Byedoo ???? How we converted a struggling team into a marketing machine - Part 2

Want to start with reading part one of the story? You can find it here.

Step 2: Nail down your ICP

Focus (was one of the favorite words of our CEO, knowing we had a French-speaking CEO with a heavy accent, you can already imagine what this word sounded like, Sebastien if you read this, sorry! ??). But Sebastien is right. Don’t spread yourself too thin. Choose your target region, target company size, target persona wisely, and stick to it once the choice has been made. Because only then you can get your marketing machine started, writing relevant content for your target audience in the correct language and promoting it on the right platforms.

As a tip on how to define this ICP: try working both bottom-up and top-down. Bottom-up: looking at your existing customer base: who are our current best customers? Why? Let’s find more of those. Top-down: looking at the market, where would it be wise to start? Which company size, industry, market? Where both bottom-up and top-down approaches meet, is a great starting point.?

Step 3: Content is the basis

If you know your ICP, then start working on 1 big cornerstone content piece per quarter and repurpose repurpose repurpose. It helps you focus on one topic and makes it so much easier to produce a lot of content pieces and types fast and efficiently. Ideally, you decide on your quarterly cornerstone topics at the start of the new FY. That way you know that if in Q1 you have topic A, you will also have a webinar about topic A, a series of blog posts about topic A, in which you can promote your white paper on topic A, etc.?

Once the quarter is over, the content you’ve created will go into your library and will be evergreen and ready to keep leveraging for paid campaigns, nurture e-mails, SEO etc.

Make sure you create blueprints and a back planning for your content pieces and activities like webinars, so you don’t have to reinvent the wheel each time.

Step 4: Paid marketing is the accelerator

Once you’ve got your content, the biggest challenge is of course to get it in front of the right people. Yes, if you’ve done your keyword research well, and written your content with SEO principles in mind, some people might find you on Google. But if you’ve only just got started the chances that happens are very small (building a performing SEO strategy usually takes 18 to 36 months). We’re starters, and we want to go way faster than that. So we need to get in front of our target audience, and make them click, leave their data or at least remember us so they can come back when the time is right.?

Plus, there’s a difference if you’re selling something people are already actively looking for, or whether you’re selling a new product or service and the market still needs to be educated about it’s existence. Both Rydoo and Showpad were the latter.?

So what you’ll be doing with paid marketing is trying to raise interest with the right people using more high level topics. Rydoo, for example, is selling expense management software to CFOs and finance directors. So in order to get these targets interest, we’ll promote educational content for Finance. Eg: “The future of finance", “what should your finance tech stack look like in 2023” etc. Because if people don’t know what expense management is all about, chances are very small they’ll engage with anything that’s promoting this in a very BOFU way immediately (like eg: “Successfully implement an expense management tool within 4 weeks, get a demo today”). These BOFU offerings are something you'll keep for a second or third phase.

Test test test and scale slowly. Paid is not something that you want to do head over heels. Even if you’re lucky and have a ton of budget to spend, you still want to spend it in a very controlled way. That said, you do need some decent budgets to test. The goal would be to each month test different formats, with different visuals and copy, and identify winners and losers. This way you slowly ramp up winners month over month.?

Important to keep in mind: paid is not just a switch you can flip on or off. It takes time to ramp up. Even if you know the drill. It doesn’t work to just pause everything for a week and restart the next. You’ll again need ramp up time to regain your SOF (Share of feed).

One of the things I’m most proud of is the growth we were able to achieve with our paid marketing strategy. Which is almost 100% thanks to the star we hired: Luca Pilurzu. And the flawless collaboration with and performance of our content team. While keeping our cost stable we were able to divide our CPL by 5 and grow our leads (incl ICPs only!) by 647%.?

For confidentiality purposes I’ve converted this table to relative percentages. For reference and as you can see in below table we had a relatively stable, 6 figure, paid budget (it went down rather than up from the initial starting point).

Choose your channels wisely, based on your ICP. It’s very easy to fall into the trap of “we have to be on twitter”, “what about Facebook?”, “Our TikTok account needs work…”. First focus on the channels where you can control your audience best. Because if you spread yourself too thin, you might end up spending way more time on managing and distributing content than the return you get from it.

Step 5: Conversational marketing

Email marketing still has its value, but purely relying on email for conversations with prospects and customers would be a mistake in today’s digital world. This is why we promoted one of our brilliant team member’s Kelly Letheule to become conversational marketeer. She wasn’t only in charge of designing our new conversational nurture tracks but also oversaw our chatbots and forms. Basically all first communication touchpoints. Drift has thought our team tons about all there is to know about conversational marketing… If you’re interested in learning I’d highly recommend checking out their resources center.

