Marketing

👓 The Wall Street Journal’s legendary “Tale of Two Young Men'' letter tells the story of two men with similar backgrounds who work at the same manufacturing business. 25 years down the line one man is in the same role and the other is president of the business, the only difference being that the president educated himself by reading the WSJ. That story, which resulted in over $2B in subscriptions during a ~30 year period, follows a clear “two path” storytelling framework which can be applied to pretty much any SaaS business. While it has lost some of its novelty through gained popularity, it’s a good framework to use in messaging where you are looking to demonstrate how you beat the competition without boasting.

🌾 Most B2B SaaS companies start with a low touch sales model before building an SDR team and moving upmarket because low touch also generally means lower cost. Marc Thomas from PoweredbySearch went against the grain and started with a direct sales model before moving down market to build a B2B SaaS demand gen flywheel. He shared a template for building that model which stemmed from his learnings, from positioning to website structuring, and also has a separate piece with some additional notes on the principles discussed in the model which is a good supplementary read if you enjoy the first!

🔔 The Bell Curve marketing agency, (who also the Demand Curve marketing group), have written loads of websites in their day, and knows what kind of content it takes to convert visitors into customers. In a recent TechCrunch feature, they highlight a few ways you can improve the conversion rate on your homepage by crafting a sharp header and designing with intention. They provide a pretty cool framework to uncover your value proposition which you can use as a header – you start by describing a bad alternative people resort to when they don’t have your product, then follow up with a sentence describing why your product is better than that bad alternative. Lastly, you turn it into an action statement. Using AirBnb as an example, their bad alternative is “stuck in sterile hotels, don’t experience the real culture”, with “stay in locals’ homes” as the good one. Making that an action statement looks like “experience new cities like a local”. Voila.

✍️ It doesn’t always take a 400 page marketing book to improve your game, sometimes a simple thought can help you reset and make you think twice about what you are doing, or what you could potentially do! This was a fun list of one sentence marketing tips which we liked, and hopefully can have provide a jolt of inspiration for you or your team. Some of our favorites included “you can buy exposure, but you can’t buy attention” (big ad budgets aren’t enough!) and “the more your marketing sounds like marketing, the worse it will perform”. Using simple language and writing as you actually speak always wins.