I chat with Saranya Babu Vice President of Marketing at Instapage. We discuss how they have created a new business category called post-click optimisation. This is the part of the funnel after someone clicks on an advert and before they convert on your website. We also discuss the strategies they have implemented to attract new users and grow their business.
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Last 5 questions:
What’s your best piece of marketing advice?
So my best piece of advice would be to not play your competitor’s game, especially in a competitive market. It’s very easy to look at what the competitors are doing and to get carried away. And to kind of feel the urge to do what they’re doing, to do it better. So the thing is everybody builds their game to suit themselves. So the best strategy would be to resist the temptation to play your competitor’s game. Don’t define yourself within the framework of your competitor’s messaging or tactics. Create your own game and then be the best at it. Execute really well. Keep playing your game, and within at your game because you can only win at your game, you can’t within at your competitor’s game.
Can you recommend a book to our listeners?
So I like this book called Start with the Why by Simon Sinek. So there’s something that I follow in everything I do, for me, when there is something that comes, I always start with why. Why do I need to do this? What happens if I don’t do it? What does it cost? And that helps me make decisions and helps me really prioritize.
What software tool couldn’t you live without?
So I don’t have a very glamorous answer here, but it’s really PowerPoint. PowerPoint helps bring to life my ideas and so I’m on it a lot and I try to visualize my, you know, my concepts, and helps me make the business case for my ideas.
What’s your favourite example of a marketing campaign?
My all time favorite is the Got Milk? campaign. It’s a very famous campaign. I like it because it’s super simple. It evokes the emotion by just asking a very simple question. Super powerful, super simple. Very effective.
Which other podcasts do you listen to?
So I listen to a few, you know, that as I see based on the topic. I listen to a lot of Ted talks when I’m on my commute, so those are my favorite.
Transcription:
Matt Byrom:
Hello, and welcome to this episode of the Marketing Strategies podcast. Today I’m joined by Saranya Babu who is vice president of marketing at Instapage. I’m sure many of you have heard of Instapage. They have a fantastic landing page software that I myself have been using at my businesses for many years. Saranya started her career as a software engineer before moving into marketing and working for companies such as Dell, BD&A, ChargePoint, and for the last two years, Instapage. I’m really fascinated to learn about the marketing strategies Saranya and her team have implemented to grow Instapage, so let’s dive right in.
How are you doing today, Saranya?
Saranya Babu:
I’m doing good, how are you?
Matt Byrom:
Yeah, I’m great. Thanks, I really appreciate you taking the time to join me on this podcast.
Saranya Babu:
It’s my pleasure.
Matt Byrom:
So in your own words, I’d love for you to tell us what Instapage is, who you work with, and what you are good at.
Saranya Babu:
Alright, awesome.
So Instapage is a leader in the post-click optimization space. And now, what does post-click optimization mean? That is the brand new category that we’re creating. So if you look at the advertising funnel. If you look at what advertisers do today, they spend a lot of money to get impressions and clicks to promote their products and to reach audiences. So we look at the funnel, there is this part of the funnel where you’re putting in money to get the clicks, and then comes post-click optimization, where you try to convert that click into a lead. You’re trying to convert an anonymous visitor to your website or your web property into a lead with a known email address.
So that’s what we call post-click optimization, that stage and that funnel, and then once you get the lead then you pass it on to your marketing automation system to qualify that lead, and then it goes into a sales funnel where they get a high touch sales experience. So that’s what Instapage does. We have a very powerful landing page builder, which is one of the very first products that we built, and marketers can build landing pages very quickly in minutes without a developer. We take a marketing manager and we turn it into a developer and even a designer who can create matching advertising landing pages, key word matched, personalized landing pages in minutes with that.
And then we have a very powerful conversion platform with features like demand in system, heat maps, AV testing, personalization, analytics, and all of that. So it’s an end to end system to convert your clicks into leads. That’s what Instapage does.
Matt Byrom:
And I have to say for the listeners, I’ve been using Instapage like I mentioned for a number of years, and it’s fantastic. We love it in our business, and we’ve got over 40 different landing pages and we have a great conversion rate. It’s very easy to create pages so we really like it.
So tell me a little bit more about the post-click optimization category. That’s everything from when somebody actually visits a site to when they fill in a form or become a lead effectively, isn’t it?
Saranya Babu:
Yeah, it’s an end to end system, and currently in the market it is actually a disparate set of initiatives that marketers do that they don’t see as a single set of initiatives, which is how they should be looking at it because it’s a stage in the funnel. If you look at it that way, then it’s all a bunch of different things that work towards the same goal.
So there are three main pillars to post-click optimization. The first one is scalable creation, right? So the biggest bottleneck today that’s facing PPC markets and advertisers is basically the ability to build all these pages, right? They’re able to go into their AdWords account, a Facebook account and easily create hundreds of ads that are targeting specific audiences. They can change the copy to cater to that specific micro-targeted audience. They’re able to test them, and they’re able to like refresh and tweak it and optimize it very quickly, but they’re not able to build, once they get the click, they’re not able to continue that journey to provide matching post-click experiences for each of their ads.
