The RevUp growth team keeps a close eye on hot topics, emerging trends, and new tools. Each month we pick a few of our favorites articles or videos to share. Here are the top picks for September 2019.
Top Picks for Both B2B AND B2C:
“How Long Does It Take for Content Marketing to Work” – Grow and Convert
TDLR: This article breaks down tactically how to think about and track content marketing and whether the investment is worthwhile for a company to invest in (only if it results in quality traffic and qualified leads!). Includes B2B and B2C examples and strategies.
RevUp Take: Chock full of goodness, from GA attribution tricks to specific case studies, this is an article we wish we’d written ourselves. Paired with Grow and Convert’s article on Pain Point SEO, a great foundation to build your own realistic content strategy and timeline.
Conversational Marketing: Trend or Tried & True Tool?
A few weeks ago a handful of RevUp founders and some members of our team went over to Drift, one of a new generation of companies focused on conversational marketing. Shout out to Sean Lane for leading us in the conversation about the role conversational marketing can play in sales and marketing. What’s our take on this hot trend? While the final verdict may still be out, there’s mounting evidence that using this real-time, feedback-oriented approach to nurturing leads is well worth exploration. Here’s a summary of our POV.The Six Values (and Four Benefits) of Agile Marketing – Whiteboard Friday
The dynamism of the marketing landscape forces the “winners” in your segments to iterate quickly and intelligently within your marketing efforts. To do this well, you have to put procedures and mindsets into place within your companies that set expectations around experimentation, staying current, and working between departments on growth objectives.
RevUp Take: Agile is very “in” right now, but it’s not a fleeting trend. Rapid iteration, a testing mindset, and other tenets of this approach are seriously helpful for your company to adopt. And if you like how RevUp has worked with you to date...well, no surprise, it’s part of our secret sauce too.
Marketing Examples is a newsletter with a website archive of case studies. The examples cover a really wide range of B2C and B2B, and manage to be simultaneously detailed and engaging.
RevUp Take: This is someone’s labor of love, and we hope they keep putting in the work. Read a few of these, from Cold Email to Referral, and SEO to Pricing, and you’ll be hooked. We use Distilled marketing as well, but this beats it for thoughtful additional insight, not just a link collection. Sign up for the newsletter, mostly for the reminder to come back.
For B2C Companies
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Direct to Consumer Review – Churn Busters
Features some great examples of retention-based customer engagement (including RevUp portfolio company Felix Grey!). Including content that doesn’t have an explicit product sell, brand-centered imagery and brand-consistent messaging can build rapport with your audience in ways that overtly salesy messaging may not.
RevUp Take: An easy read full of some great ideas, don’t miss this post if you’re doing any DTC activity. From “flexing” your brand messaging in new ways to embracing retention as a goal for all of your touchpoints with customers, these are insights you’ll want to pass along to your marketing team. With a name like Churn Busters, what’s not to like?
Ultimate Guide to Black Friday and Cyber Monday Marketing - OptInMonster
October (or sooner!) is the time to prep for the holiday sales season. This blog post provides a walkthrough of the end-to-end process as well as some helpful to consider as you plan and then execute on a holiday sales effort.
RevUp Take: Anyone else find the holiday season less than restful running a B2C business? Fact is, it takes serious work to get Q4 right, and this is a fairly comprehensive guide to help you prep. From pricing options to server load testing to optimizing check-out, no shortage of initiatives you should have on your wishlist this year.
For B2B Companies
Why Successful SaaS Startups Fumble and Fail to Scale – Forget the Funnel
TLDR: The author navigates a common bias that technology companies undervalue/mismanage marketing’s contribution to success during the start-up-to-scalable business transition.
RevUp Take: We cannot overstate this - after you pay to acquire a customer the first time, there is ABSOLUTELY still value to gain from them via “land and expand,” referrals, reviews, and other tactics. The top of the funnel is but one stage, and it may not be where your biggest business opportunities live. Also, can we get some “Growth ≠ Acquisition” t-shirts printed?
Groundbreaking SaaS Company Content Marketing Examples – Chintan Zalani
Brand is increasingly becoming a differentiator in the crowded SaaS marketplace. Content marketing is one of the best tools available to SaaS companies building a presence, and yet it commonly falls short of being a distinctive part of their overall success. Across some high profile examples, the author breaks down what great content marketing can do to move the needle.
RevUp Take: Lessons we enjoyed reading here: 1) “Each piece of content we publish has to help our target audience in a way that no one else can.” Bold thinking. 2) When incorporating experts into your content, be good to them by linking to their content as well. Sharing is caring. 3) Narrative creates readership. Check out Groove’s engagement numbers between “no story” pieces and “story” pieces that tell of a compelling use case. Night and day results.
About RevUp Capital
RevUp Capital is non-equity investment for companies moving fast up a revenue-driven growth curve. We pair cash investment with support from the RevUp Growth Platform, a science-based and battle-tested approach to accelerating growth. Companies also receive active support from RevUp leadership, an experienced team with more than 130 investments under management.
For more information, please visit www.revupfund.com or via email at info@revupfund.com.