NO AI WAS USED IN THE CREATION OF THIS
Updated 4/2/2024
Most B2B/C SaaS companies are exploring product-led growth levers, either sales-led or product-led to gain traction in today's competitive market.
With all the options available to consumers, it's about providing value upfront and making adoption easy in-product. People get frustrated with tough-to-navigate UI or lackluster supportive content, and it's important about being supportive in whatever the persona's intention is.
What's important in growth marketing today is:
Getting uniformed, trusted analytics with agreed upon business drivers.
Showing the wins and losses with everyone
Don't be afraid to make be swings, but fail fast
If these three points are acceptable, then you have the workings to find growth through experimentation.
I see 3 areas of growth marketing that are in companies control, which match the AARRR model:
acquisition - channel analytics, acquiring a customer (CAC)
activation - Engagement, ACV, stage velocity
retention - LTV, Churn, Net Promoter Score, Customer Advisor Boards, User Groups
referral - How likely will people recommend you? Again, NPS is big here.
Here is a good example from Positive Human showing how marketing is evolving past top of funnel, and why asking questions and looking downstream builds better engines:
Acquisition
Digital marketing has been changing since 2018, when companies started focusing more on their "growth at all cost" engine, stuffing money into
In 2024, things have changed. Buying habits have changed, and self-service and independent shopping has taken over. The demand gen waterfall of 2010 is no longer applicable, and the typical "funnel" is becoming less relevant for how buying behavior is today.
Companies are focused on incrementality, scalable growth, or taking big swings - and it's all dependent on how risk-adverse you leadership team is and what the opportunity is.
Every channel has it's own advantage, and following consumer behavior is important to identify what bets to place.
For example, "dark social" has increased in importance when it comes to B2B buying habits. People are using trusted sources, such as Slack groups, consultants, places like LinkedIn or Reddit, to find out what works and what doesn't. Gartner reported in 2023 that about 90% of people are doing self-research before buying, meaning you have to be in the places that people.
Money follows pain, and you need to know what those pain points are and how to speak to them. If people go on Reddit or Quora to find information about something - let's do that. If partner marketing is important because you're in a word of mouth business, explore that.
An example, people saying "social doesn't bring revenue" just aren't measuring the right metrics for the channel. You'll be hard pressed to see "Facebook" as a lead referral source in your Salesforce reporting, but you will see it as a place people are sharing and talking about you.
One way to combat this is using primary customer research, such as self-reported attribution (How did you hear about us?). Measuring this can lead to super valuable information, especially since attribution is a nightmare for most companies. Uncloaking the funnel is super important in understanding hits or misses with campaigns.
Activation
Along with how to approach product-led SEO is the importance of signal-based intent, not just are they in-market or out. Hand raisers coming in through a website, especially if you're a two-sided marketplace or service both B2B and B2C, can be hard to track from signups, through call, through opportunity creation, down to closed/won.
Leveraging platforms like Qualified or Intercom can help with accelerating pipeline velocity due to the ability to see when people are engaging with your company. Setting up nurture streams or Slack notifications can help improve SLAs, and ultimately bring the right amount of urgency to deals.
What matters to me as a marketer?
Lead quality - from sales collaboration or good visualization of leads to calls/opps/purchases in analytics
Deal velocity - is the process seamless, are you following up quickly, are you providing the right support?
Closed/Won - by channel, lead source, campaign - I want to know what actually brings in revenue, by channel/UTM/messaging etc.
Retention
Going out even farther from acquiring a customer is the ability to retain them as a customer. in B2C, it might be sales & promos, in B2B it might be stellar support, through CSMs, support documentation/videos, customer advisory boards or user groups where people can interact and feel connected.
While growth wants to capture and retain customers, it's all about getting as many at bats with in-market people as possible, but following it all the way down to NPS.
Are we attracting customers that are a good fit? If there's bad churn, maybe messaging is misleading people or the product is frustrating - dig into that.
NPS scores are a great companywide metric that everyone is responsible for, and too often I've seen it just fall on product teams to own. It's a great barometer of the ability to work as a team, and using that information to constantly improve the experience for customers.
Referral
Referral programs are a great flywheel to have a cost-effective strategy at driving new customers. Word of mouth marketing (or "dark social") has been taking the wheel while people are doing their own research at buying.
When activated, referral helps build acquisition, loyalty, as well as expansion and engagement of current customers. This is a piece that is largely owned by by customer and sales teams, often bringing in solutions consultants to identify opportunities.
As a marketer, I feel it's important to understand what types of customers hang around, so you can constantly tune your acquisition machine to bring on better ICPs.