And that’s because today it’s really difficult to build landing pages if you use developers or any of the other alternatives that people use today to build landing pages, it takes a lot of time. And so marketers just compromise and use what they have to send their traffic to their website homepages, or their product pages because that’s what they have today. But they don’t really have to. What post-click optimization does is, it helps create, very quickly create those matching landing pages, matching post-click experiences for each of your ads.
And then the second part is really personalization, right? Are you able to offer a unique experience for your audiences, right, given that you know so much information about them. There is so much data about audiences these days in terms of demographics, techno-graphics, personal data, psycho-graphics and all of that, thermo-graphics. Are you using all of that data to effectively give them a customized experience that’s super relevant for them so they come in and they immediately want to take action. So that’s the personalization piece.
And then the third piece is the optimization, right? You arrive, you create a webpage, is that the best web experience you can give? It’s often a guess and people don’t venture into validating that guess because it’s very time consuming and it takes a lot of resources, and simply advertising cannot simply wait until these experiences are built up. So the optimizations where you create variations, you split test, and then you arrive at the most optimal experience. So those are the three pillars of post-click optimization.
Matt Byrom:
And I guess this helps marketers create their experience without the need to have development resource or take that development resource time out of the business.
Saranya Babu:
Yeah. So what we’ve done is we’ve completely automated hat section of that section of the dev-production process, so basically the developer, right? So someone can come in and we have a drag and drop builder. We have a specific builder so you can pull things together very quickly and create a professional-looking, on brand – and I say on brand because you can upload your CSS style sheets and all of the customization options are there – so you build the on brand. It’s mobile optimized, right? A lot of people converting your existing webpages into mobile-responsive versions itself is a major, multi-month project. So these are automatically mobile-responsive so you create that in a few minutes.
And then we have what we call insta-blocks which is automating that even further. You don’t have to sit and you don’t have to actually create a page from scratch anymore. Most of the times you have headers and footers that are templatized, so you can save each of those blocks, and you can just reuse those blocks on your page, and build landing pages like you build Lego blocks, right? Pull those blocks and build them really quickly.
Matt Byrom:
And you have worked for Instapage for the last two years now, what position was Instapage in when you first joined?
Saranya Babu:
So in the last two years, a little bit less than two years, we have actually doubled our revenue and our hit count. So this is a hyper-growth phase very typical for a company in this phase. But it’s been super fun doing that. We’ve doubled our customer base as well. Right now we’re at 15,000 customers. We were somewhere half of that-
Matt Byrom:
That’s impressive.
Saranya Babu:
Yeah.
Matt Byrom:
And is that small medium businesses with a small range of large businesses or would that generally be the make up of your customer base?
Saranya Babu:
Back when I joined we had only one type of business which was the self-service product. We had multiple flavors of that product, but it was a product that people found online and signed up for it online where it was low-touch. And only if something went wrong, they would, you know, talk to someone from support, so that was the only high-touch part.
When I, I was hired here to actually help them create the enterprise side of the business which would be a product for the up-market that would be sold through a sales team.
Matt Byrom:
Okay.
Saranya Babu:
Right, so that’s the transition that we’ve achieved in the last two years.
So I came in and I build that foundation to transition to the enterprise product so that started from, you know, first building that whole foundation, to create that, target that market, create that messaging, all of that, the whole infrastructure to go to market through a sales team. That’s the first thing. And then the second phase that’s still ongoing, and the second thing is to then take these two businesses, like the self-service business, the enterprise business that were kind of acting very independently and putting them together to make a cohesive one business where they feed off of each other, and making sure that they’re all part of single strategy.
Matt Byrom:
Very interesting. So, it’s really an interesting point in your time at the moment, then, so if we were to look at your marketing strategy, tell me a little bit about how that works and then how that then filters back to your sales, I presume your marketing drives the sales team.
Saranya Babu:
Yeah, marketing strategy is largely dictated by the kind of market you’re in, and the kind of product yours trying to sell. So we are in this market where this is a hyper, super competitive market, right? So there’s a lot of players in the market, a couple of leaders in the market that have, kind of have a huge chunk of the market, a significant market share. And we also have existing alternatives that people have been using for the longest time. And if you look at the total market of anyone who can build landing pages, 95 percent of that market is still untouched.
So this is the kind of market that was the first thing I looked at, and so then built a strategy for that. So the first thing you need to do is to make sure that you differentiate yourself, right. Given that this is super competitive, how do you differentiate yourself? How do you break through the noise? And so one of the major strategies that our founder and CEO, who was managing marketing before I joined, and who still is very closely involved in marketing, he is very passionate about the brand. We revamped our branding, because people are exposed to like thousands of logos these days, and thousands of, you know, marketing messages. So how do we differentiate ourselves? So we have- The differentiation is one of our key strategies. So creating a brand that is very differentiated.
