What's spookier than a job description 3 pages long?
The B2B SaaS marketing newsletter you need to follow to get to Unicorn status.
Dearest readers,
Welcome to Unicorn Status 🦄 brought to you by Codi Marketing the fractional marketing team for B2B SaaS companies.
With spooky season in full flow, we wanted to shine a light on the scariest thing of all — how difficult life as a marketer can be.
So, we asked our networks to share their marketing horror stories.
We wanted:
👻 Supernatural job specs with outrageous demands
🎃 Clients with scarily unrealistic expectations
💀 Cursed marketing campaigns
And, boy, did you provide. We received some chilling tales.
Keep reading for a snippet, if you can handle it…
For the more faint hearted — it’s not all horror stories this week. We also share our top tips for email marketing.
Let’s go…
Unicorn Status is a bi-weekly newsletter that covers top start-up news, what’s trending in the world of B2B marketing and finally, a quick win that will help move the needle when it comes to your marketing.
What’s News?
🔎 Best practices for founders raising Series A funding right now
💌 Daze, an AI-powered messaging app is getting a lot of attention pre-launch
💃🏼 These are the top female leaders in the cybersecurity
💰 Klarna dethrones Revolut as Europe’s top fintech founder factory
What’s Trending?
Spooky season and the broken marketing system 👻
This Halloween, we’re shedding light on the scarily unrealistic expectations of marketers in the B2B space.
One thing was made clear when we asked our network for worrying work-tales…
The current marketing system is broken 💔
Companies expect to hire one, junior marketer to fix all their problems. They want one person to run and ‘own’ their entire marketing function.
This impossible task leaves marketers feeling burnt-out and companies frustrated with the lack of results.
Don’t believe us?
Here’s a sneak peak of one of the HORRIFYING tales we received:
“I was hired as a Demand Gen Marketing Executive for the UK with less than 3 years experience, with the vision that I would be a junior member of the team, guided by an experienced Demand Gen Manager.
Fast forward 6 months and I’m still without a team lead or manager, managing all marketing strategy and execution for the UK and US. Yes, that’s content, paid media, social media, out-of-home marketing, PR, events, email marketing and sales enablement. On top of that, I was handling a £300k marketing budget and owning a revenue goal, sitting in C-Suite meetings reporting on marketing performance and navigating marketing through an IPO process (I had literally no idea what this meant).
Safe to say I was BURNT OUT and actually ended up signed off for a couple of weeks…it completely destroyed my confidence for a good while.”
Dare to read more?
Give the full article a read now.
Win at B2B marketing…
7 steps to level up your email marketing 💌
Whatever the shape, size or industry of your business, email marketing can provide some easy wins.
Yes, you read that right…
Email marketing is not dead (unlike the one-person marketing teams we were just talking about).
With roughly 4 billion email users, you would be dead crazy not to utilise email. Especially considering 87% of brands say it is critical for success.
We know email marketing can be overwhelming. So we’ve created a 7-step guide to email marketing for SaaS start-ups, to help.
This is a short summary — read the blog for the full breakdown.
7 step guide to email marketing for SaaS start-ups:
1️⃣ Build your list
Building your email marketing list is the essential first step every B2B SaaS company should start with. You also need to continuously add to that list.
2️⃣ Segment your audience
According to HubSpot, segmented emails drive 30% more opens and 50% more clicks-throughs than unsegmented ones.
3️⃣ Types of emails
Broadly, there are three types of B2B marketing emails to know about — campaign emails, lead nurturing emails and newsletters.
4️⃣ Automated lead nurture flows
Once you’ve attracted a lead, you need to make sure you’re engaging with them through lead nurture flows. This is to push them down the funnel towards becoming a paying customer through.
5️⃣ Test, test test
Understand what resonates with your audience through A/B testing. This is where you send two different versions of the same email to different audiences to test which has better performance.
6️⃣ Track performance
You will only know if email marketing efforts are working if you monitor results so make sure you track the key metrics (included in the guide).
7️⃣ Think about frequency
Send too many emails and you’ll risk being marked as spam but send too few and you might miss out on valuable opportunities to capture your audience’s attention.
As mentioned…
This is only a snippet of the good stuff.
If you want more detailed tips on email marketing and ‘what good looks like’ metrics.
Codi win of the week…
We’ve moved into our first office 🏡
Last week, marked a BIG milestone for Codi — we moved into our first office.
Codi started because there was a problem in the market.
Tech start ups had to compromise and hire inexperienced marketers. They were wasting time and money when they most needed it.
Louise, our Founder, knew there was a better way to provide business leaders with expertise and the marketing power they needed without having to compromise.
So, Codi was born.
The first dedicated B2B fractional marketing team for SaaS.
And, now we have our very first home.
We wouldn’t be in this office without the incredible SaaS companies who put their trust in Codi.
So thank you — and if you’re in Shoreditch come and say hi.
📍 18 Charlotte Road is our new home 🏡
At Codi, we help businesses set up and scale their entire marketing functions. If you need help but don’t know where to start, we can help.
Did you know…
We lead the marketing efforts for Series A+ companies.
At Codi, we help spread the load of under-resourced teams and provide head of marketing support. We also work closely with the sales teams to generate inbound leads through different marketing activations.
We cannot thank you enough for the work you have achieved here at Sprout.ai. It has been nothing short of incredible and has given me a new found belief in marketing and its true value.
VP of Sales
That’s all for this week, see you next time!
Team Codi x