BDTP. Marketing Channels vs Programs with Asia Orangio
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Hello everyone and welcome to Better Done Than Perfect, podcast show for SaaS marketers and product people. Our awesome guest today is Asia Ranjou, founder and CEO of DemandMaven. And we're going to talk about marketing channels versus programs today. This show is brought to you by UserList, an email automation platform for SaaS companies.

It matches the complexity of your customer data, including many-to-many relationships between users and companies. Book your demo call today at userless.com. Hi, Asia. Hello. Yes, I'm so excited to be here.

We're thrilled to have you here again after like four years or so. Welcome back. For those who don't know about you, please give us a primer on your background story and what you do at Demand Maven these days. Yeah, absolutely.

Okay. So I've been running Demand Maven now for about seven years, which is kind of hard to believe, but it's been a minute. And what I primarily do is I work with SaaS companies, their CEOs and their founders. If there are marketing teams or product teams, I work with them primarily on troubleshooting growth. And when I think about growth, I think about the whole business, not just marketing growth or even product growth, but the whole thing, the entire, the whole enchilada. And

Most of the businesses that I work with, they're struggling with growth in some kind of way. I've worked with over 100 companies during my tenure at Demand Maven, primarily SaaS, primarily software. I know it's... No, you're making it up. It can't be 100. I counted the other day over 100, which is so wild to think about. But needless to say, I've seen a lot. I've seen a lot. I've worked in a lot of contexts. I've interviewed over 1,000 customers.

And so much of our work is, you know, we leverage both qualitative insights gathering and quantitative analysis. So it's really both data and insight. And before DemandMaven, I worked for two VC-funded startups here in Atlanta, both in marketing roles. So I was head of marketing and I was also head of demand gen in another previous role. During my tenure at DemandMaven, I've seen, let's see, two exits. And I also served on the board of Moz.

Moz, if you're familiar with it, the first SEO platform headed by Rand Fishkin. And I was on the board of Moz before its successful acquisition in June of 2021. I remember you being appointed. And that was spectacular back then. It was a whirlwind. And Rand and I are still very close this day. But yeah, that was probably one of the most

like just remarkable experiences that I ever had. It was very short, but I was so excited and thrilled to be a part of it. If you can give us a bit more insight into your, you know, daily practices at DemandMaven, like let's say there is a startup that wants to work with you. What kind of activities do you do with them and for them? Yeah. So whenever I work with a company, usually the first order of business is really troubleshooting and identifying like what is the actual root cause of the problem?

So back when we first did the last podcast so many years ago, I would really look for what was the North Star KPI. Today, it's really more, yes, North Star KPI, but it's also more like what is the most critical growth lever that we can pull?

And what is the root cause? Like what's making it not work well? And sometimes the founders or the team, sometimes they don't know what to look for. And so I'm coming in and analyzing, okay, well, what's the overall efficiency of the whole business? So everything from the funnel, I'm putting that into finger quotes because I know all the marketers out there are going to be like, ah, but the funnel is not a pure funnel, which is true.

There is still like a general flow in the business of how we generate traffic or how we generate leads or how we generate trials, demos, whatever it is. What's the conversion rate of those? How many of those do we retain? And then long term, how much of that do we retain? What's our general NPS? I'm looking for quantitative metrics of understanding performance in general and general efficiency.

Anything that's not working well, though, most teams have the intuition for what they think it is. So maybe we're turning too much or we're not retaining enough customers long term enough. Or maybe it's we're doing marketing, but we're not acquiring who we want. Or we're spending all this money, but they're not becoming customers. I mean, it runs the gamut. And sometimes, sometimes it's we...

We don't know why we're not growing. We have no clue. And we really need someone who's seen more and done more than us to come in and just take a look at everything. And so sometimes I'll find out that like, they changed their pricing a year and a half ago, and that's been tanking their net revenue retention. Like it's things sometimes it's stuff like that. And or sometimes it's, you know, we overhauled our onboarding, but it's not be it's not creating customers. It could be

It could really be anything across the full spectrum of when you think about SaaS. So awareness, acquisition, activation, retention, and then revenue, AKA like how we're charging. So my, my job is to come in and figure out what happened and what's going on and what are, what are we going to do to fix it? And, and,

We have had the very awesome fortune of being able to work with so many different types of companies, all SaaS, primarily PLG, sometimes we work with sales-led companies. But we've had so much breadth of experience, deep experience within the SaaS world. And we've been able to see and do a lot. And it's been a lot of fun. And I really can't complain. I have such a fun job coming in and troubleshooting. That's what I do.

I really envy your professional confidence in putting together these resolutions why something is the problem. Because we as business people definitely lack the confidence by now of knowing our own business.

