For the past 10 years or so, if you wanted to grow your company, there was a fairly common set of playbooks.
You do some content, some gated content, some paid media, some positioning projects, some social posting.
While the details were more complicated than those five tactics and varied from company to company, the majority of approaches to growth included those things as the core.
Over the past 3 years, a perfect storm of technological, societal and legislative changes have converged to drastically diminish the effectiveness of marketing playbooks we previously ran.
In this article, I propose a way forward for B2B marketers as we all learn to deal with the post-playbook world. I call it RINse & Repeat and it works like this:
- Relate – work hard to get uncomfortably close to your customers and your understand your wider market
- Ideate – using those insights, produce unique and novel campaigns and growth systems that are not based on classic channel playbooks
- Narrate – realize that we’re no longer able to simply point to an analytics report to justify marketing investment. Post-playbook marketing requires you build a narrative that combines qualitative and quantitative data to show marketing ROI
- Repeat – there is no end point to this process because every iteration will be different. You can run multiple loops at once
But before we dive into what that looks like in reality, let’s look briefly at how we got here.
Why don’t the playbooks work anymore?
Marketing a software product used to be pretty straightforward. Since around 2012, the B2B SaaS marketing world ran a series of generally accepted playbooks that when run could be quite effective.
A couple of common playbooks that did have at least some utility:
- Create content on your website that responds to the search intent for many high volume search terms so that when people search for them, they think about your product as a potential solution
- Combine third party data with analytics data to build retargeting audiences for your ad campaigns
- Improve the performance of your website to increase on page conversion rate
- Build highly segmented audiences that rely on the combination of demographic, firmographic and psychographic characteristics
But then a series of sweeping changes hit the marketing industry and everything changed:
The market became flooded with software products that are not meaningfully differentiated from one another with venture capital money pouring into the software industry.
A small group of companies were able to dominate share of voice for search terms related to their industry and then started spreading outwards to decreasingly adjacent markets.
Within just a couple of years it became extremely hard to drive enough search traffic to make your business grow.
Then GDPR and other privacy legislation started to erode the ability of companies to track and contact users without permission.
Apple’s iOS 16 update further impacted marketers ability to track users across the internet – and that meant accuracy of targeting and tracking of interactions with ad platforms declined sharply.
AI generated content took a real hold in the SERP, in the comments sections, in the everywhere, all the time, all at once.
Google sunsetted Universal Analytics and suddenly a lot of marketers were left without data on which channels and tactics were performing for them at all.
That brings us to the present moment – at the time of writing, it’s December 2023 – and many marketers are left without the ability to be effective in driving search traffic, run targeted ad campaigns or measure the impact of their work.
I think it would be foolish to say that none of the playbooks we previously used would have any impact.
But I do not think it’s unreasonable to say that any of them are the most effective use of marketing money anymore.
Why do some software companies grow so fast while the majority grind it out?
Competition for software is more intense than ever. G2 currently has listings for almost 150,000 software or service products – the majority are active software products.
But the number of buyers for that software has not meaningfully increased.
In other words, supply far outweighs demand. Look at the grid for Project Management tools on G2 and feel the anxiety of a VP marketing in any of those companies (including the big ones)
Even worse news for most companies is that they’re tiny fish in a small pond that also has sharks with lasers in it.
Large software companies (e.g. Hubspot, Clickup, Zendesk) are eating the market that they’re in and also decreasingly adjacent markets.
Take Clickup, for example.
Clickup started as a relatively straightforward to do list tool. Then it added team collaboration features. After that it added complex project management capabilities.
That’s already a large portion of the features that their beachhead market of companies looking for a project management tool needed (a significant market in its own right).
But then they went after the team collaboration market by adding in features like document editing, commenting and even file sharing – each of those products has significant competitors pray for Notion, Google Docs, Dropbox.
That’s not even considering all the AI tools they recently added in Clickup 3.0 which will absolutely cannibalize the market of small companies with less developed tools like Copy.ai and Jarvis (sorry lads).
And yet Clickup is growing at a phenomenal pace:
- Grew from $4 million ARR to more than $100 million ARR in just over two years
- More than doubled its paying customer base year over year
- Makes 8+ products, with 15+ views, and built 100+ integrations in the last year
How are they doing that? Well, I imagine the day-to-day of it is incredibly complex but the strategy appears to be relatively straightforward (as is the case with many companies going through fast growth):
Acquire an awful lot of users and predominantly users who aren’t obviously in the market for the thing your tool is known for.
This is also the core idea of the modern classic of marketing How Brands Grow by Byron Sharp
Note: Even though the book doesn’t address software companies at all, I think it should be required reading for marketers who are working today.
In his book, he identities and backs up with actual data several ‘laws’ of marketing. But the two that are most relevant here are:
- The Double Jeopardy Law: Brands with less market share have far fewer buyers and these buyers are slightly less loyal (they churn more frequently or in greater number)
- The Natural Monopoly Law: Brands with more market share attract a greater proportion of light category buyers (or as I think is more relevant for SaaS in particular: low consideration buyers)
This flies in the face of how we’ve been marketing software for the past 10 years:
Past 10 years – Focus on only attracting right fit buyers because they churn less frequently
Now – Focus on attracting even less well fit buyers because brands with more customers tend to attract more customers but churn more or less the same number as a brand with high fit customers
So why does a company like Clickup seem to be on such an astronomical trajectory while all the other 440 companies listed on G2 for project management software seem to languish?
