- Hey there, Dan Martell here,
serial entrepreneur, investor, and creator of SaaS Academy.
In this episode, I'm gonna share with you three
of my favourite new, not used, powerful marketing strategies
for you to kickstart the year.
And be sure to stay to the end
where I'm gonna tell you how to measure your activity
and productivity when it comes to marketing
so that you don't waste your time and energy.
And hold your team accountable, number one.
Let's get into it.
(upbeat music)
So I have the privilege
of coaching hundreds of SaaS founders
to help them grow, scale, and achieve
what I call the perfect exit.
Now that doesn't mean selling your company,
it could mean hiring a CEO to run it,
but for most of my clients,
it means a strategic acquisition or going public.
Now one of the things that I support them on
is essentially introducing them
to what is working in the market today,
and the reason why I have that visibility
into the most advanced marketing strategies out there
is because I coach so many clients, and many of them
are literally the world's best marketers out there.
They're the folks that have written the books,
they have these software products,
and just by coaching them,
I'm learning the top strategies and tactics
that's getting them the biggest results.
So what I wanna share with you
are the three most powerful marketing funnels,
tactics, strategies that you can implement
in your SaaS company today to get results.
Number one, challenge funnels.
So you may have seen people run ads for these,
but essentially it's a 20-day, seven-day, 14-day challenge
that helps your potential customers understand
what it is that you do in your product
or help them get better results
in the problem space that you solve.
So I have clients like ClickFunnels that's notorious.
I think they're adding 1,200 new customers a week
in their challenge funnel, The One Funnel Away Channel.
If you wanna go to onefunnelaway.com, you'll see it there.
I've got other clients like Trevor at Carrot,
Kane at Coach Catalyst, Justin at TubeSift.
Probably since I've taught
the challenge funnel builder framework
at my intensive in Atlanta,
many of them have deployed their challenge funnels,
are getting incredible results.
Here's why it's so powerful.
Okay, so the idea is
you wanna do a compressed amount of time,
teach your prospect to get an outcome.
It's from point A to point B.
The way I've heard it described is if you're on this mound
and you gotta go down the valley and cross it,
there's this body of water to get to the top
of using your software,
which is the result that they're trying to achieve,
your challenge funnel should be the boat
that helps them cross that pond of water, okay?
So some of the challenge funnels out there
is the One Funnel Away Challenge that I just mentioned.
It could be the Customer Retention Challenge.
It could be the First 10 Customer Challenge.
It could be the Webinar Challenge.
So Omar at WebinarNinja has challenges crushing for them.
And here's the reason why I love challenge funnels.
Number one is it pays for your cost to acquire a customer,
at least the CPA side, the cost per acquisition.
It funds your growth, huge incentive.
Just that alone should be worth consider doing it.
The second one is it activates and onboards your customers
and kind of indoctrinates them into the way you think
and what they need to get ready
to use your software in the biggest way.
If you have an email marketing tool
and they don't have their email sequences written out,
that would be a perfect challenge to support them,
and you can charge anywhere from $50 to $97.
I have some clients that charge $200 for their funnel,
or their challenge funnel.
But the big idea is
that whatever outcome you help them achieve,
it gets them ready to use your product.
And then my favourite part is
that it has built-in support from the community
and building community from just being part
of this challenge funnel.
That's going to increase the success rate
of your new customers and improve your retention rate
because they're part of a tribe.
They're part of a movement.
They're part of something that's exciting.
People need deadlines.
If you're gonna lose weight, you need a deadline.
You need a challenge. You need a race.
You need 30 days, 60 days, 90 days.
I would argue that the shorter
your challenge funnel is, the better,
but that is probably one of the most powerful ways
that you can not only get paid to run ads
to acquire perfect fit customers
that will eventually transition in your software,
'cause that's the last module in your funnel.
It's essentially presenting them the solution to go faster,
to use your technology, to be able to get better results.
So it'll help them ascend. It's called the value ladder.
We wanna them into the challenge funnel
and then ascend them into your software
so they can get bigger and better results.
Number two, LinkedIn prospecting.
So this is something I taught my clients a few months ago.
The idea is leveraging LinkedIn to reach out
and connect with your perfect fit customers.
But this is the problem most people do,
and you probably get a bunch of these messages on LinkedIn.
They're just spammy, "Hey, I'd love to get on a call,
blah, blah, blah, blah, blah."
So I'm gonna walk you through the four-step process
that I taught my clients to make sure
that you do it in a way that doesn't come off as schemy,
doesn't make you feel like a used car salesman,
and is actually value add for your potential prospect.
So number one is you just want to do a connection request.
If all you did on a daily basis was to search
for ideal prospects, your perfect fit customers,
those targets in your market, and just connect request,
you'd be surprised how many of them see who you are,
they're like, "Oh, he's the founder of the software.
It's in my space. I'm going to accept."
