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Mastering SaaS Marketing: Insights from Approveit's CMO, Kate

CMO of Approveit

In this episode of Wytpod, host Harshit Gupta, Director of Business Alliances at Wytlabs, chats with Kate Dalessi, the CMO of Approveit, a leading business operations automation platform. Kate shares her unique journey from an engineer to a marketing leader, offering insights into the pivotal moments that shaped her approach. She discusses the key lead channels that have driven growth for Approveit, their recent pivot to a product-led strategy, and the success of their marketing campaigns, including a standout launch on Product Hunt. The conversation delves into effective SEO tactics, the use of AI for research, and challenges faced in the competitive SaaS market. Tune in to learn about innovative strategies for generating leads, optimizing conversions, and fostering customer retention.

Approveit is a versatile business operations automation platform streamlining workflows, from project management to financial processes.

Kate Dalessi
CMO of Approveit

Hello, everyone, and welcome to another Wytpod episode. My name is Harshit. I’m the Director of Business Alliances at Wytlabs. We’re a digital agency specializing in SaaS and e-commerce SEO. I’ve got Kate with me today. She’s the CMO of Approveit, a brilliant business operations automation platform. So bring us some care, Kate. I’m so happy to have you with me today.

I’m happy to be here. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me.

Now, can you please share a bit about your journey in the field of marketing and what led you to your current role? How has CMU approved it?

I started in the world as an engineer, actually, in a completely different field. I was working in transport engineering. And once I’ve exhausted all my nervous cells in that career, I felt like there was a need for a shift. I started copywriting as a freelancer. It was very fruitful for me since I am quite versed in languages. It’s just a natural talent of mine, and I was leveraging it to the max. Then one of the customers that I was working for as a freelancer, offered me a full-time marketing role, which I gladly accepted, and that’s how my journey started in marketing. I worked in that lovely startup for a while. It was pretty small but very insightful. It was a B2C platform for designers. However, that startup closed not very long after I joined it, and then I revisited my copywriting skills and worked a little bit as a freelancer again. Then the whole story repeated itself. I was offered a marketing position by one of the customers that I’ve been working for, and I’ve worked my way to a CMO position and improved it that way.

That’s amazing. Now, what are the pivotal moments or experiences in your career that shaped your marketing approach?

I can’t pinpoint a single moment. It was more of a journey for me because I’ve been exploring marketing from knowing nothing about it to being allowed to call myself a CMO. Let’s put it that way. I’ve been reading up on a lot of experts and good books like Psychology of Influence and all those milestone books that you have to go through. Then I listen to experts like Ran Fishkin and shape my approaches. Can’t It’s not a point of point, a moment, but more of a way.

Got you. Then talking about Approved, what are the main lead channels for you that have been particularly working brilliantly when it comes to just generating sales-qualified leads for your business?

I am very happy with how we’re leveraging the marketplaces of the platforms that we integrate with. Specifically, Slack and Microsoft Teams marketplaces are showing themselves as an excellent source of highly qualified leads, and people from those marketplaces are aware already of the solution that we’re offering and they’re looking for it. I would say that if we’re talking about the stages of qualification from zero, knowing nothing about it, not being a solution to five, and being completely ready to purchase, we’re getting threes and fours from there easily. That’s a very good source of leads for us and organic traffic. Despite us not having super high numbers, it is a solid source of leads for Approved right now.

Nice. You’re also investing a lot in paid campaigns, paid as well, right?

That’s an interesting story because we just started at campaigns, I would say two I think we started our testing phase. We are right now testing this as an acquisition channel since we pivoted our strategy. We recently released our pricing in the open because before we were mostly on a sales-driven approach, and now we’re switching to PLG, which allows us to be more open with our customers about our approaches and our plans, about the prices. We’ve released a free tier for Approvals with that pivot. That is the reason why we decided to leverage paid ads, because usually in the B2B sector, paid ads are not the highest ROI acquisition channel. We did not leverage it before, but offering a free tier may just offer us some traction in the field that we can then leverage to sell.

Okay. Can you please walk us through a recent marketing campaign that you’re particularly proud of and what made it successful?

