- I really like buying old marketing books.
I'm talking about the ones that you really can't go buy
on Amazon anymore.
You gotta go scour through eBay, you kind of have to know
what you're looking for and then, lo and behold,
someone's cleaning out their basement, and they're selling
this book for a hundred bucks
and it's this old school marketing book.
The reason I love these books is because when you look
at some of these cutting edge marketing strategies today
that all the gurus tell you about,
they're really remixes of the old stuff,
the tried and true principles
that people have totally forgotten about
because they're in these books that are no longer for sale
with marketers that have gotten out of the game.
And this is why I love reading those books
because it helps you cut through the fancy, shiny stuff
to the true principles.
The true principles that help you drive growth
for a business, whether it be a SaaS business
or a different kind of business.
And so on today's episode, I'm gonna walk you
through three cutting edge marketing strategies,
which are really remixes
of some tried and true, true principles of marketing
that you can deploy today to actually accelerate the growth
of your SaaS business, intro.
(upbeat music)
What's up, everybody, welcome to Unstoppable,
I'm TK, and on this channel,
I help SaaS founders like you grow your SaaS business faster
with an unstoppable strategy.
If you are new to this channel,
be sure to hit the subscribe button and that bell icon,
that way you'll get notified every single time I drop
an episode with actionable strategies to grow
your SaaS business with the TK Energy.
If you are already part of our community,
if you're part of my SaaS go-to-market program,
SaaS scale program, SaaS launch program,
welcome back, it's seriously awesome to see you over here.
Now, I remember when I was getting into the startup game,
I was going into starting ToutApp.
This was technically my second company,
but this was like the real big one,
I'm like, "All right, I'm gonna take it really seriously."
I knew that I had to actually embrace sales and marketing.
And in order to do that, I was like,
cool, let me just go,
like the system I have,
if I wanna learn the crap out of anything, I'm like,
"Let me go buy the top 10 books on Amazon and go read them."
And once I've gone through that,
"Let me go find 10 people that know about these,
take them out to lunch," when I've done that,
"Then let me go find source principles
from out-of-print books and really dig deeper."
And so I was in phase one of this,
and I remember I bought this book,
"The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing."
Amazing book, and you'll see over here,
I keep all these books,
It's like literally baby TK signing, December of 2009,
such a long time ago.
And that's when I really started to learn that...
This is not one of those out-of-print books,
I've got the other out-of-print books here.
But marketing and sales, the principles are tried and true
because we're still selling to the same old brain.
We're still persuaded in the same ways.
And so the older the books went,
the more true the principles were.
And whenever I read a new book, I was like,
"This is the greatest new way to do strategic marketing."
I could tie it back to a core principle
that these old books talked about and used
for hundreds of years,
except now that we're kind of remixing it
in a slightly different way.
And that's kinda when I really started to dig into
the marketing and sales,
that's when I fell in love with it.
That's why I love the channel that I build now,
that's why I love working with founders
and their go-to-market strategies
because I just fell in love with the discipline.
And when you fall in love with something,
you really wanna get to the truth of it.
So on today's episode, I'm gonna walk you through
the three principles you absolutely need to adopt.
Three key cutting edge marketing strategies,
which are really tried and true principles that have existed
for hundreds of years
that you can deploy today to accelerate the growth
of your SaaS business.
So if you're excited to dig into principle number one,
strategy number one, go and smash that like button
for the YouTube algorithm.
Let's dig right into it.
Okay, so principle number one is influencer marketing.
This is strategy number one.
Now, in reality, influencer marketing
is actually nothing new.
Here's what you really need to do
because you're probably tired of influencer marketing,
you don't get it, maybe it doesn't work for B2B, who cares.
Here's the tried and true principle that you need to adopt,
which is in all the old school books,
all the OG marketers use.
What you need to embrace is testimonials and referrals,
testimonials and referrals.
Meaning, you need to go to your top 10, top 20,
top 50 customers, and you need to get testimonials
out of them.
You need to get reviews, and videos, written testimonies,
whatever it may be.
And then you need to actually mobilize that
into your marketing mix,
while they're doing that, you need to ask them like,
"Hey, who would you send this testimonial to?
Who would you send this review to?
Are there people in your network that would get value
from the product as well?"
And this is something that is so easy.
Referral marketing is so easy to actually establish
a system around, but it's almost too easy,
where people are like,
"Oh, that can't possibly help us grow."