I'm curious, where does this confidence stem from? Because for early stage startups, the numbers are just not enough to make statistically significant conclusions. Well, I'm probably phrasing this wrong, but like with 20 customers, you can't say like, this is what happened a year ago. It's just too little. So how can you be so confident? Yeah. Where's the secret? Yeah. I don't know if there's a secret, but what I can say is the

The more that you do this type of work, not, I mean, not, not many consultants probably can say like, you know, I've worked with, you know, over a hundred companies, but because so much of my work is consultative, I'm, I'm coming in, I'm helping them identify the root cause and identify solutions. And if I'm, if I'm fortunate enough, I actually get to help them with it. Like I,

We do have retainers that we then go into sometimes all the time. Not everyone has a budget for that. But I don't know if there's a secret as much as the more that you do this work, the more that you can see, okay, well, in these scenarios, this worked and this didn't. I think volume creates confidence in a way. I think about with every new company that I work with, I think about the 20 others that I worked with who were just like them. So I'm like,

Like, I remember what went well and what didn't. And so I'm using that to inform my model. Basically, I have an algorithm that I have in my brain that happens every time I meet a new company and pattern matching. I mean, that's the more companies that you work with, the more that you can pattern match. But what I can say is, yeah, like when you're a super early stage and you've got like 20 customers, depending on what the problem is, like let's say it's churn or let's say it's activation, then there are absolutely ways to figure out like how do we improve that? Yeah.

But if someone comes to me and they're very early, they don't have that many customers and they're worried about acquisition. Usually what I say is, don't hire me yet. Like hiring us right now doesn't make sense. You have to just go through the repetitions. Like you will learn so much more trying to sell your product at this stage than... Just tumbling on your own...

On your own pattern, basically. I actually have a podcast. I have an episode about this on my podcast called In Demand, and I call it the SaaS black hole. You're in the black hole, and the only way to get out is to fight your way through it. And for better or for worse, every founder needs to go through that. No consultant. Where does it end?

What's the range? Where does it stop and the white begins? Honestly, it's like zero to 40 customers. That's the black hole range. You could certainly hire us at 30 customers or even 20 or even 10, depending again on what the problem is. But if you're suffering from acquisition issues and you're in that range, the only way through is just really trudging through it. And a lot of founders don't like to hear that.

But when they tell me their process and how they're thinking about it, I'm usually like, you're on the right path. You're going to crack this case in like six months. Hiring a fancy consultant isn't going to make that go faster because you have to get the repetitions of selling your product and figuring out what

is missing or like, like what, like who are the right buyers? We can certainly help support this process again, depending on what the challenges are. But if that's all you're suffering from, you just need to, you've got to work through this ass black hole. Like you have to get through this, like this period of time and a consultant,

I mean, we probably could help, but you need that experience. And I can't, I don't want to take that away from you. You know what I mean? So it doesn't do you a favor. It doesn't do you any favors. Like it doesn't help you build your business acumen by hiring us in that frame, in that timeframe. So I usually don't recommend it. Not anymore, at least. But some, you know, sometimes we get people who are like, they're in that range, but they need help with product. And that's very different. Or they need help with go-to-market strategy. Very different. It

It's not just, oh, I've only got 20 and I need like 30 now. And it's like, okay, well, go do hard work to get the extra 10. You know what I mean? No one ever wants to. I know exactly what you mean here. I think I lowballed by naming 20 customers because it's obviously super early. But even like 50, 100, I thought these are like milestones when you figured stuff out. And I think actually the doubts even...

multiply instead of being reduced. So the stakes get higher. You're now afraid to hurt what you already have and so on and so forth. Yeah. Just wait until you have 5,000 customers and then you're like, I don't know who anyone is or like what they want. And it's really interesting. Yeah.

Before we dive into the main topic of channels versus programs, I recall, I think it was you, and I love you listing the growth levers a typical business can pull to unlock their growth, which is charging more and so on and so forth. Could you please, for our listeners, recap those and just overall give us a big picture of what levers you typically can pull and influence with those marketing efforts? Yeah.

There are five growth levers in any business, and these are relatively agnostic to the department. But when you think about growing a SaaS business, you can grow awareness, aka how much traffic you're getting or how many people are searching your brand. You can grow sales, meaning you generate more trials or you generate more deals. You can retain more customers, which just speaks to retention.

Then there's revenue, aka charge more or charge differently, or adjust how you're charging, when you're charging and where you're charging to maximize revenue for each type of buyer. This is where different types of plans come into place. This is also where you may charge for different aspects of the product. You can introduce add-ons.

