This episode of the Marketing Smarts Live Show with Amrita Mathur, VP of marketing at Superside, provided invaluable insights for B2B marketers: from optimizing for learning to humanizing marketing efforts and regularly updating buyer personas.
The approaches and tactics that Amrita outlined form a playbook for Marketing-led growth.
As we navigate the ever-evolving landscape of B2B marketing, those lessons will be instrumental in driving Marketing's success.
Let's dive into the key takeaways from this episode and explore how they can revolutionize your marketing strategy.
Optimizing for 'Speed of Learning': A New Marketing Paradigm
One of the standout moments in the show was Amrita's emphasis on optimizing for the "speed of learning" rather than immediate revenue or leads. That approach, which she applied during the launch of Superside in 2019, focuses on gathering as much data as possible to refine marketing strategy and tactics.
By prioritizing learning over immediate financial results, marketers can adapt more quickly and effectively to their audience's needs.
The Power of Paid Social and Data-Driven Decisions
Amrita shared her experience of using various paid social channels for rapid data collection. That tactic enabled her team to quickly identify Instagram as the most effective channel for them.
The key lesson here is the importance of using data to drive marketing decisions and the potential of social media platforms to provide valuable insights.
Humanizing B2B Marketing: Beyond Automation
Amrita also touched on the importance of humanizing B2B marketing. In an era dominated by automation, personalizing marketing efforts and understanding the human element in B2B transactions is crucial.
Taking an approach that emphasizes humanization can lead to deeper connections with prospects and more effective marketing.
Avoiding the Pitfall of Becoming a Support Function
A significant challenge highlighted in the show is the risk of marketing departments' becoming mere support functions for sales or product teams. Amrita stressed the importance of marketing teams' clarifying their roles and tying their efforts directly to revenue generation—which ensures that marketing remains a critical driver of business growth.
Setting Realistic Goals and Celebrating Success
Success in marketing isn't just about hitting revenue targets; it's also about setting realistic goals and celebrating other achievements. Amrita's insights underscore the importance of understanding the levers that drive business growth and aligning marketing strategies accordingly. Reflecting on successes as well as missed opportunities is vital for continually improving.
Revisiting Buyer Personas: An Ongoing Necessity
A crucial piece of advice from Amrita was the need to regularly revisit and update buyer personas. As industries and consumer behaviors evolve, so should our understanding of our target audience. Ongoing refinement ensures that marketing efforts remain relevant and effective.
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By applying the insights that Amrita shared in this episode, you can drive meaningful growth and stay ahead of the competition.
Check out the full episode:
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Episode Details, Guest Information, and Referenced Links
Episode No. 56
- Live date: November 11, 2023
- Episode link: youtube.com/watch?v=tfZ1N_cc9EI
- Original podcast episode: A Playbook for Marketing-Led Growth: Amrita Mathur on Marketing Smarts [Podcast]
Guest's social media profiles:
- Twitter: @AmritaMathur
- LinkedIn: Amrita Mathur
MarketingProfs resources referenced in the show:
- Growing Pains and Marketing at Scale: Five Key Lessons From B2B Marketing Leaders
- The Marketing Growth Triad: Data, Tech, and Creativity
"In B2B News" article referenced in the show:
"From the #mpb2b Community" links referenced in the show:
Transcript: A Playbook for Marketing-Led Growth, With Amrita Mathur
Hello to all my Marketing Smarts Live viewers today. I'm super excited to bring you EPISODE 56 of the Marketing Smarts Live show.
This week's topic is all about A Playbook for Marketing-Led Growth.
So, if you're ready to get your learn on, buckle up and let's get ready to rock and roll.
Hey, I'm your boy George B. Thomas, speaker, trainer, catalyst, and host of this here show, the Marketing Smarts Live show, as well as the Marketing Smarts podcast found on your favorite podcast app.
Our guest clips today are brought to you by none other than Amrita Mathur.
Amrita Mathur joined Superside as its first marketing hire in 2019. There was no product, no platform, and no recurring revenue.
