For so long, we’ve focused on blog and video content as being the pillars of content marketing. The thing is, they’re not. Your website — the information architecture that makes up your entire navigation and user flows — is essential to your content marketing success. If the navigational systems on your website don’t make sense and are not optimized for search, you could risk losing out on potential traffic and conversions.
There’s a myth that corporate buyers hold all the power over vendors – that vendors struggle to sell. However, perhaps it’s the other way around: buyers struggle to buy. The single biggest challenge of selling today is not selling, it is actually our customers’ struggle to buy. Indeed, more than 75% of the customers described their purchase as very complex or difficult.
Depending on the type of product you’re selling, the number of people you’ll need to convince could be vastly different. Selling a loaf of bread might only need one person’s approval, whereas selling high-end services to a large corporation will require a number of decision-makers to agree. To simplify this abstract idea, specific buying roles have been characterized. These roles will be present in most buying situations.
SEOs can relate to this, but folks new to SEO need to understand what typically happens when you focus on SEO and content. A new account gave me lots of sleepless nights. For what felt like forever, we couldn’t get articles to rank. Then in June, we felt like the issue was the blog being on a subdomain. It got moved to /blog/. 3 months later… liftoff. Trust the process.
The problem is that most startups have limited resources. When adding your first UX headcount, you’re taking one away from engineering or sales. So it’s tempting to delegate this work to contractors or, what’s worse, to get in charge of the UX yourself. The reality is that most startups need UX design way earlier than they realize. We live in a world of commoditized user experience. If you’re developing consumer software, that’s your bar. If you’re developing business software and want to win for real, that’s also your bar.
How does a SaaS company reach enterprise buyers? Enterprise decision-makers have unique problems they need to solve, but they don’t always have time to experiment with a platform or sit through dozens of software demos to find the right solution. When it comes to creating an enterprise pipeline, Notion takes a unique approach. Notion has found the most success in attracting larger, enterprise-level customers through the recommendations of their internal team members that use Notion in their personal lives.
One of the most impactful ways you can improve your user onboarding experience is to remove as many unnecessary steps as possible. Doing so should reduce your product’s time-to-value and increase the number of people who experience your “Aha!” moment. The goal of onboarding isn’t to get more people to experience your product’s value asap. It’s also to help them adopt new product habits. Habit-formation requires some friction.
What’s the role of Product vs. Growth vs. Marketing? While growth will inherently be collaborative, it can be helpful to carve out team responsibilities so that there’s clear ownership and accountability throughout key parts of the customer journey. Your product is the foundation of your Marketing and Growth efforts. It must provide real, sustaining value and solve a specific problem for users.
One of the most common questions I get from founders is: ‘When should I hire my first data person?’ At the core of this question is the common mistake of viewing data as a team to hire or set of tools to implement rather than as a strategic lever for growth. Instead, data needs to be seen as a strategic lever for growth. Viewing data from this perspective leads to different answers on the questions we started with around team and tools.
The old adage of ‘you have to go enterprise to really scale’ is being challenged now, so is the idea that SMBs sort of “max out”. These rules are still true in many cases, but there are some exceptions: Zoom and Shopify. Both got more SMB in the last year, and grew revenue explosively. The lesson here is not to not go after enterprise, but also there are so, so, so many SMBs, and they may scale far longer and far further than we thought.
Users have little to no patience to read long directions and no time for steep learning curves. The default is to find the easiest and quickest path. That’s why it’s important to reduce your time-to-value as much as possible. The goal is to shorten the time-to-value (TTV), the amount of time it takes a new customer to realize the value of a product. You’re in a race against time. Unfortunately, most onboarding experiences are anything but a straight line.
At the end of 2019, Logz.io launched their first self-service offering with only two engineers and a completely manual back-end process. They’ve since scaled up their product-led motion and now a whopping 50% of their new customers come in via the self-service channel. On top of that, about 10% of their self-service signups become enterprise opportunities. Plus, Logz.io’s smaller self-service customers are highly valuable, too.
Behavioral segmentation is one of four types of marketing segmentation. It examines consumers’ decision-making processes and shopping activity. This helps marketers to answer key questions like when do your customers buy, what do your customers buy, and why do your customers buy. Behavioral indicators help you see what customers want - and conversely, what turns them away from your brand.
Many (most?) websites, especially for early and growth-stage companies are ineffective. They don’t tell visitors who the product is for, what problem they solve, and what the product does. In self-serve, freemium, and/or bottom-up business models, the website is especially important as it needs to do a lot of the work a sales team would normally do. In top-down business models, the website is also crucial as both a lead gen and sales enablement tool. No matter your business model, your website is your front door.
When I was taught storytelling, there were three types of conflict: nature, another person, or within the protagonist themselves. As in literature, every company has a conflict as well. The type of conflict a company is in will determine how you think about competition. The type of conflict you are facing affects a lot of how you build and what you focus on as a company. Spending some time to think through where the real conflict is can help focus the company on the right activities to win.