TripleDart SaaS Trends (Edition-30)

Introducing our latest newsletter - the?#30th?edition! Let's dive into the exciting highlights for this week ??

Highlights for this week ??

Brave Search Breaks Free Of Bing With Standalone Image Index (Source)

Brave Search announced the launch of its privacy-preserving image and video search results this week, freeing itself from reliance on companies like Microsoft and Google.

Google Ranking Algorithm Research Introduces TW-BERT (Source)

Google announced a remarkable ranking framework called Term Weighting BERT (TW-BERT) that improves search results and is easy to deploy in existing ranking systems.

Google Unveils New AI Tools To Help Advertisers This Holiday Season (Source)

Google launched new AI advertising tools for retailers. The tools provide insights into shoppers and products.Google recommends retailers use the tools to optimize holiday campaigns.

X Introduces New Brand Safety Features For Advertisers (Source)

X is expanding Adjacency Controls, offering greater adjacency protection for advertisers and signaling progress in building brand safety tools. The company is extending an exclusive partnership with Integral Ad Sciences, X's brand safety partner, to offer vetted inventory for advertisers.

Google Downgrades Visibility of HowTo and FAQ Rich Results (Source)

Google officially announced that it is downgrading the visibility of two forms of rich results, the HowTo and the FAQ. The FAQ rich results will essentially be phased out for most (but not all) websites while the HowTo will be completely removed from search results in mobile devices.

Zyber 365 Raises $100 Million in Series A (Source)

Zyber 365, a London, UK, and India-based Web3 and AI startup raised $100 million in Series A funding at a $1.2 billion valuation.

Marketer to follow ??

Kieran Flanagan

Kieran Flanagan is an emerging force in SaaS marketing. With a keen focus on growth strategies and user engagement, he imparts a blend of strategic wisdom and practical tactics to guide SaaS startups towards success. Through his insights, Kieran shapes the evolving landscape of SaaS marketing with his wealth of experience and innovative thinking.

Why should we follow him?

Expert SaaS Insights: As HubSpot's VP of Marketing, Kieran offers proven strategies for scaling SaaS businesses.

Fresh Ideas: His blend of innovation and practicality sparks new perspectives on SaaS marketing.

Comprehensive Growth Advice: Access a range of growth tactics, from demand generation to engagement.

Data-Driven Wisdom: Learn to make informed decisions with Kieran's emphasis on analytics.

Interactive Learning: Engage with him for discussions and clarifications.

Continuous Updates: Stay current with evolving SaaS trends through his insights.

Follow him here?

A Cool Case Study of this Week ??

The Journey of Outreach.io - From Startup to a $1.1 Billion SaaS Company

In 2011, Manny Medina teamed up with Andrew Kinzer to create GroupTalent, a revolutionary recruitment platform. However, the traction was slow, and they were running out of cash.

To solve their sales problem, they started building software to make their sales reps more productive. This software eventually became Outreach, a sales tech SaaS giant with over $200 million in revenues and a valuation of $4.4 billion.

Strategy:

• Pivoting to a product people actually want
• Closing the first 100 customers door to door
• Ignoring marketing for the first 2-3 years
• Developing an extremely fast-paced product release schedule
• Choosing a B2C metric – monthly active users
• Developing a metric-driven outbound process

Tagline:

Outreach – The Sales Engagement Platform

Outreach is a sales engagement platform that helps businesses streamline their sales process, increase productivity, and drive revenue growth. It provides a suite of tools that enable sales teams to engage with customers more effectively and close deals faster.

Outreach:

Their approach to growth includes:

• Focusing on what they do well, which is high-velocity sales
• Customizing their outbound process based on the persona and industry
• Acquiring Sales Hacker to boost their online marketing presence
• Creating a community for their customers to build relationships and reduce churn
• Hosting an annual conference to share their vision, build relationships, and solidify partnerships

Takeaways:

• In the early days, hit the streets to gain initial learnings and cash.
• Choose your growth engine and focus on it relentlessly.
• Consider acquiring an audience instead of growing one from scratch.
• Leverage customer relationships to reduce churn and increase customer retention.
• Host events or conferences to build relationships and solidify partnerships.