And then the brand consistency, making sure that as a company, all of our touch points are very, very consistent, for visual consistency. Design superiority is something that we really are passionate about. We have a 5 percent design team. We also have an in-house video team. Video team has been our secret sauce to this particular strategy. So we’re able to churn out a lot of videos very quickly because we have an in-house, kick ass team. Some very good talent in that team.
But that has helped us differentiate, especially the top of the funnel where people are saturated with all kinds of messages. You know, you want to put out something that catches people’s attention quickly. And that has definitely helped us.
Matt Byrom:
And I notice you create videos for lots of different features on your platform as well, so it’s like, you know, in your FAQs for example, you’ve got a video for every single FAQ virtually all about the different features, how they work, so people can actually see them. I guess that helps not just post-sale, but actually pre-sale as well.
Saranya Babu:
It’s actually very interesting. Some type of content work good at some stages in the funnel, and not so good on other stages of the funnel. But our videos work at every single stage in the funnel. They’ve been very effective.
Top of the funnel, of course, is a no brainer, right, it’s to break through the noise. But then, the mid-funnel, right, where customers kind of, we’re able to get them to the website. We make sure that we’re giving them all the options, whereas some people like to read, some people just hate reading. And that segment of the population that doesn’t like reading is kind of increasing because of how social media content has shaped their thinking. And so we wanna show videos, we want to make sure that everything has videos. So we have videos from lie, anywhere from marketing, branding, thought leadership videos, to like feature-level videos, to how-to videos, which is like how to use particular feature. We have sales videos and we are also look to how we can leverage what we call one on one videos for high value accounts to then use video in our ABM strategies as well. But that’s something that we’re still thinking about.
Matt Byrom:
That’s fantastic. So how many people are in your video team?
Saranya Babu:
We have three people in the video team now.
Matt Byrom:
Fantastic, and what’s your video strategy in that case. Do you have a strategy basically just to fill out your funnel, or all different types of videos, everything that would be required or needed?
Saranya Babu:
The way we approach a content production is we start with, okay let’s start with one piece, which is a little bit more generic, for all audiences. And then what we do is we take that, then we optimize that a little bit, we test it a little bit. And then we segment it out, right? So now we take that thing that work and then let’s see if we can then have a video for every single feature, right? Maybe every single integration, every single use case, every type of audience, right? So then that segmentation starts, and we kind of go through the priority order that we have.
I’m also a big believer in omni-channel strategy. I believe that a company or a marketing team, and all of the channels should be marching hand in hand. So when we do those things we make sure that, it’s not just video, but there’s an info-graphic. There is a blog. There is an email. There is, maybe an ebook. There is everything, across all the channels, there is something that matches for that specific, let’s say feature, and we then launch it all at the same time. It’s all about, kind of, variety, right? Giving people that choice of how they want to consume that information. And we want to catch as many people as possible.
Matt Byrom:
It’s very interesting. So it sounds like a huge amount of content perfect feature. How would you actually go about creating that, and then what’s your launch strategy?
Saranya Babu:
So the way we create our content, like, we have a very sophisticated campaign process which starts with the product marketing team. And that’s a team I put together in the last one year. So I hired someone and she is now building that team. But product marketing is very important especially as you go up market. So every launch starts with a messaging document, right? Messaging is something that I truly believe in, which is another big strategy that I follow is, you know as a company grows, there is so many different channels, so many different touch points, and so many people also creating content. We want to look like one company with one perspective, with one personality. The personality of the company is really important. So we don’t want to look like a company with multiple-personality disorder, right? Like acting like different people.
So that’s where the product marketing comes in. We start with the messaging document. We all agree. We review it, we agree upon it, and then that becomes the gatekeeper of all the messaging. Then from there we create all of our collateral. The video script is written from that messaging doc, with that basis, taking that message and then turning it into a script that’s more suitable for a video type of experience. And then taking that messaging, the blog team, they take it and then they create the blog from there. But they take that message and then package it into a way that’s consumable for the blog audience, that’s appropriate for that audience. And then the email marketing, all of the assets, right, social media, webinars, everything then draws from that one messaging document going from the top of the funnel down to our support team, everybody goes from that messaging.
And then we have a campaign process, we have a whole campaign process where we bring all of- Everybody’s in the room. We are a very collaborative team. I don’t have the channels go off of on their own and like do things. We all site in a room, and we make sure that it’s all like one cohesive strategy, and it’s one campaign that gets launched with the different types of voices across the different channels.
Matt Byrom:
Sounds like the ideal scenario, really to have all this just pulled together so easily.
So the messaging document then, who would be part of the creation of that document, and how will that actually come together for you guys?