No stranger to being called in when companies are at a strategic inflection point with their growth strategy, Amrita did what she spent a career in B2B marketing learning how to do and implemented a marketing-led growth strategy that translated into $8M in subscription revenue in the first year and 400% year-over-year growth since then.
Now, as VP of marketing, Amrita and her team are revolutionizing design at scale for ambitious brands such as Amazon, Meta, Shopify, and Coinbase.
Now, remember the clips of Amrita Mathur today are pulled from the full Marketing Smarts podcast episode, and if you want to listen to the full interview with Amrita Mathur and myself, make sure to tune into the Marketing Smarts podcast, link to the full show will be in the description below after the live show ends.
Now, in this episode, again, I'm talking with Amrita Mathur about A Playbook for Marketing-Led Growth.
In this clip, I wanted to ask Amrita if there was one massive universal tip that B2B marketers should leverage for growth. While her initial answer was no to the "massive universal tip", she shared several along the way in her story!
Take a listen.
Amrita: There's no universal tip. Just picking up from where you left off in the last section, there is something to be said about the early days just optimizing for speed of learning, kind of like what you said, and really setting up your go-to-market, your experiments, etcetera, in a way that you just get a ton of data back. Then you can observe that and refine a bit further.
I'll just use a simple example for that. When we were launching Superside, we had spent a few months what's the messaging, what's the positioning, how are we going to talk about ourselves, what's this website going to look like. We didn't even have the name Superside, we didn't have the dot com, so we did all of that set up. Then we were ready to launch in September 2019.
We did, and I'm freaking out, is anyone going to want this thing, what's going to happen. I remember I was freaking out and my boss said to me, "Listen, don't have this thing about leads and revenue in your mind. Just optimize for your speed of learning." That gave me permission to say where can I invest from a channels perspective that gives me that speed. I said because I'm optimizing not for revenue, but for tons of data, I'm going to go all in on paid social. I know that this can get in front of a lot of people very quickly in the right way on Facebook, Instagram, etcetera, so let me try that first.
We tried Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Within four weeks, we were like Instagram is where it's at, that's where we were getting a ton of the data, that's where we were getting tons of traffic coming through. We were like let's just put all of our miniscule budget that we had against Instagram, and we went full throttle. Anybody that came to our website and converted, we had a conversation with. The main call to action was to book a demo. We were trying to make sure that people understood what they were getting a demo about and it wasn't this nebulous thing. Then we just clocked every single conversation.
We discussed it. There was a very tiny sales team that was like two people at the time, I think, so it was them, head of sales, me, and a couple of other people. We would just go through every conversation and learn, learn, learn. We looked at where they came in, what website pages they visited, what kind of questions they had, what objections they had. It would be like, "Everybody asks about this one thing, we should put that on the homepage or the landing page."
We had this amazing tight loop and really optimized for as much data as possible rather than be like I'm going to optimize it for the best quality leads or the most amazing revenue in the world. That's going to come, the revenue will follow once I've learned. My boss gave me that permission to do that.
Are you running marketing experiments?
Are you going through customer conversations or conversions?
What takeaways are you then leveraging for your marketing?
And did you hear the major takeaway?
The revenue will come once we've learned!
Boom!
I have to ask …
Do you have a loop between your customers, lessons learned, and then new marketing?
Put the answer to that in the chat pane or let me know on X using the hashtag #mpb2b and, of course, tag me using @georgebthomas.
We'll get back to Amrita Mathur and her thoughts on A Playbook for Marketing-Led Growth, But first, I have to ask...
Are you part of the MarketingProfs community? If not, become part of the MarketingProfs community by heading over to mprofs.com/mptoday - That's mprofs.com/mptoday.
Now, it's time for one of my favorite sections …
In The B2B News - Where we talk about breaking B2B news or really important tips we find on the Google news tab related to you and your B2B business. This week, the title is...
Humanizing B2B Marketing: What Most Brands Get Wrong by Paroma Sen
Your B2B Marketing has the potential to drive deeper impact if it's humanized in a more strategic manner.
