SaaS Breakthrough – The 7 Top Campaigns of 2021

saas breakthrough episode 162

Welcome to this special SaaS Breakthrough episode with our host, Ashley Levesque, covering the 7 Best Marketing Campaigns we observed in 2021.

From LinkedIn to email marketing, you’ll learn how to replicate these results-driven campaigns.

This episode’s guests include:

Paul Cowan at FreshBooks (Full episode here)

Thomas Peham at Storyblok (Full episode here)

Alan Silvestri at Growth Gorilla (Full episode here)

Camille Trent at Dooly (Full episode here)

Breezy Beaumont at Correlated (Full episode here)

Thomas Paris at Hoppier (Full episode here)

Christi Williams at HubSpot (Full episode here)

Thank you so much for listening, subscribing, commenting, and being part of this incredible journey! We have more fabulous guests lined up for 2022!

 

Isn't it time to level up your scrappy marketing team with a weekly dose of high-octane content?!? ?


Show Notes:
01:45
Paul Cowan at FreshBooks
"One thing we were helping provide it back to the government so that they could inform their stimulus packages and what they should be doing. And, and at what levels were, were small businesses being affected. And then we can, you know, obviously then divide it up by sector and by region as well (...) it was amazing because then we started getting excited about it and going like, okay, how can we spin this data and look at it differently? And what are some of the insights that we can come up with here? And, and we found other things like, what were women-owned businesses doing versus male owned businesses? And, we found out things like, Hey, women-run businesses were affected more than male ones. And they took three times longer to recover. And they didn't recover to the same levels. So, all of these pieces are something that I'm like very excited about and want to kind of double down on, because one, this is a content magnet. If I'm able to help other businesses understand where they stand and how are they tracking and trending versus versus where their books are telling them, then all of these things are incredibly powerful for our customers or prospects or anybody in the SMB space to be able to understand, like, how is their business going to fair and how are they managing their cash and their cashflow. And what should they be preparing for."
05:15
Thomas Peham at Storyblok
"We tried to map the full funnel starting with like top of funnel assets, top of funnel content really, really creating those pieces for the awareness stage. I would argue within the marketing audience, let's say, but also then, we try to look at it from like, what's the middle of funnel, what's the bottom of funnel, right? What's the, what are the areas we can talk about in the education stage, for example, when it comes to educating people about our topic, which we define as headless CMS, and it's quite a technical term, it's quite a technical concept. So we knew that there needs to happen a lot of education in between those like top of funnel and bottom of funnel assets. So I think that's, that's around the whole educational journey and looking at the bottom of funnel same thing there, right? Like what, what actions, what conversion steps do we see closest sitting towards the product? What, what do we believe helps us in the activation stage as well? Right. Marketing doesn't stop at, okay now we acquire leads. We're happy, right? It doesn't stop there. It goes much further beyond that, from a product perspective, it goes into activation, it goes into enablement. How do we enable marketers using our product? How do we retain them? Like what makes them come back? The same thing on the sales side. So we really try to map the full funnel also from an asset perspective."
09:40
Alan Silvestri at Growth Gorilla
"The main thing that we do for 90% of our clients is that we try to support the content production that they do with the quality manual link building outreach. So we take the content that they have. We try to find specifically the pages that have the most potential to rank higher with maybe just a couple of backlinks. So I take a look at the top 10, like ranking results. And let's say that they have a page that's ranking number eight. So the bottom of page one, I do analysis to see how many links that page kind of needs to rank higher and so on. So we essentially try to do like the 80/20 of link building, finding the pages that I call, like the quick win pages. So pages that have the most potential to rank higher in the short term. And then we essentially try, we basically keep working on those pages until they rank higher and then move to other pages that are ranking lower basically, and then like repeat, basically the same process over and over, essentially."
17:15
Camille Trent at Dooly
"It was like we have all of these creative elements. How do we still get still get like the reviews in there and get the product in there a little bit more so so we don't get too wrapped up in just the creative element. We still remember like what this was originally about, because it's easy for that happen to go off the rails. And so I guess I did like in the scripting of all of this, like make sure that I picked out some of the better reviews from G2, included those in the video and had had a call to action of of which we're running this contest in tandem with this. Like if you sign up this week and you're eligible for these prizes and things and linked back to also like are our press release that we did, sent that to the PR team, too, so that they could run with it. So we had a couple of things running in tandem with this, and I can get into the specifics a little later, but that's like how the idea came to be.
24:10
Breezy Beaumont at Correlated
31:15
Thomas Paris at Hoppier
"The thing about virtual events is that most of them are free, first of all. And also that the content is available on demand after they actually take place. So what incentive do people have of actually showing up? And if you have to link that back to the fact that if you compare it to in-person events, virtual events or like people usually attend virtual events to learn something. So if they attend to learn something and you offer all the content for free after the virtual event, so why would somebody attend? Like that became clear to me that that was a big challenge. And that was a big challenge because you can talk about during and after event engagement. But if people just don't show up, like your chance of turning that attendee into a lead and into a client is almost zero. I mean, yeah, they might watch the on demand webinar, but let's be honest. Like the view rates of these on-demand videos is not that great either because people think, Hey, I'm going to watch it afterwards. And then they have kids or other activities, life happens, and you get lost in 100 emails a day (...) I think where people get wrong is like not having a clear event promise. That's why people don't show up. And so what I think I learned that from you, by the way. And then, and then I made sure that in all my communication pre-event, I re-explain what I was promising. And so part of the promise was the content. So what, I'm going to talk about, the talking points, and please don't have talking points and then the actual talking points are completely different than the one on your landing page."
39:25
Christi Williams at HubSpot
"One of the important things is don't just copy what your competitors are doing. You know, I took a look at a lot of our competitor sites and they had blogs out there, not a lot, but you really want to be making sure that you're answering your customers. And while the competition may have, you're talking about the same thing, you're talking to the same target buyer persona, there's different value adds that you bring. And there's different perspectives that you bring. And I would encourage you to hone in on those because that's what differentiates you. So don't just copy the competition and do what the competition is doing. I think it was Albert Einstein that said insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."
Resources:
Listen to "Virtual Events – Six Tactics To Create Memorable Virtual Experiences":
https://learn.demio.com/podcast/virtual-events-six-tactics-to-create-memorable-virtual-experiences/
Connect with Ashley:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/ashleylevesque/
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