
John Doe
Architect & Engineer
We love that guy
Architect & Engineer
We love that guy
Architect & Engineer
We love that guy
BioT, a fast-growing SaaS startup providing cloud infrastructure for medical device companies, needed to establish its brand authority, expand its reach, and drive demand in a highly competitive space. Through a strategic content marketing and thought leadership approach, we helped BioT achieve consistent growth across key marketing metrics, leading to greater visibility, market positioning, and business opportunities.
As a B2B SaaS startup operating in the medical device industry, BioT faced three key challenges:
Expanding Brand Awareness – While BioT had a strong product, continuing to expand its presence among key industry players was crucial for long-term growth.
Strengthening Market Presence – Their digital presence needed greater resonance to cut through industry noise.
Need for demand generation – BioT needed to translate brand reach into high-intent interactions, demo requests, and sales opportunities.
With a clear mission but lacking a structured marketing strategy, BioT turned to Bold Digital Architects to build a scalable content marketing engine.
To help BioT increase market influence and generate demand, we implemented a multi-layered approach focused on:
✅ Strategic Thought Leadership – Positioning BioT’s leadership as category experts through high-value LinkedIn posts, newsletters, articles, and industry insights.
✅ Amplifying Market Presence – Driving 3,233% engagement growth and a 1,600% rise in shares through consistent content efforts and internal advocacy, reinforcing BioT’s industry influence.
✅ Turning Visibility into Action – Strengthening brand credibility and audience engagement contributed to a +35% increase in demo requests, translating reach into business opportunities.
In just one year (2023-2024), BioT saw clear growth:
Audience Growth: +54% → Expanded reach & brand recognition
Published Content: +1,685% → Increased presence & industry authority
Engagement: +3,233% → More conversations & brand interactions
Shares: +1,600% → Increased credibility & community-driven growth
Reach: +1,222% → Larger, more engaged audience exposure
Website Sessions: +105% → More inbound interest & direct traffic
Demo Requests: +35% → More high-intent leads & revenue potential
“Beyond their marketing expertise, what stood out about Bold Digital Architects was their ability to truly understand our technology at a deep level. They didn’t act like an external agency; they became an extension of our team, translating complex ideas into clear, compelling outputs that resonates with both customers and investors. The quality of work is consistently impressive, and their strategic insights have played a critical role in expanding our market presence.”
Through Bold Digital Architects’ proven strategy, BioT transformed its brand awareness into measurable traction, strengthened its market position, and generated real demand.
Looking to achieve the same?
If you’re a B2B tech startup looking to increase visibility, establish thought leadership, and drive demand, let’s talk.
Let’s turn your funding into traction.
Architect & Engineer
We love that guy
In order to make performance evaluation easier, on May 28, 2020, Google launched Core Web Vitals, a set of three user-centric metrics called LCP (or Largest Contentful Paint), FID(or First Input Delay), and CLS (or Cumulative Layout Shift).
They were designed to help focus on the improvements that are most important when it comes to a seamless and enjoyable user experience.
Google began rolling out the Page Experience update on mobile devices between June and August 2021.
It’s important to understand that the global trend from Google (who is more or less shaping the internet and how we interact with it) is to make everyone develop mobile-friendly websites. This is why the Core Web Vitals are already official ranking factors for the mobile part of the search algorithm.
A big part of the world, India, and Africa, have almost no or low access to the internet and use devices with small screen resolution and slow connection. Google wants to shift webmasters’ focus on improving their mobile versions of their websites in order to facilitate access for everyone, no matter their technology or geolocation.
However, although the main light is set on mobile, the desktop traffic also matters a lot – this is why the Core Web Vitals will also become official Google Search ranking factors in February 2022.
This post will cover the core principles non SEOs need to know in order to come out of these updates standing.
Visit g.co/chromeuxdash to get started.
This will lead you to the CrUX (Chrome UX) community connection page, where you may specify the origin from which the report should be generated (a.k.a – your website). Note that you may be required to answer permission or marketing preference questions.
Source: Web.dev
You’ll get a report that depicts how your pages perform (sometimes called field data), broken down into:
– status
– metric type
– URL groupings (groups of similar web pages).
Note that this is based on real-world usage data and that it only contains URLs that appear in Google Search (which if you think of it makes total sense as the big G is giving you feedback on pages that are indexed in the search engine).
With the help of the CrUX report, you’ll be able to see how your users are actually consuming the content of your website. Are they able to quickly see the content? Can they scan the page in a couple of seconds?
This is huge news in an era where people are switching from desktops to phones and the internet connection is not always the best. Using this report you can promptly identify pages that underperform thus delivering a poor user experience that would lead to a loss of organic traffic (as the Core Web Vitals are directly correlated with search rankings) and potential sales.
Whether or not a URL is part of a Search Console property, the CrUX database collects information about any page that’s indexed. URLs are given the ratings Poor, Needs Improvement, and Good, per each core web vital, and broken down per device type.
Source: Web.dev
You can use free tools such as Lighthouse in Chrome DevTools, Google Search Console, and PageSpeed Insights to identify and optimize your LCP, FID, and CLS scores. While the CRuX report is more like a top-level report that you can check on a monthly basis and see how things evolve, these tools provide actionable insights and problems that one can tackle in order to work towards satisfying the thresholds for each metric.
It’s a powerful strategy to periodically check these tools and analyze the set of problems the tool indicates, and then discuss with your tech team to work towards fixing them.
Beginning in February 2022, Google will include page experience into their desktop ranking algorithms. The implementation is expected to be finished by the end of March 2022. This new ranking system will be based on the same page experience signals that Google introduced earlier this year for mobile.
