Master class: Marketing

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This master class on marketing is based on notes taken by Dana Hwu, Program Manager, MIT delta v 2020, during a two-part workshop on Sales and Marketing in 2020 by Jose Martins, Business Development Manager, Hubspot for Startups.

Sales and Marketing: Area of focus after you have an MVP

In the early days of a new venture, it’s all about defining who your customer is and what you can do for the customer. At some point you will have built a minimum viable product (MVP). This is when you will be ready for sales and marketing.

Marketing 101: Start with building a great buyer persona

The first thing is you want to think about your persona. And this is really the core of everything you can start doing marketing. If you don’t think first about who you want to connect with, you will not succeed.

Most startups have a good idea of the type of companies they service. But they often have not gotten to the point where they really understand deeply the human beings who work in those companies. It is very important for startups to build not only the user personas but the buyer personas. Hubspot provides a walkthrough tool that can help you create your buyer persona. That is the first step before you do anything in marketing and sales.

You need to understand who you are selling to. List out all the details. What job title do they hold? What was their career trajectory prior to this job? What are their success metrics at work? How comfortable are they with technology? What is their history and affinity to the type of product or service you are selling? How do they prefer to do due diligence – are they more likely to try free tools and figure it out, or do they want someone to concierge them through the whole process?

Map out the buying process for the buyer persona

Once you have the buyer persona, the next thing to think about is how does the buyer persona, the ideal buyer make a decision to buy your product. What is the process they go through as they move from an awareness of the problem they want to solve? How do they consider alternative solutions? How do they decide on a supplier? You need to get into that mental process. They typically go through several stages:

Awareness that there is a problem
Get a sense of the problem they are experiencing
Consider how they might deal with this problem: Explore and compare options
Decide on the best option based on a set of criteria
Start evaluating vendors for that type of an option – consider pros and cons
Choose the best vendor to solve the problem

Keeping the buying process in mind when doing marketing

Now if you’re doing marketing for your company B2B or B2C, you have to be aware of this, because as you build your website and content, you need to connect with them based on their process and mental model.

Awareness phase

Let’s say you connect with them when they are in their awareness stage, you have to have something for them to do or something to help them with. Ask yourself what resources you can create for your buyer persona to help them understand their problem.

Consideration phase

Now, if you’re connecting with the buyer persona during their consideration stage, what materials and tools might you create for them to compare options during their research of potential solutions?

Decision phase

As they go through their consideration stage and then the decision stage. That’s a little bit more of what most companies do with their websites with their content with our marketing as well. They talk about my product versus other products versus other competition or other competitors in the same kind of space.

Why you should not spend 90% of your time developing marketing material for the decision phase

Most companies spent 90% of their marketing efforts on the decision stage.

And that makes no sense. Because 90% of the people you’re going to connect with digitally are going to be in the pre-decision stage, they’re going to be either in awareness or in consideration phases.

So if you develop collateral materials for both the awareness and consideration stage, it will create a huge competitive advantage that will help you connect with your target market against your competition.

Buyer’s journey

So, it is very important to know your buyer’s journey for your buyer persona. Let’s start at the beginning. We know who we want to connect with. We know their mental process. How do we connect with them?

We call this “generating awareness”. In the digital world we call this “generating traffic to our website”.

Generating traffic organically

How do you do this? One is organic – without spending any ad dollars getting in front of people. For that you use Google. The problem with that is that Google changed their algorithm 5 or 6 years ago and it really changed the game of how you actually connect with people online.

Before 2013 we were playing the keyword optimization game. After that, Google started being really smart about interpreting intent of search. Instead of looking at words in your search, they interpret the intent of your search.

So if you search for food on Saturday at 11am or a 10am, Google is probably going to interpret that I’m meaning groceries. Whereas if I’m in the North End on a Saturday at 7pm, it’s going to interpret that I’m looking for the best Italian restaurant in Boston, depending on location and time of day and your past history of searches.

What that means is instead of just playing the game of optimizing for keywords, you need to start playing the game of topics. One way is to build content to rank organically and win at the SEO game.

