A bootstrapped SAAS founder who sucks at Marketing. So I have decided to invest time learning everything about Marketing and Digital Marketing. From the ground up. Btw on that note, has anyone heard of Demand Curve which teaches Marketing courses ? I like some of their stuff online and thinking about taking their Premium Course.
Thx for asking. oo, where do I start ? I guess setting up an overall strategy before any actual tactical execution. We do close to 1M in revenue already and have inbound traffic already but I got to this point somehow without any real planning. We write a few blog posts, content etc, got social profiles where we post, were lucky to get a few great backlinks and have built some relationships with influencers in our industry. But what do we now ? I have no real strategy here. Should we run ads ? Where ? Why google and not linkedin or vice versa ?
There’s two divergent approaches to learning, sometimes referred to as top-down or bottom-up.
Top-down begins with broad context, such as the history of programming languages, the advent of objects and classes, and eventually zoom in to modern languages, syntax and functions.
Bottom-up works inversely; maybe you’re given a Python sandbox, a hello world, and a cheat sheet. You explore what you can do and build on those low-level operators to create foundations that frame wider context.
Effective learning is always a mix of both. Everyone learns somewhere on the spectrum, maybe bouncing around depending on motivation and experience.
With respect to your goal of learning marketing, you’ve identified your path of study: strategy. And just like your SaaS product was created out of an understanding of functions and needs in a space, so too should your research explore the functions available to your business and how they’ll affect your pipeline.
Simplified: you have a tool, and since you have revenue, you know people want it. Your goal is to find questions to ask and answer them, and use that feedback to make decisions regarding your marketing strategy.
-What is my biggest source of traffic to my site? Where do they spend the most time? What causes them to click buy? How can I use these data to optimize my funnel?
-What is my total marketing cost divided by the number of paying users (CPA)? What’s their expected lifetime value? What do other products in my space cost?
-What do my customers and affiliates describe my product as? What problems disappear once they subscribe? How does this translate to value for decision makers? Do my enterprise sales represent 80% of MRR or 10%? Should I use multiple approaches to entities of different scale?
The questions you’re asking are the right ones. And like any other field, they multiply and become more specific - but if you bear in mind the top-down goal (spend less, charge more) of a business, things will crystallize quickly.
Start by choosing a definite objective. Something obvious and unavoidably precise. Do you want to help more people, or the same people more? If the former, set a new users objective. If the latter, set a lifetime customer value objective. How will you measure success? Good objectives include both quantity and quality metrics.
Choosing a meaningful and definite objective is the second hardest part of marketing.
The hardest part is talking to customers.
You'd like to buy some more customers, right? So do some research. What kind of customers do you want? How much are you willing to pay? Where can you get a great deal on them right now?
Many business owners spent more time researching lunch options last year than customers. Why?
What's the most obvious way to get more or better customers? Spend 45 minutes writing down every idea you can think of. Every single idea. You'll get through the fluff after about 25-30 minutes.
Then find the options that use your existing strengths, preferably in a non-obvious to your competitors way, and turn them into a story.
That's your strategy.
Do those things and see if they get you closer to your objective. And move fast.
Try big things, don't tolerate slow learning, and remember that you learn from reflecting on experience, not thinking about tools and techniques.
