How to Ethically Steal Winning Campaign Ideas | SaaS marketing funnels

nowadays there are so many competing products and generally just a lot of noise on the internet and so it's getting increasingly difficult to capture the attention of your target audience so I'm hoping by the end of this video you'll have a better process for understanding your Target personas and how to ethically steal their own message in order to create compelling angles and campaigns now if you don't know who I am my name's Liam and over the last few years I've worked in a SAS space both as an early stage employee and nowadays I'm the founder of digiseed which helps B2B SAS companies increase conversion rates and reduce customer acquisition costs through acquisition funnels and cro and as it says on the screen we guarantee to be the current performance of your funnel or you get a full refund and you can find out more about us that offer and the types of companies we work with on our website in the description so let's jump into it so what we'll be talking about um first of all just briefly cover why the company strong able to create high performance campaigns you know campaigns that capture the attention of their target audience and and lead to you know increased reach and conversions and then I'm gonna give a step-by-step breakdown of the message mining process what it is and the steps you need to take um to be successful I've got roughly 20 to 25 slides and so I'm going to be breaking down a a live example of of how to do that so why do companies struggle to create high performing campaigns well so number one it's a lack of a uvp so unique value proposition it's no surprise there are so many competing SAS products in the market similar features similar Technologies targeting a similar audience and so a lot of SAS products just sound the same they're struggling to stand out and you sort of end up in this situation where buyers are sport for choice you know they want to buy a piece of software to help them solve a problem and there are 10 20 25 options that help them achieve that outcome and everybody sounds the same and so everybody's fighting for the attention of these buyers and obviously the best way to get ahead in those scenarios is to be unique is to stand out is to you know have a uvp and secondly not understanding the target Persona on a deep level so these are kind of interconnected um if you don't understand your Market if you don't understand your Target personas on a really deep level you know what motivates them to buy a SAS product what are their challenges in their day-to-day job if you don't understand those then you're never going to be able to craft messaging or campaigns that capture their attention right because your messaging is just simply Never Gonna resonate and the message mining process will help you get a better understanding of your target audience and then it will also help you not sound like everyone else stand out have a unique message that does capture their attention rather than sounding like everyone else because as it says here buyers have become numb to marketing lingo right even marketers right we have we have become numb to you know buzzwords and you know you visit someone's website you see their content and you can just see right through it you can just see you know they're trying to sell to you and they've got some kind of you know uh secondary agenda um and some examples these are the classic um sort of marketing lingo I constantly see when I'm you know swiping ads landing pages Etc 10x your revenue for some reason SAS companies marketers love to use 10x everything is just 10x um which obviously doesn't make a lot of sense like um and it's not realistic uh project management on autopilot um so this is sort of like uh could be vertical specific um SAS products on autopilot like again what does that mean um I think we've all accepted that software uh the whole point of software is to automate things and so we we kind of get it that you know SAS products automate things um so that's not really a unique value prop anymore and also what does autopilot mean what does you know what do you define as project management um it's not specific enough it's just very vague and sort of uh surface level similarly AI powered business intelligence so we're you know there's a lot of talk about AI at the moment rightfully so there's some impressive stuff going on you know we're using it internally to help some of our internal workflows um and it's impressive but you know as a sort of main value prop um does it stand out does it sound like you know does it sound similar to loads of other products uh probably so and then even still you know what does this even mean AI powered business intelligence like what does business intelligence mean um it's just not you know captivating and as it says here it's it's genuinely and I'm not saying this just to like uh be cringe or cliche but it's genuinely got to the point where you visit a SAS company's website and it takes minutes to decipher what they're saying what the product does why it's Unique and how it benefits you which ultimately um the three things that visitors care about right you know what do you do how do you do it and what do I get out of it um and it's it's just affecting people's growth because visitors are going to a SAS company's website they don't understand there's a lack of clarity and so they're just bouncing and they're going to the competitor who does understand the power of positioning a messaging and they're they're buying their product um I might have mentioned it before but my team and I you know we're constantly looking at SAS companies websites and there was one example where it genuinely took us two