Why yes, I did steal this title from Mark Manson’s excellent book, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck. I guess when you’re creating competitor ads, you need to not give a f*ck. I’ve pissed off Shopify, Udemy, and many others, with my slanderous copy.

But let’s start at the beginning. Back in 2014, I was working at a Vancouver startup called LemonStand, an eCommerce platform like Shopify. They were a rising powerhouse in eCommerce with a large marketing budget. We were a 10-person startup fighting to compete. It was like David vs Goliath.

We wanted to experiment with ads but Shopify had bid up our core keywords, like “eCommerce platform”, and we couldn’t afford it. In fact, they were bidding on just “eCommerce”. They do that to this day.

So I decided to bid for the word “Shopify” and that’s when I created my first competitor ad.

Shopify was still small enough to care back then so they emailed our CEO. The fact was, our ads actually were working. And that led to many years of creating ad campaigns for dozens of SAAS companies.

I’ve learned a few things about competitor ads along the way, and I’ll share them in this post.

Why Create Competitor Ads

You mean, aside from your insanely rich competitor bidding up every remotely related keyword?

Think about what’s happening when someone searches for a brand. Let’s say I type Shopify into the search bar. I’m either already using them, in which case I want to log in. Or I’m researching them because I’m in the market for an eCommerce platform.

If the search intent is research, it’s pretty obvious why you should run a competitor ad. But if someone just wants to log in, is it worth it?

I’d argue it is. I’m talking about SAAS specifically, but most SAAS don’t have very strong defensibility. Even Shopify can lose customers early on before they’re fully set up and have tons of sales.

And so, if you can plant the seed of a thought that maybe there’s a better product out there, then if someone has issues with Shopify, they may come back to you. And this holds for nearly every SAAS.

But don’t go throwing up those competitor ads just yet, because there’s a subtle art to it.

PS – Book a free 30-minute consultation with me if you want specific feedback on your competitor campaigns.

Keyword Selection

So while I did say it’s worth broad targeting a competitor’s brand name, there may be times when you want to narrow it down. 

Low Budget

If you have a low budget, you may want to target the highest-potential keywords. These are keywords where you know the searcher is looking for a new tool, such as “competitor alternatives” or “competitor vs”.

This works especially well when your competitor is popular and receives a ton of brand searches. When you narrow down, you’ll still get a decent search volume.

Let’s take Mailchimp, for example. It’s one of the most popular email marketing software, so there’s a ton of search interest for the word “Mailchimp”. 

You’ll notice that only Mailchimp advertises for that keyword. This is good practice to protect their brand name.

However, when you search for “Mailchimp competitors” or “Mailchimp alternatives”, it’s like you’re entering a monkey brothel with a bucket of bananas. Everyone wants your business.

Common Word

Sometimes you may have the budget but your competitor has a brand name that’s also just a common English word, like Apple.

I ran into this problem when I was working at Thinkific, and we set up ads against our biggest competitor, Teachable. I would see people searching for “teachable moments” or variations often. Even with negative keywords, I’d often get highly unqualified clicks.

So I was forced to narrow down, but I opened it up to keywords like “teachable app”, “teachable pricing” and so on. Once Teachable got wind of it, it escalated into a bidding war and ultimately ended in a ceasefire, so I don’t have any screenshots of the ads I created.

However, a good example is FOMO vs Proof, both social proof apps, and both regular English words. FOMO is also slang for fear of missing out, which is what people want to know when they Google it.

But when you search for “FOMO app” or variations, Proof, their main competitor, is on the money. Unlike Mailchimp, FOMO isn’t protecting its brand name leaving Proof to take the top spot.

What’s really interesting is that Proof also protects its brand name, even if you search for “proof” which is a common English word. However, they are limiting it to only exact searches of that word to reduce unqualified searches. 

It’s also surprising that FOMO isn’t running ads against Proof but maybe they don’t have a fear of missing out on those clicks…

Broad Application

You may find that your competitor targets a broad range of audiences while you focus on a specific one, so you may want to narrow it down to searches within your niche.