And then there's operations. So processes, how we work together as a team, the goals that we choose actually have a huge impact on how we grow as a company. I know you already have a lot of episodes about OKRs, but even the OKRs that you choose can actually predetermine how successful you are. The tools that we use, the processes that we leverage to run our programs or whatever they are, or even how we work together.

especially if you have a little bit more of a team. How you run your meeting can even determine to some extent how you think about growth. I actually have a client right now where I'm fractional CMO and the way that they run their meetings actually has a big impact on how they think about growth because they never, during their meetings, they never have a moment where they pause and they challenge each other on growth.

okay, well, why is this KPI not performing? It's usually just like, it's not performing and then they move on. It's like, no, let's pause. Is it good or bad? Well, I think it depends on the culture of the company, of course. But my argument is actually...

No, we're actually, we're creating a culture of complacency by not talking about this. Like we mentioned it, but then we move on very quickly. So there's also growth by operations. There's also hiring, like you can grow more salespeople to get, you know, in theory, more deals, but there are different efficient ways to grow by hiring and how you structure your team and how you think about the business. So those are the, those are the levers. And of course there are some, some folks would argue that there are others, but those are the big five that I look at.

I want to make a quick detour. Among the topics you wanted to discuss was how to do OKRs completely wrong. And I'd love to get a two-sentence summary from you, like what exactly goes wrong with OKRs as you see it. Well, there are two things. The top two things that I see go wrong with OKRs is key results that are not measurables, but tasks or projects. So you should never, ever, ever, ever have a key result that is just a task or project. Meaning,

KR1 launch webinar program. That's not a key result. That's a project. A measurable is truly a measurable. A key result has to contain a measurable impact.

If it doesn't contain a measurable, it's not a key result. That's number one. Number two is objectives that are not ultimately inspiring. So most objectives are things like generate more trials or generate more demand for the product. Or I mean, like, especially like for marketing OKRs, like it usually falls in some type of territory like this. But what I've really pushed teams to do is to identify objectives that are actually very inspiring.

and not just purely correlated to some kind of boring marketing objective. The objective should be something like, create a better world for yoga instructors.

And now how do we measure that? Okay, KR1 is probably, okay, well, we probably have an NPS score of this. And maybe also when we conduct a survey, maybe like, maybe we see like 70% of our customers are happy with their experience. But objectives that are ultimately inspiring and

That is what I think a lot of teams forget about. And I guess if I had to add a third, it would be that you're actually not supposed to hit all of your OKRs. You're only supposed to hit like 50 to 60% of them. And then a lot of teams think that you need to hit like 80 to 100%. And I'm like, no, if you're hitting all of your OKRs, they're not hard enough. Yeah.

Just point blank period. But anyway, that's my two cents about doing OKRs. Totally wrong. KRs should never be a task or a project. It's always a quantifiable. And your objectives need to inspire you and your team, even if they sound bonkers and like totally batshit crazy. It kind of should be like that. And if you fall into the territory of like, oh, generate more demand or get more trials, not inspirational enough. It needs to be something that's like

Yes, like I'm excited about this. And every time you say it in every meeting that you have, you are excited to talk about the objective.

But most teams don't do that. I would be really excited to double my trials. Our trials at Hezal. Totally. If that actually excites you, I would say go for it. But what I find, especially for marketing teams, is a lot of the times it's like, yeah, generate more trials. Like we get it and you need something more. But yeah, I would say if that actually does inspire you, go for it. But if it doesn't, and if every time you say it, you're like, kill me. It's yeah, let's change the energy up.

a little bit. So the marketing efforts we're going to be discussing today, probably mostly in the awareness camp, right? So would that be correct to say that? I would say also in the acquisition camp as well. Oh, the sales, like the second part. Yeah. Yeah. So when it comes to channels versus programs, for example,

What I'm finding is a lot of teams and also founders have different views about how marketing should look and feel. But perhaps like the biggest discrepancy that I see is I think marketers actually already do generally a good job of this. But what I see is founders tend to really get stuck with thinking about marketing only as channels. And this to me is one of the biggest opportunities for growth actually is changing this mindset.

Really what needs to happen is channels need to evolve into what we call programs. So channels, everyone understands this for the most part. There's SEO, there's email marketing, there's direct mail, there's Google ads, there's meta ads, channels. And most founders think about marketing like just putting money into channels and then executing those channels and then marketing and putting those, you know, we're marketing something through that channel.

But the next evolution of this is now thinking about marketing as programs, right?

Which to me, a program is some ongoing effort. It can be seasonal, but it's some repetitive effort of some kind that encompasses many channels. And usually it's more than one. And it can be united by a piece of content. It can be united by a theme or a topic or even a type of campaign. But the whole premise of a program is that it's ongoing. It encompasses many channels. And it's usually generating revenue in some kind of way.

