Ongoing and automated feedback loops is the secret of optimizing results: Neil Roy
Head of Growth, Delightree

• How to design your marketing automation?
• How do you automate the website content production process?
• What metrics matter to marketers?
• How do you know which product features have * worked and which have not?
• How to create a funnel for a channel?

Neil Roy walked into digital marketing with serendipity in 2013. He loves design. His first company was BlazeClan where they were helping clients with AWS. He started there as a design intern. Then, took up other work concerned with organic marketing like blogs, SEO, and so on.
Later, he moved to the paid side of digital which was in Sokrati, later acquired by Merkel, a paid marketing company. This job entailed working with Google ads and other ad platforms where the spend touched Rs.2 crores. This initial foundation gave a great understanding of paid and organic marketing.

His next stint with UpGrad, an e-learning company included six months of end-to-end product creation and marketing. It involved overseeing content production, marketing the program, and managing the P&L. That pushed him to dabble with a lot of product marketing tasks and provided industry exposure. This was when he got introduced to a lot of opportunities with SaaS.

Then, Neil moved to FusionCharts and headed marketing which was around converting footprints into customers. Here is when he also explored developer marketing which he recollects to say that, Developers are a no-bullshit persona and marketing to them is very difficult.

He further moved to the logistics domain and then to Hevo where we did a lot of data work which included sales, pre-sales and so on. Then, moved to his current company called Delightree, heading the growth.

The importance of Automation in Marketing

Neil: There are so many tools that help a marketer in automating processes like downloading, mails are going, CRMs, personalization, etc. This way tasks are already automated. Beyond that, I believe, marketers need to look at how they can not just automate the tasks but their day-to-day life itself. For example, if you are a product marketer or a marketer in a small team, then you end up doing a lot of designing on your own. In case, if you can automate the process of choosing and going live of your designs, your experiments can become really fast. This is what I mean by increasing automation in marketing. 

Website content automation

Neil: Over the years, I have done lots of revamping and repurposing, I have realized sometimes we stop questioning the basic principles. It should not be about filling in the right space but understanding demand. Plan with the corner stones of the content while keeping in mind the demand of the audience.

Follow hub and spoke model. Understand what is the intent of various searches, how can I produce relevant content for my audience. 

With channels, the content format changes. So, planning through all these aspects ahead of time helps you create a lot of seamless process automation. Build your core content hub and see how it works and how it ranks.

                              “Everything needs to be reverse-engineered and then plan about your content.”

You get the most value of a piece of content only when you plan it with respect to demand and the channel where it will be displayed. Gradually, set up a pattern for measuring the results and optimize the process. 

Metrics that matter to marketers

Neil: I think it's important to look at subjective data as much as objective data. For example, heat maps and journey maps. I used to go through recordings of 200 plus people and figured out a pattern of these behaviors. I analyzed these data points. Thereafter we put an event tracker and reached our conclusion. 

What are the Post-click performance metrics

Neil: There are objective and subjective metrics that you should track. Objective metrics are those that pertain to volume data such as page views, average session duration, next page, what is the page. Subjective analysis is about finding out how long are they staying, how are they skimming content, where are they spending more time. For each segment, I will run heatmaps and find out how the users are behaving.

How do you know which product features have worked and which have not?
Neil: Feature understanding and listening to customers is most important. We look at customer feedback and which is a feedback loop that is a process and provides feedback, puts them through demos and uses.

Two sources: Through interviews with customers and the customer success team with their day-to-day interactions understand which product features really help them and create a log where they observe the product features. The customer's voice is more important. Extract customer voice with minimum friction. Understand what is the right sample set for your business.

Funnel for a Channel

Funnel marketing is becoming the center stage. Slowly, you own the funnel. Start with the goal when you are devising the funnel which could be demos or intro calls. Then we do reverse mapping and understanding different touchpoints of a channel and then plan the funnel. Funnel is about tracking the customer lifetime and does not end at the conversion.

Test automations in a funnel for every campaign and each of your channels. For SEO, we check content downloads and see how they are converting. All marketing activities can be made into a funnel with levers and start optimizing.

Feedback loops exist everywhere and need to be activated with automation. It will be an ongoing process to automate behaviors.

Sales and marketing work together

Neil : As a marketer, you might be doing many things like generating website traffic, hosting events, and so on. Each marketing activity should have a proxy metric that should translate and lead into a demo which is the final metric that sales and marketing teams go after in a SaaS market. Demo becomes your ‘north star’.

After setting up the initial total addressable market (TAM) it is going at the pace of 5 to 10 demos. Both sales and marketing should be looking at demos. Calculate how a landing page or a campaign is converting into intro calls and demos. Once you have the demos and expect the sales team to close those as customers, marketing teams receive feedback from sales about the quality of demos and the time taken to convert each lead.

Sources for knowledge used by Neil Roy

• Product marketing alliance and massive group for product marketers
• Demand curve newsletter
• Marketing examples.com

Advice to entry-level marketers

Neil : Get into the job as soon as possible and get into a job that brings accountability and makes you accountable for your actions. Reach out 200 different marketers and interview some of them so that you understand and know if you want to lead that kind of life.

                          "Extract customer voice with minimum friction to set up a good feedback loop."

What is Delightree?

Delightree works in the franchise business model specific to the USA market. With per hour rates, and managing micro-operations in a franchised setup requires automation and it still remains manual in 2021. This is a blue ocean space.

Delightree uses an app that helps franchise brands and shop owners to automate day to day operations. This could be managing day-to-day tasks, improving qualities to stick to standards, and avoid penalties and lawsuits.

Neil said, “This market needs a lot of understanding and this is what Hubspot did in 2013. Now, we are at a scenario where we are trying to figure out what is the right channel mix.”

Contact Neil

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/neil-roy/
Twitter: NeilRoy91