Take Zendesk, a customer support app for SAAS, eCommerce, and more. When I was consulting with Gorgias, a customer support app specifically for Shopify stores, Zendesk was our biggest competitor but broad targeting didn’t make sense because they attracted too many people outside our niche.

So we had to focus on keywords like “Zendesk eCommerce” and “Zendesk for Shopify”. Alas, my boy Guillaume Cabane, who is now running growth there, seems to have paused my extremely tasteful ads, so I have no screenshots for you. However, Freshdesk and HappyFox have taken up the mantle.

Ad Copy

Despite not having any conscience whatsoever, I do believe it’s important not to trash talk competitors on your ad copy. It’s just good business practice. You don’t want to turn away leads because you sound too boastful. As always, there’s an art to it.

Be Specific

Whenever I see an ad that goes “#1 in XYZ” my eyes glaze over. What makes you #1? If you can’t answer that, why should I take your word for it?

Here’s what happens when you’re lazy and your ad copy says “Best Alternative”

That’s right, everyone else is doing it! What sets you apart?

WisePops is getting away with this because of their smart use of the word “Privy” in their ad (we’ll get to this later) but the fact is the rest of their copy doesn’t tell us how it’s different from Privy.

Remember, if someone is looking for an alternative to a competitor, they have a problem with it. So if you solve that problem, say that in your ad!

A simple Google search for reviews of your competitor will bring up G2 Crowd, Capterra, and other review sites. Look through them to find what people are complaining about. For example, I found negative reviews about Privy’s customer support. If I were WisePops, my ad would say “Privy Not Supporting You? WisePops Can Help”. 

As a side note, I also found many people complain about Privy’s pricing, which WisePops alludes to in their ad. However, I wouldn’t use pricing as a differentiator. Trust me, customers who complain about pricing are never satisfied.

Make It Personalized

As mentioned above, WisePops did well to include the word “Privy” in their ad copy. If the ad copy reflects exactly what I typed in, I’m more likely to click on it.

Here’s an example from Qualified where they use the search term “Drift Chatbot” in the ad copy as well.

There’s absolutely nothing wrong or illegal about using your competitor’s name in your ad. However, if your competitor submits a complaint to Google, you will no longer be able to use their brand name in your ad copy. You can still use it in the display URL and that helps. 

Plus there are ways to get around it. I remember a story Oli Gardner once told me about Instapage’s competitor ads against Unbounce. Even though Unbounce had protected their trademark, Instapage would still use ad copy like “Unbounced?” or “Un Bounce” to get around it.

Profitwell does this with their Baremetrics ad –

If you can’t use your competitor’s name, you can still personalize the ad based on other words in the search, the location of the searcher, and more. When I search for Zenefits in Canada, I see Humi’s ad stressing on how it’s made for Canadian businesses.

Landing Page

Snappy ad copy is half the battle. The landing page is where decisions are made. Besides, a more relevant landing page gives you a better ad score and can even place you higher than the competitor’s own branded ad.

In this screenshot, you’ll see that Asana ranks higher when searching for Trello. One big factor is the landing page which references Trello multiple times. Let’s break down what goes into a good competitor landing page.

Stay Consistent

In the Asana ad above, the headline says “Compare Side-by-Side”. In their landing page, they follow up on it with direct comparison charts. 

This is good practice in general. Your ad sets the expectations that your landing page must fulfill. So if you’re making claims about being the #1 alternative to a competitor, you need to follow up on that statement on your landing page.

Here’s what it looks like for ActiveCampaign alternatives. Both Iterable and MailerLite are directly pitting themselves against ActiveCampaign. In the ad copy, they both claim that marketers are switching over to them.

However, on the landing page, Iterable doesn’t actually follow up on that claim. It’s just a standard lead form page with no mention of why they are better than ActiveCampaign and why people are switching.

MailerLite does a much better job. There’s continuity between the search query, ad copy, and landing page. They describe MailerLite in terms the searcher will understand.

Highlight Benefits

It’s important to list feature differences like in the Asana example previously, and I’ll come to this in the next section, but I prefer starting with benefits. Features are the what, but benefits are the why and they’re more powerful.