It doesn't have to. Sometimes it can purely be based on brand awareness. But a program, ultimately, assuming you're doing in the early stage SaaS space, you're probably doing it because it's making you money in some kind of way. So for example...

A webinar program, there's the webinar itself. That's the content that unites the entire program. But it's probably getting promoted on social. It's probably getting promoted through ads. It's probably getting promoted through email. You're probably cross-promoting it with other partners or what have you. But the program itself encompasses many channels.

And depending on the nature of the webinar program, it could be more like demand creation. So getting people before they're ready to buy, but it could also be more demand capture, capturing people who are ready to buy like right now. And that's,

That program is the evolution. It's going from just thinking about channels into programs that ultimately generate revenue in some kind of way. This is where a lot of founders get stuck because, again, they tend to get stuck about thinking about marketing only as channels. And then what I find from the marketing perspective is marketers, I think, are already... If they're good marketers, they already understand this concept.

But they might have a hard time explaining this to their bosses because their boss is only thinking about marketing like, it's just channels. What are you talking about? Why do we have to do webinars? Or whatever it is. Webinar is one example. But there are other examples. You may have an account-based marketing program, ABM. You may have a program that's your podcast or what have you. Sometimes it's a campaign that unites the programs. Sometimes it's a piece of content.

There are some marketing teams that do like a state of report every year, or it's like the state of email marketing or the state of whatever.

that's a program. And it doesn't run the entire year, but it runs every year. So it's regular, it's ongoing. It gets distributed through many different channels. It gets repurposed and repackaged probably to death throughout the rest of the year. But that's a program and it generates, it's a little bit of demand creation, a little bit of demand capture, but that's the whole goal, right? So anyway, so this is, this channels to programs mindset is

Very natural, I think, for marketers to do. Very challenging, I think, for founders to do, especially if they're not marketers. But this is the next evolution to go through with marketing. If you're a founder listening and you're stuck on marketing because like, and you're like investing in different channels and like you're getting some benefit from it, but it's not like taking off like you're expecting it to, it might be because you need to think about what programs do you need to add? Or do you need to bundle like what you're currently doing?

So the result of a program is a process? I mean, the ultimate result of a program is revenue generation, ideally. I love this. Yes, sure. I mean, and that's just my demand generation brain speaking. But a program can certainly be a system or a process. Absolutely. So when I think about ProfitWell, for example, one of their most popular programs was their pricing teardowns.

So that's more of like a media strategy. They're thinking about marketing like media. But it's what I would just call a program. It's a program. So they record this pricing teardown. They distribute it a million different ways. They repackage it a million different ways. They also did have a few campaigns that they ran. So I don't know if you remember when they did their hot sauce campaign.

But I think ProfitWell is a really good example of a company that understands programs and they understand the cyclical nature of not just media strategy, but when you actually combine these channels and you unite around a topic or a theme or a piece of content and it's an ongoing engagement, what you get is ultimately, I mean, yes, like you create demand for your brand, but you also ultimately generate demand itself and you...

It makes them money. That's the only, that's why they do it. But it also creates, you know, good feelings between their constituents and then the brand itself, ProfitWell. So great example, I think, in the wild. I don't see much from them these days, but if you look back at their history, I think that they're a really good example of programmatic marketing. Once in a blue moon, I can give a real success story for my own company, like with the results. And in our case, that was discovering the

email examples thing for us. So that is just a continuous, it's part of our SEO efforts, but it's a specific way of gathering examples through the community and putting together those series of blog posts that describe specific SaaS-oriented use cases and how those are addressed through emails.

Totally. Yeah. Once we discovered that it was goldmine, I think we're really, I think we're at the border of exhausting like all SaaS use cases where you can be sending emails. Literally in our blog, you can find like all potential SaaS occasions from a website for design to, uh,

new funding round announcement to like new feature launch and everything else you can possibly think of. Yeah. And we, from day one, it was not obvious. Like if you would think about this, like,

With you looking at 100 companies, you would probably go like, that's pretty obvious now. But no, it wasn't. Like, SignWell, founded by Ruben Gamers. Ruben is more experienced in SEO. So that's why when he founded SignWell, he was already having contract templates in mind for his key acquisition strategy. And then, I guess, the program. Totally. Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely.

