Andrus Purde - Marketing Automation Essentials

My name is Andrus Purde. I'm the co-founder and CEO and marketer over at Outfunnel. At Outfunnel we build marketing automation that is super easy to connect to CRMs. Here at Saasta Europe my topic was different. I talked about the framework which I think is useful for planning and scaling marketing. I also did a couple of thought exercises that have been helpful to me in various companies in deciding what channels to focus on and what functions to focus on and how to make it work. So why is video getting more popular? I think the internet is getting faster, there's more quality content on video and I think marketers are looking for new opportunities where they haven't existed before. If I had one piece of advice for marketers from video, I would advise not to do video for video's sake, to cut down on crappy video and just do less maybe but higher quality video. So what would be the marketing theme of trend in 2019? I don't know exactly what would be the trending thing. I do know that the main things would remain the same. I think it's important to understand the customers, having a good strategy, having a good plan for experimentation and testing and then not trying to run with every new trend. I think this will still work next year as well as they did this year. I think not all startups should use video but some startups must use video. My advice would be to not just go blind and start experimenting with video or any other formats of advertising or marketing but try to find a place for video and the strategy and have a strategic place for video in the marketing mix and then really go all in. I've used video to an extent in marketing because it's usually on third party platforms, it's hard to sometimes tie the metrics into one central place. So that's a challenge I think for video which video platforms and video marketers need to solve. Marketing automation is important for startups for a couple of different reasons. First, it saves you time and second, it can be really effective in both lead generation and lead nurturing and then lead follow up. Many startups I've seen overdo it. They automate or start automating marketing without testing what actually works manually and in an un-automated manual way. So they maybe are too fast to automate some of the things. But marketing automation is definitely an important and effective for most startups. I think as a community we can do a better job at testing more and being more mindful of the end users so we don't over spam people and we only send the relevant message to the right people at the right time. For all the startups that operate in different markets, my advice is to start from understanding the customer and understanding the business. So what's the category of awareness, what's the category of work and see should you work more on direct response and search time media and channels or should you work more on more interactive and more display type channels like social and media and PR. I think it's a mistake to try to do everything but some channels are a must have, some channels are nice to have. I think putting some energy into understanding what the customer is and what the buyer journey is like and then picking channels based on that, I think that's a good evergreen tip. Very often the highest ROI channel if you can call it that is customers themselves. So it's driving word of mouth and recommendations which is not easy, it's not trivial and it's not solely the work of marketing but it can be super profitable. Beyond that I think it really depends on the context of a startup, having a good plan for experimentation and then executing the plan and seeing what works. So the growth of Pipe Drive which is a good growth story coming from zero to now more than 75,000 paying customers, it's a story I can speak about in the past tense because I'm not with Pipe Drive anymore. The growth story was based on having a very strong product, so the product solved the clear customer pain in a very elegant way and then marketing was easy, I think it's easy to do marketing if you have a great product. What we did, we helped to increase findability of Pipe Drive because in my experience people discover tools mainly in two ways. They talk to their friends and colleagues and partners and they search. My job or our job at Pipe Drive was to make sure that if people start searching for a CRM tool or a sales pipeline tool then no matter where they clicked and no matter what they searched they found us. And then there was more to marketing but I think that was one of the key strategies which worked really well. So Outfunnel, we just got started a couple of months ago, so our marketing is very embryonic, we're at the very early stage. I'm using channels like, so I'm trying to increase findability or discoverability of Outfunnel using things like AdWords, using things like search engine optimized content. We're also listed in the Pipe Drive marketplace which is driving needs to us and personal hustle and opportunities like this. We're not using video yet but video will definitely have a big role in the marketing. I don't think you can really have a marketing function these days without having at least some areas covered with video.