When you click on Front’s ad against Intercom, you’ll see what I mean. Right away, in the hero section, Front mentions the 3 big benefits of switching over.

I might even make the copy more benefit-oriented. So the first header would be, “Save time with a unified inbox” and the next would be “Respond faster with real-time chat”.

PandaDoc takes this a step further in its campaign against Proposify. They go deep into 8 benefits of switching over, a few too many in my opinion, but really drive home the point.

Compare Features

Highlighting your top 3 or 4 benefits will do most of the work for you, but sometimes people have a checklist and they need to go through the motions, so you might as well humor them with a feature list.

In their campaign against AppCues, Whatfix has a section that lists out feature differences between the two products. This is a common practice though I don’t much care for it. 

The problem with this is most people won’t know what you mean by “Smart Algorithm” or “Branching”. These may be common terminology within your company and existing community, but outsiders will probably misunderstand.

Instead, this feature comparison by Mixpanel against Heap is more helpful.

Use Social Proof

When I was working at Thinkific, I’d see potential customers post in our FB group, asking everyone else if they switched over from a competitor and why. The responses would often convince the poster to switch over as well. Social proof is a hell of a drug.

A common method is to list logos. Asana does this right beneath their hero section on the Trello comparison page.

Further down on that page, they also display user review scores from comparison sites like G2Crowd and Capterra. It turns out the scores for Asana and Trello are almost the same so I’m not sure how effective this tactic is.

A better way to follow what BigCommerce does on their Shopify comparison page. They embed quotes from customers who actually switched over from Shopify.

Boosting Performance

So people have seen your ad, they visited your landing page, and… they’re not converting! Worry not, my friends, for there are more tricks in Sid’s bag of insidiousness.

Start A Conversation

If someone isn’t converting on your page, they’re either not ready to, or they still have questions. The best way to figure this out is ask questions with a live chat conversation.

When I was doing research for this post I looked at every live chat software out there and the only one that actually did this was Qualified.

This shows up on their Drift competitor page. I like how they segment the visitor into whether or not they have Drift. This helps them figure out what information to send the visitor.

I’ve personally used simpler chats in the past. Something like “Hey there, what’s stopping you from signing up right now?” works wonders.

Retarget Them

A retargeting campaign is a basic requirement for any company as I explain in my previous post. It becomes even more important to have one when you’re driving traffic to competitor pages. These are people who are even more likely to convert than your average blog visitor, so you need to stay on them.

MailerLite and Asana are the only two retargeting ads I’ve seen so far. MailerLite advertises a blog post in theirs. I wouldn’t recommend this and would go straight to a signup landing page because these visitors are close to the bottom of the funnel.

Asana is on the right track, though. The ad is clearly driving toward a free trial.

Defense Against The Dark Ads

Ok so you’ve launched ads against your competitors but they’re doing the same to you because they read this post. How do you defend against that?

The fastest way is to set up your own brand ads. Founders are often hesitant when I suggest this because they don’t want to pay for what could be a free organic click. However, they tend to change their mind when I show them a screenshot like this.

This is a search for Aircall where the first four links are all competitor ads. You don’t get to Aircall until the fold! If you were at Aircall, would you rather see this or pay for your ad to be on top?

Or how about suffering the indignity of this ad if you were Gong?

You could trademark your brand on Google to stop competitors from using it in their ad copy but ads like Chorus will still remain.

Another benefit of launching your own brand ads is that your competitor will end up spending more per click, especially if they want to retain the top spot. At some point, it may just become economically unfeasible for them to continue targeting you.

Now, if you’re really tight on cash, you can just advertise for searches that contain words like “alternatives”. I like what Canva has done with its brand ad copy.

And if it turns into a mutually destructive bidding war, you can always call for a cease-fire. 

Putting It All Together

Here’s a great example that combines the principles I mentioned for ad copy with a consistent landing page experience –

LogRocket highlights one major differentiating factor between them and Fullstory. The ad copy is specific and personalized. 