And Ruben is such a great example, too, of someone who he understands SEO as a channel. And he could have been channel-minded with this, but he really took SEO and turned it into more of a program. He matured SEO as a channel in his business into a program. And I think SignWell is an excellent example of doing this versus maybe, say...

just looking at random keywords and creating blog posts for it and like hoping or praying it becomes money for you. I think he really systematized this process and he's always goals for me when it comes to like he's I always use Seinwell as in my example of like you can do SEO or you can do SEO as a program and this is what it looks like. Amazing. I guess we were thinking like yeah when they say SEO I think

Yeah, I think Ruben too. Yeah. I think there is one more person who's been our SEO consultant, Pavel Grabowski. He's helped us a bunch. But yeah, when it comes to examples, please, Ruben. Yeah.

Totally. I find it hard when you do this for a while, you accumulate those ongoing programs, such as you're running webinars. They seem to be doing fine. You can't measure direct ROI from it. They're fine. You're running podcasts. They're doing fine. And you're accumulating those projects. A lot of them

seem to be like a brand awareness thing long term so the roi i mean just hard to measure so how do you know what programs should be kept and which should be sunset and how to keep the balance because you can't just well probably if you're doing 5x growth you can keep going and add more but sometimes you have to sunset something old to start something new yeah where's the balance

So this is where we divvy up our programs between are we doing this because we're trying to create demand or are we doing this because we're trying to capture demand? Demand capture is the premise is pretty simple. Someone is looking for an answer or they're looking for an unlock to make a buying decision. That's the way I like to explain it. So, for example, you can run a webinar program about demand.

like you could run it about something that your audience is interested in or you could run it about something that your audience needs to know in order to make a buying decision and both are valid depending on where you're at in the business most earlier stage companies or smaller stage like like they're they they want to get two million or they want to get to five million or whatever it is i usually encourage the demand like more demand captured and kind of

kind of leaning more on that side. So for example, so there's a company that I worked with for three years and we went from 15K NMR to 3 million ARR before we exited. And when we thought about demand capture programs, we thought about, so they were in the vacation rental management software space. They had very large competitors and their huge number one bet, of course, was like product experience and like ease of use.

self-serve trial, things like that, because none of the other competitors were doing that. But the other thing was we really took a very strong, we made a very big investment in educating the ideal customer profile about how to think about structuring their business and what software choices to make.

So one of the programs that we, that we ran was a state of report. Basically it was like the state of vacation rentals, uh, like vacation rental management. And every year we had a different theme and, and, um, every year we, we created this report to educate like our ideal buyers about here's how super, um, high growth vacation rental companies, like here's how they're structuring their businesses. So that way you can kind of like, you can emulate this, you can copy this.

And, and also all the features that we built were correlated to some of those investments that these businesses were making. That state of report was, while it was extremely popular, it was referenced everywhere. It was shared everywhere. Influencers picked it up, but that was the type of information that they needed to unlock a buying decision. Oh, my peers are investing in these things. And the, uh, this product offers several of those things. And I know a lot of people who use it. So,

this seems like an obvious choice for me for when I'm ready to make a buying decision, or I'm ready now and I'm going to just go ahead and sign up and see what it's like for myself. We could have run a, you know, we could have done like a guide about something random, but we chose, we tried to get as close as possible to what do you need to know to make a buying decision? So that's where I would, I would, that's where I start. And then the next layer beyond that is

We do get into attribution to an extent. Attribution is, it's like chasing like a magic dragon. It's, you can, you can go so far down the rabbit hole of attribution and end up with nothing. Like it is just so easy to waste a lot of time here. But what I recommend is traditionally speaking, most marketers use last touch as how they attribute to a channel. But when it comes to a program, programs are interesting because they encompass many channels usually.

And what we have to look at is, did this program assist in a buying decision or did it not? And yes, of course, we want to know if it's sourced. Like, did it actually source something or someone or whatever that became a customer later? I mean, yes, obviously, like we want to know that. And if we can get there, it's amazing. But if we can't, then it's...

was this a part of the customer journey? And where was it a part of the customer journey? Because it should still get credit in that case. So that's kind of where programs, I think, have a little bit more flexibility. Of course, you want to know if it's the first touch or their last touch before they became a customer. But that's how we attribute. And what we find too is

Some programs are more efficient than others at creating customers. And ideally, we put energy into the ones that are very efficient. There's a program that is being run right now by one of my clients that it generates. The volume is not big, but 60% of the people who go through that particular program become customers. It's like an insane conversion rate.

But we have another one. We have another program. It's paid acquisition, ironically enough. And it's like 23%. So out of all the leads that we generate, 23% of them will become a customer.