Before Core Web Vitals becomes a desktop ranking indicator, and in turn, the CrUX report provides a desktop overview, Google announced that they will provide a Search Console report to help site owners understand how their desktop pages are performing in terms of page experience. The report is currently dedicated to your mobile URLs and it can be accessed using this URL: https://search.google.com/search-console/page-experience
An example of a report showing what % of a website’s pages are good in terms of LCP, FID, and CLS and the number of impressions they attract. This way you can clearly see what percentage of your website provides a good page experience.
Core Web Vitals are definitely not something a marketer should ignore, and it’s more important than ever to identify your website’s weak spots and optimize your page experience as soon as possible. I hope this post makes navigating the page experience update less daunting.
Architect & Engineer
We love that guy
No, it’s not stocking up on toilet paper, masks, or alcogel. It’s not even to get ready for the worst situation possible. It’s not buying zoom stocks or BioMed stocks. It’s not about our relationship with China and not about public safety. It’s about us and how we communicate. Applying this one lesson will make everything we do easier. We can improve the way we communicate, we can influence better and easier, we can create new relationships faster and in a more meaningful way.
As a leadership coach at Intel, I work with many managers. In conversations with managers some have told me how much they miss people around them and it is weird to communicate through the skype all day long. There is an unseen magic the two people communicate face to face. We haven’t noticed the need for connection until it was taken from us.
Usually marketers are experienced communicators. Covid-19 created an opportunity to communicate in a better way, not just because we have changed but because our audiences have changed. Let’s examine how.
When we first were forced to stay at home, our regular life routines were interrupted, the fear of the unknown took over many. How else can you explain people howling toilet paper? For a week we were ok, maybe two. Then, when the understanding that the quarantine can take months took place, we started to feel uncomfortable. It’s not just the fear for our job, the fear of the unknown. It was also the need to communicate and be around people.
Two months ago, If I asked all of the leaders I ever coached how they feel in front of a camera, I’m pretty sure 90% of them would feel highly uncomfortable. Yesterday, I spoke with my partner on skype using only audio. After ten minutes into the call, we reflected on how weird it is to have only a “phone call” and not using video after we have used video in so many meetings and zoom events in the past month. Just a “phone call” felt weird and disconnected. We have all changed!
The required quarantine helped us discover our need for human connection, out need to be heard to feel that we belong. Feeling alone, people re-created their businesses using online tools, attended late night parties, exercised and attended lectures, birthdays and weddings, all virtual. Human interaction and our need to share experiences together is stronger than anything else in our life. This is in line with the Adlerian theory that all of our actions are driven from the need to feel that we belong. It is the same need that makes us run home and tell our loved ones when something good has happened or call our best friend when bad things happen. We need to share our world, be heard and accepted.
When the need to connect is amplified, we have an opportunity as communicators to tune into this need in a deeper and more meaningful way. Here are some practical ways to practice our relationship building and improving our communications:
When we listen to reflect, as opposed to listen to respond, or listen to solve, we give the other person a feeling that they are heard and that we understand what they say. To practice that, begin your sentence with “It sounds like” or “It looks like”. For example, if your client tells you “I’m so busy, I don’t have a lot of time” reflect and say “It sounds like you’re under a lot of pressure. I’ll make it short so you can go and take care of the most important things to you. Maybe I can even help you with it if they are relevant to our conversation”
Listening with the purpose of reflecting trains us to listen in a much deeper way. With time, you will hear what is said between the lines. It quiets our inner conversation and bias and opens us to a new level of listening.
There are many stories of deals that were signed with a handshake. Those are based on mutual trust.
The fastest way to build trust is to declare your intent. If you don’t declare it up front, the person in front of you will fill that space with their own interpretation of your intent. For example: “I wanted to speak with you because I left our last call with a strange feeling that something was not right. I care about our relationship and I wanted to learn if I have done something wrong”
Remember that people are more than their role. They have experiences, opinions, stories of hardships, joy and pain. They can tell you stories about the challenges they experienced. Just like you can. When communicating with others, share as much as you can about yourself and let them an opportunity to get to know you beyond your role, they will in return share with you about themselves if they feel safe. In one of my management roles, our main customer was a tough person to work with. He run his group and technical domain without anyone to challenge him. When I came on board, I scheduled some time with him and was curious about his role and about who he was. I soon discovered he served in the Israeli army reserve duties in roles I was familiar with. We very fast turned to share our stories from our army service and found many shared experiences. Very fast we became good friends and our business relationships was very efficient. It doesn’t mean he didn’t give me and my team a hard time. He did, but it was always in a friendly way and focused on the technical details and requirements. Finding what we share together created a bond that supported the business.
We all want to belong, to communicate with others and share our experiences. Understanding that we all share the same basic needs and that especially today, more than ever, we’re looking for human connection, creates an opportunity to strengthen our relationships, to communicate in a deeper way. Improving our communication skills can create better opportunities for everyone, both in business and in life.
What have you learned about human connection in the last month?
Architect & Engineer
We love that guy
E-A-T rating is one significant aspect of Google’s continuing attempts to “make” businesses, brands, and content creators of all kinds create useful content by focusing on quality. Because quality can be subjective, the search engine company uses Quality Rater Guidelines to make the content better for actual human users, instead of search engines (those guidelines are super underrated if you ask me – I’m willing to guess most people don’t know they’re public domain).
So, the emphasis is on:
Why is this important?
Basically, Google’s mantra goes like this:
Highest quality sites and pages have a very high level of expertise OR are highly authoritative OR highly trustworthy
In other words, if you’re looking to score a quick win, you’re outta’ luck. Going by E-A-T’s framework means taking time to build and nurture as it implies a gradual growth of a positive/relevant online presence in the most natural way. So, focusing on these three pillars is the smart thing to do if you want your pages to rank high for the most relevant search queries in your industry.
