Personalize Content for the Right Reasons: Tarah Darge
Marketing Manager, Time to Reply

She started off as a copywriter but began to take a keen interest in marketing as it let her be creative and work for a business and that was exciting. Her interest in SaaS also grew with its fast growth and active community. She joined Time to Reply because she was keenly interested in the problem that this startup solves. “Business email reply time is measured by Time to Reply when you are converting a lead or you had a successful interaction in the team. It started off as a widget, but now we have it as a tool with metrics specific to customer success and sales teams.”, shares Tarah.

She moves through her daily work reading some of the interesting marketing newsletters such as the Marketing brew, Morning brew and the Clikk.

Highlights of what you can discover in this conversation

• What type of content should B2B marketers produce?
• Does personalization work with content and website?
• Creative ways to conduct customer or audience research
• What to choose between B2B and B2C?

What type of content do you produce?

Value-added content is what we feed to our potential customers. Those who find our content useful in their own lives come to us. We are a part of SaaS academy and the kind of content that we create for our customers helps us address the exact pain points and interests of our customers.

We use the database of our own leads and we test it with them, first. And then, put it out there in the world. We also use search queries and organic results to create more content around it.

Does personalization work with content and website?

Tarah : Yes, for our blog especially, we believe that if a person has already started a free trial, then it wouldn’t be right for us to start showing the same content to them. And we feel the blog can’t have static pages. We should be working with dynamic pages.

We started personalization with automated email communications. Start personalization with the segment that matters most to you. Make it really appealing and then move to the next vertical.

B2B vs B2C

Tarah : B2B is more challenging as there is a lot of noise out there. There are many different pieces to look at. In B2B, we end up serving people a bit more. Working with B2B startups makes you take charge and if there's any idea, you end up implementing it fast. It helps you plug into communities, where you get to connect with people, it's a lot easier than you think.

Email marketing is very important for the coming days. It works for both B2B and B2C. It is measurable and not as invasive as social media. If you are not generating revenue through this channel, then you are missing out on a lot of opportunities.

Creative ways to conduct customer or audience research

Tarah: We tried a variety of tools. We found a lot of success with Linkedin. A program called Growth X would help us really funnel down and find the type of the role, the person we wanted to connect and that would automate messages for Linkedin. It helped build our email subscriber base as well. We didn’t do a lot of Facebook or Linkedin ads.

For me, it is really about looking at what your ideal customer is struggling with and providing specific content that is going to serve the customer, and it also helps you qualify them for success. Using this, you can gate content and create a good lead magnet and a downloadable piece around that and then put them on a personalized journey for them, whether by email or engaging with them through a Lead feeder. Lead feeder sits on top of your funnel and sees which are those companies that you should be educating. It profiles the ICP and we know who is coming to our website. We can use that data and create content that is relevant to that website.

Increase brand's online presence

Tarah: Be where your customers are, be active as a brand in groups and niche communities. Get your employees active and do some press. Let more and more people engage with the content. One’s aim should be to get maximum engagement in a limited budget.

Data points for paid campaign

Tarah: How does any piece convert into a trial? CTR and trial conversion rates are important for the moment. Trial to customer conversion rate and get the right person into the funnel.

Favorite Marketing Tools

Tarah: We love Hubspot and Zapier. But we, as a team, have been playing around with Intercom, Bloom, Mixed Panel, and Crossbeam posts.

Advice to Entry-level marketers

Tarah: Learn about all different types of marketing channels and come up with creative ways to engage your audience.

                         "Be where your customers are, be active as a brand in niche groups. Involve your employees."

Contact Tarah

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/tarah-darge/