minutes a whole 120 seconds to actually start to build the picture start to understand connect the dots of what the company did right the average visitor is not going to be spending two minutes uh on your website they're going to be spending 10 30 seconds um and so if you are not answering those questions within that time um they're gone and so these messages right this is how leads process these messages right if you're sounding like everyone else but the brain starts to build patterns um and it starts to build this sort of tolerance for these messages these patterns that it's seeing in the market and so if your message contains you know these keywords like 10x they're just going to switch off they're just going to go uh you know another company trying to pitch me you know BS um I don't believe it so they're just gonna you know not engage with a campaign they're just going to swipe past your ad similar with autopilot and similar with AI powered and so you know hypothetically what's happening is their brain is processing this information and you know they're scanning your message they're scanning your copywriting your images and they're looking for patterns have I seen this before is this new information to me and if they've seen it before and they associate it with you know past experiences with bad products bad sales people and just bad experiences in general then you know the brain is just clicking the ignore button um and that's what's happening right this is a sort of a realistic visual representation of what's happening when um leads or you know prospective customers are coming across your campaigns your websites your messaging and you're using these um sort of buzzwords so that's why um companies have struggled to create high performing campaigns right simply not stand it out sounded like everyone else and um the reason why this is happening just to go off on a slight tangent is because everyone's just consuming information from the same place they go in you know top 10 campaign ideas uh how to write a good headline and they're consuming the same content as every other company all of their competitors so everyone's consuming the same content they're making the same conclusions and so they're also you know speaking to Their audience uh in the same way and so there's just no um you know uniqueness going on so message mine in uh so what is message minder so it's the process of research and instances of your buyer Persona voicing their challenges desires and fears in relation to your category and so why it's good is because instead of making assumptions on what your target audience cares about you can go directly to the source of Truth um and not just assumptions instead of you know consuming content that is you know let's say you search um you know problems that um Persona a struggles with and you come across a Blog right these pieces of content are um optimized for engagement they're not optimized for Value right they just want people to click on their website maybe they're going to ask you to opt in and sell to you via their email and so your your consuming recycled information uh when instead through message about it you can just go directly to the source of Truth and there's no middleman um it's it's just raw insights and as it says here it enables you to speak to your buyer personas in their own language really important Target pain points they actually care about and stand out in a sea of buzzwords and vanilla positioning right if I am a head of customer success struggling with you know I have a short term churn problem so you know we're struggling with onboarding customers are leaving very in the first sort of 60 to 90 days of purchasing our product um that's a really specific problem and there are probably keywords that I'm searching for there are probably specific topics subtopics on my mind and so if you can uncover what those are what those challenges are what those desires I have and you put that into your messaging and your campaigns then that is going to resonate with me rather than a campaign which is just says you know I don't know 10x your retention or AI powered retention marketing um if you actually talk about the specifics then of course your message is going to resonate with me okay so let's jump into it so message mining um so I'm going to keep this fairly high level if I was to go into too much detail here this could probably take you know two to three hours um and nobody wants to watch a two to three hour video uh so we're going to keep it high level but enough uh information um that you could walk away and understand the process so Step One is finding the watering holes I'll talk about what those are in a second and step two categorizing your Insight so you can actually leverage them in your messaging and your campaigns at the right time and then finally copy swiping you know using the precise syntax used by your target audience um to capture their attention while they're scrolling the internet uh and and your website so finding the watering holes so for this step you need to be asking yourself where does my target audience congregate on the internet so we're trying to find those watering holes uh over the internet where your target audience um is and some examples of these so private communities slack Discord uh school public forums so Reddit quora are really good and social communities so like Facebook uh LinkedIn groups um stuff like that now just one thing to note here is generally speaking um you are going to find the most valuable information in private communities um and the reason for that is pretty simple is because people are willing to be a bit more vulnerable they're willing to open up and they're willing to share sort of the the