Aimers B2B Marketing Digest for SaaS & Tech - September 2024

Xan Mannekens shares 2 posts with tested and approved top-funnel and bottom-funnel LinkedIn ad strategies. His advice is not to “obsess” over the bottom of your funnel while neglecting the top – awareness ads are foundational. Both posts are packed with step-by-step strategies for LinkedIn ads and are totally worth the read!

David Hard quotes April Dunford’s new book Sales Pitch and stresses that B2B marketers should get out their focus on “how hard it is to sell technology products” and remember “how terrifying it is to buy them”. He elaborates:

“What buyers often need is an understanding of the competitive landscape and where you fit into it. They need to understand why the value you bring is most suited to them, over the other options out there. So, actually acknowledging the competition, rather than pretending that you are the only choice, is something sales and marketing should spend time doing.”

Richard Marriott shares his learnings from over 25 go-to-markets for SaaS and Service-based 

businesses. 3 major areas where he sees GTM process going wrong the most:

1. Lack of audience understanding

2. Misconceptions and assumptions of the buyer journey

3. KPIs and reporting metrics

He highlights that for a successful go-to-market you need to cover:

• Account segmentation and deal velocity
• Understanding your ICP
• Service design, messaging and leveraging customer pain points
• Account targeting
• Competitor analysis
• Channel selection and tech
• Existing assets and content gap
• Sales, Marketing and Client Success alignment

MJ Smith opens up about the types of ads that they were running in the first 9 months of CoLab Software. It was a single ad type:

“The #1 question I get asked about building demand gen from scratch:

What’s the best mix of ads (case studies, thought leadership, etc)?

My answer usually surprises people:

I don’t know what the best mix of ad types is, but I can tell you that CoLab had no mix at all for the first 9 months of building our program

We ran 100% the same ad type:

Ad creative with messaging on pain points and solutions, segmented by use case, linked to a use case LP

The objective is to get people to consume the whole LP and then request a demo

We now mix in other formats, but these are still the highest performing ads for pipeline creation”

She then unveils their exact process for launching such campaigns:

1. Pick 2-3 priority use cases (business processes your product is used for today)

2. Interview customers to identify their jobs to be done and pains/frustrations when it comes to these use cases

3. When you start to see patterns (should happen after 5-6 interviews), prioritize the pain points and map your solutions to them

4. Ship creative and landing pages with LinkedIn paid

A focused, high performing team can complete this entire cycle in 2-4 weeks - even if you have never worked together before.

Ragen Dodson reminds us that customers are just buyers, until we make them into ambassadors:

“🔥 Real Talk: Customers who just buy are temporary. They might stick around, but they’re not riding for you. They’re not hyping you up. They’re not making noise.

But when you flip the script and turn them into ambassadors? Now you’re playing the long game.

💡 Turn Loyalty into Influence:

Shout Them Out: Make their wins loud and clear—give them their flowers.

Collaborate: Create with them, not just for them. Let their voice drive the convo.

Give Them the Mic: Let them tell the world how they’re leveling up with your product.”

Andrew Sanderson reminds B2B marketers: “The pressure of daily business prevents marketers from doing what's really important 👉 continual improvement.” He advises tackling this in the following manner:

“If you think of a repeating project as a process, you can begin your first continual improvement cycle.

Figure out the scope across multiple iterations and you find the space to re-design current processes. Establish the economic value and you can create a business case for change.

And that leads to better quality for less effort 👏”