Saranya Babu:
Yeah, so the messaging document is the responsibility of the product marketing team. So we have a head of product marketing. She comes up with that, she’s responsible with that. Someone in her team might also be doing it depending on the type of launch. I was doing it before I hired her, and I come from a product marketing background, so this is process we always followed.
There’s a messaging document that, when we create the messaging document, we put some thought in who’s the audience? What is the top-level message for this audience? And sometimes there are multiple audiences. If that’s the case, then we come up with: what is the benefit, or the value, the single thing why this particular audience should care about? So for each audience we kind of lay that out.
Then we look at, that’s fine, so now that this is what we are, why are the best option? We are the best, or the first, or whatever that is. We come up with that differentiating position. And then we come up with: what is our, based on this, it could be a feature launch. It could be a point of view launch. It could be a carry away launch. Whatever that launch is, then we come up with what is the messaging for the whole world, right? If I have to go to, through PR to the industry, like what would that message be? What would the message be to our customer? What would the message be to our prospects? What would the message be for the different audiences? And we come up with all those messages. And then we talk about pinpoints. So it’s a whole comprehensive document that we create.
And then it goes through review. The whole team revieWs it, the executors review it, and then we make sure that we’re all aligned, and there’s buy-in from every team before that messaging document is finalized.
Matt Byrom:
And how long might you spend on one feature, or one messaging document?
Saranya Babu:
It depends. So we have different tiers of launches. We have like Tier 1 launch, and we have like up to Tier 4 launches. So it really depends on that. Tier 1 is where we do press releases. We do like the whole, everything, all channels are involved. Sometimes we may do an event, like a launch event so it’s a major, major investment.
And usually we do some research as well, right, leading up the messaging doc. Because we have to look at, let’s say we are going into a new market. Then we look at that market. We research that market. How does that market landscape look right now? What are the alternatives? Who are the competitors? Because we also do competitive messaging within our messaging doc. For example, what is our position against, with respect to this alternative, all of the alternatives. So we study that market, and that becomes part of the messaging document as well. And then there’s some groundwork.
Sometimes for Tier 1 launches, we may also do some message testing with live people or through online means. We do that to validate some of our assumptions going in, so we want to be as data-driven as possible.
Matt Byrom:
With some focus groups, for example?
Saranya Babu:
Yeah, so we do that as well. But so far we’ve done like, you know, individual interviews. Interview someone from, let’s say it’s a PPC manager, then we interview them, we ask them some questions, but we also run them different options of the messaging and see who they’re receiving that messaging and how are they understanding it? Is it getting communicated the right way?
Matt Byrom:
Fantastic. I really like the structured approach to it. And then how many campaigns, you know messaging documents, how many would you work on, say in a quarter?
Saranya Babu:
Three would be like the highest. I try not to do more than one Tier 1 campaign per quarter. But sometimes, you know, like depending on the product schedule, it’s like, important things happen. But let’s say two Tier 1, and maybe like three or four Tier 2, and there’s like Tier 3 and Tier 4, like close to, anywhere from six to ten messaging documents.
Matt Byrom:
Very interesting. And then, okay, if we were to bring this back a little bit further and talk about your acquisition, you know, what’s filling the funnel for Instapage at the moment? What are your effective marketing strategies and channels?
Saranya Babu:
We have two endpoints, right, to this funnel. One is the self-service, right, customer signs up for a self-service product. The other one is they go into the sales funnel.
Now at the top, top of the funnel, very top, not even looking at acquisition but very long-term branding, is our PR, social, and paid branding campaigns that we do through paid media. So that’s always going to be there. But in terms of acquisition itself, for the top funnel, we see organic as one of our biggest channels. N
ow the way I see it is, depending on the stage in the funnel, different channels work better at different stages in the funnel. So for the top of the funnel to get people on to our website, that’s usually the first stage in the funnel for most of our campaigns, and then we also have other type of campaigns. But to get people onto the website, organic is our biggest source right now.
Matt Byrom:
Organic search is that?
Saranya Babu:
Yeah, organic search.
And so, we have invested a lot in that. We have a five percent content team, we have an in-house SEO manager who’s a rock star. So that team just pumps content. Like we do, I think three blogs or four blogs a week. And so we create that pathway for anyone with any kind of remote intention of updating software that would lead to our product, we want to create those pathways so they can zip straight through to upgrade. So organic is definitely our biggest channel.
And then the second channel at the top of the funnel is paid. So we do both prospecting as well as re-targeting. But we do AdWords, Facebook, we try a bunch of different channels. So getting paid traffic to our website and landing pages, so that’s the second biggest channel. So that’s at the top of the funnel.
For the high value type of market, we also do some, we’re creating some ABM, Account-Based Marketing strategies, but those are low volume, high value, experimental at this point type of thing. Where cold email for ABM is also something that’s been like super effective at that volume. But it’s aways gonna be a low volume game.