raw truth um in in private rather than you know airing their dirty laundry on social platforms and also you'll find in private communities is um some of them are quite strict on who they allow in and so often it's a bunch of peers rather than you know sales people trying to um poach them and trying to engage on their content to do some social selling and so they just you know far more open to sharing stuff and so some examples here this is actually a screenshot of my slack which looks pretty chaotic um but as you can see I'm a member of several private slack communities uh all relevant to either something we do at Digi seed or some of our client work and um people are always asking questions what they're struggling with asking for help um and you can you can really uncover like what um what are their priorities right now like what do they care about um it's just good to be a fly on the wall and see what's going on um so read it so as you can see here uh so I've just put Reddit e-commerce and we can see here there's a Reddit Community for e-commerce Founders operators I mean this is actually the example we're going to be going through uh in this video similar um so we've just put Ecom on quora and as we can see you know e-commerce the topic 2.8 million people following it um you can see uh platform specific communities so Shopify Dropship success again Amazon FBA um so depends e-commerce you know is quite broad um so if you're focusing on Shopify Founders and you probably want to you know start going to the Shopify community so you can see on the right here as well um hundreds of thousands you know in some cases millions of of people following these topics and then private slack community so just search on Google private slack Community Shopify Founders and you look at the third link down here and there's a list of e-commerce slack groups uh for founders of d2c brands from around the world so again if you can get into these communities and just be a fly on the wall see what people are talking about what questions they're asking absolutely invaluable rather than you know reading the blog um which millions of other people have done and so we're going to be going through in this video an example of Reddit and just some of the information you can uncover and some of this information we actually used as part of a client campaign um to create a high converting funnel so as we've done here this step one so Reddit e-commerce we're just going to find the e-commerce um Reddit community and then what we've done is we've just started to look through the posts in that Reddit uh community and the way Reddit Works um you know I'm not massively active on there but people basically ask questions or they um post content and then people just reply to it so just as any other sort of social platform so as we can see here on the left somebody has asked what are the biggest challenges for an e-commerce store right and as a marketer this is exactly well precisely the question you'll be asking people right um and if you do this on like LinkedIn or Twitter or anything else um you know it's probably just gonna be crickets because people don't want to air their dirty laundry whereas you know a lot of users on Reddit are Anonymous and so um they're far more comfortable sharing information you can see here um somebody has replied with a couple of things and um generally I've just highlighted the sort of important parts uh in red and so step Point number one so never compete on price um and the reason being is because um customers always looking for those prices are only loyal to price um and I don't want to be involved in a race to see how little money I can make fair enough and so competing on price three here build a loyal brand uh acquiring a customer is expensive retaining one is cheap so uh some interest here some desire to to build a brand uh and also you know a focus on uh retention Uh custom acquisition is expensive retention is cheap which is similar to most Industries um so now we're just starting to build a picture you know what do these people care about what are their worries what are their concerns um so let's go to the next one so what were your biggest challenge when you started e-commerce and what are your challenges now so here we go on the left Capital to start Capital now uh getting cheap traffic is an increasingly problem so they're getting clicks but it's low quality traffic so now we're starting to build a theme here so this person's talking about you know custom acquisition is expensive we're talking about price so there's a lot of like um Financial concerns here now we're talking about Capital to start Capital now so starting to form a picture okay you know e-commerce sounds pretty Capital intensive and then this person on the right um add cost shipping cost packaging costs everything and you actually have 10 to 15 profit so somebody actually sharing what their profit margins are here so now's again starting to build a picture you know e-commerce low profit margins um and so now we're just starting to think okay well what do these people care about what angles can I can can I create to combat that let's go further so what do new e-commerce stores owners struggle with the most so here um they're talking about so this is talking about Amazon um just the struggles of um selling on Amazon and how having like your own website is better as I can see here um easier to manage more profitable and brings in Greater overall Revenue than Amazon so again what angles can we come up with there um using sort of Amazon as the common enemy and then underneath here we've got I think the biggest challenge for any businesses to adopt a changing markets right so no surprise I'm not going to go