In fact, it can.
To these days, with our go-to-market coaching program,
and we actually grow a lot faster with word of mouth.
Investors send their portfolio companies to us,
other founders that have seen success
on the program tell others about it,
and then boom, founders join.
It's through that word of mouth, through testimonials,
through reviews, and through them spreading the word
that we're really growing.
And that's super powerful.
It feels easy because it's pretty easy to implement.
You can implement it in probably a day
if you have the right framework to follow,
but once you do, it can be really, really powerful
in driving growth.
And when you think about it, testimonials and referrals,
hundreds of years, it's existed.
Every business uses it, especially the successful ones.
Influencer marketing is just a twist of that,
but if you truly get into, like, look,
your best influences are your successful clients,
if you get them to do testimonials,
if you get them to do referrals,
you're gonna grow a lot faster.
So put that into play and you'll start
to actually accelerate the growth of your SaaS business.
So that's strategy number one.
Strategy number two is content marketing.
Now, content marketing is still the rage.
It's been the rage, maybe for 10 years now,
but it's still the rage today.
Marketing agencies will pitch you on content marketing
and how it's the next best thing
and how you should start blogging and do SEO,
like all that stuff.
I get it,
it's great, it's totally awesome.
It's kind of saturated.
But if you go to the tried and true principle,
here's the principle, here's the strategy
that you can deploy today that will actually help you stand
out and grow faster.
The true version of content marketing
is education marketing, education marketing.
If you think about it, I do education marketing.
I teach people.
I teach people principles.
I teach people what I know.
We at ToutApp did education marketing
because we were creating a brand new category,
and people didn't know how to actually think
about sales engagement.
So we taught people how to send cold emails.
We taught people how to actually do multiple touches.
We taught people through an actual manifesto that we had.
For me, I teach you how to grow SaaS businesses,
and at the end of the day, if you wanna work with me
to grow faster and follow a framework, then you buy.
But at the end of the day, it's education marketing.
And what you can do in your business,
regardless of how competitive you are,
or how new you are, you can either out-spend the competition
or you can out-teach.
And for me, I always prefer to out-teach.
I would rather teach people what we know,
the big transformation we're bringing to the world,
how much success we brought to others, the nuances of it.
And when we teach, people trust us
'cause you can't fake it.
You can't fake teaching.
You either know it or you don't.
And when you start to show that,
"Hey, here's what we can do for you."
All of a sudden, people will engage and buy your product,
buy your software, whatever it is that you're selling,
all of it because you're doing education marketing.
This is nuance because content marketing is like,
let me just do a blog post every week.
Education marketing is let's think about
what is the big change we're bringing?
How do we get people to think about that change?
And how do we teach them about it?
How do we make them aware about it?
These are all the core things
that are in education marketing that makes
a big difference.
So that's strategy number two, education marketing.
Now, let me pause here for a second
before we go to strategy number three,
principle number three.
Are you starting to see the power in this?
See, all of these new tactics and strategies that come out,
there's nothing new under the sun.
At the end of the day,
there's some core marketing principles,
and sales principles, and product principles that work well
and have been tried and true for hundreds of years.
Now, what ends up happening is people take them,
and try to see how they apply today, and try to remix them,
and try and make it their own thing.
And that's fine, and that's good.
But, if you as a leader, if you as a CEO,
if you as a founder can cut through that and start
to think about, you as a marketer,
and a lot of marketing people watch this channel as well.
If you can cut through that and get to the source material
and start to think about what are the strategies
that have always existed and will continue to exist.
They'll always work because it's the same brains
that were operating, we're just in different mediums.
Then you start to see how you can rise above
and really differentiate yourself.
It's about going to the source material.
Now, if you're starting to see the power on this,
can I just get a yes in the comments below?
Seriously, just put a yes in the comments,
it just means the world to us when you do that.
Also smash that like button if you haven't already
for the YouTube algorithm.
Now, if you are building out these pieces
and you want a framework to follow,
if you wanna figure out how do we actually get
a referral program in place,
how do we build out education marketing,
this is why I created my SaaS go-to-market coaching program.
It's a framework that you can follow to actually build out
a go-to-market strategy and scale your SaaS business.
I'll tell you more about it at the end of this video,
let's go to principle number three.
Principle number three is channel marketing.