When it comes to page quality rating, the main thing is to understand the true purpose of the page. Hence, having a beneficial purpose for any type of website means providing valuable information on a specific topic. In turn, it means your hypothetical E-A-T rating will boost your chances of ranking well.
Now we come to the interesting stuff: what makes you an expert and authority on a particular subject, and trustworthy at that?
Expertise refers to being knowledgeable AND communicating effectively – knowing what’s what while engaging your audience through optimal delivery. To create expert content, you need to perform keyword research to figure out what your audience is looking for, and then try to understand their intent. It’s crucial to find that sweet spot: not too simple and not overly comprehensive. As always, make your content easily digestible through the magic of formatting and visual/aural aids.
Authority relates to being a source of information for relevant topics in your industry. Naturally, that largely includes linking or more precisely, building domain authority through links from equally high-ranking E-A-T websites. Besides that, simple mentions and consistent social shares are also signs of increasing authority.
Trustworthiness is a bit trickier as it includes a number of things. Some, like having positive reviews for your business or lack of any form of negativity attached are fairly obvious. Others, like having a clear privacy policy and ToS or proper implementation of HTTPS, are not. Everything matters, from a physical location attached to the business to linking out to other authority sites.
If you’re in the habit of sharing information, here’s what you can do to incrementally grow in the eyes of Google:
Pro tip: add your personal touch (experience, events, stories, etc) to show you’re an expert on yourself (and it works like a charm).
That would be a quick rundown of the E-A-T ranking. It’s a holistic approach, an ongoing process of fine-tuning your content so that the right pages rank well. Do it right and others will have a tough time taking you down from the top search results.
Architect & Engineer
We love that guy
A while ago I stumbled upon a guide of 56 growth hacking resources to follow by Roy Povarchik. Prior to encountering that guide I had been following several resources and subscribed to quite a few newsletters but I didn’t have a system in place for staying on top of my game. I was playing defence rather than offence with respect to my online knowledge consumption. I’m a huge believer in routines and this guide was a missing piece in my puzzle as it helped me set one up.
I added those 56 resources to a feedly account and started visiting it daily, saving stuff I’d like to read and allocating an average of 2 hours weekly to doing so (actually reading). Recently, I’ve also added zest to my established ritual, which provides me a daily dosage of carefully curated community and AI personalized reading recommendations (the latter sentence sounds like a “message from our sponsor” but it’s not. Though I am bias in the sense that I think very highly of zest’s founder Yam Regev, even more so after interviewing him to my podcast).
In this post I’ve decided to share the top blog posts I’ve read in July that have helped me grow my knowledge and I think would be valuable to my readers. If I get feedback that this is indeed helpful, I’ll do this more often. Here goes.
I’m always experimenting with new welcome emails and automated subscriber workflows that help progress and qualify subscribers to marketing qualified leads. Anyone who’s subscribed to the Bold newsletter has experienced receiving an automated sequence from us. It’s proving a superb way to tap into the opportunity of people raising their hands asking to hear from you (for some of our SaaS clients we’ve taken this to very elaborate levels of personalization but I’ll leave that for an entire blog post). This article by leadpages provides great tips on how to craft that initial welcome emails, what to pay attention to and pitfalls to avoid. I learned a few new things and I think it’s a good read.
This post by amplemarket is actually a great example of inbound marketing done right. The guys at amplemarket provide great tips on how to turn lemons to lemonades when it comes to out of office auto responders (let’s admit that at most, sales teams typically add a task to follow up when the person they’re trying to reach returns). The post opens up your mind with actionable tips on how to take action on the spot. They explain by using their own tools (the great inbound marketing part) but it’s of course possible to also apply with other tools. At the very least, it’ll give you food for thought.
In a brilliantly written and structured article, Gilles DC shares golden gems for one of the most important resources of any company – the sales deck. So much has been written on the subject and this article truly stood out for me (and I’m no stranger to the topic – I’ve taken several sales courses both online and offline. As well as several HubSpot trainings and bootcamps). For the impatient readers (who isn’t) Gilles also adds a TLDR to every section of the post. I admit I initially planned on skimming and only reading those but ended up settling to read the full version. You welcome.
This one was an eye opener for me. I’ve been religious about stuffing all messaging above the fold and in this post Liz Murphy made me rethink this. She says “We may live in a world where buyers are doing their damnedest to avoid talking to someone in sales…” The major takeaway here is that people are more focused on engaging with a brand and educating themselves. They’re ready and expecting to spend time scrolling and absorbing information on your website to help them evaluate if you’re the right match for them.
Ok this last one isn’t a feedly/zest discovery. Trinity Audio are a client and working tightly with them I’ve become a huge advocate of the audio revolution going on these days. In this post you’ll learn why it’s crucial to at least consider providing your readers with an audio experience.
That just about wraps it up. I hope you’ll find these content pieces as valuable as I did. If there are blogs you recommend following, remember that sharing is caring.
Architect & Engineer
We love that guy
I know this post is going to upset some people – we all want to feel we’re doing the right thing and it’s super offensive to hear that despite this being the norm, if you’re basing your initial startup’s funding on your friends and family – you’re being very unfair and selfish.
If you’ve already done it – I wish you and everyone involved the best of luck. I really do. If you haven’t, I hope this will make you reconsider.
I know it seems like a valid road to go down, I know so many people around you in the startup ecosystem do it, but believe me, what you’re doing is robbing your nearest and dearest of their hard earned savings.