You need to structure your content pages of your website and your blog in a way that is cleaner and more deliberate to signal to Google which sort of topics, you’re an expert for. You might create a “pillar page” – a gigantic Ultimate Guide to your area of expertise on your website. Then you create sub articles of smaller pieces of content related to the main topic. You can interconnect all that. In the past you may have needed to create 25 or 55 blog posts optimized for individual keywords. These days you can do 10 pieces of really good interconnected content and get the job done.

And that signals to Google. Hey, if someone’s looking for information on your area of interest, the authority in this topic, not this keyword, but this topic is your company. You need to master the concept of topic clusters and SEO strategy. If you do this wisely you can beat the giants in your industry and come up ranked 1st or 2nd on a Google search.

You don’t need to be a huge company and have a lot of budget. A small company can win the game of SEO if they really structure the content in a smart way.

Generating traffic through content posted on social media

The second thing is you have your persona, you have their buyer’s journey, you’re connecting with them through you decided to connect with them through content.

The next thing you need to decide is what are the channels that you’re going to reach them through. While you might want to reach them in all the channels that are possible, you have to really make sure that you understand how much time you really have to devote to a social network.

It really does require a lot of time and effort to do the proper job of connecting with your customers to a specific social media channel the right way. You will not have the bandwidth to have three or four different social media accounts that you can serve. So you should focus on the network that is going to get you the most connections with your potential buyers. You should then invest all your time there. It is better to do one social network really well then doing three or four not not very well.

The content is going to change depending on the media that you choose. If you’re going to choose Twitter that’s going to look different in way shape and form than if you choose LinkedIn as your social media to connect with your target market.

Images are very important. If you’re trying to connect and write a post on social media with only text, that’s not going to be very successful, you have to use images.

If you use video, that’s going to be way more engaging. So try to invest a little bit of time creating videos. It doesn’t have to be very elaborate. It’s just you with a camera recording.

Spending money on channels that work

When you start seeing what type of content in which type of channel is working, it is okay to add some dollars behind it, distributing your content through social media like Facebook and other channels. It is OK to use ads to boost how your content is helping you connect with your target market.

Converting traffic into leads

Now you have your traffic coming into your website through great content that you’re creating or through ads. How do you monetize the opportunity you have with the traffic? If you’re not generating leads and opportunities for sale from that traffic, that means nothing. So what I want to walk you through right now is how do you convert that traffic into leads.

The golden rule of converting traffic into leads is this: You have to find ways to add value to that website visitor in such a way that you can then extract value.

For example, you can ask for information from them. If you go to a website and there’s a piece of content that you want to read – this may be an E book or an infographic, or a list of the top 10 X. The value for that content has to be worth your name and email address.

What you have to do is you have to balance that transaction. What am I giving you and what am I asking for in return. So if you want someone to, say, sign up for your newsletter, you can ask for their email only if you can provide content that is valuable to them.

Then you have the actual mechanisms to deliver and capture that value. It could be a tool. It could be a video. It could be an ebook. You can then design an optimized landing page to deliver the content and capture their email. That is a piece of content that you are offering – what you ask for in return is some information back. So that is the transaction – that is a conversion.

Another way of doing this transaction is to use chatbots. A lot of people today are not going to be comfortable giving information, but there’s a ton of people that will give you information in the form of a chat interaction that most people don’t realize they’re also giving you information.

For many users, if you’re interacting with a chat bot on a website. It just feels more natural. So a lot of people will convert and give you information this way – a lot of people would actually prefer this. So it’s good to have both.

By the way: You can connect your website to your CRM. This is strongly recommended.

A lot of people are going to go to your website. 95 to 96% of people will go to your website and not convert on anything.

You can have spots here that you can embed on retargeting ads. If someone wasn’t your website and then they’re navigating their LinkedIn or their Facebook or the, you name it, then they can see an ad. The ad can show them some more content from your company, so they can come back to your website. Paid retargeting is a really, really good use of your money when you have a limited budget.

