SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
I'm a fangirl for your SaaS business, here's why you need me to survive an economic downturn
02 Jun 2023
Chapter 1: What is the purpose of this podcast episode?
You are listening to Conversations with Nathan Latka, where I sit down and interview the top SaaS founders, like Eric Wan from Zoom. If you'd like to subscribe, go to getlatka.com.
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Hi, everybody. How's everyone doing? Falling asleep after having all the food during lunch? Are the speakers' names blending in in your heads yet because they aren't mine? My name is Maria Delano, as you can see on the slide. I work as a marketing consultant focused on content, but I'm not here to talk about that today. I'm not going to talk about my business.
I'm not going to talk about how much money I've made or how much money any of my clients have made. Instead, I'm going to do something weird. I'm going to talk to you about love. And I know what you're thinking. It's weird. We're in a business conference. Valentine's Day was more than a month ago.
But we're going to talk about love and passion and the biggest fans that you could possibly have for your SaaS business. So raise your hand if you've ever recommended something to somebody just because you've liked it. It could be a brand of ice cream, a pizza place. Okay. Keep your hand raised if you've ever recommended software to somebody else because you liked it. Great.
Keep your hand raised if you could consider yourself a fan of any piece of software. Quite a few hands are up. There you go. There's your social proof that this is a valid topic. Now, let's jump in. So we're going to go over this in three steps. Step one, find your biggest fans. Figure out who they are and where they are. Step two, figure out what to do with them. How do you talk to them?
How do you nurture them? How do you get them to engage with you more and more? And step three, how do you actually empower them at scale and turn fan engagements into a proper marketing program? And right before we fully dive in, I want to answer, so what? That some of you might be wondering, why do we care?
And I want to tell you about something that my father-in-law talked to me about a couple of weeks ago. You know, we were on Google Meet spending one hour talking about SaaS metrics, as in-laws do, I'm sure. And he said something that stuck with me. If you run a business where you're depending on the same people
Getting money to you more than once, and especially sustained over a long period of time, which any subscription business does, that's not a transaction, that's a relationship. You're building a relationship with those people. And especially if you're talking about getting people to keep sticking with you, even in tough times, over a long period of time.
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Chapter 2: Why is love important in SaaS marketing?
If you don't know what Notion is, you should go visit their website and download after this, because it will change your life. But Notion is a project management and note-taking tool. And its fans are a bit of a cult. In fact, I'm in it. This is me, also in New York City, at an event that lasted two hours at Notion's offices.
And I went all the way from Ithaca, took a bus, took multiple days of work just for a chance to spend two hours at their office with their team and with that guy in the back with the big smile who is a YouTuber who built a whole business about Notion. Notion's fans are like really intense. We turn ourselves into walking product placements. Those are Notion logos on my laptop.
We make entire spin-off businesses just about Notion and YouTube channels and hours and hours and hours of videos just about this software that we all really, really like. And Notion knows this, they have a lot of community programs for community involvement, for engaging their biggest fans, and that's actually how they grew.
Unfortunately, I also want to give you a word of caution, because the people who love you the most are also the most likely to be disappointed. So I'm about to turn the slide, and you'll see two emails. Those emails are not something that was only related to me. These are responses and updates about fan programs that Notion's running.
And they welcomed applications and encouraged a lot of people to apply at this online event last year. And I was one of the people who applied. And both of these emails were sent months after the fact and months of silence from Notion. So as you see, both of these are fan programs that were welcoming people in and when they applied, nothing.
Silence and then a sudden delay with barely an explanation and the second one was actually sent to me directly. It was sent by somebody I met at Notion's offices during that one event that I went to and I'm still counting, it's March, it's been 10 months since I originally sent in that application, and they still haven't resumed review for me or for anybody else.
And I'm sure we've all heard the phrase, with great power comes great responsibility. And I wanted to give you this warning because your biggest fans are also the ones that care the most. And when you don't meet your promises, just remember that the opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference.
And when I got that second email, I cried for an entire day and I stopped talking about Notion as much. I've never talked about them as much since. I didn't make a template for months. I chose not to make videos anymore. I've been recommending it less. So if you're trying to engage your fans, just remember what can happen when it goes wrong. All right, step two.
And we're going to talk about a different SaaS company, SparkToro. They make an amazing audience research tool. And if you're in marketing, you should check it out. But they have done quite a lot. No, how do I go back? There you go. They are a tiny company with three people and some very impressive metrics that you can see on the slide over there.
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Chapter 3: How can you identify your biggest fans?
When they hear from people who are like them, not influencers, not stars, not some fancy founder somewhere, people who are like them, people who genuinely like a product, people like me. So this is one way that you can apply this to your own SaaS company. This is what I've called the fan-driven marketing flywheel.
And in business, we like making our flywheels and they don't fully respect the laws of physics. So the idea is once it starts spinning, it's gonna have its own momentum and keep spinning faster and faster and faster. So figure out a way to get your fans to find you. Once they start talking to you, listen, reply to them.
take it a bit further and actually show them that you care and try to help them in their own lives, learn from fan feedback, and then it will keep going. All right. And also, my artifact for this conference is a little template that will help you start doing this with your own content. And there will be a link on the last slide, so don't worry about it. All right, step three, empower your pans.
We've talked about smaller SaaS companies. Spark Tor is pretty small. Notion's growing, but they're still not the biggest. Can you do this if you're a big company? Yes. And our example is HubSpot. I'm actually not a customer of HubSpot, so I couldn't call myself a fan of their product. But I am a fan of how they interact with their fans.
Their manager of offline community and advocacy, Christina Garnett, often talks about how important it is to preserve the human element, no matter how big you get. You can't automate everything because your fans are humans who are dedicating their own time and their own love to you and to your company.
So if you want them to keep doing that, and all you do is thank them via some automated sequence, that will feel like a slap in the face. So don't do that. Stay human.
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Chapter 4: What strategies can you use to engage your fans?
Show them that they matter. And here's another little model that you can use to apply all of these ideas to your own work. On the y-axis, we have emotional resonance. Is the campaign that you're doing making people feel something? Because think of the music concerts and the crazy fans. Why are they so intense? Because that band, that music makes them feel something.
So if you want to truly make an impact and make people love, really love your SaaS business, make sure you're engaging with them on an emotional level. And on the x-axis, we have scale. Are you speaking one-to-one, like Sparkator did with me in response to my tweets? Or large scale.
Are you speaking one-to-many, like by making a great video or by hosting a webinar that thousands of people can attend? And I would say every SaaS brand should do a mix of all four of these things, but the exact amount of budget and resources that you dedicate to each one will change from company to company and over time.
them and I think I spoke a little bit too quickly but we're mostly done and I want to leave you with one final note why does all of this matter because there are people out there and I can guarantee it for all of your businesses there are people out there for whom what you do means something so if you want them on your side
and to promote you out of the goodness of their hearts and in their own time, you better show them that they also mean something to you. Because they'll know. So, I guess we're done? Very early? I'm sorry. And please follow that link. Yeah, on that link, you'll find the graphics that I used. You'll also find links to the brands I talked about.
You'll find a link to the paper I talked about about behavior change and some fun further reading. And I don't think it works if you don't capitalize those letters, so you better get that right. All right?
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