Step 6: Operations: the most underestimated role in marketing

Operations is the function that makes the machine turn and connects all the dots. You can have an amazing inbound team, generate loads of leads, but if you don’t have a smart, dedicated team member setting up your workflows, lead scoring, making sure the sales team gets MQLs in real-time… all your efforts are in vain.?

Hiring an operations manager has been the most challenging of all our marketing hires and took us 4 tries before we got it right. (Diana, you rock!) I might write a separate post about it now that I come to think of it. Would be interesting to share what hard and soft skills you need to look for in an operations manager, and how to set the expectations right.

Step 7: Verify whether you’re on the right track with external experts

This is not fun if you’ve got a rather defensive personality like me, but therefore even more needed. Make sure that at least once a year you work with an external organization to check and improve your marketing strategy. You hope on one hand that you’re doing brilliantly so they won’t find anything to improve, on the other hand, you of course wish they do, because that would mean you can grow faster.?

We’ve over the years got advice from Winning by design (Harold was absolutely great) who worked mainly on improving the relationship and handover process between sales and marketing, and helped us focus on partnerships as a valuable channel. We’ve run some tests with Chris Walker from Refinelabs (definitely worth following if you don’t follow him yet) to see if their non-gated content approach could be a game-changer for us (which it wasn’t, but if you don’t try you don’t know). We’ve engaged with different local specialists to falsify our regional approaches etc. In many cases, they weren’t able to pinpoint major things that had to change, which was a great confirmation for our team and organization that we were on the right track.?

And that’s it. Easy peasy right??

Sidenote: Everyone in the company is better at marketing than the marketing team - try to educate your colleagues

And I’m sure if you’ve read this far. You recognize this very well. What marketing does is out there in the open, so people will have (constructive?) feedback, all the time.?

If a marketing team would have billions to spend then they would be the top search result for any relevant term in any language out of any country. And yes, they would have billboards in the London tube or the Newark airport.?Or… maybe they would not. Because it’s not about just being visible. It’s about reaching the right audience, in a meaningful way, that converts to pipeline and won deals. Not just any deals, deals inside your ICP.

"But, what about monday.com then? They are a great example right?" Well… their ad spend was 1.6M each and every single month about 2 years ago. And their audience? Anyone who works in, or with, a team. So… aren’t you part of their target group? Are you a CFO or Finance director? No? Then I hope you’ve never seen a Rydoo ad, or we would be spending our marketing budget incorrectly.

And fellow marketers, this is something that we understand. But we can’t blame our colleagues from other departments for not knowing. Try to educate your colleagues and listen, they are just trying to help but not every suggestion might be great and well-thought-through. Don’t let this get to you and stay focused on reaching your goals. If you’ve got a clear vision and GTM plan. Stick to it.

Some things I would do differently next time?

• More interviews with the target audience. This is something we’ve tried, but never really nailed. Find a way for your entire team to keep checking in with your target personae. Not only from reading the case studies the content team has written but really finding time to talk to your ICPs on a regular basis. This helps to keep in check with reality. And make sure you’ve got an actual person in mind when you’re writing ad copy/thinking about the next webinar topic etc.
• Working together closely with the product team is something we really aspired, to but never really got to work on. If you can have a cross-functional growth team that can co-create a dummy product environment or great free trial experience, product messaging, upsell flows, etc. I believe things could scale even faster.?
• Leverage SDRs as a part of your marketing team, outbound and paid marketing are not that different. AB testing messaging, reaching the right audience, getting the right volumes, the analytics…?
• I’ve focused really hard on making the marketing machine turn. If I would’ve decided to stay at Rydoo longer, without a doubt my next project would’ve been to connect the marketing and sales org under one revenue team.

What’s next??

Phew, that was quite the ride, wasn’t it? I’m super proud that this marketing machine can now run perfectly without me. My mission has been accomplished. And what more can you aim for as a growth consultant!

So what am I up to next? Trying really hard to say "no" to new growth assignments and give myself some time to decide about my next move.?Sitting in the Birdhouse board of two promising startups: Stuck (Solving support tickets faster with video) and WeLexit (Making lawyers easily accessible for everyone). Helping build my hubbies latest venture 0nboard that's all about Web3. Spending loads of time with our baby girl Joanna...

While trying to answer the big question: Will I continue consulting startups / scale-ups? Will I start something completely new? What about emerging sectors like psychedelics, or web3? Or going back to basics and spend some time working with my hands on an interior design dream?

While being super thankful and proud of the past years, I’m extremely excited to post this article and be able to close this chapter and discover what’s on the next page.