Guerrilla Growth Tactics for Startups

Eric Eden: 0:59

Welcome to today's episode. Our guest today is Anne Laffin. She is a marketer with over 20 years of experience. She is a marketing strategist, a content creator and a problem solver. She works with startups and founders to help them grow their business. Welcome to the show, anne.

Anne Laffin: 1:20

Hello, thank you for having me Love lead to be here.

Eric Eden: 1:23

All right. Based on your many years of experience in marketing and working with startups and founders, I'm sure you have a great story to share with us about some of the best marketing you've done, the marketing you're most proud of.

Anne Laffin: 1:37

Yeah for sure, I was employee six at a fintech startup. When you're there that early on, the company is small and not a ton of people know about you, so lots of room for growth and trying out fun projects. The story that I want to share today actually centers around opportunity. So while I was there, we were in the midst of building out a really strong webinar program, or at least that's what happened. I didn't realize at the time that's what we were doing, but it stemmed around the incident that I'm going to tell you about. So we had an opportunity where there was a law change, right, some legislation that changed, and it gave us this wonderful window of opportunity to create really impactful content for our audience, who were financial advisors, and we jumped on it right. We created a presentation for financial advisors. Getting continuing ed credit is really important. So we created this impactful presentation for CE and we shipped it quickly. So we see the opportunity get a good, strong presentation pulled together. We have incentive with it, we get it out the door and we had thousands of registrants. So for a small company not well known to get thousands of registrants and then, which turned into hundreds of leads, it was huge and we realized there was enough need that we could actually run the program more than once. So this one small presentation ended up being the catalyst for really a huge series of webinars that became a massive need gen for us. So it was really cool, a lot of fun.

Eric Eden: 3:17

So because of that change in regulation, you were able to create a whole new channel essentially, and the interesting twist in it and I've done this before working in Vintech myself is it doesn't apply to every industry, but it's really great if you can offer those continuing education credits as an incentive for people attending the thought leadership, because they have to get a certain number of them every year and they are interested in the topic as well. It's a two birds one stone sort of scenario, and so I think that's great that you got such a great response to that. I have seen that be the case in a lot of industries. Again, every industry doesn't have that continuing education requirement, but when you can do it, it's really fantastic, and getting so many people when you're a startup and you're at early stage and getting so much engagement from people from a tactic like that is great.

Anne Laffin: 4:16

It was great. And if you can offer CE, I think really the thing to remember is just offer value. Don't just have it be a demo right, like, just make sure that your content is engaging and important in solving a need. Solves for the same thing.

Eric Eden: 4:28

Yeah, have thought leadership at a minimum. If you can offer the CE credits, people should walk away saying I got something out of that and then they'll want to work with you because, hey, we should work with those guys. They know what they're talking about. That's the vibe that people want to have, and I think that what I've seen is the conversion rate off of things that are more thought leadership is very similar actually to if you just do the demo and actually you'll get a lot more people in if it's more thought leadership oriented. But the reality is that if you work it, if you work all the people in the right cadence, afterwards you can get just as much from taking a thought leadership approach right.

Anne Laffin: 5:14

For sure it really did become just the catalyst for, as I said, a greatly generator and a lot of business.

Eric Eden: 5:21

So agreed, so let me ask you more broadly about working with startups. You work with early stage companies who are at the seed stage or series A. Often, a lot of these companies have more limited resources and you have to do more gorilla things because you don't have $100 million in funding to just go out and splash money every where. What have you learned in working with early stage companies? That has been great for them and driving growth, because it's really all about growth, right.

Anne Laffin: 5:58

It is A lot of it, honestly is experimentation, because you don't usually have the historical information to know the two things are going to kill it, right? So you've got to do a little bit of tactical experimentation, if that's a term here right? So if you say we're going to try these three channels, we're going to see how they go, we're going to get the results and then we're going to pivot quickly if they don't work, that's the key. So you have to be willing to experiment. You also have to be willing to know when to cut your losses and move on to something else, because usually you don't have a big team. You already said you don't have a ton of money, so you have to be willing to again take the risks, cut your losses. Move to the next thing Webinars, obviously we've already identified can be a really good channel for people. Email has still been a really good channel for me with startups. It's a list that you already own of people that you know are usually interested or at least semi-interested, so email has still been really strong. Content is the other thing. All the founders I work with are super smart, super knowledgeable, they have a lot of expertise, and so we can always build up some really good content that can be multi-purposed, and that's other big win for me.

Eric Eden: 7:14

So you said that you also are a problem solver as a marketer. What kind of problems have you had to solve to help companies get the growth they want?

Anne Laffin: 7:23

A lot of times I find there's a disconnect with, maybe, how the founder reviews marketing or how the founder wants marketing to work, and so there may not be systems in place or tools in place to really get the most out of marketing. So a lot of times I will come in and maybe do a little bit of training or educating around how marketing really needs to work to be effective. I can definitely educate on tools that are out there that are helpful strategy systems. So really getting a place that, let's say, even it's with design right and you never worked with a designer so you may have to learn about how to have a kickoff meeting, how to have a brief right, how to have an editing cycle that's appropriate. So these kinds of things can cause a lot of snags in marketing. But once those are cleaned up, you have a good system in place, things start to flow and content starts to get shipped more quickly, or just marketing gets shipped more quickly.

Eric Eden: 8:18

So that's what I might come in and do. That makes sense, and I like the advice about testing things before you go big. Do things in a step function, because you need to understand what the ROI and the unit metrics are before you really ramp something up and go big. I think that's the people get excited about the potential of an idea and they want to go big and do a huge investment, and when those things don't work out, that's the most painful and so at least if you test it, you have a better shot at success because you can say you did your homework and you did your due diligence and coming up with a thesis that this was going to be a home run. So I love that advice. What else would you say to early stage companies broadly about investing in marketing? How would you advise them to get going in it? Because a lot of them are just at the early stages of getting going and they want the growth for marketing, but a lot of them just don't really know where to start.

Anne Laffin: 9:29

You need to lay some kind of foundation. So there has to be need to take a look at your messaging, need to take a look at your audience. Even again, a lot of times it might be a guess, it might be a hypothesis, but you got to have some kind of plan about who you're serving and how you're helping them and plan for how are we going to move forward. You already alluded to the fact that resourcing is an issue. You could lay out a massive marketing plan, but if you really can only work on two or three things at a time, that's okay. Make a plan, get it on paper and then as crazy as this probably is to say, don't be married to it. A plan is great, but in a startup world, you've also got to be willing to pivot. So map out a plan, get something on paper and be flexible.

Eric Eden: 10:18

That's great advice. Thank you very much for sharing these insights with us today. I encourage everyone listening, share this episode with your friends. It's great advice for early stage companies and startups. It's potentially some of the hardest marketing to do out there, for the reasons that we've been talking about. Please rate, review and subscribe so we can continue to have great guests like Ann on the show. And thanks for joining us today and sharing these insights.

Anne Laffin: 10:44

Thank you so much for having me.