weekends in the summer? The beach. He hired planes (surprisingly cheap) to fly a DoubleClick banner up and down the Hamptons and Connecticut beaches. You get the point; be clever like Lee.
One simple way to brand is to get a list of prospects' email addresses (ZoomInfo, Customers.ai) and target that audience on Google and Meta. To stay top of mind, cap the frequency to perhaps three ads/month. This same email list can also be used for “drip marketing” campaigns, a form of direct response.
Warning:
Beware of marketers that are more interested in winning awards or branding themselves.
Direct Response (DR)
DRers believes “good art is the art that sells.”
DR is about targeting and measuring the performance of your advertising. You need to be able to target your audience and measure their effectiveness against a goal like signing up for a demo or webinar. With DR, you test everything with a statistically significant sample until you achieve satisfactory results. You test creative. You test the copy on the ad and your site. You test colors. You test the call to action. You test EVERYTHING. Then, and only then, do you scale your budget. Because you tested with a statistically significant sample, you can be confident you’ll achieve the same results in full production—the beauty of statistics. However, this ongoing process must continuously "beat the previous control" to improve and avoid burnout. AI can help by quickly and inexpensively providing multiple versions of creative that can be tested. But, the human and creative approach must guide the work to ensure it hits the mark strategically and creatively.
DR people are almost always different from branders. They tend to be very quantitative (they must know statistics) and methodical. They are obsessed with ROI and constantly improve it. They test a channel and scale it once it’s proven to work. Then, they move on to the next channel. They don’t care about winning “creative” awards; they only care about sales.
What’s a channel? A channel is a distinct method of marketing. Examples include email, LinkedIn ads, Google AdWords, SEO, SoftwareAdvice, etc. Some channels, like Google, are very broad, so you want to track sub-channels like specific AdWords. You need to be able to track the source (channel) for each lead generated and track it through actual sales. You must track the ROI on each channel. Expand channels that work until you can’t expand that channel anymore. Channels that don’t work, keep testing until you conclude it will not work, then cut it.
Every company should first focus DR on “high intent” channels. High intent means people who are actively seeking a solution to their problem. Where do you find people with high intent? Google, Bing, comparison engines like SoftwareAdvice and Capterra, and visitors to your site. We invented retargeting when it occurred to us that visitors to your website are the strongest intent signal to humankind. Out of the millions of websites, they came to yours. Why? Because they are interested in what you do. Why would a person go to a comparison site without actively looking for a solution? What’s easier, convincing somebody to buy your product who isn’t even looking for a solution or somebody actively looking for a solution!?
You must nail high-intent channels first. They are the easiest channels to exploit but also limited—not everyone is actively looking. The next place to focus is education through webinars, studies, whitepapers, conferences, etc. Branding is increasingly important at this stage.
Ultimately, you want to measure the ROI of every channel. If you have a long sales cycle, this can be challenging. However, you can measure intermediate results in the marketing and sales “funnel.” Some actions, such as a demo completed, are better predictors of sales than others, such as webinar attendance.
As a prospect journeys to becoming a customer, you have conversion rates for each step in that funnel that greatly impact your results. You need to focus on improving each step to increase conversion. For example, say a user clicks on your Google ad and your goal is to sign them up for a demo. If you can double your conversion rate from a site visit to a demo request, you double the effectiveness of that channel. You should tailor your landing page based on the user’s intent. One conversion point is contract negotiations. One company started with a very onerous contract but ultimately negotiated most of the points away. However, in the process, they lost a lot of potential customers. Solution? Start with a reasonable contract and they doubled their conversions.
Brainstorm how to improve each conversion point, and focus on the top ones. Test, repeat, test, repeat. When it works, SCOP it - it’s now a Scalable Opportunity.
Important Note:
Your goal is not to get the cheapest leads, but the most leads with a positive ROI.
Demand Generation is about driving qualified leads to your sales team. There often needs to be more connection between sales and marketing. Marketing is often measured and incentivized on MQLs (Marketing Qualified Leads), while sales want SQLs (Sales Qualified Leads). You need to align incentives. Educational leads like webinars or whitepapers are MQLs that require more nurturing, but you want these to turn into SQLs.Over time, as you move “up the funnel” to broaden your audience, your marketing team can focus on MQLs, but in the early days, focus on SQLs.
Visitors to your website are showing “high intent.” However, you can only expect to convert a visitor to a lead maybe 2% of the time. 98% of those visitors are lost. Or are they? You can generate likely leads using a tool like ZoomInfo, Clearbit, or Customers.ai. Customers.ai (we are investors) can give you the actual email address of the visitor 10-20% of the time. Other methods take the visitor's domain name, match it to a company database, and provide email addresses of likely buyers. You can feed this into your email drip campaigns, as well as through audience targeting on Google and Meta.
Product Marketing
PM is how you communicate what you do. The biggest mistake I see people make is focusing on all of their features. People DO NOT CARE about your features. They only care about themselves and their problems. Ideally, your features solve your customers' problems. If they do not, you have a Product Management problem, which we’ll cover in another article.
Brainstorm the problems you believe your customers have. Ask your customers what their biggest problems are. Have your customers and employees force rank these problems to find the biggest problems. Focus your product marketing on those top 2 or 3 problems. On your conversion page, don’t just go for the sale; sell them. You sell them by showing you not only understand their problems, but you have the solution. Your site should have a “Solutions” tab explaining how each of their problems is solved with your product features.
In the classic technology book Crossing the Chasm, the author discusses tech companies' struggles after depleting the “early adopters” who will buy anything new. He concludes that prospects only care about what their competitors are doing. Why would an airline company care about how your product solved the problems of a consulting company? They don’t. Your site should have an “Industry” tab that shows how you solve problems, preferably with case studies, for THEIR industry.
Conclusion
Focus your messaging on how your solutions will solve their problems.
Focus on prospects that show high intent first.
Focus on each channel, keep testing until it works, and then scale it. Keep improving.
Focus on improving each section of your sales and marketing funnel. Increasing conversion at each part of the funnel will make your marketing more efficient and scalable.