into it but there's a lot happening in the world now and there's a lot that's happened in the world in the last three to four years um and this is what people are worrying about people businesses are going under um some of the largest tech companies in the world are uh getting rid of people um and so there's some big changes happening and I think things are only going to get worse um and so that's a genuine anxiety for a lot of business owners uh right now so again as a marketer we're thinking you know how can we um play that into our messaging and then this one has done a poll um so again we can just you know instantly see what uh people's priorities are um so they've asked a question what are your biggest e-commerce problems right now and so there are 83 votes um 20 have said uh sorry 20 votes brand awareness 27 driving traffic 19 supply chain Logistics so we can see you know these are some key areas uh we can see what people actually care about and it seems like you know driving new traffic um is the biggest priority here and then supply chain and Logistics another big priority right as somebody's external to the e-commerce space you know has I have some experience in that space but to me you know I wouldn't have thought supply chain Logistics um would have been you know up there with with the other ones in this um and so we're just uncovering things that we wouldn't wouldn't have known otherwise and so brand awareness driving new traffic top two and then supply chain Logistics and as we can see increasing customer loyalty is actually you know bottom two um now something to consider here is you know what's the well first of what's the sample size so it's 83 votes is that um statistical significance probably not um and also who are these people um you know what Revenue do they have what what verticals are they and that kind of stuff um but it does help you regardless um start building that picture um and as it says here sort of done the gun here trust but verify um you know a lot of this information can be filled with bias uh again you know not every e-commerce operator is going to be um in these Reddit threads uh responding to these questions um and so some of the answers might not be completely accurate and so you need to verify this information yourself you need to get information from multiple sources so you can then start to build the picture and so as it says here trust but verify so this is actually a real exercise I conducted but what I did is I started to look for e-commerce uh surveys so rather than you know relying on a sample size of 83 people um you know are there any sort of mass research verified research um that has been conducted that I can draw insights from so here's this website verifying.com which is a a credible Source um and I just took a screenshot of one of the things from this website feel free to check it out um but it says the customer journey is strategic focused in 2022 and so as it says here a personalization of the customer Journey continues to be a top Focus for merchants noted by 42 of respondents um and then yeah so here we've got building brand awareness and optimization so that's something interesting if I was a SAS product operating in the e-commerce space perhaps you know touching on the personalization of the customer Journey tailoring the buy-in experience maybe that's a sort of I want to bake that into my value prop um again these are just sort of little bits you can take um to use in your in your marketing so quick recap on on what we've seen uh so far so low profit margins uh we've seen across the board a lot of people talk about this if you're in the e-commerce space obviously this won't be a surprise to you e-commerce notoriously have e-commerce businesses and a tourists so you have low profit margins Capital intensive obviously um um opposed to software where it's very scalable depending on um you know the product you're selling the market Etc but software is inherently scalable right um the whole thing of um build once sell multiple times whereas um e-commerce is in the physical world and so to sell products you need to have physical products and so there's that upfront capital investment of getting those products and before in a lot of cases when you're starting you haven't even made a pound yet you only made a dollar so it's very Capital intensive um don't compete on price uh because it's just a race to the bottom and your customers won't be loyal to you they'll just sort of you know jump ship at the next opportunity high quality traffic is expensive uh makes sense um you know none of these are sort of uh groundbreaking very similar for all Industries uh build brand loyalty for long-term success um so this is sort of you know um how you combat um the the competing on prices you actually just build a brand so people will come back to they're buying you for you know the emotions that you give them the feel the community rather than uh just on your price and personalizing the customer Journey as we saw in the the research survey so another source of where we can um find information raw information from our target audience as part of the message mining process so reviews um so here's one click upsell by zipify so a popular Shopify app and now you probably noticed the pattern here just doing this sort of thought for e-commerce uh so if you use like a SAS product and service in e-commerce brands um so we've gone straight to the one star reviews um you know obviously this is going to bring some bias because they're all going to be negative but this is really good for understanding what people care about their anxieties their objections um because that's what you want to bake into marketing but you also do want to you know look