Marketing teams are building their entire go-to-market around leads.
Every quarter, the cycle continues: the lead goal marketing is measured against grows, the CAC number increases, the marketing payback period gets longer.
Marketing teams are forced to run campaigns that generate as many emails as possible at the lowest possible cost.
Paid search across Google Ads & Bing set up to lead potential customers to landing pages or gated ebooks. In-person and virtual events spent scanning badges, constant content syndication, and creating native forms on Facebook & LinkedIn promoting whitepapers.
Sound familiar? It’s a seller-focused playbook where your marketing team generates a ton of leads and MQLs with intent based ads and ebook downloads.
Here’s the real problem - it’s no longer effective.
Have you ever heard of a “warm” ebook download?
When’s the last time you responded to a sales cadence after filling out a form for a gated piece of content? Have you ever clicked a banner ad and filled out a demo form?
Most likely, you would answer “rarely.” These tactics worked in 2002, but they aren’t nearly as effective the past few years.
With this revelation, we’ve been challenging our customers to re-think their entire approach to demand generation and marketing.
It’s a primary reason 100% of our customers experience positive ROI when they engage with our agency, with an average lift of 80% in inbound volume in the first 6 months.
Interested in driving growth and elevating demand? It’s as simple as booking a call with our founder to start the conversation.
Our Narrative Marketing B2B SaaS Playbook
Most agencies will tell you that you need better content, better ads, and better designed landing pages to improve your marketing results.
That selling point, packaged as conventional wisdom, is not only outdated; it’s wrong.
You don’t need to fix your ads - you need to fix your entire approach to marketing.
While the agencies giving you this particular advice aim to cash a paycheck and deliver lower CPC and leads, we deliver revenue results and go-to-market strategies that will fundamentally change your approach to marketing.
Our most powerful marketing playbook is called ‘Narrative Storytelling Marketing’ and it focuses on a buyer-centric approach instead of the typical “Let me tell you why our product is better at solving your problem.”
We create and implement marketing campaigns that help your buyers understand the way they are operating is obsolete (competition), and why they need to embrace a new and better way to win (your product).
Today’s prospective customers and clients are not connecting with sales to get their beliefs changed. If you want to win in today’s marketplace, you have to create change with your marketing.
Your marketing shouldn’t just build brand awareness - it should also shift the belief of your customers and motivate them into action.
Here’s how we did exactly that for three B2B SaaS customers.
How We Increased ASP and Lead Quality
Our work for a Construction Management Platform completely transformed their entire go-to-market strategy with two big shifts.
The first phase was shifting their current strategy to focus on a more customer-centric marketing approach. It sounds minor, but for most brands, it’s a huge first step.
This led to a redirect of the marketing budget centered around free trial ads to our Narrative Storytelling Marketing playbook, comparing the old way business is run and the new way (their product).
This approach created urgency with their buyers and led to an increase in the marketing departments contribution to monthly recurring revenue.
The second phase was adjusting the marketing strategy to increase ASP (average selling price) and drive larger inbound opportunities. We created new conversion events in Facebook to stop optimizing for free trial requests, but instead optimized for free trial requests with a specific company size. Implementing this portion of the overall strategy led to a 35% increase in average ASP.
“Inbound leads have been noticeably more engaged and of higher quality.” - Actual quote from customer.
Virtual Event Platform 3x Paid Search Opportunities & 3x Revenue
When you’re aligning your marketing spend with your revenue results, you can more effectively reinvest in other channels - that’s exactly how we assisted a virtual event platform with their paid customer acquisition strategy.
We completed a full CAC (customer acquisition cost) analysis: from marketing alignment to revenue results, and during the process, we uncovered wasted spend not generating revenue.
Sound surprising? It’s not uncommon for us to recover 30% - 70% of wasted ad spend from a previous agency engagement.
With this recovered ad spend, we were able to completely revamp their performance marketing channels and execute a new paid search playbook.
This revamp consisted of:
- Running specific competitor-based campaigns that captured competitor customers and buyers looking at competitor solutions
- Restructured paid search based on revenue results and reinvested into new campaigns
- Found new intent-based keywords closer aligned to revenue results and dramatically increased inbound volume
We helped increase marketing contribution to revenue from $600k to over $3.5M and within 3 months they were ROI ROI-positive.
“I love this guy. LOVE him.” - Actual customer quote
If you’re interested in finding opportunities to improve your marketing strategy, book a discovery call with our founder; during the first 30 days, we’ll do a full CAC analysis.
Closed $600k in Marketing Revenue in 6 Months
We worked with a Law Firm RFP software company to completely update their approach to demand generation and marketing. We switched the team from a traditional lead-based approach to a new approach focused on creating brand awareness and driving more inbound opportunities based on how their buyers want to buy their product.
Our strategy included the following:
- Creating an organic LinkedIn thought leadership strategy across the organization that helped position them as experts and create additional brand awareness.
- Launching a podcast as a mechanism to get into large accounts and create additional brand awareness.
- Providing strategic level guidance on product positioning, messaging, and Narrative Storytelling Marketing framework.
“Jay's scientific approach to improving lead quality led to significant increases in revenue.” - Actual customer quote.
Now It’s Your Turn
Your biggest opportunity to differentiate your product today is how you acquire new customers.
The lead-based approach to marketing and demand generation is dying quickly. Now, the buyer holds all the power and if they’re going to give you the time of day, you need to build marketing that is buyer-centric. This empowers the customer to open up and request sales interaction.
We’ve found this approach to marketing works best at creating actual product demand and not generating leads. When you stop spending on what you want, you start creating marketing that actively engages and informs buyers.
Your aim shifts from a push for sales and sales only, to informing your customers, answering their questions and offering actionable advice. This builds trust and starts the process of product consideration.
Your marketing will start to create real demand.
This is how you get attention and engagement from your buyers, which leads to results.
Whether you’re ready to transform your marketing playbook, or you want to hire a demand generation agency that aligns to how your buyer’s want to buy, starting is as easy as booking a discovery call with our founder to change the way your company elevates demand and increases marketing revenue.