Tweet of this week ??

Marc-Etienne Dartus, software engineer at Amazon Kindle, has a humorous take on how the mind of a SaaS founder works non-stop. It’s well-known that there is much to do in SaaS — sales, customer success, product, engineering, demand gen, etc. SaaS companies get their first customers differently, based on who they are and what their app does.

Find the tweet here.?

PPC Creative of the week ??

Why this creative works:

• The headline makes it immediately clear who the product is meant for: big teams.
• The image gives readers a sneak peek into the dashboard of the product, triggering interest and building trust.
• The copy speaks to the pain points of the target audience: enterprise teams that depend on cross-functional collaboration to get work done.

Tip of the week???

“The best marketing is when your customers talk about you. The second best marketing is when you talk about your customers. Unfortunately, most companies just talk about themselves all of the time.”?

- Peter Caputa, CEO at Databox

Our pick: A SaaS tool we used and loved (Review) ??

CoSchedule

CoSchedule is a comprehensive content marketing and social media scheduling platform designed for teams. It helps marketers plan, promote, and execute on their entire content marketing strategy from a single dashboard.

Features:

1. Content Calendar: At its core, CoSchedule is known for its unified calendar view. This allows teams to see all of their content — from blog posts to social media updates — in one place and adjust schedules via drag-and-drop.

2. Social Media Scheduling: CoSchedule lets users schedule social media posts for various platforms directly within the calendar. It also has a feature called "ReQueue" that automatically reshares evergreen content at optimal times.

3. Task Management: Within each content project, users can assign tasks, set deadlines, and add comments, helping teams to collaborate effectively

4. Content Organizer: This tool helps you manage your entire content workflow, from ideation to publication. It's useful for teams with a lot of moving pieces or those that require collaboration between members.

5. Analytics: CoSchedule provides insights into the performance of your content and social media posts, so you can see what's resonating with your audience.

6. Email Marketing: It can integrate with various email platforms, allowing you to plan and visualize your email campaigns alongside other content.

7. Integrations: CoSchedule integrates with a variety of other platforms, including WordPress, Google Docs, Evernote, and many popular social media networks.

Pros:

1. Unified Calendar View: The visual content calendar is one of CoSchedule's standout features, providing a bird's eye view of all scheduled content, from blog posts to social media updates.

2. Streamlined Social Media Scheduling: The ability to automate and recycle social media posts using features like "ReQueue" helps in maximizing the reach of evergreen content.

3. Task Management: Built-in task management within each content piece facilitates collaboration and ensures deadlines are met.

4. Integrations: CoSchedule supports integrations with a variety of platforms, including WordPress, various social networks, and email marketing tools, allowing for a centralized content management experience.

5. Analytics: The tool offers built-in analytics for content and social media performance, providing insights to refine strategy.

6. Email Marketing Integration: Visualizing email campaigns alongside other content is beneficial for overall content planning and strategy coherence.

7. Team Collaboration: CoSchedule's team management features are robust, making it easier for teams to collaborate, assign tasks, and track progress.

Cons:

1. Price: For smaller businesses or individual marketers, CoSchedule might be considered pricey, especially when they might not utilize all its features.

2. Learning Curve: With its numerous features, there can be a learning curve for newcomers, making it potentially overwhelming for those new to content marketing tools.

3. Overkill for Solo Users: For solo bloggers or marketers, the tool's extensive collaboration features might be unnecessary.

4. Limited Social Media Analytics: While CoSchedule provides decent analytics for scheduling and post-performance, users looking for in-depth social media analytics might need to rely on additional specialized tools.

5. Template Limitations: Some users have mentioned limitations in terms of customization and flexibility with content templates.

6. Performance: At times, with a lot of content and multiple integrations, the platform might exhibit performance lags.

Final verdict:

CoSchedule is particularly beneficial for teams and businesses that produce a lot of content across various channels. It's best suited for medium to large-sized teams or those with a multifaceted content strategy. Smaller businesses or solo marketers might find it to be more than they need.

Upcoming Sessions/Events to follow????

1. SaaS Open Reviews - The Largest Gathering of SaaS founders in the world.

Sep 05, 2024 - Register Here