So top of the funnel is that, and then mid-funnel, what I’m seeing is email, super effective. Emails, webinars, right, so we can update them through that, and then some retargeting. So we do, anyone who comes to the website, we re-target them with more, something that would urge them to give up their email address, right? The first step of ads we usually show are like to get some impressions so we can re-target. So that’s that.
And at the bottom of the funnel, for the self-service, right, we want them to get into our free trial, which is a product, so it’s all inner, plus the email and re-targeting. And then for the sales bottom is, basically goes into the sales team, and then we just continue to re-target them and email them.
Matt Byrom:
That’s really interesting. You’ve gone through an awful lot there, I’ve made a few notes, so.
I want to just jump back to the start of the top of the funnel there, so, you say paid and organic search, really, so a big reliance on search. I guess, you know, you mentioned it’s very competitive and I can see, you know, this part of the market is getting highly competitive. Is paid search still viable? Is it still working for you guys? Has it become more difficult? How are you finding that these days?
Saranya Babu:
So paid search is working really well for us. Paid is only a channel. It really depends on how you use it, right? It’s a tool. You can use it really well, or not.
So one thing that also aligns really well with the purpose of why we have our company is that we use our own product to improve the ROI of a paid search. We spend a lot on paid, but we make sure that we hyper-segment those audiences. We don’t just go with one single ad to everyone. We realize that at the top of the funnel, people who are not thinking about their product are thinking of it in terms of some pain point that they’re going through. And so we have to talk to them to connect with them. And so for that, that message at the top has to be different for the different audiences.
So we have a hyper-segmented, very organized paid program by audience, by persona, by interest. So it’s all hyper-segmented. And then we constantly test those segments, and we keep optimizing them. We watch them every week. We have an agency that helps us with that so we watch it every week. We tweak the copy, we tweak all of that on an ongoing basis, constantly. But we also have matching landing pages built on our platform that connect, that add to that post-click experience. So our landing pages are basically an extension of the ad.
Let me give you an example, if someone’s searching for, let’s say, black shoes. We know that they definitely want black shoes. At that point, you are able to create an ad for just for that keyword, right. So in AdWords you can do that, you can actually say “black shoes” and maybe “40 percent off of black shoes” or something. And target these people. And once they click that, you want to take them to a page with black shoes, right? You don’t want to take them to a page with all kinds of shoes, or even worse, just buy, “Here’s a shop, go buy whatever you want.” You don’t want to throw them into a shop. You want to continue that journey, and that’s how you close a customer.
What most people do is they segment at the ad level, but then once the click the ad, they go to a very generic page. They’re lost, and they bounce. So we don’t do that. We bring our audience. We continue that experience. We create our landing pages as extensions of the ads themselves. And then, so we see very high conversion rates. In the industry, the average is I think 3.75, it was 2.65 last year. And our conversations are way north of 20 percent. We get, we get anywhere from 20 percent to actually 70 percent conversion rate depending on the specific campaigns.
Matt Byrom:
Wow. That’s incredible. And it makes total sense, doesn’t it? And it’s something that everybody really knows is, you know, make sure that the ad is totally relevant to the person who’s searching. So the ad text is correct, and then the landing page or the place that they go to needs to totally follow on from the ad, but. I know you’ll know, I know, it’s so often it’s not the case. So often it’s just fairly generic and, I guess that’s what you guys are looking to really fix with your post-click optimization category that you’re creating a the moment.
Saranya Babu:
Right.
Matt Byrom:
So, if we then say another strategy is the organic search. And, well you’ve already said, you know, you’re creating three, four blog posts a month, a week, sorry. You’re also creating videos and emails and all sorts of other things. You’re clearly creating an awful lot of content. How important is, say, like SEO for you when you’re creating all that content? How do you actually focus on search while creating that content?
Saranya Babu:
So our content team was built with the purpose of SEO, right? Our content for the longest time was purely SEO-focused and now we’re kind of beginning to ad like product updates, and other type of things, point of view, and everything. But SEO is the organic search, and the journey of the customer who is, you know, most journeys today start with a Google search. Right? It’s just the reality of today. So we want to, we keep that in mind. Our goal is to give useful information to anyone who is showing some kind of intent. So we create all kinds of content, but we- They are super-optimized for organic.
We have an in-house SEO manager who is super-passionate. He’s a rock star. He makes sure every piece of content is run through him. And he kind of vets it for, is it something that can be easily found? Is it something that can be [inaudible 00:28:12]. And we’re looking at the latest type of stuff, too. How do we get the zero position, right? So now Google’s focusing a lot on the zero position where the answer’s right there, where you don’t even have to click, right? No click type of-
Matt Byrom:
A snippet.
Saranya Babu:
Yeah. So that snippet.
We do the same thing with out videos like when we post on YouTube, there is an SEO component to it. So because when people come on YouTube, right, and based on their intention, and their search, they can actually find our videos as well. So we optimize everything for organic search.
Matt Byrom:
How is GPDR going to affect you moving forward where you’re collecting data? Is that a big concern for you guys?