I hope one day you’ll think back to the day you’ve read this and thank god (or whoever) you stopped before it was too late.
Small exception – If you’re Bill Gates’s son or friend – you can disregard this post. He can afford to handle your loss and would probably see it as a better investment than to pay your college fees.
Now, here’s why I feel so strongly about this topic:
About 90% of new startups fail. Ninety percent. What a depressing stat. And please, in no means let that deter you from pursuing your dreams. I think if you are passionate about something you should do it. I believe that with all my heart. Even at the probable chance that you’ll fail – as Henry Ford famously said “failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time intelligently”. You can learn what went wrong, regroup and try again. BUT – your friends and family shouldn’t be the ones funding your real life tuition. I think there’s only one condition where that would be fair – when they’re aware of the chances and are entering this with their eyes wide open.
Now this is tricky, as a startup founder you have to have tunnel vision, you have to believe you’ve got a winner on your hands, You have to be the crazy one that believes in your idea when no one else does. And that passion is also your drive to raise money from whoever is willing to listen. Still, the closest people to you shouldn’t be a part of that equation, keep them there as your biggest cheerleaders, not as your financial backers. You’ll need their moral support more than ever if and when the shit hits the fan.
When you go to your friends and family and ask for money for your idea, you’re making it personal. If they say no, it’s as if they’re saying they don’t believe in you. And they’re uncomfortable. Even “worst” – they do believe in you. But what will happen in the case your startup fails? Are they prepared to lose that money? What percentage of their capital are you risking? Are they expecting to get it back? Even if it’s not an investment but a donation – how will they feel if it goes to waste? What would they otherwise have used the money for? How will you live with yourself knowing you’re preventing them of that?
Figuring out your business and validating it is a ruthless journey. You need professional people by your side whom will be brutally honest with you and question every single aspect of your business model. Raising money from unbiased people will dramatically increase the accuracy level of which you’ll enter your startup adventure.
Ideally, go for an MVP approach, create a valid proof of concept and then go to get an investment. Now you might be thinking that in order to create a POC you need money from your friends and family. NO! Go to the bank, go wait tables, get a day job and work on your project at night. Figure it out, and leave them out of it.
You think you’re taking care of them by giving them an opportunity to get a piece of the pie. So that when you exit your startup they’d enjoy the fruit of their investment. I say – if you’re so close to each other and you want to help them so much, when you exit – give your friends and family a cut because they’ve always been there for you and supported you. They were there for you on all those tough moments when you were about to give up. They encouraged you and helped you get through and break through. Uncomfortable with that notion? Hell that’s all the more reason you shouldn’t be taking money from them.
In business the business needs to come first. You make decisions based on what’s best for the business, whilst with friends and family you typically put them before you. So for example, if a family member is invested in your business and you give them voting rights – they might not be qualified to make calls. In a healthy business environment you wouldn’t tolerate that, but with a family member, you’ll now start feeling uncomfortable and not want to offend them. Especially if they’ve given you money. And yes, there are mechanisms to prevent such instances. And yes, you can align expectations, but at the end of the day, you’ll end up seeing sides of your friends and family that you could have spent a lifetime not seeing and a happy one at that. Sometimes interests simply collide and it’s not in the best interest of anyone involved.
I admire anyone going after their dreams and taking the unstable entrepreneurial path. I work with startups daily, I’ve founded a few companies (including this agency you’re currently visiting online) and I’ve had my share of failures. It’s incredible. My point is that we all need to take responsibility for ourselves and not drag other people into our journey. Not unless it’s 100% clear to them (and you) what happens if things don’t work out the way you hope. GOOD LUCK!
Architect & Engineer
We love that guy
In this post I uncover transparent, actionable insights on what worked (and is working) for us as a lead generation and lead nurturing technique that we use to generate customers for our marketing agency. Gary Vaynerchuk once said that there’s no reason to not share work methods and info. Eighty percent of the people won’t do anything with the information, and the 20% that will are winners that are going to win with or without your help. So might as well add value to all 100% of the bunch, position yourself as an expert and join forces with the readers who will crush it with or without you.
Know the person, to get the customer. If I ever needed a mantra to go by, I’d go with something along these lines. The best way to make sure you sell whatever you’re offering is to really get to know the person you’re trying to sell to – what their goals are, what their pain points are, what they consider challenging and what they’re lacking in tools, infrastructure, ideas, brains…
That way you will be able to custom-tailor your own offering to what the potential customer is looking for. You’ll be targeting their pain points with laserlike precision and you can be damn sure your prospects will love you for it.
Technically we use HubSpot, we find it works best. There are of course other solutions out there.
Our agency’s main buyer persona is a marketing manager at a b2b startup. Other buyer personas of ours are startup founders, and general c-levels at startups. We’ve researched all of their goals, challenges and dilemmas and created a series of blog posts that helps each of them and educates them on how to reach their goals and overcome their challenges.
The idea is to touch upon the topics that are of interest to your potential customers. That can be anything from raising awareness of a specific problem they may be having, to drawing attention to various solutions that may work for those problems. Whatever helps draw these people to the blog and hopefully solves (or raises?) a few questions along the way.
For first time visitors to our blog our goal is to turn them into subscribers. They can turn into subscribers by filling out a form with a direct call to action. Once they turn into subscribers they’re in fact a lead. Now our goal is to learn more about them in order to send them content relevant to them and in the process position ourselves as authorities in their eyes. How do we do that? By creating a subscriber workflow.
