Analytics should be a marketer’s best friend, by Mike Korba
Chief Commercial Officer and Co -Founder, user.com

Mike Korba, the Chief Commercial Officer and Co - Founder at User.com fulfills the role of upgrading free customers to different grades of a paid customer. He dabbled with online marketing, PR, web and mobile application development, and now it is all about marketing automation.

Linkedin, podcasts, thought leaders, books on audible have been some of his favorite sources to stay updated about the marketing gyaan. He looks up to Mike Sadowski, CEO of Brand24 for mentorship and advice. He believes that reaching out to people who are specialized in their skill provide specific solutions instead of overwhelming you with a 10-page explanation.

Quantity and quality metrics

Mike: As much as conversion rate is one of my favorites that determines quality, to me, metrics that quantify are also important. So, monthly recurring revenue with conversion rate is important to me. I would use both of them to measure performance.

Distinguishing what is conversion rate in one segment and conversion rate in another segment. You need to be able to understand what are the arguments that they are supporting either with you or your competitors.

Learning from good and bad campaigns

We organized a SaaS Growth Summit for SaaS businesses and we were able to invite amazing speakers. This was a successful event campaign. What didn’t work for us is the freemium model, and we plan to bring it down soon. We were hoping to gain scale with the freemium model, but it didn’t pan out the way we anticipated.

Researching the market provides us facts to tell us not to do something. What is working for your competitors may not always work for you.

Challenges faced by marketers in 2021

• iOS has changed many things. Attribution and Facebook ads have changed. It’s not so easy to track users with upcoming changes in data privacy.
• Good definition of your ideal persona would always be a challenge to marketers.

Putting Account Based Marketing to use

Many are using our solution to use data to reach out to specific companies. We spend a lot of time and effort to purely qualify leads and building personas. But, now we are analyzing which type of customers would stay with us and who would not. We are trying to evaluate our efforts with how long they will stay with us in the entire lifecycle of the product and the customer themselves.

Increase a brand’s online presence with a good name

Get a good domain. That makes most of the job easy in increasing online presence. Keep it simple. They are expensive, but can be a great investment. Have good connections with good automation.

Paid marketing is scalable and I rely more on paid campaigns rather than SEO and organic which gives you slow growth. Channels like Capterra are a different type and scaling is not like other paid media.

Advice to entry level marketer

Learn basics of analytics. Google analytics, Google tag manager, Google optimize, Amplitude, Segment or Tableau - all these tools provide free courses. This provides you the ability to work with data and draw insights from it.

                    “Don’t focus on tools. Focus on failing a lot. When you are failing, you are learning.”

Contact Mike Korba

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michalkorba
Twitter: @michalkorba