So wait, wait, that program of 60%, can you disclose what that is? Partnerships. It's a partnership program. So I don't want to disclose exactly who the partnerships are because that'll reveal possibly like who the company is. But the partnerships are like, there's a partnership manager that we have on deck. And what they do is they reach out, they do outreach to partners, people who can connect us with our ideal customer.

and that partner runs like promotions and like one in particular has like their own podcast and

So every time they run a promo for the product, it generates, let's say, like 10 to 20 trials. Most of those will become paying customers. But it's not a big volume. So it's like 10 to 20 for the whole month, for example. It's not huge, but it's very high converting for us. On the flip side, we've got paid search and it generates like...

I don't know, 150 trials. Very few of those will actually become customers. It's like 23%. 23% probably sounds really high. But when we look at what we're spending, we're like, the ROI is just not here yet. So we need to do a lot more massaging to get that a lot more effective.

And then also there's like how much we're spending to even get the trial itself. That also has a very big gap. It's pretty inefficient right now. So that's where my effort and energy is going at the moment is getting that as effective as possible. But the way that we know that we're using tools like Amplitude, we're using tools like, um,

even though we don't love it, GA4. And then there are other tools that can help with some attribution like Segemetrics. Of course, there are other marketing automation platforms that do their own attribution, but that's how we are understanding this. They also use, I believe, Metabase is their BI tool. All of these platforms say something different, but we have enough of an understanding generally of the pattern that we're pretty confident that these programs...

Um, some are more efficient than others. So we are doubling down on the ones that are very efficient and we're optimizing the ones that aren't. And so far, I would say we don't feel like we need to sunset anything, but we definitely need to, like, we definitely need to reorganize how we're distributing our energy. So SEO, for example, is we're kind of treating it like a channel and not a program. And that's actually where I'm like,

we should look at Ruben at Seinwell. So that's kind of where I'm like, yeah, like we got to, we need to like this, this channel needs to evolve into a program because we're kind of just treating it a little willy nilly right now. But, and it shouldn't be. If we translate this, it's all about making intentional packaged efforts.

Yeah. Yes. Basically. So you shouldn't just be doing SEO. You should be having a specific approach in mind and treating that as a project. Yes, absolutely. And it's not always possible for everything, but there are absolutely at least two to three money-making programs that you could be executing now. And your mission is to find them. What we really love to have as listeners is...

Where can we find that ultimate list of program ideas that we could read through? Because you gave us like 20 examples today. Obviously, there is 100 more in your mind. I know there are websites like All My SaaS Marketing Ideas or something like that. Generally speaking, what's your source of inspiration? It's not always your head, is it?

Can you just like read or something? Roster? I really, because I am constantly looking at SaaS companies. I am always looking at just other companies and what they're doing and how they're doing it. Keeping in mind that what they're doing is highly contextual. As a consultant, I have to acknowledge that like,

Dovetail Strategy, for example, is going to be different than what Cognizant is doing. But both of those are companies that I just love looking at their marketing. I love looking at Cognizant's marketing because they're marketing to marketers. And I am like, they just get it. Cognizant really gets it. COG, NISM, it's also spearheaded by a CMO who I really respect. And there also is a consultant that's working there that I also admire as well. And then I look at companies like Dovetail.

And Dovetail, the programs that they run

What I love about a good program is it never feels like it's a program. It just looks like they're doing good marketing. But Dovetail has really clear programs. They have a very clear product marketing program that they have been investing in and been scaling out for years now. Just looking at their website and you get a very strong feeling of, oh, they really understand product marketing. And then there are other... Sometimes you can get ideas for programs by looking at people's ads.

And I just found this resource. I'm going to pull this up really quickly. Just found this website that I've been obsessing over because of course I've been using it for client work.

So magic library.co, this is, I get inspiration for programs actually by ads and just looking at what ads other companies are running. And you can just get so much, you can get so many ideas for like, what are people doing? I mean, yes, there's like typical demand gen type stuff, like download this report or book a demo or whatever.

read our book about blah, blah, blah. But I just find that there are so many different types of things that you can do. And yeah, so magiclibrary.co, it's basically a library full of ads specifically from SaaS companies. And I think they even give you templates that you can use to create something similar. And I've just scrolling through this, I'm so inspired by what's here. And it's all different types of SaaS companies. There's also some eCommerce in here as well.

But you can get a feel for, oh, that's interesting. I bet they have a program for this or, you know, or, oh, they're promoting a report or like a webinar or whatever. And that's a program that they're running. So there are definitely themes like you're going to find a lot of content.

You're definitely going to find lots of guides and reports. You're also going to find lots of webinar type stuff. Those are very common. But what I really appreciate is they're finding ways to make it not boring. And that's what... To me, that's great marketing. Like, yeah, this is a webinar I actually want to sign up for. When was the last time you said that? Like...