Saranya Babu:
No, so GDPR is all about the data privacy, right? To make sure that people’s data is protected, and it’s not used for the wrong purposes. Couple of basic requirements of GDPR is to get consent for any person data. And, really the only that is major in that is the cookies, right? Most websites use cookies to store some information so they can provide you a more relevant experience, right, based on who you are, and your past browsing behavior and stuff like that. We use cookies for the same purposes, and so GDPR requires that you explicitly state that you will be using cookies for what purpose, and get a consent, right?
Matt Byrom:
Yeah.
Saranya Babu:
So we will be doing the same thing. I don’t see that as a big concern.
Matt Byrom:
No, but obviously there’s the collecting of data so that people actually have to opt in to receive, say, nurture emails and things like this as well.
Saranya Babu:
So, our nurture emails are already opt-in.
Matt Byrom:
Okay.
Saranya Babu:
Yeah.
Matt Byrom:
And that’s just a policy of Instapage, I guess, to do in that way.
Saranya Babu:
Yeah. So when they sign up for a free trial, or they download an E-book, so the email address is given, so they give the email address, and that’s how they get those emails from us. And they can unsubscribe at any time, so it’s perfectly compliant already.
Matt Byrom:
Fantastic. Following on from that as well, you mentioned, you know, previously re-targeting is big for you guys, as well. Tell me a little bit more about how your re-targeting strategy works.
Saranya Babu:
Right, so re-targeting is a very powerful tool. If you look at our website, we get close to a million, more than a million visitors on the website per quarter. That’s a lot of people. Now not everybody there is ready to buy; they’re in different stages. But we managed to make a connection with them at a certain point in time, so that’s why they came to our website.
Now how do we stay top of mind and continue this journey, right? So after the first encounter, you want to make sure that you have a second encounter, and a third encounter, and so on. And with each of these connections, you want to make sure that you’re educating them a little bit more, right, to a point where you’re not overwhelming them. But you want to keep doing that slowly so that they move along this awareness journey, and at some point they understand who you are, what value you bring to them, and why you should purchase, right? So re-targeting is really, really useful there. Re-targeting and email is what we use for that particular purpose, once we get that first anonymous visitor.What we do is we re-target them based on the type of content they consumed.
For example, if someone came and consumed a blog that has very top leadership, high level type of stuff, right? We then take see that, based on that particular theme, let’s say they came to a PPC page. Then we show them a PPC related, let’s say downloadable asset, right? So there’s also mostly top leadership with a little pitch at the end of that [inaudible 00:31:44]. But really stuff that educates them on some best practices that would then bring them to our product. So we’d re-target them with that. We’d continue that theme throughout.
And then we, if they sign up, then we have their email, then we send them an email, and we re-target them with an asset that is further down the funnel, a little bit down. And then let’s say they respond and they come to a feature page or a pricing page, at that point now, they’re more advanced so then we re-target them with more of a direct call to action, to sign up for a free trail, or request a demo, right?
So we use re-targeting as a way to reach out to people to give them some action and ways to go further in the funnel.
Matt Byrom:
So you’re using almost exclusively more content along the same line that they’ve already shown an interest in-
Saranya Babu:
Yes.
Matt Byrom:
-to actually nurture and help them further rather than going straight in for the kill with the re-targeting and say-
Saranya Babu:
Yeah.
Matt Byrom:
-just advertising with the Instapage product directly.
Saranya Babu:
Yeah, yeah.
Matt Byrom:
That’s really cool. And what software are you using to actually do that? Are you using Google AdWords or AdRoll or something totally different? What’s you re-targeting tool of choice.
Saranya Babu:
We use AdWords. We’re a big user of AdWords. So there’s GDN, right, the Google Display Network. We also use Facebook, and then Linked-In, Twitter, Cora, Bing Ads as well.
Matt Byrom:
So you use like Facebook native re-targeting rather than using, say, a third-party software to actually pull it together.
Saranya Babu:
Yeah, right now we are using the native platform, so we feed those targeting lists audiences into Facebook as well. But yeah, we are looking into a few tools. We’re still in the evaluation phase.
Matt Byrom:
So, I’d love to bring this back down to say, where we started this conversation, and also the bottom of the funnel, which is your sales team. So you say, you were brought into Instapage to expand out the enterprise section, and that revolves around, you know, having a sales team to actually sell into these enterprise. Tell me, then, how all the marketing strategies and plans that you’ve just explained, how does that then filter through to your sales team. When do your sales team get involved in that process?
Saranya Babu:
The sales and marketing teams basically work on the same funnel, except at different stages, right. So they own the bottom part of the funnel. And we own the top part of the funnel.
So there’s a few ways in which our marketing and sales teams work together. The first thing is to make sure that we equip the sales people, so that’s sales enablement, right? That function sits within the product marketing team. So we have someone dedicated for that. We make sure that we train our sales teams, and the customer success managers on an on-going basis, make sure that they are up-to-date on what’s happening, what our point of view is, what messaging, what are the objections? How to respond the objections? What does the competitive landscape look like, and how to respond to that. So everything, it’s a very comprehensive program that we have to enable sales. And those teams work really closely with each other.