Preparing leads to speak to sales

Let’s say someone is in the consideration stage. They do a Google search and find an article you wrote with an interesting snippet. They click on that link and navigate to your website to read that post.

You can put multiple calls to action on your website – email capture, learn more, chatbot, you name it. This is the pillar content and it links out to a lot more interconnected content.

And you can have multiple types of calls to action (CTA) for people in different stages of their buyer’s journey. You can have CTAs to learn more, get an assessment, get a quote, etc.

If someone is pretty advanced on their buyer’s journey and it’s already kind of considering engaging with a vendor, they can click “Request an assessment”. They have done a lot of research and are ready to talk to your team.

On the other extreme, if they are in the awareness stage, and are still learning, they may just click “Subscribe to the blog”. They don’t want to talk to people yet.

Lastly if there is a valuable piece of content, such as “The Ultimate Guide to X”, you may capture their name and email and phone number in order to allow them to complete the transaction. That transaction will make sense to some users because they feel they are getting a ton of value and paying you back with some value.

So: Adding value is more important than extracting value there. This is how you convert traffic into leads. Offer value and capture value in the form of information.

Nurturing leads via marketing automation

When someone converts and downloads a piece of content, the mistake that a ton of companies do is that they expect a high purchase conversion with every type of conversion. If someone subscribes to a blog or to a newsletter, that is very different from someone else who clicks on that request and assessment assessment CTA. The problem with most companies is that they reach out to the leads too soon.

To avoid this, you need to nurture those leads. Once you have traffic and you got information from the visitor, you have a lead in your database. How can you work that lead or heat it up, make it more likely that they will want to interact with your sales team? You can do that with automation.

Marketing automation can include automated email marketing email marketing campaigns. This is taking a lead who might not be ready to speak with your sales team, and get them to reach that point if you are B2B – or get them to be ready to go to your website and buy something if you are B2C.

How you use automation depends on the type of content that you are converting on. That is linked to the lead’s state in their buyer’s journey. They may be in the awareness, consideration, or decision phase.

Let’s say the lead converted on a piece of content. Email marketing can walk them through the process, from awareness to consideration, and from consideration to decision.

Once the lead downloads the Ultimate Guide to X, the next thing you can do is to send them an email a few days later, talking about something related to it.

And a few days later you may send you another piece of content that is a little further along that buying process. So it is pulling the lead towards the decision stage.

Eventually, if the lead is interacting with that email – opening those emails and clicking links, downloading more stuff, going back to your website, you can start scoring the lead. Eventually they give you enough signs that they are at the decision stage of the buyer’s process.

Then the last automated email that may be sent based on if/then rules in the system might be an offer to do a free 30 minute assessment on the problem you may have. So automation is used to bring someone from the awareness or consideration stage, and nurture them so that they’re ready to speak with sales. The last thing that the marketing automation does is to actually try to connect the lead with sales.

The other thing to do with automation is you want to have your sales team ready to interact with that lead. So on one hand, marketing, what they’re doing is they’re nurturing those leads. You want to get your sales team ready to interact with those leads. The CRM is the best way to do that. The sales team can get automated internal notification emails about leads who have been progressing along the buyer’s journey to give them some notice that they may be ready to speak with someone in sales.

So marketing is helping sales with leads, tools and collateral to help sales connect with the person and initiate a conversation.

The sales funnel

For a startup, it is very important to think of a funnel. You’re trying to get as many people knowing that you exist – because they don’t. Then you’re trying to get as many of those people who are finding you through ads or SEO, or really good content online.You want to get information from those people, convert them into leads, and then nurture those leads until they’re ready to speak with sales.

How much you need to nurture them until they’re ready for sales is a function of how much time or bandwidth you have to invest in nurture emails and nurturing campaigns. And how much of a database you have, and how much of a need for sales you have.

If you don’t have a ton of leads because maybe your market is not a lead rich environment. you need to scale back on what constitutes a strong enough signal for me to engage with the lead.

