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The challenge of marketing is that in order to be effective, it must keep reinventing itself.
Old strategies lose their punch because platforms are oversaturated, and available data sets overexploited.
Marketing bombards us all day long, both online and in real life.
The biggest hurdle is to get people to pay attention. To achieve that, your targeted marketing must break through the background noise with something fresh.
Let’s take a look at what we can learn from Resonance Marketing.
If you could benefit from an in-depth analysis of your SaaS business’s financial health, Baremetrics is the perfect tool for you. Track over 26 different metrics, see who’s trialling your software, and get tips on where to find your Ideal Customer Profiles by trying out the free trial today.
Sales drop off
Have you noticed your sales figures suddenly drop off, stagnating your business growth?
There are several reasons why this could occur. Some of the most common ones are:
- Environmental – the market has shifted, e.g. due to an influx in competing services
- Product-related – your ICPs’ needs have evolved beyond what your product is offering
- Saturation – you’ve arrived at the end of the barrel of potential customers
- Reach – your current campaign strategy is no longer connecting with your target audience
As you can see, the latter two revolve around marketing issues, which is the focus of this guide.
Market trends
In response to an unrelenting pressure to evolve, most marketing strategies actually end up following the newest popular trends, and in so doing, obsolesce much faster.
Some years ago, email outreach enjoyed high response rates. But as cold contacting leads became the norm, effectiveness rapidly declined.
Social media turned into the new medium of choice for casting a wide net. Wide net campaigning on Facebook and equivalent platforms resulted in two things: advertisements weren’t customized enough to effectively hook leads, and everyone was seeing ads aimed at everyone else. The total platform swamp encouraged users to skip past all paid content on their feeds, so even if an ad came along showcasing a product they could really benefit from, it wouldn’t grab their attention.
LinkedIn connect requests took the marketing world by storm a few years ago, until users became so annoyed by the resulting blend of organic and paid connections that the platform itself started imposing heavy restrictions on how many connection requests an account could make in a week.
Most recently, we found ourselves back on social media, but this time, sending direct messages to a narrower pool of potential leads. For this to be effective, DMs required quite a high touch approach that didn’t always see ROI in the long run.
How do you remain a step ahead of the game?
The short answer is, you can’t. Not forever, in any case. As available technology, and just as importantly, culture itself evolves, marketing either adapts to meet users where they are, or simply becomes irrelevant.
There is, however, one constant in these changing tides: resonance.
Resonance marketing emphasizes brand identity and shared values over the logistical aspects of a traditional sales pitch (such as price point, performance, ROI etc).
Here we’ll break down how to use the foundations of resonance marketing to create campaigns that hit home every time.
- In Tip 1, we’ll discuss the 3 facets of campaign building: relevance, reach, and message.
- In Tip 2, we’ll outline the process of gathering important information on your ICPs, and how to leverage that data successfully.
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Tip 1: The 3 facets of campaign building
Whether you’re branching out into new target segments, or you have a limited audience pool you’ve already exhausted and are contacting again, there are 3 facets to develop in your campaigning:
- Relevance: reaching the right people at the right time
- Reach: accessing your ICPs on the right platforms
- Message: saying something that resonates
Relevance
Relevance breaks down into two factors: who, and when.
First of all, your campaign needs to target the right audience, i.e. your Ideal Customer Profiles.
You’ll need to find out who these people are, run data analyses into your prospects, and interview converted ICPs for their patterns that you can use to run projections.
For a step by step guide, here is a detailed handbook on developing your ICPs. And here is a how-to for analyzing user behavior with customer segmentation using Baremetrics.
The second factor, timing, takes into consideration any major inflection points in a prospect’s work-life that could signal a good time to strike.
Conduct research into the public data of leads to find any of the following changes:
- Moved to a new job
- Achieved recent external funding
- Made significant new hires
- Purchased new software
- Changed their brand identity
- Shifted their product
If you’ve reached out to a lead before but they didn’t convert, it’s worth taking another shot if they, or their business, recently underwent some major changes.