at positive reviews as well and because that shows you what people are motivated by and what they care about and so here we can see in this review uh they're talking about how this app destroyed uh their buttons um and due to just taking so long to load so we can see there's some sort of issues with the integration here and some technical things happening where uh perhaps um there's a lot of code that's been installed which has like slowed down the website or perhaps it has just been bad code which is uh throw in errors um so the sort of theme here is some issues with like the integration of the product which is massive when it comes to SAS right um next one so here we can see they're saying stay away from this app um so it has utterly ruined my checkout alright so strong roads here uh strong words which doesn't work after adding to carton have had to pay developers to remove the code right so we're starting to see a pattern here now and there are issues with integrating this app uh getting it to work and then in this example uh so difficulty integrating with all um I think it's supposed to say conversion pixel tracking Solutions the lack of integration with conversion pixel tracking is simply too restrictive right so these are more so uh like the implementation of the product um so the zip file this is all to do of like checkouts and um uh upsells pre-purchase post purchase um whereas this one is more talking about like product integration so integrating the data from that product out to sort of third-party tools um and an important one right um conversion pixels that so you can track your purchases retarget people and it seems like they're having some issues with this and so looking at a positive one we don't want to just you know skew our results with negative ones only of course this is just for example sake anyway but here we can see this person has said they had the best onboarding experience they've ever received in the 19 years of being a business owner so this is very Punchy right um saying they've single-handedly made them a customer for life um it takes a lot for somebody to write a review uh like this especially you know a sort of senior business owner typically very direct people um hard to please and so for them to write this review is really big and so you need to pay attention to you know what motivated them to write this review and clearly it was a non-born experience so as a marketer thinking okay that's obviously something that motivates this person how can I use it as an angle um can I just use that as one of my value props when writing our copy so we've looked at a bunch of this information that we found on Reddit on the Shopify Marketplace reviews um and so now you know you should probably have a spreadsheet with dozens of rows filled with information um but you need to categorize that information because what's really important when it comes to copywriting and and just sort of offer an angle creation is you need to use the right message at the right time and that sounds quite cliche uh probably something that said a lot so what does that really mean right what it means is um if you're targeting a cold audience you know strangers who have never heard of of you before then you're going to use a different message to that audience than you would to somebody who's already visited your website and you're retargeting them or somebody who is at checkout about to purchase and so you would definitely use a different message um for those people and so it's similar with this information that we found you know if you scratch beneath the surface that you can uncover you know whether what they're talking about is something that motivates them to buy a product is it something that prevents them from buying a product and so you want to use those messages uh in different ways and so three categories um at a high level you can go deeper than this is motivation value proposition and anxiety and so to break these down so for motivation uh what we want to be asking ourselves here is what motivates them to make a purchase and so these are you know desired outcomes things they care about again SAS products are just a vehicle people use to get to some uh end destination um and so what is that destination where are they trying to go and why do they want to go there what challenges are they trying to solve um and purchase prompts and then for Value prop what we want to be thinking about you know what do they need to to see and hear how do we um sell that transformation you know what do they need to hear from us um to picture that and so we want to be talking about unique benefits nice to haves uh deal breakers and if you look at the messages that we've just gone through you can start to see which buckets those messages um go in you know is it something that would motivate them um is it more on the value prop side or anxiety so what could stop them from purchasing so this is like what would motivate them to purchase now it's you know well what would stop them what would prevent them from Crossing that line and so these are uncertainties objections and perceived risks so um let's go through some examples um so I haven't done it for all of them but it's just really for example sake so on the motivation side and we can see for one of the first messages we came across um they cared about building a loyal brand for their e-commerce company and the reason being is because acquiring a customer is really expensive um and so you know there's there's far more of a motivation to retain those customers to build a brand to build that community so they're not just seeing you as a commodity they're seeing they're seeing you as something they feel a part of you know they're emotionally