The SaaS industry lives and dies at lightning speed. Because SaaS businesses are under high and volatile pressure in the technology industry, they are not capable of a slow and steady growth state. Instead, they exist in a permanent intense state of existence that is only achievable in the technological world.
Many successful SaaS unicorns struggle to implement marketing strategies while facing rapid growth and increasing demand.
Most marketing agencies focus on specific areas, such as strategy, tactics or creativity. Matter Made eschews these presets and transforms based on each client's needs, from marketing strategy and leadership to execution and results. Its ultimate goal is to help companies drive demand efficiency; Reduce customer acquisition costs (CAC) and find effective ways to achieve scalability.
I recently had the opportunity to speak with Matter Made founder and CEO Elias Rubel as we discussed recent changes in post-pandemic marketing strategies, the impact of millennials on the marketing mix, and marketing trends we can look forward to in the coming years. .
Jeff Froome: How have your marketing strategies or tactics changed since the start of 2020?
Elias Rubel: It has been a furious race since the beginning of 2020 in terms of strategies and tactics that made sense for the ever-changing market conditions. In the mid-to-late 2020s, we saw a Covid-19 "surge" in funding and underwriting, and as such, companies entered a "growth at all costs" mode, often prioritizing acquisitions. of market share regardless of CAC or potential lifetime value.
It was a self-fulfilling cycle in which companies invested aggressively at the behest of their boards, greatly expanded their customer base, and increased their ratings. At some point, the once pretentious and elusive moniker "unicorn" began to lose its luster, with more unicorns being formed every day in the tech industry.
During the growth at any cost stage, companies often invest capital to acquire the top of the funnel without spending time on message testing, optimizing landing pages to flow the buyer journey, or planning for the rate of lead growth. I'm not ready. for. for sale. Monitoring and measurement for many companies was a second-tier priority to growth, which ultimately led to many companies growing without a clear understanding of the core strategies and tactics that drove their success.
The tides turned sharply in the early third quarter of 2022 as mounting macroeconomic concerns, combined with the realization that valuations had reached unsustainable levels, pushed the venture capital market off its previous mat. Boards were abolished and companies were forced to reevaluate their acquisition strategy. This led to a fundamental shift from growth at all costs to a focus on demand efficiency. Teams cut themselves in half with budgets. In many cases, internal teams were downsized and wondering how to achieve the same growth with half the budget.
Along with these moves, a general changing of the guard has begun in the ranks, as many millennials begin to assume higher levels of decision-making leadership at large, high-growth technology companies. Future stars made a name for themselves and a new marketing style that would respond in response to navigating this fundamental market change. The answer for them was to change strategies and tactics to focus on order efficiency, which was a big shift for many of these teams.
Demand Efficiency is a Northstar metric that focuses on the top two-thirds of the revenue funnel and is an important key indicator for teams working to reduce CAC. The Demand Efficiency Framework, originally designed by the Growth team at Matter Made, evaluates key revenue conversion points as: total addressable market, revenue organization, top-of-funnel activity, and bottom-of-funnel activity. and experimentation. The goal is to highlight the deficiencies that ultimately lead to the reduction of CAC.
We will continue to increase our focus on demand efficiency as teams shift their strategies and tactics to support a more sustainable growth model amid market changes and as more millennials grow and take leadership roles in decision-making. Decisions in large, high-growth technology companies.
Fromm: What are you excited about in the next 2-5 years?
Roble: The next 2-5 years will be an exciting time for the B2B technology industry. The old days of annoying webinars and ads are quickly over. Public awareness has finally taken root that business consumers are no different from ordinary consumers, and indicators are rapidly shifting strategies from the usual B2B textbooks to newer, more personalized and engaging B2C strategies and tactics.
Technology has also kept pace with supporting highly complex and well-coordinated shopping experiences. Using platforms like 6Sense, Mutiny, ChiliPiper and others, companies can create highly personalized conversion funnels for consumers to educate and acquire customers.
It will be exciting to see the increasing use of machine learning to make effective marketing decisions. Revenue and retention always come first for any good marketer or merchant, but without reliable AI and accurate forecasting, decisions about how to effectively generate and capture demand will be haphazard. Artificial intelligence and machine learning will be useful in developing the ideal customer profile (ICP), targeting customers, sending messages and creating personalized experiences through the marketing funnel.
Look for companies that rely on social opaque tactics to build awareness, nurture potential customers and gain trust through their KPIs. Dark social media and dark social share clicks are on the rise, possibly due to the fact that this data provides a detailed representation of consumer interests, which is of great value to digital marketers. . The rise of dark social networks creates an atmosphere where consumers receive useful, relevant and timely content. The days of content delivery and clickbait based advertising will be a thing of the past.
However, the most exciting is on the creative front. Historically, B2B has been one of the least interesting and aesthetically pleasing places to be. Boring ads, boring resources, boring sales teams – there's no shortage of B2B boredom. However, with this consumer wind of change comes a new wave of creativity among companies.
Companies, even large companies like ServiceNow, are investing heavily in consumer-level creative campaigns, and new agencies like NoBoringDesign are emerging to help companies like Loom, Yelp for Restaurants, and Productboard transition from the status quo of B2B design to advertising . B2C. . This is just the beginning of the wave. As more B2B companies realize that people are people, the waves of creative change will revolutionize what we can expect from B2B in the next 2-5 years.