It’s simple. People who sign up to the blog receive a sequence of emails inviting them to read blog posts from the series of blog posts we’ve created based on what we know their challenges are. Here’s an example of an email a new blog subscriber receives:
We try to uncover what buyer persona they are by including calls to action inside the blog posts inviting them to download a content offer. Here’s an example of such a call to action:
In order to download the eBook the lead is requested to fill out a form and to provide info about themselves – in this case to let us know what buyer persona they are. Pro tip: we’re using smart call to action so that once a lead downloads a content offer, the next time they enter the blog they’ll see a different call to action, inviting them to take further action and tell us more about themselves. More on that very soon.
At this stage our email sequence branches out a bit. On one side, we have subscribers that have opted to download the content offer and those that haven’t done it yet. For the latter, the email sequence continues, sharing more valuable information with them and inviting them to download the content offer.
For the other branch, those who have downloaded an offer, the game continues. They’ve now progressed to a more advanced email sequence, inviting them to take a free marketing assessment (we’ve used a tool called Typeform to set up the assessment). When entering our blog these leads will see a smart CTA, which will invite them to take the assessment (those who didn’t download the content offer will still see a CTA inviting them to do so).
The goal of the assessment is to ask questions that cover things we provide services on. It grants us a much clearer picture of what our buyer persona is actually looking for and what kind of problem they’re trying to solve.
An example of a question from the assessment:
After taking the assessment our leads are progressed to a new email sequence, inviting them to take a ‘Crash Course’ in marketing. Based on their answers we further educate them on the things that it appears they know less about. The course uses smart content so that the emails sent to them differ based on what they’ve answered. This creates a personalized experience that enables us to provide upmost value.
Once the course is over, our leads are progressed to an email sequence inviting them to to schedule a free consult with yours truly.
At the end of it all, what we’ve done is traded some of the knowledge we have, for a highly valuable, one-on-one with a potential customer, someone we already know a lot about, someone we know has a challenge to deal with, and someone we know is considering us to overcome that challenge.
So far hundreds of marketers and startup founders have taken the assessment and course, and the feedback and results are even above what we’ve set as internal goals.
Let’s go back to the beginning a bit. If you want to get the customer, you need to get to know the person behind the customer. The general idea is to trade whatever valuable info you have, for info on your potential customer you may find valuable – their goals and challenges. Here are the five steps to action:
Once you’re one-on-one with a potential customer, of which you know plenty, closing the deal shouldn’t be too much of a challenge and it becomes a matter of whether or not they’re actually a good fit for your business (as not all leads are such you can actually help!) And of course, in order to make it all of it come together (blogs, content offers, email sequence copy, etc), you’ll need super talented content writers (can’t have Sead or Damir though, they’re an integral part of the magic we call Bold).
I hope this guide will help you generate relevant leads and turn them into customers. If you have any insights or feedback about this post I’d love to know, don’t hesitate to reach out to me!
Architect & Engineer
We love that guy
Inc. Magazine has named our client PowerInbox as the 30th fastest-growing private company in America on its 37th annual Inc. 5000 list.
The recognition is based on the company’s 7500% growth over the last three years with a revenue run-rate over $30 million. PowerInbox was also ranked by Inc. 5000 as number 2 in the category of top software companies, number 4 in the category of top New York City companies and number 4 in the category of top New York companies.
Over the past year alone, the company has seen a 51% increase in new customers, including the addition of marquee publishers like Bonnier, Crains, HarperCollins, Hearst, New York Magazine, Palm Beach Gazette, ReachMobi and Seattle Times, driven by surging demand for its unique email-based content personalization platform.
“It’s an incredible honor to be recognized among such an elite group for our success, which is a direct result of our team’s relentless dedication to serving our customers,” said PowerInbox CEO Jeff Kupietzky. “I’m extremely proud of the fact that we’re also profitable, which is unique among venture-backed companies that often focus on revenue growth at the expense of profitability. This gives us a much more stable foundation and positions us for aggressive growth and innovation.”
PowerInbox’s advertising and content optimization system helps publishers and brands deliver highly relevant, precisely targeted native and display ads and sponsored content to subscribers across email, web and push notifications, as well as other emerging channels. By using email as a unique identifier to target individual subscribers, the company’s personalization solution is more precise and reliable than browser-based cookies or device targeting, which can be thrown off by device sharing among multiple users.
The PowerInbox monetization platform works at any scale, currently delivering content to 95 million unique monthly subscribers across 600+ publishers, using artificial intelligence technology to learn users’ likes and dislikes and continuously refine targeting. It also boasts its own Advertising Network, enabling brands to reach new audiences and eliminating the hassle and expense of direct sales for publishers.
“If your company is on the Inc. 5000, it’s unparalleled recognition of your years of hard work and sacrifice,” says Inc. editor in chief James Ledbetter. “The lines of business may come and go, or come and stay. What doesn’t change is the way entrepreneurs create and accelerate the forces that shape our lives.”
The Inc. 5000 awards will be presented at the 37th Annual Inc. 5000 Conference and Gala October 17-19, 2018 in San Antonio, Texas.
Architect & Engineer
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Marketing any product is a challenge. Non-marketers tend to have a fantasy that creating a terrific product and bringing it to market is enough. Sadly, the “if you build it they will come” approach rarely proves a valid strategy. Nor does any variation of this approach that essentially relies on word of mouth. It’s a romantic notion but at the end of the day, relying on chance (or an influencer for that matter) would be irresponsible and non-scalable.
Marketing (with SaaS being no exception) requires a thorough understanding of the ins and outs of your product and landscape. Moreover, ideally, both your product and your landscape should be agile and adaptable based on feedback resulting from any encounter between your plans and real life.
As Mike Tyson wisely said “everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face”.