Matt Byrom:
And how would a lead get flagged up to your sales team to say that they’re sales ready, they’re ready for a conversation, for example?
Saranya Babu:
So that function sits in the demand gen team. So the demand gen team is again, a new team. We brought in a director of demand gen in January. So the way that works is, the first thing is alignment, right? I want to make sure that these teams are aligned. So the variable compensations is, so they both work on the same goals. If there’s a quarterly revenue goal, they’re both comped on the same goals, both sales and the demand gen team.
So that’s the first place to start. Which means I don’t care if you bring in 500 leads or 5,000 leads, as long as that revenue is there then the goal is satisfied. So I don’t want to make it a lead goal because then what happens is people getting leads, and then it’s all about the lead with no consideration for whether they were closed or not.
Matt Byrom:
Junk leads.
Saranya Babu:
Yeah. So the process we have is very simple. We collaborate very closely with the sales team. Take the leads that come from the different sources and score them. We have a bunch of different scoring methodologies. We use a product and we use our own scoring as well. So a bunch of different methods, and once they score, the scoring methodology is already, so we say with the sales team and we agreed upon a scoring methodology. Because they’re the ones who have to follow up, right?
Matt Byrom:
And what will the score be based on? Will activity on, people take with other pieces of your content?
Saranya Babu:
So the score is based on a bunch of things, it’s most of, based on formal graphics, right so the company profile, title, demographics, title, and that formal graphics which is company, industry, company size, their ad spend and a few other things. And then techno-graphics, so depending on some of the technologies they may be using. And also their in-app behavior. So if they were in a free trial, and they’re really active there, so a bunch of different things. We feed a bunch of different factors into that.
Matt Byrom:
Okay.
Saranya Babu:
So yeah. So then the leads are scored and then we have a protocol for handing them over, so all of that is agree upon with the sales team. Once we hand it over, they have a follow up process that’s also agreed upon. And then once they follow up, there are leads that don’t proceed. You know, we have also an agreed upon protocol to take them back into marketing to like throw them on to them. And we have that same thing for leads that get stuck at the different phases in the sales funnel as well. So, let’s say stalled MQOs, stalled SQOs and stuff like that. So we then take them back.
But we work really hand in hand, almost like one team so that we’re like you know, handing off, and then handing them back and nurturing, and all of the programs are all agreed upon. Before we do a demand gen program, we sit with them and then we send them a brief, in terms of, this is a campaign that’s happening. This is how you’ll get the leads. This is what’ll get assigned, this is how you should code them in so that we can track them properly. And this is a content they got, so this is a call script so that you can respond appropriately to that particular campaign. So we do a lot there.
Matt Byrom:
And what percentage of new business wins at the moment might be closed by the sales team rather than still self-serve?
Saranya Babu:
We just started last year, so we’re getting close to a 10 percent on the enterprise side, but that’s growing really fast.
Matt Byrom:
And then, do they tend to be bigger customers, as well? I know it’s called enterprise but do always bigger customers that sell through the sales team, or is just people that needs some support sometimes as well?
Saranya Babu:
It’s kind of a mix. On an average, they are larger companies, and people that need sometimes smaller companies but it’s really people that are more strategic that need more of the hand-holding for the tactical, and they just want to get things done. They want fast time to value so that’s different people. In general these are larger companies, but also what I’m seeing is, these are people that are more mature, right? More sophisticated in that particular, if you look at the curve of advertising maturity, the people that come to the self-service are often people that are just getting started or like, trying to get something up. On the enterprise side, these are more mature people looking for more, right. So they’re not just looking to create foundation, they’re looking to take it to the next level.
Matt Byrom:
Yeah, put something in place for the future rather than just like “I need a landing page now!”
Saranya Babu:
Yeah, exactly.
Matt Byrom:
‘Cause I bet there’s quite a few of those. I was probably one of them at one point.
So if we bring this back to the marketing strategies, looking forward now for Instapage, what are the marketing strategies that you’re going to be focusing on in 2018? Is there anything particularly important, stand out for you? Is there anything that you’re going to be testing? Excited to be testing in the next few weeks or months? What does the future hold in terms of marketing strategies for Instapage.
Saranya Babu:
Well a lot of interesting things.
So we have a bunch of initiatives happening at the same time. The first thing of course is making sure that we hit our revenue targets. We just closed Series A, we have revenue targets, so hitting them and maybe even exceeding them and building that infrastructure.
Because when you have an increasing revenue target, you have to constantly keep building that infrastructure, like at least six months to one year in advance because it takes some time for what you build to actually start showing results. So we’re constantly building out that infrastructure. So if we are looking at, say two x-ing our revenue, what does that marketing stack look like, right? For that particular revenue at that scale? What does the lead flow look like? What do we need, and then let’s build that out now.