So you start with the connection request.
The second, and the big idea that a lot of people miss,
is create a industry group, okay?
So create a group on LinkedIn and invite them to that group.
And the way to make the group really work
is to name it something that would be attractive to them.
Give it a name.
Sometimes it's the role their in,
so maybe they're the director of purchasing.
So it'd be called the Director of Purchasing Alliance,
right, so that could be the name of your group,
but something that would come off as attractive,
that they would wanna be part of,
that if they felt like they joined this group,
they were gonna learn from other people that are like them.
Birds of a feather flock together,
people wanna be part of a tribe,
and the truth is, you can just create it, invite them.
You can start with a dozen members.
You can get to 50 members.
Eventually you'll have 1,000 prospects supporting each other
and you're the connector.
So that's the second, invite 'em to a group.
Number three, I want you to give them a resource
that you actually think can be helpful,
like a quick download, like a free thing, no opt-in.
Straight to the PDF, straight to the template,
straight to the resource, straight to the blueprint.
Whatever it is,
just give it to them as a value add
'cause then all of a sudden, now you connected,
you invited them to a group
that's gonna improve their situation
and connect with other people like them.
You sent them a resource that you've created
that's really valuable.
And then the fourth message around that should be,
"Hey, do you need help with this?
Love to get on a quick call to see if we can be helpful,"
and you'd be surprised how much pipeline
that could generate for you.
So LinkedIn prospecting is here, it's today.
Go try it out.
Number three, vanity marketing, okay?
So I love the idea of vanity marketing
and the way this works
is essentially using a marketing platform.
You can call it a podcast, you can call it your blog,
you can call it a platform if you have an event,
and it's inviting your prospects
to actually be on the podcast.
Ooh, what a crazy idea. Imagine this.
You create your kind of dream 100 customer list.
These are the people that if I had these as customers,
that they would just create a lighthouse,
like a beacon of light for everybody else to say,
"Hey, these people are using this software,
so they must be credible."
It's gonna create super credibility.
And your ask of those potential clients is to be invited
to the podcast so you can interview them.
And it's industry specific, super nerdy, inside. Why?
Because if I'm the ops person of an eCommerce company,
I wanna listen to a podcast of a person
that interviews other operations people
at the top eCommerce companies.
And typically what happens
when you're doing those interviews is they're gonna ask,
they're gonna say, "Hey, what is it?
What does your software do anyways?
How does it work? Tell me about it.
Super interested. I'd love to learn more,"
and that is your in.
That is your opening to do a quick discovery,
see if there's a needs assessment,
and then move them forward.
So the other part that I love
about the vanity marketing strategy,
if you're gonna do a video podcast,
or the easiest one's an audio podcast,
or even an email interview, I've done that many times
where I'll do an email list of questions,
here are the eight questions, they answer 'em,
and I publish it as a blog post,
is you can also use it for your customers that are purple.
So I've shared this in the past.
In customer success,
we have red, yellow, green, and purple customers.
Purple customers are referenceable customers.
They're the ones that you want to bring onto your stages,
interview on your podcast, to create case studies.
They're natural case studies
that created by doing vanity marketing.
You're appealing to the person's vanity, their ego,
'cause a lot of these folks, especially if you sell
to a very specific role in a company,
they're never asked to be on a podcast,
so your hit rate could be
literally 85, 90% of getting these people.
And if you wanted to go crazy, like my buddy John Lee Dumas,
you could go daily with your podcast
and do five prospects a week, seven prospects a week,
and really dial it up to blow this up.
It's also a really great way to extract case studies.
And one of my coaching clients,
David Cristello at Jetpack Workflow,
he actually transcribed the interviews
that they did on the podcast
and created a number one selling book on Amazon
for his niche of accountants.
So you can repurpose the content. It is a powerful strategy.
Vanity marketing is just at the infancy
of the distribution of it,
and it's an idea for today, so go after it.
So three hot marketing strategies for this year
that you can implement today:
number one, channel funnel;
number two, LinkedIn prospecting;
and, number three, vanity marketing.
As I mentioned at the beginning of this episode,
I wanna share with you an exclusive resource
called the Precision Scorecard.
It's the exact same framework that I use to coach my clients
to help them get clarity, accountability,
and performance out of their team
by showing them how to measure your goals
on a quarterly, monthly, and weekly basis
to hold everybody accountable
and moving your marketing metrics forward.
So if you deploy any of these strategies,
you wanna click the link below
to download your copy of the Precision Scorecard.
It's got the template.
You can swipe and copy
to build out the funnel around these numbers
and the strategies so that you make sure
that they're moving those marketing metrics forward.
And if you like this video,
be sure to smash the Like button, leave a comment,
and let me know what was your biggest takeaway
from this episode.
And as for usual, I wanna challenge you
to live a bigger life and a bigger business,
and I'll see you next Monday.