Personalization is the Key to Visitor Engagement on Landing Pages: Anna Kocsis
Head of Marketing, 10 to 8 Appointment Scheduling

In talk with our Co-founder Ashwin, Anna Kocsis shares her expertise and experience as a SaaS marketer and why she calls herself a creative marketer than an analytical one.

Highlights of the interview-

• Make your visitors feel unique with a personalized landing page and keyword optimization
• Be creative, especially when it comes to organic content but also keep an eye on data
• Marketers, be curious, experiment and learn

How did you start your journey in marketing? What were the challenges you faced?

Anna: I started with the beauty industry working as a marketing manager for a beauty salon in Hungary, which is my native. Later when I moved to the UK, I joined 10 to 8 Appointment Scheduling. It was my first job in SaaS marketing which turned out to be a great learning experience.

Tell us about 10 to 8.

Anna: It is a scheduling tool. It is a powerful feature-rich tool that reduces your scheduling time from ten minutes to 8 seconds. That's where the name comes from. Our focus is to stick to our core values and goals and data-driven strategies. We experiment based on results.

How do you think B2B marketing is different from B2C?

Anna: Both are quite different in terms of communication, approach, and strategies. However, between e-commerce and SaaS, there are a couple of common points. We go for conversions, which is the most important part of your job. It is also about reconversions. It is really important to retain those conversions because these are customers who push your company and give you visibility.

Finding Product- Market

How do you set your audience segment and how do you study them?

Anna: Let me take you through how 10 to 8 began. It was very popular with smaller organizations, however, we found our product-market fit with a larger organization, to give you an example, we started working with a company that had more than 2000 backlogs, they came to us to not only schedule but also help them data, in just a matter of few hours, we could clear out their backlog, we were able to look at their data and we were able to solve the problem on the basis of their data.

It’s all about delighting your customers all the way through. We should take care of customer reviews not only because you want to prevent them from giving bad reviews but also because it is very important to understand your own product, its various features from the user perspective.

Ashwin adds at this point regarding how CustomFit.ai comes up with Feature Fit meetings every two months in order to encourage customers to share their feedback and feature updates, this is a great way for us to keep in touch with our users and also understand their perspective to understand customer pain points, challenges. We get customer inputs and also share our future road maps.

Give a personalized experience to your website visitors

What do you do to make your website visitors feel unique?

Anna: We should be careful about website personalization so that our visitors are not taken back by surprise. However, I give utmost importance to the fact that visitors’ landing page should always be what they are looking for and that makes a huge difference to their response to the website. SEO is crucial and considering the keywords they searched for and how to customize our results for their keywords. We try to gather problems and solutions around that topic.

What do you do to make your website visitors feel unique?

Let's say I want to design a landing page for pet owners. I would like to look at what are the problems they might be facing. And their solutions. Not everything has to be automated and you might also have to think and execute.

Ashwin: A lot of marketers think that personalization is about the name, location and other personal attributes which feels very creepy. But there is more. It’s about the visitor’s behaviour, their preferences, their history, the entire pitch of your website can change according to it.

Optimize your keyword strategy

You have always said that data is very important, what is your secret formula in designing a paid campaign, and what is your approach?

Anna: I look at the keywords, what are the terms people are searching for, it is possible that people who are landing on my website might not be interested in buying the product so you don't want everyone to be landing on your website, you want your desired Ideal Customer Profile. We use a business intelligence tool to look at what are the conversion patterns, it tells us which are the channels that drive the revenue. That’s how I make the decision and this also helps us understand which are the areas where we want to be relevant and which are the areas where we want to contribute to the person’s business.

What are the aspects of customers that you take into account when you plan your content?

Anna: Keywords and looking at the intent of your keywords are very important. Let's say there is a keyword that has a lot of click-through rates. When you target these keywords, it is important that you stand out because there are so many competitors. You have to be smart, you can add image extensions. Think about what you would like to see when you are searching.

Please share insights from successful and failed campaigns?

Anna: That's a hard question. There are no failed campaigns because you always learn something. There was a video we added to our page and we were looking at whether it brings higher conversion. The result was not good but it helped us understand the customer better.

Regarding successful campaigns, the best ones are organic content. We pay attention to our blogs, we update the text, audio, video etc, we study how others write about the same topic. One has to be patient to see organic content grow.

                       "There are no failed campaigns, only learnings which you apply to the next campaigns"

What are the biggest challenges faced by marketers in the recent pandemic situation?

Anna: I think there are multiple challenges. Marketing is becoming noisier and noisier, we can't create content just for the sake of creating content, it should be directed towards clear goals. Make smart decisions despite the plethora of suggestions and tools available in the market.

What are the lead generation platforms that you use?

Anna: I am a big believer in organic and referral traffic in building brand awareness. If you have a good budget, there are a lot of channels that you can try like event marketing and PPC. If you have the patience, I would put my efforts into organic marketing because that’s what matters in the long run.

What’s your secret sauce for referral marketing?

Anna: We have an affiliate marketing program from which we earned lots of insights into how customers are interacting with our tool and we implemented those into our own sales.

Who is your mentor in marketing whom do you look up to for guidance or feedback?

Anna: I dont have one mentor. I believe in talking to people one on one. I talk to my sales team members and sometimes turn to marketing communities.

I love hubspot academy, their resources are very helpful. I can recommend SaaS Breakthrough group on Facebook, Demio podcasts among a few others. The book I am reading currently is Contagious- a book about viral marketing.

What is your advice for entry level marketers?

Anna: Keep your curiosity burning and never stop learning, coming up with experiments is important and keep thinking that you still have stuff to learn.

How effectively can one increase their brand’s presence?

Anna: Make as much noise as you can. Use every opportunity to tell your story. Don't make your messaging boring. Make it interesting and attractive for your audience. Tell your story effectively.

Finally, can you share precious information that will make someone a successful marketer at any level?

Anna: I am more of a creative marketer than analytical marketer. But I acknowledge the importance of data, it gives you so much information and it helps you streamline your plans. That’s a great marketing mantra.

Contact Anna Kocsis

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/annakocsis/