Edward Ford, Marketing Director at Supermetrics, joins us for this episode of GrowthFit. Edward began his journey as a corporate language instructor. He experienced a lot of things after he joined his first job right after university at a digital agency. He was one among the two-team marketing teams serving six different European markets at a cloud computing company. Then, he switched gears to work with an agency specialized to serve SaaS companies. He started a podcast to interview other great marketers before joining Supermetrics, a high-growth global SaaS company headquartered in Helsinki, Finland, as one of the early-stage employees.
What is Supermetrics?
Edward: In his own words- “We have products that help marketers, analysts, and engineers spend less time moving data and more time using data. Their marketing and sales data is moved from siloed platforms to wherever they need it, such as analytics and reporting tools like spreadsheets, dashboards & BI tools, as well as data warehouses. It enables marketing teams to have access to their data so they can make more important decisions backed by data and identify opportunities for growth.”
When we started, we were more focused on product creation and now our focus is on sales. Now, marketing focuses on communicating to customers how Supermetrics can help marketers solve their problems. We are visible whenever people are trying to find out how to move data and Google spreadsheets or Twitter/Linkedin data to spreadsheets or build a dashboard.
Don’t Skip Strategy - “What do you mean by that?”
Edward: It is about understanding as a company where you are going, what is the goal, how are you going to achieve this? It is about bringing everyone together and figuring out how we are going to hit the target. That is a strategy in simple terms. It is about understanding where the growth is coming from, what is the buying process and just getting that company-wide alignment. In all this, marketing plays a crucial role.
As a marketer, you think about messaging, how you want to be perceived, who you are, what is the top of the funnel that you are following. It’s also about gearing the leadership. It’s more about getting the basics right and setting the foundation.
Measure what works and what doesn’t
Edward: We use Supermetrics to understand what works and what doesn't and which channels fetch us the best opportunities. A go-to-market strategy that powers demand generation engine is effective content. The foundation of content strategy is knowing what people think on Google. Our performance marketing teams are heavily crunching numbers of different campaigns, different acquisition costs and combining it with conversions. If you are not looking at conversions, then you are in a trap of just analyzing traffic. It is just about having systems and processes in place where you can come back and see what are you looking at on a monthly, quarterly, half-yearly, and annual basis.
Data points used to create Content
Edward: It is about looking at high keyword volume with different search intents. If there is a search term that can be made into an article where we can show how we can solve a problem when they read our article, then we go behind that. We do a lot of customer and audience research on what content needs to be created and try to find out what is converting well.