So what can you grip onto in order to sustain a level of scalable control?
– Best practices
– SaaS marketing tactics
– common sense and
– as much data as you’re able to collect all along the way.
This guide will walk you through the best practices of marketing a SaaS product to success. Everything written here was written in blood, following endless trials and errors, and working with dozens of SaaS startups, helping them scale by converting strangers to MRRs.
Let’s dive in.
This is obvious but it’s also a step that many somehow skip. There are so many legitimate reasons for this, so don’t think you’re above it.
If you’re a SaaS startup founder –
you might find that the value of your product – your pride and joy, isn’t actually as easy to understand as you’d like to believe. We sometimes become so involved with what we do, that we forget to step aside and take a fresh look. If you’ve been through investor pitches, you’ve probably had to hone this and clarify your USP. Yet too many times we meet startups post the seed stage, who conduct a conversation that revolves too much around the FEATURES of the product, not allocating enough attention to crystallising the BENEFITS of the product.
A little exercise we recommend experimenting with is to make a list of all that makes your product valuable to your target audience. Now, see if you can ask “so what” about anything on that list. Anytime you can ask “so what” you’re still in the features zone and not in the benefits zone you need to be at in order to communicate true value.
For example, if one of your core features is a customizable feature, you might say your product is “designed specifically for each customer”.
OK..so what?
So your customers can get access to what they really need without needing to waste money on solutions that won’t affect their bottom line.
Better, right? Try it yourself.
If you’re a marketer joining a team –
Working at a high pace can sometimes distracts you and lead to skipping the step of truly understanding the product. You have goals, time is pressing and you want to get users ASAP. The founders tell you what they want done and somewhere amongst this your forget to STOP, step back, evaluate and strategize before your step onto the playing field.
Don’t do that.
You’re in a long term game and you’ll need to align expectations and set the pace in correlation with what’s realistic to achieve.
Sign up to the product, play around with it, put yourself in the shoes of a potential user and ask the difficult questions. If you have recorded demos at your disposal – watch them. Be sure you completely understand what you’re marketing – advantages and disadvantages – there is no such thing as knowing too much..
Next,
You’re probably not operating in an unoccupied territory. Even if you don’t have direct competitors, there are companies who are probably competing on correlating services and your prospective customers will need to decide whether to allocate their budget to your solution or opt for theirs.
Make sure you understand who your competitors are. Then evaluate:
Armed with this info you’ll be able to know what you’re up against and always keep that in mind when creating your marketing strategy.
click to download a copy of the above competitor research questions
The next stage of research is to,
A good starting point to learning your target audience is to learn all you can about your current customers. If you don’t yet have customers you’ll need to make educated assumptions, which you’ll need to verify against reality with time.
Nonetheless, evaluate the following:
who are those people whose problem you’re solving?
Buyer personas aren’t just target markets or job titles. They aren’t based on specific products, but they are based on why they use them. And of course, personas are not specific, real people. Real people, individuals, have things about them that make them unique. Personas, on the other hand, are fictional characters you create to represent a subset of your customers.
You can use insights you’ve learned from the competitor research. For example, the types of websites that have your competitors tech installed can shed a lot of light, especially in cases where you don’t have enough relevant customers to learn from.
The best practise is to send out questions to your specific (or if not possible, to your potential) clients. You can use a google form to do so, but really anything goes so long as you get them to collaborate with you and help you get to know them.
Avoid creating a persona you ASSUME you have–not the one you actually have. Asking broad questions, will get you broad answers. Keeping your questions specific will help you better understand your persona and start noticing trends. Attempt to get the most complete, unbiased view of exactly who your persona is.
Questions to ask them:
More ways to further expand your research:
There’s a lot that goes into a buyer persona, so remember to put in the time and effort to better understand your ideal customers.
Here’s an example of one page out of a full buyer persona research we’ve conducted for a persona who’s a publisher (we use xtensio for the cool visualization):
click to download a copy of the above buyer persona questions
Next,
Once you’ve mapped out who your ideal buyers are, it’s time to put yourself in their shoes and understand the journey they go through leading up to a purchase.
First, I’ll tell what their journey isn’t (though wouldn’t everyone’s life be easier if it were) :
a dream buyer’s journey
I’m surprised by the number of SaaS marketers who still think that by interrupting their target audience with ads intended to sell them something they’re not ready to buy, from a company they don’t trust – can actually generate positive ROI.
The brutal reality is that interrupting will not get you far. Selling to people who don’t trust you and aren’t ready to buy is annoying, spammy and a waste of your money. Here’s what a realistic buyer’s journey looks like:
(image credit: HubSpot)
A typical buyer’s journey includes 3 stages:
Many companies are trying to sell to prospects at early stages of the buyer’s journey when in fact what they should be focusing on is adding value and positioning themselves as experts in their fields.
The secret lies in distributing valuable content, building trust and creating lasting relationships. Turning visitors to users and further on customers will happen on your visitors’ terms. Just as you can’t force a social relationship, you can’t force a business one.
The days of salesmen knocking on doors (both online and offline) asking for a glass of water and then pitching to death (or closed deal) are gone.
We’re in an era of value.
By placing the right content at the right place and the right time, you’ll be amazed at the quality of leads you’ll be generating.
Now that we understand the product, competitive landscape, target audience and what the buyer’s journey is, let’s see how this knowledge can utilize us when trying to map out –
A marketing funnel is a representation of the buyer’s journey, along different stages of a theoretical funnel. By strategizing and mapping out a marketing funnel, we are able to correlate different lifecycle stages of a potential buyer and see how we can take action to help them progress down the funnel.
Here’s a simple marketing funnel visualized:
A potential customer can theoretically enter the funnel at any stage.
