How to sabotage your own marketing and slow down growth
A how not-to-do-marketing guide for early stage SaaS startups
This is a follow-up to my last piece on why marketing is not management. Though I wrote it last year, it brings real-life examples to the argument I was making: that marketing needs more simplicity, and that unless your metrics actually help you make decisions and confirm/negate hypothesis, they are useless.
One other point I try to make here is that when you know something is working, don’t do anything else. Incentivise your marketing team to double down, and don’t confuse them by asking things like ‘what new initiative have we done?’, or ‘the competitor has this, why don’t we?’. If these are the questions you ask, they will immediately go do new things, ignoring what has already been working, and that can be a costly mistake.
A couple of years ago, my team and I were in a great place. We’d grown revenues five-fold in a year and a half. This wasn’t Slack-level growth, of course, but it was significant, and we’d worked hard to get there. We were confident that if we just kept doing the same things we were doing, we would grow more. A plateau would probably come soon, and we would have to change our strategy, but for now, we were on track to grow our ARR into a few millions.
Except that didn’t happen.
Why, in spite of attaining product-market fit, assembling a great marketing team, and with clear, superior leadership, did we fail to maintain and increase our growth?
To tell this story, we must get into some details.
(The numbers I’m discussing are not absolute, please treat them as approximations.)
Here goes.
75% of the leads we were bringing in were attributable to organic marketing efforts. These included but were not exclusive to SEO/Content, Social, and PR activities. About 25% were coming in through paid channels. And we controlled spending on paid channels tightly.
Being a fast-paced team focused on creating stuff rather than measuring, we didn’t have deep metrics on our organic marketing efforts.
For example, we didn’t know how much of the leads coming in through organic marketing could be attributed to content, and how much to PR or branding activities.
However, and this is important, we were measuring our direct marketing very well; we had clear budgets, and I made sure we didn’t overshoot them. This kept efficiency fairly high.
But a little less than a year later, I started getting asked for more numbers: How much was coming from which medium, how many leads were coming in via this piece of content, and so on.
This is natural. Every leader will (and should) ask for this clarity. If you have these numbers, decisions are easier to make, and teams can then naturally optimise for the part of the marketing spend that is working.
My leaders simply wanted to make better decisions, and they were asking for the numbers that would help them do so.
Fair, yes?
Except that I didn’t have the numbers. We had focused on leading metrics, getting as much done as fast as possible, and within those constraints, with as much quality as possible.
So we tried to get the numbers. We devoted resources, time, and effort to figure this out. We did make progress, though it never seemed to be enough.
But this had a side-effect that we didn’t anticipate.
My diverting of resources and effort meant that we slowed down on the things we were already doing. I mean, we didn’t know which of these were working, sure, but we knew that they were working. And these were the things that had stopped in our effort to measure and optimise.
The result was that even though we had all the ingredients necessary to sustain and accelerate the growth we had, we slowed down, and didn’t really recover.
At the time, I did not have the necessary vocabulary and experience to push back, and keep going for growth. If I was in the same situation now, I would definitely try to say what I now have words for, and didn’t then: Precision is not significance.
Direct Marketing vs Brand Marketing
In Seth Godin’s This is Marketing (which you should read), he defines the difference between direct marketing and brand marketing thus:
Direct marketing is action marketing and if you’re not able to measure it, it doesn’t count.
If you’re buying brand marketing ads, be patient. Refuse to measure.
Let’s contextualise this for us in B2B SaaS: Direct marketing includes Adwords, Facebook, and any other digital media spends. Brand marketing will include content, videos, and other stuff we create for marketing, including events, and related spending. A slight simplification, but this broadly holds true.
In a particularly engaging blog on his site, he takes these points ahead:
We need to spend more time figuring out what to keep track of. When you measure the wrong thing, you get the wrong thing. Perhaps you can be precise in your measurements, but precision is not significance.
This is where I found the words I used earlier: Precision is not significance.
Now is the time to do
But then how do you know if all the organic marketing efforts you are executing are working?
How then, in this day and age when everything can be measured, do you justify not measuring everything that you possibly can?
You can’t.
The point I’m trying to make is that there will come a time when you will have the time, money, and resources to do this.
But if you are an early stage startup that’s just starting to move the needle up in terms of leads/revenue, now is not that time.
Now is the time to do.
Brian Balfour actually talks about this as one of the reasons why companies fail at growth:
I see teams who are having success with a specific channel, tactic, or growth experiment and then they decide to try something completely different. I feel like I’m taking crazy pills when I see this. If something is working, DO MORE OF IT before moving on to something else. When Noah Kagan succeeded with an experiment running a contest to acquire emails for AppSumo, he didn’t try something else. He ran contest after contest until he found the ceiling for that tactic. When Zynga found that holiday virtual goods were huge revenue and viral drivers in one of their games, they immediately implemented across every game for every holiday you could imagine. Yes, repetition can be boring. But if you want to grow, look at what’s working and figure out if you can do more of it before moving on.
Go for growth.
So if you’ve figured out some way that works for you, don’t spend too much time trying to precisely measure or optimise your marketing. You have to do that eventually, and it’s extremely important. But not at the cost of something that’s working.
You job is to do more - a lot more - of what’s working.
Go for growth. Always. All the time.
And lest you forget, I’ll say it again: Precision is not significance. Write it down somewhere.