Simply: they are attracting a huge number (presumably) of customers, some who only have a very light need for the software that they provide and this group probably makes up a little more than 60% of their customer base.
(I’m estimating – but I think I’m likely close)
How does RINse & Repeat help marketers deal with uncertainty in the post-playbook era?
Software companies grow not by targeting a small group of customers but by targeting an increasingly large number of customers from a mass market.
But the playbooks that we’ve always used for this are decreasing in effectiveness due to factors that are beyond our control.
How should marketers respond?
There’s really two parts to this:
First, by helping improve the alignment of product, marketing and sales to the extent that the product naturally appeals to a greater number of people while making the product repeatedly and obviously recognizable to a mass market.
But that’s a topic for a different blog post.
Second, by consistently creating memorable campaigns that get in front of an increasing number of people.
This is achievable with a huge budget or – as is likely the case for most readers of this piece – a small/no budget.
In 2023, I have thought about this extensively and also run multiple campaigns that have achieved it. In the rest of this post, I want to walk you through the approach I think will work best for marketers involved in the day-to-day of growing their companies.
I call it RINse & Repeat and here is how it works:
- Relate – work hard to get uncomfortably close to your customers and your understand your wider market
- Ideate – using those insights, produce unique and novel campaigns and growth systems that are not based on classic channel playbooks
- Narrate – realize that we’re no longer able to simply point to an analytics report to justify marketing investment. Post-playbook marketing requires you build a narrative that combines qualitative and quantitative data to show marketing ROI
- Repeat – there is no end point to this process because every iteration will be different. You can run multiple loops at once
This system is agnostic from top-to-bottom. It doesn’t make any assumptions of budget, market, tech stack. Instead, it lets marketers make strategic choices that can adapt to their changing contexts.
Relate
A key factor in this whole process is creating novel and interesting campaigns that are remembered by buyers who want to choose a tool to solve some problem they have (Ideating!)
A precursor to ideation is to have a clear understanding of how the market thinks.
This is hard because we’re simultaneously trying to tap into specific pains or problems that buyers have but also go broad to reach wide markets (their problems may be different or diverse).
Traditional customer research for software marketing relies predominantly on asking people about their lives as it relates to the product. And while this still applies, the approach that many companies take – making customer research a fairly two dimensional process that happens only at random – is not fit for purpose.
Instead, building a system at your company that allows you to regularly run customer research (and to a small extent market research) is necessary.
Podia’s culture – that’s where I work! – is heavily driven by understanding customers.
To do that, we run regular sprints of customer discovery which broadly look like this:
- Define the scope of the research we’re running (e.g. attitudes of our users to email marketing)
- Ask a closed question about the topic with an in-app survey or build a contact list by segmenting on specific user characteristics
- Invite respondents or users identified in the previous step to participate in a user interview – I recently ran a project that involved 20 user interviews over a 10 day period. In this, ask open ended questions around the topic
- Code the transcripts from that interview process to look for themes, interesting ideas or novel ways of talking about the topic
- Using that coding process, build a survey about the topic and send to a very broad set of our users (sometimes everyone in our user base)
- Synthesize a report from all of the above which summarizes the findings of the research sprint identifying areas of commonality, user needs, expectations or pains
This process takes around 45 days from start to finish and we mostly run them in series rather than parallel. Each one is slightly different but they usually follow a structure quite similar to that.
From time to time in a research exercise I’ll also layer on sources like:
- Product usage data
- Screen recordings/heatmaps
- Support tickets related to the topic
- Community posts
- External sources (e.g. software reviews)
We don’t do any formal market research at this point for many reasons but the main one is that there is so much opportunity to ideate based on our existing customer base.
The key with this phase is to distill everything down into a few key insights about your topic and audience.
Ideate
Once you have a series of insights about your customer, you can begin to think about how you might respond to those insights with the campaign you’re planning.
The key with this step is to make sure that you come up with a range of ideas that are diverse and novel. A good way to do this is to simply start writing out ideas or use a system like these IDEATE cards I recently created to help you and your team have better ideas.
My advice is to get as many ideas out as possible even if you feel you’ve got a knock out idea very quickly. Sometimes even great ideas are made better by adding elements from weak ideas into it.
You may well find that during this process, you start to fall back on playbooks that are proving to be less effective for you. This is particularly true if you’ve worked primarily in content or SEO.
If this happens to you, resist the temptation. You’re doing this whole process because the classic approaches are diminishing in value for you. Instead, challenge yourself to take good ideas and ask: “What would this look like as [channel you’re frightened of] campaign?”