But wait, what are the typical life cycle stages?
Subscriber: Those are your most basic contacts who have opted in to hear from your periodically (for example signed up for your newsletter). Typically you don’t know much about them other than their email and so you don’t know if they’re in fact potential customers or not. At this stage their interest in you is superficial.
Lead: Those are contacts who have shown higher interest than subscribers and whom have typically provided you with more than their email (probably in order to receive a content offer).
Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL): are leads who have shown a high level of engagement with your content, have shown interest in your solutions (for example filled out a form requesting a demo) and marketing identify them as leads that are ready to be transferred over to sales (both from an engagement perspective and with the relevance of their profile based on the info they’ve provided).
Sales Qualified Lead (SQL): leads that sales have qualified on their end and have confirmed are worthy of their follow up.
Opportunity: contacts who have become real sales opportunities in your CRM. In certain SaaS products these would be trial users whom sales identify as companies with high conversion potential to paying customers.
Customer: a paying customer.
So now that you understand the structure, how do you take control of the funnel and get people to join it at different stages? You’ll need to strategize your marketing funnel and remember: content is king.
By understanding that different people will enter the funnel at different stages, you are able to plan ahead and figure out how to position your company as an authority in your field and how to get found by your target audience during the different stages of their journey. Content will be the king in this game, and keywords research will be your map to taking over the kingdom.
The purpose of the keywords research is to locate keywords that our relevant to our potential buyer persona.
So start off by researching what would answer the needs of your buyer personas at the different stages of their buyer’s journey.
But how do you create that list?
For the awareness and consideration stages: create a list of keywords that are based on what you’ve researched and have found to be your buyer persona’s challenges at the different stages of their journey.
For the decision stage create a list of your product features. Consider your USP, use synonyms and try to think beyond the obvious.
Use Google’s Keywords Planner, to make sure people are in fact searching for those terms. You should be looking at a report such as this one:
At this point you should be looking for keywords that have a maximal amount of search volumes. Don’t dismiss keywords that seem super competitive – these could still be keywords that will serve your strategy well. The key point at this stage is to be aware of what keywords you plan on getting ranked for on google “organically” and what keywords you plan on investing other efforts in order to generate traffic from.
A clear disadvantage of Google’s tool is the lack of diversity in keywords. You’ll get mostly suggestions for short tail keywords, which is a bit limiting from a content creation perspective. Also, remember you’re not alone – your direct competitors are also making decisions based on this tool, so you might end up choosing the same keywords making everything all the more competitive.
For that reason, we like to use another tool called ubersuggest which provides average monthly searches, as the Google Keywords planner does, but the advantage is that ubersuggest also provides long tail keywords.
In the digital world, one of the sure ways to succeed is to thoroughly examine what your competitors are doing and to then surpass them. Finding out what’s working for them is actually simple. You can use a tool such as ahref or semrush.
Insert the URL of your competitors website to find out what pages generate traffic for them. By learning what pages generate the most traffic to your competitors you can make educated assumptions as per what keywords are leading to those pages (mainly based on the core theme of the page).
Add all keywords to your initial list.
Next,
It’s now time to narrow your list down and choose the keywords you’ll move forward with.
Create a spreadsheet that looks as follows:
Persona | Buyer’s journey stage | Keyword | Search volume | 1st result on Google | Ref domain to 1st result on Google | 2nd result on Google | Ref domain to 2nd result on Google |
Now look at the competition around each of the keywords in your list. Competition is measured by search volumes and the number of referring domains to the first results leading to the keywords on SERPs.
Note that keeping an eye on the first and second results in google for each of the terms you’ve identified is a crucial part as it’s a good indication of what Google sees as an relevant result with respect to the term at hand. If for example, you find out that the first results in google under a certain term lead to company product pages, there would be no use in writing a blog post for that term as Google would probably not rank your content on the first page.
Aim to choose keywords with a balance of high search volumes and low competition (based on referring domains) and that seem the most relevant to your buyer personas. It’s OK to leave in keywords which you identify as too competitive for SEO – just be sure to stay grounded and know you’re not counting on SEO efforts to generate traffic via those keywords.
click to download a copy of the above keywords research template
You’re now ready to –
So far you’ve gathered the following info:
You’re now ready to create a content plan that will reflect a marketing funnel per each of your buyer personas.
It’s important to understand that each stage of the marketing funnel is a conversion opportunity where you can invite your prospect do provide you with info about them in return for information about them.
For example, at the top of the funnel, you could invite a prospect to provide you with their email in order to subscribe to blog updates thus turning them into a subscriber OR you can invite them to fill out a more elaborate form in return for receiving a content offer such as an ebook.
At all stages your plan should aim at progressing contacts down the marketing funnel, in correlation with what they’re showing interest in (what they show interest in is an indication of their intent)
An example of a conversion path inviting a prospect to become a lead at the top of the funnel by inviting them do download an ebook
Thus,
Your content plan should offer a conversion opportunity at each stage of the buyer’s journey.
Each stage of your content plan should include blog posts and a correlating content offer.
The template of your plan should look as follows:
Our recommendation is that for each of the personas, the top and middle of the funnel should include at least 20% keyword oriented blog posts that you will focus your SEO efforts on. Plan on promoting the rest of the content using other distribution methods (such as PPC and social distribution, we’ll get to that later on)
As per the decision stage offer –
figure out what compelling offer could be the conversion point from marketing to sales per each buyer persona. This could be a free consultation, a discount, or any other relevant appealing offer that could initiate the prospect to shift to a more progressive buying mode and open the gateway for the sales team to step in.
click to download a copy of the above keywords research template
Pro tip: Evaluate your current assets that can be leveraged. Consider what current content you already have that can be used to strengthen the content plan for “quick wins”
Your content plan now reflects the different content assets you plan on creating. The next step is to
You will need to plan the following:
Very important point to consider: for SaaS products, the bottom of the funnel is a very crucial touchpoint. When your users become free trial users, mapping out their journey from this point and sending them emails that are based on their behavior and usage of your product can dramatically impact your conversion rates from free to paying users. Intercom is great for this purpose. We’ll cover this in depth later on.
