Your Questions On Building A Growth Engine Answered
As promised, here are answers to some of the questions that arose out of our last webinar on Building a Growth engine. I hope these help you better understand and execute on several on the concepts discussed.
FYI: The webinar recording and more in-depth Q&A are available for Let’s Build Community members.
Q: What’s the difference between a brand promise and differentiators?
A: Brand promises are the outcomes, values, or experiences a company’s users or customers expect to receive by using the company or its products every time they interact with the company. It is what you promise to deliver consistently and forms the basis of differentiation from a company’s competitors.
To make a brand promise extra effective, add a guarantee. The guarantee is what strengthens the brand promise. Having a brand promise without guarantees means you are not fully leaning into the promises made, and not fulfilling those promises costs nothing. Your customers know this or can sense it, devaluing the promise as a differentiator.
Walmart’s brand promise is always low prices: affordability. The guarantee was they will match any lower price within 30 minutes of a Walmart store. Promising low prices is powerful; promising a match makes it differentiated.
Sometimes brand promises do evolve as a company evolves. Crafting and leveraging a brand promise is a topic unto itself. If you want to dig deeper into crafting one for your start-up with me and how to use it to drive faster growth, schedule a coaching call, and let’s dive in.
In short, Effective Brand Promise = Differentiators + Guarantees
Q: How do you manage all of your ongoing campaigns? Do you recommend any tools for this?
A: The tools matter less at the beginning. The process matters more. Use whatever you’ll be comfortable consistently using and getting results out of, whether that’s Asana, Monday.com, or Google spreadsheet.
In terms of building a marketing stack, from a technology standpoint, we use various tools across multiple companies. Our typical stack is Segment.com as a Customer Data Platform, which then pipes data into other tools such as Google Analytics, Intercom, and Hubspot. If Segment is too expensive, just use Hubspot, and cobble things together with Zapier. The process is what matters. The best tool for capturing the process is Extelli.
Q: Do the transactional & nurture funnels correspond to marketing concepts about "conversion" vs "general brand awareness"?
A: Not really. Conversions happen in every time of marketing, whether transactional or brand campaigns. A conversion definition is typically whenever a customer begins a journey in your funnel. Funnels can sometimes have multiple conversions. For example, a prospect can convert from a visitor to a trial, and convert from a trial to a paid subscription. In a nurture campaign, they convert from visitor or click conversion to a follower, or email newsletter subscriber, etc. The ultimate goal is obviously customer acquisition whether it’s a transactional campaign or a nurture campaign. In my opinion, most early stage businesses should not spend resources on general brand awareness campaigns that are not primarily designed to lead to paying customers.
Q: Is there a resource you’d recommend for nailing your ICP? Specifically interested in how you would approach defining an ICP in a horizontal market?
A: Here is a great resource to help you get started on nailing your ICP.
Q: So is a good practice to start with what our competitors are doing and improve on their ads/campaigns? Message, imagery, offer, etc.?
A: In many cases at the beginning, yes. Not copy, but study what works with competitors, and influencers. And then make it in your own image, with your own differentiators, guarantees and unique offers. This should not be done in isolation, away from the voice of your customers or prospects. Your job is to gather and synthesize, not parrot your customers or competitors.
There are exceptions to the study your competitor rule, such as brand new categories, and use cases, cutting edge R&D, and so on. Even then, the channels, delivery methods, may likely be similar. There’s hardly anything new under the sun, just repackaged.
Q: What would have happened if your competitors at TheraNest copied your brand promise?
A: The truth is, this will happen sometimes. If you keep doing what you’re doing better, the others will keep playing catchup. Sometimes it may be smart to copy a competitor’s brand promise if it is core to your growth strategy. Your job is to keep differentiating yourself. While the core promise may stay the same, you’ll need to find other attributes to emphasize around the same promise.
A lot of people have copied Walmart’s brand promise of low prices. But each store that promises low prices emphasizes different attributes – at the Dollar Tree, everything is a dollar, Costco sells in bulk, etc. Find your differentiator and double down on it.
Q: Are there specific KPIs that can help us evaluate the conversion rates at different stages of the funnel?
A: Tyler, who joined me on the webinar, shared these resources that should help:
https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/the-most-important-bottom-up-saas-69d
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/freemium-free-trial-conversion-benchmarks-ada-chen-rekhi/
https://recurly.com/research/churn-rate-benchmarks/
Q: I work for a B2B SaaS company in a very traditional industry where sales is often done in-person vs digital and the sales cycles are long. How do you think about channels and funnels in markets where buyers/users and their processes are less digitized?
A: There’s always a channel and always a funnel, even if they’re not digital. Your channel may be sales events, trade shows, etc. Even for in-person events, the key elements of a campaign still apply. You need an attention-grabbing hook, a story that connects, and a compelling offer so the prospect takes a particular action.
You can design a scalable strategy around trade shows and in-person events to accomplish these goals. It may not look the same as a social media or email campaign, but the fundamental principles are the same.
There is no business where you can’t build growth channels and funnels.
If you have more questions, I’ll be hosting an Ask Me Anything in the Let’s Build Community on Tuesday, June 6.
Join our Slack to get all your questions answered live by me and my team of experts. You won’t want to miss it.