connected to and so if we were if you were creating new angles new campaigns then you know this is something you should definitely be thinking about uh sprinkling this into your value prop you know linking your product to building a brand um and then touching on these challenges you know acquiring customers expensive retain one is cheap you know planting that seed um you know you're gonna resonate with them if if you talk about those kind of things and so for Value prop we're talking about the um the zipper fight example here so this person was complaining about the integration with conversion pixels and so if I was a competing product here then I would be talking about this I'd be talking about how we enable you know one click Integrations with conversion pixels you know easily install your metapixel I'd be showing examples of that I'd be helping them visualize that you know that would be at the Forefront because as we can see that's obviously a weak point um for this product and then anxiety so what would be preventing people from buying my product so here we can see um this person who had issues with the implementation of this product and so their anxiety when they're looking at these products in the market is you know is this going to break my checkout like that other product did am I gonna have to pay developers to implement this is it going to waste my in-house developers times and so a way to combat this through your your messaging is just talking about how easy it is to implement you know no code implementation um you could literally say you know you don't have to bother your developers because this person has been burned and so I have many others and this is clearly a weak point for this product and so that's the anxiety people are going to be having is you know how what does the implementation of this product look like is it going to take long is it going to waste time and so we can use that to our advantage and then final step copy swiping so this is where we're you know using these insights to now create our headlines our campaigns our angles and so what you want to be thinking here is what is the precise syntax used by your target audience that you can swipe to create compelling headlines and campaign angles so looking at all this information we've found across the internet how can we now leverage that to benefit our company um to Target those pain points to speak about those outcomes to you know handle those uh objections that people are going to be thinking about and so some examples here um so build a law brand there's obviously a desire amongst e-commerce companies to build a brand with their audience and so that's a desire that's something we want to be talking about how can we link our product to build and loyal brand so you don't have to compete on price so this is obviously um a challenge for e-commerce Brands it's competing on price you know race to the bottom being a commodity and so maybe um your product can be linked to that is so they don't have to compete on price they can create their own lane they don't have to compete with everyone else they can create their own uh blue ocean without profit killing discounts um so you know e-commerce Brands we've identified very Capital intensive low profit margins and so brands are going to be reluctant to give you know just handout discounts willy-nilly to customers because one they lose margins but two are also cheap instead brand it trains the customer to believe okay well I can just get a discount from this company all the time um and so you know maybe you can link your product to that you know well you don't have to do that anymore through our product because it's going to increase um the perceived value and so you don't have to use discounts anymore without frustrating your developers so this is more on like the technical side of the implementation the the Integrations um you know this is an anxiety uh e-commerce brands are going to have you know it this product sounds great but you know RMI developers going to be able to implement this do they have the time um and so you can use this to handle those objections in your copy in your campaigns um and then finally without breaking your checkout right this is a very specific one um but you know checkout is the most important part of your of the e-commerce shopping experience uh you know you can have a great front-end store but people can't check out and purchase your product well then you have no Revenue right and so this is sort of the Achilles heel of of the e-commerce Brands and so um perhaps you can talk about this somehow in your value prop you know if you are competing with these products um you could use this in your copy you know without breaking your checkout on Instagram think okay yeah I remember that bad experience um let's check these guys out and it's just a way to to stand out now I think that's it so I'm not sure how long this this one has gone for but hopefully you found that valuable message mining really really really um powerful to use as part of your like campaign and angle ideation process um I recommend you know trying it for yourself just go down those rabbit holes on the internet where your target audience congregates um just be a fly on the wall maybe even ask questions or ask to hop on people hop on calls with people DM them um but you're gonna find your high performing angles in in these places um so always try to go to the to the source of Truth rather than consuming content that is uh optimized for engagement right you always want to find the unfiltered truth so I hope you found that valuable if you have any questions um if you'd like to learn more just reach out to me and I'd be happy to help right see you on the next one