Once your plan’s structure is ready, the next stage is to figure out –
Let’s start by Search Engine Optimization A.K.A –
One of the things that stand out to us when speaking with founders and CMOs of startups, is a lack of understanding of what SEO is and when to invest efforts in it.
SEO (Search Engine Optimization), focuses around making sure that your website (and blog) is optimized for the search engine you’d like to be ranked under. People tend to think Google is the only search engine that matters but there are actually others to consider based on what you find out when you research where your buyer personas conduct their research and go to for information.
The basic idea of SEO is to make sure of two things:
How does this apply to you?
Simple. After you’ve chosen what keywords you’d like to focus your organic efforts on, you’ll want to make sure that the search engine you choose to invest efforts in:
Social media can work wonders when utilized correctly. During your buyer persona’s research you’ve figured out where your target audience goes to for information.
Make sure you have a detailed list of all relevant places. There are many vivid communities that are sharing experiences, asking questions, solving roadblocks and cracking jokes on a daily basis. This could be on LinkedIn, Facebook, Reddit, Quora or really anywhere else online where your research points to.
Strategize how to participate in this party by taking part of their online conversations both by initiating conversations and by participating in relevant active ones.
You’ll find that you can monitor relevant keywords in order to tap into active conversations and then work in your content. We monitor very high volumes of content so use a third party tool called buzzsumo but google alerts can suffice at early stages.
Here are the types of keywords which we recommend tracking:
Make sure to also initiate conversations that lead to your content.
Being active on social media is a proven way to generate relevant traffic as well as position your company as pros in your vertical. For a more indepth read checkout this post
Another best practise is to generate traffic via media buying A.K.A –
In this area, startups tend to waste a lot of money by doing things wrong. The ground rules are different here than the rules of SEO and social.
PPC – Pay Per Click is based on how much money an advertiser is willing to spend in order to expose content (blog posts, landing pages etc) to specific targeted audiences.
Sounds simple right? It’s not. Campaign management is a skill that needs to be acquired. Lack on knowledge in this field can end up in low expose and money down the drain.
OK you get it, PPC is for pros, what CAN you do yourself?
The advantage in PPC vs SEO for that matter is the speed (social distribution carries that advantage as well). If SEO efforts take a minimum of 6 months to make an impact, using PPC you can get to the first page of SERPs under the keywords of your choice as soon as you start paying. You can use PPC to generate immediate traffic to your content and generate leads to nurture.
The first mistake startups make is to use PPC to generate leads out of people who don’t trust them and aren’t ready to buy from them. If you generate paid traffic to your content, at the awareness stage, you can nurture those leads and sell to them when they’re ready. Checkout this video to learn more about our agenda on this topic:
So you’ve invested efforts to understand your target audience and their buyer’s journey. You’ve generated leads, nurtured them and got them to sign up for a free trial of your SaaS. Congrats! The steps you take now will make or break the conversion rates of your B2B SaaS funnel from free users to paying ones.
So how do you tackle this critical point of your buyer’s journey?
You map out typical user behavior of your product and you make sure to send triggered automated users to your free users based on their activity (or inactivity for that matter).
You can use tools such as Intercom, Mixpanel or Optimove for the execution of this stage.
Here are some typical triggers that are best practices and we recommend considering:
Another best practise is to segment users based on different criteria and prioritize sales calls to users who are more engaged and seem to show a high potential of upgrading
Pretty cool right?
Now,
You’re almost ready to execute your plan by getting to work on the creation of the content. Before that, there’s one more step which you need to consider which is
One of the main pain points of marketers and CEOs is their inability or lack of understanding of measurements.
Essentially, your marketing efforts can become costly, knowing how much you spent is one thing, knowing what you’ve achieved from your efforts (and how to improve) is another.
Here are the aspects you should be measuring and the tools you should be working with daily in order to save time and money and remain in control:
Google analytics (GA) is a platform that monitors and aggregates the traffic to your website and user behavior on it.
Through GA you can see (among many other stats):
In order to view the above go to GA and click on acquisition->channels
the volume of traffic to your website within a chosen time frame.
The source of traffic to your website broken down into channels.
Here’s what each channel represents:
Google Search Console (GSC) is the official way to “communicate” with Google regarding your website and receive official information.
The stats worth paying attention to:
Learn more about utilizing GSC in this post
Overnight success is a myth, it’s not enough to have an awesome product. In order to get strangers to become leads and further on customers (and even your ambassadors) you’ll need to thoroughly understand the ins and outs of your product and landscape.
We hope this guide helped you get an understanding of SaaS marketing best practices. Remember to only create SaaS marketing funnels after you’re confident you understand:
Be sure to conduct through keywords research, work according to a plan and apply different methods to generate traffic to your funnels. These will typically be SEO, social media and PPC.
Don’t overlook the bottom of the funnel – make sure you nurture free users to turn them into paying ones and lastly, don’t forget to measure because “what isn’t monitored isn’t managed”.
We invite you to save to bookmark this SaaS marketing guide and return to it for future reference, as well as to download the free collateral we’ve offered through the guide.
Happy marketing!