To wrap up the Marketing part of this session: There is a flow, someone comes to your website, they have a CTA that guides them through a conversion, they leave you their information. You nurture them with email, and eventually you connect them with sales.

Q&A

Q: How do we capture the data for funnel metrics?

One thing you can do from the data point of view is to connect your website to your CRM. That’s the first thing that will get you an idea of how much traffic you’re getting, where it is coming from and when they convert, what they do is they convert into your CRM. So if someone comes into your website and they leave information, that will be a lead in the CRM.

The next thing is once you identify the person and this is why conversion is so important. Once identified that that visitor that IP address is actually someone with a name. Now you can see what that person has been doing. More importantly, when that IP address comes back to your website, you know who that is.

And so you can start seeing how many times the person comes back, you can see which type of articles they read and what assets they download.

Now, that’s part one connecting your CRM with your website and your content, part two is to know where they are in their buyer’s journey. When you create content, create a map of what is most likely to be read by someone at each stage. If someone downloads material from content you have classified for the awareness phase, you can assume that’s where they are. You can have content for the consideration phase and the decision phase.

Each single part of the content that you’re creating you’re linking to a stage in the buyer’s journey. And what you do is you assume the latest states based on whatever they’re downloading. If someone is in your pricing page and they see the product page, and are looking at your pages where you compare yourself with the other competitors, those three things together are pretty good signs of someone in the decision stage. And so what you do is you start interpreting the type of content being consumed with the state they are at. You have to define that for yourself.

What you can do is you can create automation, the system saying something like, hey, whenever a visitor downloads this piece of content and has been on my Pricing Page, mark that person as someone who may be in the decision stage – and move the person into the workflow of emails for the decision stage.

Q: Let’s say we’re in the process of creating thought leadership content to create credibility to our clients. So I want to write a lot about a specific subject so that when I speak with someone, they know that I know what I’m talking about. What would you recommend we do next?

When you’re creating the content, every piece of content, I would argue, is trying to prove thought leadership. If you’re not creating content to influence the perception of your thought leadership, then you’re not doing it right.

The first thing I would do is to have a very deep definition of who your buyer persona is, as well as the buyer’s journey.

The second thing I would do is to create a matrix and ask, what content can you create today about the problem itself. So you have a company, you have a service or product. That is a solution to a problem. So I would write a ton of content about the problem itself and you want people to be aware of that problem. And people will resonate. Invest in that, because about 80% of people who connect with your content are going to be in the awareness phase.

You could also invest time creating content for the consideration stage. So once you define the problem your prospects are having, people are going to ask, how do I solve that problem? What are the different alternatives to solving that problem?

So I will create a lot of content around that. That will probably cover another probably 15% of people who interact with your content.

I would not be too worried about proving that your solution is the best amongst your competitors or competition. You have to do that. But when I’m creating content, the amount of content for each stage will be something like: 80% 15% and 5%.

Q: What medium should we use for content?

Ideally, you should do everything that you can in video form and not in written form with subtitles. People may be navigating, say, LinkedIn, and they see the video. They will probably see it in a context where they don’t always have audio on. So you need subtitles. You can actually watch the video with subtitles without having to have audio on and that is a huge, huge advantage.

Q: When we write content, when should we post it, how often, and where do we begin?

Great question. So the frequency and times depends a little bit on the network. And then a little bit on the actual market size. For example, you want to post on LinkedIn once a day.

The industry influences the frequency. In some industries, you need to be more frequent. For example, B2C brands like Starbucks and Coca Cola post frequently. They have to hire dedicated community managers for their social media accounts, because you have to be on it every single minute. You have to respond to people commenting almost to the second.

If you’re more in the B2B segment, you can take a full day to respond and maybe even a couple of days. So it’s a little bit of experimentation.

You can search for content online in terms of frequency depending on the channel. The first thing you need to decide, though, is, which channel is going to get you in front of your ideal buyer persona. Think of your buyer persona. Where are they most likely to be present? On Facebook, LinkedIn, or another channel? Then focus all of your effort and energy in one really good channel instead of diluting your effort in four or five different social media channels.