That said, first impressions do count, so you’ll want to switch up something significant in your campaign’s relevance, reach, or message, to trigger a different outcome.
Reach
The mechanics of reach are fairly simple.
The first step is to track down the contact information of your leads using software tools like data scrapers (see tip 2).
The second step looks deeper into a prospect’s habits so you can assess where they, and users like them, do business.
This information will highlight which platforms you can reach them on, what the best timing for contact is, and how they are most likely to engage with your content.
Message
The third aspect of resonance marketing is your campaign message itself.
In order to be effective, this process requires rigorous testing. As you implement incremental changes, be meticulous about documenting the exact impact of each tweak you make.
Here are some of the elements you can conduct A/B testing on:
- opening lines
- body copy
- CTAs
The results of these tests, if segmented correctly, should speak for themselves. If by the 10th iteration you’re not seeing notable results, this is an indication that there is something fundamentally wrong with your campaign thesis. It’s time to take a big step back and look at the key assumptions you’re making.
If you need a fresh perspective, here are some alternative marketing strategies to check out.
Your message should be true to your brand identity above all else. The purpose of this testing process is to identify what matters most to your prospects, so you can emphasize those features during outreach.
Tip 2: The importance of research
High impact campaigns are founded on quality of research, leveraged expertly.
Mined data serves the following purposes:
- To qualify or disqualify accounts to target, based on whether they fit your Ideal Customer Profile or not
- To personalize ad copy and messaging patterns
Data sets, on the whole, are extremely overexploited. The more easily data can be accessed, even for a fee, the more people will already have leveraged it.
The better your detective work, the more valuable the data you retrieve will be. Make sure you’re doing this primarily for high value ICPs though, so you’re seeing good returns.
Where to look
There’s a plethora of tools out there to help you locate the data you need on your ICPs. Different platforms specialize in different types of data sets. Here is a useful guide on using sales data tools for SaaS businesses.
Fundraising data:
- Crunchbase Pro
- Apollo
Technographic data (what tools a company is using):
- BuiltWith
- Datanyze
- HG Insights
- Purple Sonar
Job change data:
- LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator
- ZoomInfo
Review page data:
- G2
The collective price tag on these tools is too high for most start-ups. Choose which ones make the most sense for your business, and build from there.
Don’t forget to dig into your own past for some of the best data. Post-mortem looking into which parts of your past campaigns worked, and how conversions correlated with your clients’ inflection points in retrospect, yield veritable goldmines of information.
Better yet, keep track of these inflection points as they happen. There’ll be less data to work through while you’re actively campaigning, and as a bonus, you’ll be able to spot potential churns before they happen.
How to interpret data
The best way to interpret the data you’ve uncovered is segment by segment. Here’s a guide on how to do that using Baremetrics’ large scope of metrics. Try it out for yourself using the free 14 day trial here.
Some of your best data sets on prospects are already in your lap – simply look into the features and behaviors of your current customer base. Many of these qualities will be replicated among your leads.
This data is so valuable for two reasons: you have the opportunity to interview your clients directly, and you’re the only one with access to that exact data set.
How to leverage data sets effectively
The fuller the picture you have on your targets, the more you can adapt your approach. This gives your messaging the best chance to truly resonate with its audience.
The most effective high touch campaigns stitch together all available information to create an approach that, to the prospect, feels like it was custom-made only for them.
Here’s an example of a customized email automation that plugs in all this data:
As you can see, this cold email pulls information about the prospect’s company size, ad spend, and top customers, to create a highly customized approach. Sprinkle in some common pain points and bold promises – that’s powerful!
Recap
Research is an invaluable investment into your business growth.
Resonance marketing requires your outreach to be relevant to prospects in timing and intent, have an effective reach, and wield a strong message.
And at the core of any powerful, 3-dimensional campaign, lives data.
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