With the ton of marketing automation choices available to marketers today, the biggest issue is that many B2B marketing teams end up writing mass mails to prospects who aren't really in-market for their product or service or, they end up writing to those that genuinely have no interest.
While these are two of the common factors that may affect eventual marketing ROI, the other lies in not humanizing the B2B marketing effort or content well.
Ready to learn a few key, immediate factors for modern B2B marketing teams to consider in order to get ahead when it comes to humanizing their B2B marketing efforts?
Then, to read this article, check out the link below when the live show is over.
So, let's get back to Amrita Mathur and her Marketing Smarts podcast episode.
In this clip, I wanted to ask Amrita, What is one pothole or hurdle to watch out for as you seek marketing-led growth in your organization?
Here is what she wanted to share with us.
Amrita: The most common one and the notorious one that we've all been part of at some point in our lives, I certainly have, is that you can very easily become a sales support function. Or if you're a company that is almost entirely product-led growth, you can just become a brand person where your entire job is to make things look pretty, the voice and tone, and really it's the product team that's calling all of the shots and driving the bus on how people experience the product and what the path from the first trial or whatever freemium it is up to upgrades. In both of those scenarios, whether it's sales-led growth or PLG, marketing becomes a support function.
There's actually nothing wrong with that, but it's extremely important to clarify the role of marketing, and it's very important for you personally to clarify how you are going to tie yourself to actual revenue and actual dollars, and optimize your entire roadmap, your marketing plan to working on the things that actually enable that. If you come to the conclusion "I want to do all of these five or ten things here and I don't know if it's going to actually drive revenue," maybe you shouldn't be there. Maybe you should be like these are some side things that should be taken care of, but maybe the product team can or maybe the sales team can.
That's a long way of saying you don't need to be a marketing team at a company that doesn't do marketing. If you're literally sales support or product support, that's not marketing, you're in the wrong place.
Tons of tips in that answer.
Are you OK, or are you stuck in the pothole?
Or, as Arita stated, are you in the wrong place?
I hope not but, if so, you know, have a little bit of a road map to get you in the right direction.
We'll get back to Amrita Mathur in a few minutes, but first, it's time for some...
Dope B2B Learnings From The Vault of MarketingProfs Articles
That's right, it's time to dig into the treasure trove of valuable information and pull out two pieces of gold to help you be a better B2B marketer.
Article one this week is: The Marketing Growth Triad: Data, Tech, and Creativity by Ally Bancroft
The modern business world has become more measurable and data-driven than ever before.
As enterprises become more performance- and measurement-oriented, investors and business leaders are prioritizing increases in organic growth and market share to measure returns and success.
Although many marketing teams can feel the shift across multiple lines of business, it's been especially noticeable for B2B marketers.
As their roles have evolved, marketers have been tasked by their companies with driving business growth. In fact, 78% of CEOs are now relying on marketing leaders to drive growth, according to research from McKinsey & Co.
Want to keep learning more? Check the links below.
Article two this week is: Growing Pains and Marketing at Scale: Five Key Lessons From B2B Marketing Leaders by Emily Sue Tomac
Growth initiatives have been one of the main factors driving adoption of marketing automation (MA), and scalability is one of the most important considerations for buyers and users evaluating MA products.
Marketing leaders who have experience with rapid company growth. Some of them have successfully helped scale multiple companies; others are now working on major growth initiatives.
All of them shared lessons and advice on the following:
The role of marketing in driving growth
What it means to think like a growth marketer
New challenges that arise with scale, and how to approach them
Want to keep learning more?
If so, check the links in the description below after the live show to get access to both amazing MarketingProfs articles.
OK, back to Amrita Mathur … Let's dive back into this conversation of A Playbook for Marketing-Led Growth
In this clip, I wanted to ask what does success look like and what success metrics do you think B2B marketers should be looking at.
She gave us a great answer and, some tips for you to grab and use in the future a swell.
Let's listen in and learn.
Amrita: Do we all cheer and relish the fact that we hit our goals at the end of the year, or at the end of the quarter even? Yes, absolutely. That's a very important success metric.