When you click over to the landing page, it stays consistent and has some social proof. What I’d like to see on this page are more specific benefits of using LogRocket over Fullstory and perhaps a quote or two from someone who switched over.

When done right, competitor ads can be a great source of highly qualified yet affordable leads.

If you’re setting up ads for your startup, book a free 30-minute consultation with me

I was on a call with a potential client recently and, after he gave me a rundown of his software, I started to brainstorm some ideas with him. Having worked with similar companies before, I had a good idea of his audience and what would work.

Unfortunately, he kept shooting down every suggestion faster than contestants get eliminated on “The Bachelor.” None of the strategies I proposed—ideas forged from working with dozens of other startups—were good enough.

Side note: I’m offering free 30-minute brainstorming sessions right now. Find a time here.

Mind you, I can’t predict exactly what will work for your specific situation. I can only suggest ideas to test (more on this later), yet he dismissed even the notion of testing them. Having exhausted my repertoire of ideas, I finally asked why none of them appealed to him.

“None of these ideas will 10X my company in the next quarter. I’m looking for 10X ideas,” he said with the conviction of someone who’s watched too many Y Combinator videos on YouTube.

Ah, so he was looking for the good old silver bullet. That one growth hack that propels your startup into unicorn status. I told him I was good, but not that good (no one is), and respectfully ended the call.

You see, in our world of instant gratification and “overnight” success, founders tend to look for the silver bullet when it doesn’t exist. More importantly, they ignore the foundational stuff, the boring, tried-and-tested strategies that, when combined, will deliver results over time.

The most difficult part of sales and marketing is getting used to the grind.

Doing the same set of things over and over and over again.

Sometimes with such mediocre results that you think about giving up right before striking gold.

— Hiten Shah (@hnshah) May 7, 2020

Like Hiten Shah says, marketing is really about doing the same set of things over and over again. The One Hack doesn’t exist. It’s only by following a systematic process that you’ll get results, and I’ll show you how.

Why Hacks Don’t Work

In poker, a common mistake new players make is to go for longshots. They have two cards of the same suit in hand, and one shows up in the flop. At this point, you have a 6.25% chance of getting a flush but new players chase it anyway.

This is the main problem with focusing on hacks. You’re chasing longshots that may have tremendous upside, but usually all the time, money, and resources you put into it are wasted. 

And then you need to start over. Do that enough times without big gains, and you’ll be where you are a year later.

2/ Without a clear growth engine, all you have is a bunch of random tactics with no clear path to scaling growth.

If you want to affect outcome X, but you don't know which inputs to work on, you have a massive efficiency problem. Probably working on the wrong things.

— Pe:p Laja (@peeplaja) April 29, 2020

Another problem with trying out the latest growth hack is that it often doesn’t make sense for your business.

https://twitter.com/aprildunford/status/1248586626143576064

This is why the best poker players have a process. They only play certain hands when the probabilities are in their favor and they don’t change their strategies because it works for someone else.

A process will help you build a clear growth engine with strategies that make sense for your company.

The framework I use is that process.

An Overview Of The Process

I can’t take full credit for this process. It’s really a combination of various frameworks developed by other experts in the field. I simply combined them into one unified process for my area of specialization – SAAS.

As always, we start with the customer. The first step is building out a customer persona. The second step, and one that is often overlooked, is mapping out the customer journey to understand their buying process.

Armed with that information, we can move on to ideation, where we generate highly relevant ideas for channels we want to try out and prioritize the ones with the highest potential.

Then, we start testing to quantify each channel. This step allows us to determine which one we really want to go all-in on. In poker terms, it helps us get to the double Aces hand.

And finally, we scale.

PS – I’ve created templates you can use to follow along and implement my framework.

Building A Customer Persona

As Harvey Specter says, when he plays poker, “I don’t play the odds, I play the man.”

What he means is, even with poorer odds, you can still beat your opponent if you understand them really well.

Of course, your customer isn’t your opponent, but the principle still applies. You need to understand them really well to figure out what will make them buy your product.