Successful or We are still proud of our recent launch on product hands. It was a big campaign. We prepared for it for a long time. Unfortunately, we did not get featured on the main page. However, we still managed to get more than 200 upvotes. It was great. Our team worked hard and the support of the community was amazing. Marketing is all about people anyway. Even if you’re in the B2B sector, in the SaaS sector, you’re still talking and selling to people. Despite us not getting featured on the main page, unfortunately, we did We had quite a good spike of traffic that day and the boost in registrations. That is exactly what we were going for since we already have this number-one product of the day badge from one of our previous launches. We weren’t hunting for that, particularly. We just needed people to hear about us, and it worked. We’re very happy with that.

Now, talking a bit more on the basics, basically, how do you approach creating and executing a marketing plan for a SaaS company?

I approach it. If you ask me how you approach it, literally, then I just sit down and do it because there’s nothing else to be done here. But I think you’re going for a slightly more in-depth answer.  Hence the paid ads that we just discussed that previously we did not work with because Google Ads and CTOs and CEOs of 500-plus employee companies don’t go together very as well. But when we’re talking about startups and small businesses who are just surfing the internet searching for solutions, now we’re talking to them.

And that’s where we leverage the channel. So that’s how I approach it.

Now, I’m going to be a little bit biased and just try to understand What are you focused on SEO mainly. Please tell me, what specific strategies, when it comes to your search engine optimization, have been fruitful for you?

The number one thing that gave us a boost in Month Over Month traffic recently was investing in our website health, and technical health, specifically. It was always on the higher side, like 70 plus, but now we have achieved a 90% website health mark. That is pretty impressive if you ask me, but I am biased, though it does give us a very good ramp in the traffic acquisition. Also, we tried, and it worked, acquiring a backlink from Google itself by creating an extension for Google Chrome, a private extension for Google Chrome. That gives us a backlink from Google marketplace, which is Google itself, which reinforces the domain rating and also creates more trust in Google in your domain. That worked out as well.

Any specific SEO challenges that you have faced and how did you overcome them?

We are facing challenges. One of them is our product is quite niche and it speaks to a very specific audience. Keyword volmes and search volumes are not very high and the competition is very high because products that optimize business operations like Approovit do exist in the market and have existed in the market for decades before we entered this competitive field. We do face the challenge of gigantic companies dominating this search, but we’re getting there slowly. We’re pinpointing the words that are still unoccupied, so to speak, and can create content around it to make it useful and fruitful for us as well.

That’s brilliant. I think that’s the way to go. You figure out the good variations, you figure out low competition keywords, and make the most of it. If they are transactional, that’s just the cherry on top.

Yeah, definitely. Definitely. I would say that this is a good way to start for any business just to go for the content that is a low-hanging fruit, so to speak, that is there and available. But year to year, those keywords are more scarce. Starting the SEO efforts, you’re already one day too late, if you haven’t yet, but the second best day is today.

I agree. All right. What specific tools or methods do you use to keep track of your SEO performance and what KPIs do you prioritize?

We are leveraging Semrush as our main source of data and Google Search Console as our main source of organic insights because sometimes Semrush does not pick up on a lot of the insights that you can find in the search console. I wouldn’t rely on that solely. Just leveraging both tools gives us the broadest picture. Of course, we are using Google Analytics, but I do not rely on it as a good source of information. It’s more of a trend observation from our side than a reliable data source because it cuts a lot of data and misrepresents some of it. Unfortunately, I know that a lot of marketers are not happy with the performance of Google Analytics on their sites. I’m among them and we’re just using it as a source of information to make my team see the trends. That’s all. But Our main tool is Semrush for keyword research and backlink optimization and all these lovely things. All right.

Any other analytics you prepare for tracking down the performance of your website and the user Usability on the side?

We’re using Hotjar to do specifically that to understand the usability and the hotspots of the website where people are clicking and paying attention the most.

Okay. I would love to understand what a typical real conversion and optimization process looks like.

First of all, I have noticed that what you write on the button and what color your button, is matters. With A/B testing and trying different things, The location of the buttons has to also be in the correct spots so that the eye catches the action first and everything else later. Also, the action that you prefer people to take has It has to be more highlighted than the additional actions that you also added to your website. Adding CTAs should be consistent. We’ve been also exploring the A/B testing of how the text on the buttons should be. It should be the same all over the page or should it vary? It should be the same in our humble opinion because it just confuses people. They think that if you write different text on two buttons that do the same thing, they get confused and they are thinking that there are two different actions that you expect them to perform, which is not true. That is a conversion optimization thing. Also, the word free is always a good driver of conversions. If you’re going for registrations or a free trial or free version, these are thethe very obvious things\I’m hardly saying anything new, but that’s the truth that we have discovered for ourselves. I think that would be it. Also, import information on your website should be out in the open because if you hide it even behind a scroller or a carousel or any other content, in our experience, it’s inefficient. If you want people to see something, it has to be like Bam, there. And no other options as far as I’m concerned.