For example, at Podia, I recently proposed a campaign that was almost a complete after thought based on the insight that a lot of our customers struggle to make their ideas happen. I joked to myself that they need a little ‘Creative Juice.’ I thought maybe we could actually create a soft drink.
When I proposed that in a meeting with the marketing team everyone, including myself, laughed because it seemed like a farfetched idea.
But later on, I was glad that we had discussed it, because it became a key part of the launch of a new channel for us when the Whole Food Plant Based Cooking Show created it on their YouTube channel while discussing Podia to an audience of over 367,000 people – many we’d never reached before.
Hopefully you’re seeing that by aligning your customer insights with your ideation process you’re more likely to find high leverage opportunities to get in front of potential customers.
After all, I don’t see any of our competitors sponsoring a whole foods YouTube channel.
Narrate
There’s a very obvious gap between ideating and this step, narrating.
Every campaign and channel idea you have will be different, the intermediary step is to actually do the work.
This will feel extremely uncomfortable because it relies on you doing stuff that your organization might find weird or difficult to understand.
The way to offset this is to propose a narrative around how you will measure it.
I call this phase Narrate.
Take our Creative Juice campaign as an example. There is no analytics tool that can successfully measure the direct impact of having an influencer create a soft drink for your brand.
But at some point, the VP Marketing at Podia Benyamin Elias persuaded the organization as a whole that ideas like this would be valuable.
A good marketing leader should already be able to at least make a case that their less directly attributable marketing investments will return some value.
In the post-playbook world this becomes an increasingly valuable skill for two reasons:
- Attribution and analytics tools will continue to be limited in what they can achieve due to privacy laws and technical challenges related to that
- You will run campaigns in new channels where the benefit is not solely direct conversion and even when it is, it is not technically possible to track the conversion
So what do you do?
You build a narrative.
A narrative is a story that you tell containing key data points from a range of sources. Some examples:
- Ad platforms
- Web traffic analytics
- Social engagement
- Community engagement
- CRM data
- Self-reported attribution
- Community posts
- Social listening
- New, innovative or additional data sources that may appear in the future
While I was at Powered by Search, I created a framework for building these narratives which I call the Attribution Matrix. You can read the original blog post here.
It has these quadrants:
- Key narrative – qualitative, high confidence signals – e.g. self reported on calls, demos and yeh, sure, form fields but also sometimes your own gut feel
- Supporting points – qualitative, low confidence signals – e.g. comments on social posts
- Key reports – quantitative, high confidence signals – e.g. ad platform data
- Supporting metrics – quantitative, low confidence signals – e.g. engagement with email marketing
To really make an argument for your marketing campaigns or effectiveness, you need to add points from multiple quadrants together.
For example, I tend to favor narrative reporting for harder to attribute channels like sponsorships. So in addition to the Key Narrative, I should add in Key Reports like affiliate link tracking and Supporting Metrics including traffic numbers to related landing pages to get a richer picture of what’s working and what’s not.
But let’s say you like numbers then I should take Supporting Metrics and Supporting Points and add them to my Key Report.
By doing this, you achieve the following:
Firstly, you de-risk the investment before the campaign launches – presenting a measurement plan that explains all the places you’ll look for the ROI increases confidence in a leadership team
Secondly, you increase the likelihood of making successful marketing decisions once the campaign is up and running – by building a narrative rather than simply pointing to an isolated metric or analytics report, you harvest value across the whole gamut of attribution. That means you’re less likely to encounter a scenario where your boss sees the marketing spend as a ratio of leads generated and tells you to turn it off.
Repeat
The RINse part of the framework is the meat on the bones but for it to be really effective, you must continually rerun this process.
When should you do it? Multiple times a quarter probably.
Sometimes it’ll make sense to do a very involved iteration of the process with a long research period like I mentioned above. Other times, an insight will just appear in a more informal way.
When that happens, consider re-running this process.
Another instance when you might start a new cycle is when something in the business changes, you’re evaluating whether to invest in some new channel or in response to broader market changes.
My advice is to use this as a framework only and to try to remain as agnostic about the actual process as possible.
In closing
Marketing playbooks that previously worked extremely well have decreased in efficiency over the past few years.
Due to those changes and to saturation in most B2B markets, most companies would benefit from changing their marketing strategy by trying to acquire as many new customers as possible from as broad a market segment as possible.
The best results come from discovering novel ways to reach your customers and get in front of new audiences. Using the RINse & Repeat framework is a good way to maintain some rigor around what is a very open and unstructured process.
RINse & Repeat works like this:
- Relate – work hard to get uncomfortably close to your customers and your understand your wider market
- Ideate – using those insights, produce unique and novel campaigns and growth systems that are not based on classic channel playbooks
- Narrate – realize that we’re no longer able to simply point to an analytics report to justify marketing investment. Post-playbook marketing requires you build a narrative that combines qualitative and quantitative data to show marketing ROI
- Repeat – there is no end point to this process because every iteration will be different. You can run multiple loops at once
By doing this, you will build a marketing organization that’s able to effectively able to reach new audiences and build an acquisition pipeline that goes far beyond the pipeline quality of companies who stick to tired playbooks and busy channels.