So that's what I... Those are some examples. And I also, because I'm, like I said, I'm constantly looking at SaaS companies, constantly dissecting what are their programs that they're running. Dovetail is one that I mentioned. I've been really excited lately about Balsamiq. They...

I can feel their marketing evolving and I really appreciate seeing a company go through that evolution. But yeah, there are just SaaS companies that I come across and find and I'm like, ooh. And then I think about it from all the lenses, growth, marketing, all the things. Fabulous. I think we should wrap up here. It's been brilliant. Now we have...

The footer section of our episode. First, I'd love to hear one do and one don't when it comes to running a marketing program from you. Do think outside the box. You could do better than this. We all want to be outside the box. No, but I mean, we are competing with the attention of people

everything. Like what is the, the average amount of time that people spend on their phones a day is six hours. Like we are, we are competing with so much. It's not just your competitors. You're, you're competing with attention and it's easy to say, think outside the box. But I think what I, what I really, what I really mean when I say that though is remember when marketing was creative,

It needs to go back to that. Because like, yes. Yeah. Like ProfitWell didn't have to run a campaign that was purely on hot sauce just because Patrick likes hot sauce. But that damn campaign was extremely successful for them. And it was about hot sauce. It wasn't even about subscription analytics. Like remember when marketing was fun? It needs to go back to that.

Now, I say that being someone who I understand how to get buy-in. I understand how to make business cases for making investments like that. That may be scary to technical founders. So I think if you're a marketer and you're like, Oh my God, I agree. How do I get someone to say yes to this? I think you have to show them real life examples of this. Do your research. Find other companies that have done things like this. I just gave you an example of the profitable hot sauce thing.

Hot Sauce has nothing to do with what ProfitWell does, but yet they did it anyway. You know what I mean? Drift is a great example of a company that does creative stuff all the time. But I think marketing needs to go back to being fun and creative because that's what inspires people. And it doesn't always have to be about demand capture in that way. But I do think that when you start thinking about your programs, how can you make this as fun as possible? Because that's what people are going to engage in.

Um, I, and you can, you can still make something fun and make it demand capture as well. Those things don't have to be isolated or zero sum. You can create a report that's fun as hell. You absolutely can. So that, that is what I think I would push founders and marketers alike to be thinking about is bringing creativity and fun back into the work that they do. About a don't. Don't.

I'm feeling this more on the agency side than anything. It's more of like a stop, but we need to stop creating things that we ourselves would not consume or care about. There's a paid ads agency right now that I'm working with with a different client. And I did not hire this paid ads agency, but they were an incumbent agency. But the creative that they're putting out

is if I'm thinking about being in the customer's shoes and if I'm like on my couch scrolling, cause you know, it's Facebook or whatever, it's Instagram. If I'm thinking about, I'm really putting myself in those shoes. I wouldn't stop on this ad for anything. I would scroll right past it. And, but, but the agency doesn't see that yet. Like they don't, like, they're not thinking, um, they're not thinking about it like from the customer's perspective. Uh,

They're thinking about it just from like a, you know, we do ads all the time and this is just what we do. They're not thinking about it from like a, no, like we need to get in the customer's shoes here. Like we're targeting someone who is tired. They've had a long day. Their business is stressful. They're here on Instagram trying to relax a little bit and like get a dopamine hit from seeing pretty things. This is the ugliest ad I've ever seen in my life. You

And I'm not going to... I don't want to drag anyone out of their work. Everyone works really hard. The designers have a tough job too. But I want us to stop creating things that are just like...

We're not even taking into consideration what the perspective is of the person who's going to see this. So maybe it's more of like a start being more empathetic to the customer, but really it's like a stop being so unempathetic to the customer or to the buyer that's going to see whatever it is that we're putting out. We really got to think about the experiences of things because it matters. It's really frustrating. A lot of agencies are like this, but then there are a lot of agencies that aren't like this that are like,

They get it and they're like, yep, we need to stand out and here's how we're going to do it. So if you have an agency, let's look at what, you know, like what's going on. What's the experience of this?

I love this idea, but I have like a personal twist to this. And a different one is about taking pride in your work because the startup grind is so grindy that if you don't take pride and enjoy the quality of your putting out as a marketer, as a product person, then it just becomes a painful, pitiful grind. Well, at least you'll be proud of your results, even if the KPI is not met. At least you've put out something cool. Yeah.

I have a client, they're targeting the construction and manufacturing space. And they have this belief that

well, construction manufacturing is boring, so we don't have to be... So it's okay if we're boring too. And I'm like, it is not okay to be boring. Just because you're targeting construction manufacturing, if anything, you need to be the most lit on fire brand ever. You need to be the opposite of boring. And the work that we're doing is basically me convincing them that you can have fun and do beautiful, wonderful things that you're proud of, even if you're in this boring industry.

