B2B SaaS Marketing – Edward Ford

Who is Edward Ford?

Edward Ford is the Head of Demand Gen at Supermetrics. He joined the company at an early stage three and a half years ago and has seen the company grow during his time there.

Ford has always worked in marketing, tech, SaaS and sales. Before joining Supermetrics, he worked in many roles in marketing both in an agency and client-side.

–  I used to host a podcast called the Growth Hub. We started that in 2017 and focused on interviewing great marketers, CEOs, founders and leaders from the world of B2B SaaS. We grew that to over 100.000 downloads, Ford tells about his past experience.

Seeing Supermetrics Grow from within

Because Ford joined Supermetrics early on, he didn’t start as the Head of Demand Gen, but has worked very broadly within marketing. 

– When I first started, there were three other people in the marketing team. The four of us literally sat around the same table. Currently, the Marketing Team consists of almost 30 people and there are 300 people working at Supermetrics altogether, Ford reminisces about his time at Supermetrics.

Thanks to joining the company early on, Ford has done:

• content marketing
• customer marketing
• product launches
• product marketing 
• sales enablement
• brand marketing
• performance marketing
• demand marketing

As the company grew, Ford was able to go from doing marketing broadly and horizontally to becoming very focused on doing only demand generation. He now leads the demand generation team.

B2B SaaS Terms Defined

Supermetrics recently broke the 50M in ARR, which is a huge milestone for any company. This means that they’ve really nailed down how to do marketing in the B2B SaaS field. 

Let’s have a look at how Ford defines the most common terms used when talking about marketing in B2B SaaS.

SaaS

There are two ways to define software as a service: functional and aspirational. 

– The functional is a cloud-based software that is typically sold through subscription, Ford clarifies.

– The aspirational SaaS is where a lot of the work happens today. Most of the time when I’m working, I’m operating on one or multiple SaaS platforms. This applies to all teams including Sales, HR, finance and not just marketing, he continues.

Ford then goes on to describe all the different platforms he uses on a daily basis to get his work done. 

B2B

– In my opinion, people always buy from people. The only difference between B2C and B2B is whether the buyer uses their own or the company’s money, Ford clarifies.

He says that this is the most common aspect people get confused about. Even though B2B is business to business, one shouldn’t forget the human side of things. Often, B2B marketing tactics tend to be outdated in this matter.

– A lot of the B2C playbook is finding its way to B2B, which is a good thing, he continues.

ARR

ARR refers to annual recurring revenue. 

– Basically, this is your twelve month runway. If you reached 50 million in ARR, you should aim to maintain and grow it. In other words, to not lose more subscribers in value than what you’re able to maintain and grow, Ford summarizes.

Customer Acquisition Sources

When you’re doing SaaS marketing (or marketing in general), it’s important to pay attention to where your customers are coming from.

Here are three customer acquisition sources Ford considers important at the moment.

Marketplaces 

Marketplaces can be a big part of the business. 

– We put a lot of time and effort into marketplace optimization, reviews, updating our descriptions and listing images and messaging. We’re tracking quite carefully our position in those marketplaces.

This might not be as important to all businesses, but if some of your business comes from marketplaces, you should focus on this.

Paid 

Supermetrics does paid advertising that aims to get conversions, but they also use it for creating brand awareness.

– We’ve created different campaigns that can be browsed while you scroll through Instagram while watching a movie in the evening, Ford says.

Organic

As for all businesses, organic traffic is valuable for Supermetrics as well.

– Positioning CTAs is a huge part in guiding your customer to either start a free trial or chat with us, Ford emphasizes.

It’s a Combination

Ford reminds us that doing effective marketing involves being creative and active in many areas, and it’s sometimes impossible to track the results directly.

– As an example, you can do brand marketing, events, podcasts, have people on your team post on LinkedIn every week and launch campaigns that speak about the high-level messaging and the challenges we as marketers face when it comes to operating with data. All these actions are important and will at the end of the day bring in results, but you can’t pinpoint their exact value, Ford lists.

Creating Demand vs. Capture Demand

Marketing is often targeted at the end of the funnel and its results focus on generating leads. There’s a huge underlying difference between capturing existing demand and actually creating demand.

– We consider Demand Gen to consist of two parts: creating demand and capturing demand, Ford states.

Ford’s team focuses heavily on creating demand as he feels it’s the marketing team’s responsibility to create demand. It can be that you’re creating demand from nothing, so you start with making your target audience realize they have a problem. Only after they’ve noticed they have a problem, you can position yourself to be the solver.

– What’s the narrative behind our product? Who are we telling the story to? How do we adapt that story to different ICPs? What are the channels we should use to reach the target audience? What kind of frequency are we looking for? These are the questions you need to ask yourself, Ford summarizes.

New Marketing Experiments Supermetrics Made this Year:

• Online events
• More money allocated on paid social media ads
• Producing podcasts
• Organized a face to face event 
• Plans on trying TikTok
• Becoming more regional in terms of marketing

Other topics discussed

• Story of Supermetrics explained with few milestones
• How Supermetrics reached 5 million ARR without a single sales person
• Marketplaces as separate ecosystems
• The dark funnel in marketing
• Allocating resources for different marketing channels
• Go-to-market story
• Biggest challenges in marketing at the moment
• Future of Supermetrics