So we are doing a lot of the re-factoring if you will, in terms of our infrastructure, in terms of the tools we use, in terms of everything to build for the future. So that’s our marketing stack. We’re also looking at creating this category called post-click optimization. The reason why we are really focused on this is it simplifies that conversation around why you need to do this, right? It’s not about “I want to quickly create a landing page right now because I don’t have money,” that’s not, we want to kind of move away from that into a conversation where-
It’s a multi-billion dollar industry, right, the digital advertising industry, the conversion rates are like at 3.75 percent. So that’s huge. If you could double your conversion rates, and as we have seen, we are seeing like six x of that. So it’s easily doable. Just imagine what kind of ROI people can get who are spending thousands of dollars in advertising per month. So that’s another thing, kind of educating the people on how to work smarter and not harder with respect to their advertising funnels by creating this category.
And then the third thing is really to continue to go up market and get the right customers and educate them so that we can create like champions within the market that do advertising really well and the way it should be done.
Matt Byrom:
Absolutely. And in terms of the conversion rates as well, I’ve got a video I’m personally releasing on my YouTube channel this week, and actually one of the products that we’re featuring is Instapage because it’s one of the five marketing tools that we love. You know, we get a 32 percent average conversion I think, and then we’ve got a page, our top page is converting at over 50 percent so it’s fantastic to be able to, like you say, hyper-target the messaging, and actually convert at a high rate like you say you’re doing there, as well.
Saranya Babu:
Oh, that’s awesome to hear.
Matt Byrom:
Yeah. So, it’s been an absolute pleasure talking to you today. I’m doing to bring this round to our last five questions, which is five quickfire questions that I ask every guest that’s part of this podcast as well. So number one is, what’s your best piece of marketing advice?
Saranya Babu:
So my best piece of advice would be to not play your competitor’s game, especially in a competitive market. It’s very easy to look at what the competitors are doing and to get carried away. And to kind of feel the urge to do what they’re doing, to do it better.
So the thing is everybody builds their game to suit themselves. So the best strategy would be to resist the temptation to play your competitor’s game. Don’t define yourself within the framework of your competitor’s messaging or tactics. Create your own game and then be the best at it. Execute really well. Keep playing your game, and within at your game because you can only win at your game, you can’t within at your competitor’s game.
Matt Byrom:
That’s very wise words. Do you know what, it’s actually very interesting because I’ve done 15 or so of these podcasts now, and then that is a very, very common thread is to do your own thing. Focus on you, and don’t worry about anybody else. If you do the very best that you can possibly do, you’re going to win down the line, really. But if you’re focused on other people, then you’re always going to be doing the ifs, the whats, the whys, and you know, you’re not gonna be focused enough on your end goals.
Saranya Babu:
Very true.
Matt Byrom:
So, number two is: can you recommend a book to our listeners?
Saranya Babu:
So I like this book called Start with the Why by Simon Sinek. So there’s something that I follow in everything I do, for me, when there is something that comes, I always start with why. Why do I need to do this? What happens if I don’t do it? What does it cost? And that helps me make decisions and helps me really prioritize.
Matt Byrom:
Fantastic. Well I’ll put a link to that on our show notes page at mattbyron.com so if anybody wants to check that out, please go there and there’ll be a link straight to the book. And what software tool could you not live without?
Saranya Babu:
So I don’t have a very glamorous answer here, but it’s really PowerPoint. PowerPoint helps bring to life my ideas and so I’m on it a lot and I try to visualize my, you know, my concepts, and helps me make the business case for my ideas.
Matt Byrom:
Fantastic. Keep it simple. I love it. And what’s your favorite example of a marketing campaign?
Saranya Babu:
My all time favorite is the Got Milk? campaign. It’s a very famous campaign. I like it because it’s super simple. It evokes the emotion by just asking a very simple question. Super powerful, super simple. Very effective.
Matt Byrom:
Love it. And my last question is: which other podcasts do you listen to?
Saranya Babu:
So I listen to a few, you know, that as I see based on the topic. I listen to a lot of Ted talks when I’m on my commute, so those are my favorite.
Matt Byrom:
Yeah, I’ve never met anybody who doesn’t love a good Ted talk.
Saranya Babu:
Haha. Yeah.
Matt Byrom:
Well thank you very much. It’s been an absolute pleasure talking to you today, and it’s been really interesting learning about Instapage. It’s a product that we’ve used for a long time, and really interesting to hear about the strategies that you’ve used, and your team have used to grow the business. It sounds like you’ve got a fantastic plan for the future, you know, growing the category, your new category, post-click optimization. I’m really excited to see how that develops. And I wish you all the best for the future.
Thank you very much for being on today. And I appreciate your time.
Saranya Babu:
Alright, thank you, Matt for having me. It was my pleasure.