Fortunately, at our company, we don't have to do this weird conversation around how much of this revenue is Marketing sourced versus Sales sourced versus Product sourced. We don't have to have that because we're an inbound shop, so everything comes through Marketing, it's 100% Marketing sourced. Various people have touched it, but it's 100% marketing. Thankfully, we're not that type of company.
I think the nirvana is actually hitting your goals. First of all, setting realistic expectations is a very important piece of the puzzle. I just want to address that for one minute. At companies, sometimes those metrics and those models are built by finance, sometimes they're built by Sales, sometimes it's a combination of the two. At our company, marketing used to build all of it from scratch, for many years, and only recently have we transitioned it to finance, but the model is set, how we think about it is set, and marketing has huge input in that. What that allows us to do is actually have a realistic target.
We sit there and say in order for us to hit this target, we would actually have to improve win rate from our standard 20% to 22%. Is that doable? Yes, it is. We'd have to improve our deal size from $9,000 a month to $11,000 a month. Is that realistic? No, not really, let's lower that and do something conservative to $9,500. There are all these levers. We understand those levers extremely well and we all align on what is actually going to improve, what is actually going to happen, and build in a little bit of buffer. What you get at the end of the day is here is a realistic target. Great. Awesome.
Once that's set, when you start hitting those goals every single month, it's important to relish that, it's important to celebrate that, it's important to reflect on what you did right that got you there, and some missed opportunities as well. It's OK to talk about some of the missed opportunities, it's a lost opportunity cost. Like, "Oh damn, I wish I had invested in YouTube earlier because it's really paying off," or, "I wish I had started this in May of last year rather than November of last year."
Those are the kinds of conversations that hopefully the team is mature enough to have so that you can be like I'm not going to make this mistake next time, I'm going to move faster next time, or I'm going to call the failure early next time, or what have you.
Are you reflecting on what you did right?
What about your missed opportunities?
Are you taking time to relish the success moments in your organization?
We're going to get some words of wisdom from Amrita Mathur here in a few minutes but right now, it's time to turn the spotlight on you, the MarketingProfs community. Yep, time for...
From The #MPB2B Community
We searched far and wide in the #MPB2B universe to find amazing information and conversation to bring to the masses.
So, first, make sure you are using the hashtag, and second, make sure you have fun and add value to the community.
Then, we'll spotlight you or your crew on the show.
This week, it's... Carlos Hidalgo or @cahidalgo on X
"What's hard is also extraordinary"
@annhandley
#mpb2b #b2b #innovation
But you need to check out the description and click that link to check out the post and graphic!
Marketing Smarts viewer, I have to ask... are you going to be next to get the spotlight?
Remember, community, use the hashtag #mpb2b on Facebook, LinkedIn, or X and get the light shined on your awesomeness in the next episode or a future episode of the Marketing Smarts Live show!
Pro-tip, it won't hurt if you tag me in your post as well; I'm @georgebthomas on LinkedIn and X.
OK, let's kick it back to Amrita Mathur and some words of wisdom around this topic of A Playbook for Marketing-Led Growth.
Here is what Amrita Mathur wanted to leave us with...
Amrita: Oh my gosh. Wow. I feel like there's way too much to say. I'll leave you with a fun one. Your buyer personas are probably wrong. They're probably wrong. What I really mean by that is they need to be revisited quite often, more than you think. People change. Industries change. There are macro trends everywhere. Things ebb and flow and shift in ways that you can't see unless you're deliberate about figuring that out.
Whatever buyer personas Superside had when we started this thing in 2019, we call them the same things, but how they buy, what they care about, what their selfish needs and desires are, they have absolutely changed. That's probably true for every single industry in every single space. I'll leave you with that. Find ways to know your buyer and know your audience.
I had to laugh at her words of wisdom!
When is the last time you went through your buyer personas, and are you using them every time someone converts or purchases?
That's probably an entire live show in the future.
Have you enjoyed today's journey? Let us know, use that hashtag #mpb2b on whatever platform you are joining us on.