Channel marketing, honestly, this one's really cool
because channel marketing is starting to become
this shiny, new object thing.
Like there's lots of podcasts,
and there's lots of people coming out and saying,
"Hey, you should do channels.
There's products being built."
And so what is old is new again,
this is shiny and also tried and true.
The core of channel marketing,
is what you're essentially doing, is you're saying,
"Who are larger companies, people, influencers
that are already selling to my ideal customers?
And how do I go to them?"
Forge your relationship and use their marketing machine
and sales machine to sell my product.
That's channel marketing.
Easy ways of getting into channel marketing
is actually going into a marketplace.
So say, you're selling in the Shopify ecosystem,
getting this in the Shopify marketplace
and promoting through there,
the Salesforce AppExchange marketplace,
the HubSpot marketplace.
These are all easy ways of starting with channel marketing
'cause all of a sudden, you're using their channels
to actually sell your product.
Now, there are more advanced ways,
you can start thinking about co-marketing, co-selling,
reselling, affiliate marketing.
There are different ways you can approach
these other companies that are not competitive to you
but are still selling to the same group of people
you're selling to, and you can actually get scale there.
If you wanna dig more into how to build out
a channel marketing strategy, I did an entire video on this.
You can check it out right over here,
channel marketing for your go-to-market strategy.
You can dig more into it.
You don't have to go right now,
I'll link to it below, don't worry.
And so this is one more cutting edge marketing strategy
that you can use today, which has also been tried and true.
It started to come in vogue,
partly because this is a little bit black art,
like not that many smart people know
how to do this really well.
They've kind of retired,
but now there's people that have like gone through a turn,
they're like, "Oh my God, this is awesome."
So they're starting to promote it more, which is great.
I'm really happy for channel marketing.
So to recap, three cutting edge SaaS marketing strategies
that you can deploy today to accelerate the growth
of your SaaS business.
Number one, testimonials and referrals,
put that into play, put a system into place for that.
Number two, education marketing, teach the market.
Don't try to out-spend them.
Actually, put out a book, a manifesto, a course,
whatever it may be, teach them
on what the transformation is,
and then tell them to use your product.
And number three, channel marketing,
find other companies, non-competitive to you
that are already selling to your ideal customers
and work with them.
You can check out that video down below, I'll link to it.
Also, while you're here, if you're like,
"You know what, I can totally see how these three things
will help me accelerate the growth of my SaaS business,"
but you're wondering, "Where do I start?
How do I establish a referral marketing campaign?
How do I collect testimonials?
What am I educating on?
What should I entail?"
If you want a proven framework to follow,
to implement these strategies, this is exactly why I created
my SaaS go-to-market coaching program.
Inside of this coaching program, you get the training
that you follow to actually implement these key pieces
and a scalable go-to-market strategy.
You also work with me and my coaching to make sure
that you're following the steps in the right way,
you're implementing in the right way,
you're deciphering the data,
and you're making the right strategic decisions.
And you also get hooked into my community of SaaS CEOs,
who are following the same framework as you to rise above.
This is super powerful.
So if you're interested in joining
my SaaS go-to-market coaching program
to accelerate the results,
to implement these key pieces,
then I invite you to go to tkkader.com/gtm
Over there, you can book a call with me.
We can get on a call.
We can discuss exactly where you are in your SaaS business.
We'll review the answers to some questions we asked
while you were booking the call so I can figure out
if I can help you or not.
And then based on that, if we're a good fit,
we're off to the races, we can start building
and implementing your go-to-market strategy
and scaling from there.
Just go to tkkader.com/gtm to book a call with me.
I'm super pumped to meet you and actually figure out
if we can help you through the go-to-market program.
Also, if you got values from this video,
please smash that like button for the YouTube algorithm.
I drop an episode like this, two to three times a week,
so be sure to hit the subscribe button and that bell icon
if you haven't already.
That way you'll get notified
every single time I drop an episode.
If you have a fellow founder, a team member,
other founders that you know
that are building SaaS businesses
that will get value from this,
please share this video with them.
It'll mean the world to me and my team,
put a lot of love into these videos.
And lastly, remember, everyone needs a strategy
for their life and their business,
when you are with us, yours is gonna be unstoppable.
I'm TK, I'll see you in the next episode.
(upbeat music)
If you are already part of our community,
if you are a part of my SaaS scale...
(phone ringing loudly)
That's probably going in the blooper.
There we go.