Yeah, makes sense. When it comes to your customer retention side of things, just to have a good improvement on the churn rate factor altogether, what specific strategies do you have in place to ensure that the customer sticks to the platform for a long?

I have to confess, that Approovit does not have churn. Almost at all. We’re over 90% retention. I think it’s due to the nature of our product, because once you implement something into your workflows. It’s very hard to get rid of it. It’s very hard to sit on something else. It’s hard to stop using it. If it works for you, if you’re happy with it, if the product fulfills your requirements, then why would you churn? You wouldn’t, right? Our main task and goal is to onboard users because onboarding is the biggest challenge. It’s the part where most teams struggle, specifically when you have to onboard not the champion, not the person you’re talking to, but the whole team. Our average customer has over 50 employees on their team. Imagine you figured out a platform, and now you have to do the same for 50 other people, 50 or sometimes 500 other people. That’s where the main challenge arises. So Approovit has a strategy in place for that. There’s a self-onboarding that is very detailed, but not long enough to put you to sleep. So you can stay focused, but explore the platform well and hit all the milestones of the exploring without actually getting bored.

We’ve been working on that a lot, A/B testing that a lot, and now I’m proud to say that it’s up and about, and people are not hating it, which is amazing. I’m following the progress of our users on Hotjar, and that makes me hopeful that this onboarding to be a good idea. Also, there is, of course, a free trial right now It wasn’t there before. It is there now. Helping the team to explore the product during their first week and a sequential first month is the most important. It’s a crucial moment because if it sticks during that time, it will stick forever. We have a team of amazing customer success managers who are extremely professional, and very versed in the product, and they assist our users to help them adopt, and approve it, and it works very well. The personal touch works very well in there.

Okay. Any specific reason why you did not go for just integrating an interactive demo on your site instead of offering a premium version of the software? It’s very interesting.

Yeah, there is a reason. An interactive demo is reading a chemistry book. You read a chemistry book and it seems very interesting, and okay, fine. But the free trial is you conducting a chemical experiment. You’re experiencing what happens there. You’ll see the use case that you want because Approveit is a very versatile platform. We handle everything from project management to accounts, payable management, and all the stops in between. You can manage time off, you can manage finances, budgeting, whatever you want because it’s a constructor. You can put all the blocks, and constructor blocks in the order that you want. That makes a challenge out of creating a universal demo. Because if I came there to manage my time off and you’re showing me accounts payable, this just doesn’t click. I would have to create an endless amount of interactive demos for our users to be able to select one, and that would have proven a big challenge, technically and time-wise. It’s much more productive and much easier to just open up the platform and let people explore whatever they came there to explore.

All right. Any new emerging marketing trends that you’re seeing or are really excited about or maybe planning to take those initiatives within the organization?

I love, again, being corny here, but I love AI research, leveraging AI for research, specifically, because I do not enjoy AI content creation. I’m not being skeptical. I’m just being human-oriented in that regard. I know that AI-generated content works for a lot of brands, and it has to be managed properly just to work. But I just call it my personal bias. I prefer the human touch in these thin however I love leveraging AI for research and minor tasks like keyword optimization checks. I create a brief for my content creator, and I Then take the text that they give me, upload it into the AI, and together with the brief, I ask, How well optimized is this content to this brief that I gave to my content creator? It gives me a pretty fair outline. It saves me a lot of time in detailed analysis of the text that they provide to me. I love that. That saves me a ton of time.

How do you see AI and machine learning influencing the future of marketing in a field?

I don’t think it influences the future. I think it influences the present very much. I see it as a tool. I don’t see AI. I know that a lot of people see AI as something threatening, as something that will take over their jobs. Bad news, if AI can take over your job, you should find a better job. Because honestly, I see AI as a great tool that can be leveraged to achieve batch results faster. But It shouldn’t be relied on as a source of truth, God forbid, or as a substitute for a human writer, because you still have to optimize and explore and fact check and add useful information that ChatGPT or any other AI platform cannot access, right? Yeah. This is something that is already happening, and it will keep happening, and it will ramp up, and then everything else, it’ll come down. People come down. Remember how they said that television is going to kill radio, and then the internet is going to kill television? But those things coexist, and very comfortably, too. This is exactly what I foresee in the future of AI and marketing. This is just going to be a coexistence of existing strategies.