It's interesting. Well, since they're already halfway there by hiring an advanced marketer like you, they may as well enjoy implementing your advice, right?

Yes. All the like typical shiny, like marketing stuff, like do pretty things like, yes. Um, but also, yeah, like let's be smart about what we're doing obviously. Uh, but that's like one of my biggest pet peeves just because you're SaaS, just because you're targeting an industry that's maybe not as like sexy does not give you, doesn't give you leeway to be boring. That's like the worst thing you could possibly do. So, yeah.

I'd love to have your opinion on beautiful versus boring. I mean, beautiful versus fun, like versus useful. I guess these are three axes, right? They're, it's... And I do kind of use them interchangeable. Yeah. Yeah. So like my axis is beautiful and useful. I'm really bad at being fun. Yeah. Yeah.

But fun and creative does not necessarily mean the same thing. You can be like creatively useful, which I'm hoping to get there eventually. So what's your take? Yeah, yeah. So it's so interesting because I...

I've actually always felt like all the creative from user list that I've seen, I've always loved. But I actually do feel like there's an element of whimsy to it that I really appreciate. I don't know if you see that as much, but there's whimsy to user list, which I really like. Okay. But to answer your question, this is a tough one because you're right. There are so many different axes that we can kind of think about. And I do think it comes down to your ultimate brand values and...

Some companies don't want to be the fun company. That's fine. But when I think about... Yes, I think beauty helps a lot. Aesthetics helps a lot. The playfulness or the fun aspect of whatever it is that you're promoting or marketing, to me, it kind of comes down to what it is. A report can certainly... Even the word report sounds boring as hell. But...

The topic might actually be really fun and engaging, or it could be maybe we're kind of being tongue in cheek about it. In that magic library, there are a couple of ads where like,

I mean, it's a report. It's a state of whatever, whatever report. But the way that they made it interesting or engaging, maybe I wouldn't say fun, but they made it interesting and engaging by kind of like pitting ChatGPT versus blah, blah, blah, whatever, perplexity, I don't know. And it kind of is like a little sensational, like, oh, that's interesting. So maybe it's always doesn't have to be fun, but it could at least be engaging. This is enticing in some kind of way. You've created interest.

Um, and boring to me is like, we're either not creating anything engaging or interesting or fun. Um, it doesn't have to be all those things, but at least has to be one of those things. And also maybe it's not as visually engaging, AKA it's not very pretty. Um, and maybe it's by, I guess I don't have like a super strong definition of this, but I, I can say it's one of those things where it's like,

When you see this and you kind of compare it to what you're used to, you can feel a difference. I think that there's, and I think most people intuitively can understand what the difference is. I think most folks maybe just don't know what it could look like. And that's maybe where the gap is sometimes of like, here's what something fun is. And, but we're just so not used to it that we don't,

Like we don't think about, oh man, we should brand some hot sauce and like send it to people. Like that's, no one thinks about that, right? Except for ProfitWell. Yeah, so that's how I think about it. But I don't know that I have any super strong, like hard and fast rules for it. But I think if you can't be fun, at least be engaging. Because not everyone can be fun. That's fair. That might not be part of your brand. But at least capture attention in a way that you, that your competitors aren't or that maybe you haven't in the past.

I love this. It's super inspiring. Thank you so much. Where can people get more of you and of DemandMaven? Where can they find you? Yeah, there are a couple of places. So of course, DemandMaven.io is my website, but I'm on Blue Sky. I definitely am treating Blue Sky more casually than I might treat any other

uh, social channel. So if you follow me on blue sky, please come say hi. I'm very chill there. I'm not going to pump a bunch of like marketing stuff to you. Uh, I mostly just go to blue sky to hang out. You can also find me on LinkedIn. Please connect with me. Tell me that you were a part of like, you listened to this podcast. Um, so I know, you know, that you came from there and then I'm going to start publishing again on my newsletter called the work.

There's a sub stack. I'm sure we can include a link, but that is where I publish my thoughts. I'm kind of thinking my theme for this year will be what I'm observing from a fractional CMO perspective. And then also just my work in general. I like to publish things that help marketers, founders and product leaders there. So you can find me there as well. Amazing. Thank you so much for being our guest today. Extremely inspiring for me as a marketer.

Hope the same for our listeners. And we're wishing you a super productive year. Yes. Thank you so much for having me. Have a wonderful rest of your week. Thanks. You too. Thanks for listening. You can find a written recap for this episode at usaless.com slash podcast. Please help us grow by leaving a review on iTunes.