I agree. All right. If, say, you have to mention one marketing strategy or tactic that didn’t work out like you planned out, what would that be for you? And any specific learning from that experience?

Facebook ads.

Okay.

Yeah. We did our research before trying Facebook ads, and we concluded that none of our competitors leveraged Facebook ads. That was a sign on its own, but still trying on our own is always the way to go as far as I’m concerned. We did and got a very predictable result of zero conversions. It’s very explained by the fact that at the time, we were a platform with closed pricing, we were sales-driven. We were relying on our sales team a lot in customer acquisition. It’s clear that the user who is scrolling through our Facebook feed, stopped by our ad, will click on it, and then find no information that they want to proceed. How much does it cost? What does it take to get there? They are asked to book a demo call without really knowing why. That was the point of the journey that was broken, and that’s why it didn’t work out. I am not saying that Facebook ads are no-go for SaaS marketing.

We’ve done for groups as well, which are pretty active and working out for the SaaS industry.

Yeah, exactly. It’s just that for our case at the time, that wasn’t safe. I am going to try it again, though. I will make it different. I will make the barrier to the entryway lower, and I will make it easier for users to get in touch with us, to talk to us, to touch our brand, and to explore it. I hope it will work.

Can you try only lead gen ads or remarketing ads were also part of the whole campaign?

In social media, remarketing is a go-to strategy, but first, you have to observe the audience. We’re also going to work with lookalike audiences. We have a pretty good pool of customers and leads that we can build a lookalike audience. So this is going to be a part of our strategy.

What is the top row, of your marketing team for the next term?

I would say that search engine optimization is our number one because I want more organic leads, and I see that it’s possible. Our growth and our competitor’s growth prove the fact that it’s doable, and the field is very warm in terms of people are looking for solutions like ours actively on Google. Leveraging that would be our number one. We already is our number of priority. We’re creating a separate section on our website that will be dedicated to explaining the terms that we’re using inside a product, especially finance-related, to make the barrier to entry, again, lower, to introduce more informational keywords that drive a lot of organic clicks that in turn drives our domain rating up and in turns allows us to leverage commercial intent better. That is something that we have already planned and laid out and are going to be implementing.

Brilliant. Good luck to you and your team. Now, Kate, we’re coming to an end, and I would love to have a quick rapid buy with you. Are you ready for that? Shit. If you could have dinner with any marketing legend, who would it be?

I don’t know if he’s a legend, but I do enjoy the talk of Rand Fishkin on the internet. I would love to have dinner with that guy.

Okay. What career did you dream of having as a kid?

I wanted to be a ballerina.

Oh, okay. What’s your favorite brand mascot of all time?

Lacoste, Crocodile.

Okay. What’s one marketing trend that you hope never dies?

People selling to people.

Okay.

Yeah. Not treating marketing as B2B marketing, specifically, as you’re talking to a business and everything has to be serious and everything has to be very all strict. But you’re talking to a person. Even if you’re talking to a CEO of a huge corporation, you’re talking to a person, and diving into that person’s motivations is what has been a trend in marketing for quite a while, and it persists, and I’m glad, and I hope it doesn’t die.

All right. Now, going to your very last question. If you had an unlimited budget for one campaign, what would you do?

I’d create crazy creatives. I’d create crazy copy and maybe 30, 50, 100 times different things and just A/B test all over and over again until I find the perfect crazy copy that works. I have been following a very fun page that is called Surreal on LinkedIn. It’s the brand of Serial. They are approaching marketing with so much humor and bigger, and they’re testing all sorts of theories, I love what they’re doing, and I’d love to do the same.

Since you mentioned crazy, I would love to know how many tech campaigns that you have ever seen work-related.

I have seen quite a bit. I think Japan would be my number one country in the rating of crazy advertisements because sometimes it starts off something completely different from what they’re going for. I don’t have an example from the top of my head right now, but Japanese ads are the ones to watch if you’re going for creative inspiration.

All right, Kate. Thank you so much. This was a fun conversation. I appreciate your time here with me sharing your insights. Thank you so much.

Thank you so much for having me. It was a pleasure, and it was nice meeting you. I hope we can stay in touch.

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