While every startup and marketer understands this principle, most don’t actually apply it. The pressure to constantly grow MRR supersedes what is seen as an exercise that doesn’t instantly increase revenue.

The best growth hacks, ranked
8. Don’t
7. Look
6. For
5. Hacks
4. Look
3. For
2. Systems
1. Talking to your customers

— Kevin_Indig (@Kevin_Indig) June 30, 2018

But while digging into your persona may not give you that 20% growth you’re looking for this month, it will help you sustain it in the long term.

There are many excellent resources for creating a customer persona already, so I won’t get into it in this post. However, I do want to share some key aspects you should focus on as they’ll come in handy later in this process.

To illustrate this, here’s an example of a good customer persona from a company called ClearVoice. They’re a platform for in-house content marketing teams to find vetted freelance writers.

The top half of the persona is about who this customer is. Attributes such as the age range, job titles, industry, and so on allow us to fine-tune our targeting. So if our ideal customer is a middle-aged executive then, instead of marketing on Tik Tok despite it being so hot right now, we would likely pick LinkedIn.

I’d also add data around their interests here. Who they follow online, what sites they visit, what books they read, what podcasts they listen to, what shows they watch. This allows us to niche down in our targeting even further.

The bottom half of the ClearVoice persona is about the customers’ why. It gives us an insight into what they really care about, and allows us to determine the messaging that would appeal to them. We see that Sandy really cares about saving time vetting freelancers, and doesn’t mind the cost, so our marketing should be geared towards “save time” vs “save money”.

You can have multiple customer personas so you’ll want to do this exercise for each one.

I know you’re skimming through this section and convincing yourself you don’t really need to spend time building a customer persona, so here’s a personal story to illustrate the importance.

I once worked with a client that built a platform to connect engineering managers with mentors. I made the mistake of not figuring out the customer persona right at the start. I assumed we should target engineering managers and developed strategies around that. We ran meetups and webinars and created content and ads all around engineering management.

And while they were indeed the end-user, it turns out they didn’t really care about finding mentors. Their primary goals were finishing the story points for their next code sprint.

Eventually, we realized we should be targeting the VP of Engineering. Though the VPs themselves wouldn’t use the platform, it was their responsibility to ensure their engineering managers were doing their best work and growing in their careers. And that meant helping them find mentors.

The moment we switched out marketing to the new persona, things became easier. We were able to cut out a whole bunch of channels that weren’t working and focused on strategies like group dinners that eventually moved the needle a lot more.

Starting with the persona, even if you think your assumptions are spot on, will save you a lot of time and money in the long run.

Building Personas With AI

1. Data Aggregation Layer

Instead of starting with assumptions, use AI to analyze:

• Customer Support Transcripts: Feed customer support chats and emails into Claude or ChatGPT to identify common pain points, language patterns, and objections.
• Social Listening: Use sentiment analysis on social mentions to understand how your potential customers talk about their problems in their own words.
• Competitive Intelligence: Analyze reviews of competitor products to identify unmet needs and emotional triggers.

2. Pattern Recognition

Prompt your AI tool with: “Analyze these transcripts and identify recurring challenges, goals, and objections. Then categorize them by urgency and emotional intensity.”

3. Persona Synthesis

Have your AI compile findings into a structured format with:

• Demographic details
• Psychographic information
• Key challenges (ranked by prevalence)
• Goals and aspirations
• Decision-making triggers
• Objections and concerns
• Preferred communication channels
• Daily routine touchpoints

4. Reality Testing

This is crucial: Cross-reference AI insights with actual customer interviews. Use the AI-generated patterns to create better interview questions like:

• “Our analysis suggests that [specific pain point] is particularly frustrating. Could you walk me through the last time you experienced this?”
• “We noticed many people in your role struggle with [common challenge]. How do you currently handle this?”

5. Continuous Refinement

Set up an automated system that:

• Updates your persona document quarterly with fresh data
• Flags emerging trends or changing priorities
• Tests messaging hypotheses against persona parameters

Sample AI Prompt Template

Analyze the following customer data:
[Insert transcripts, reviews, support tickets]

Create a comprehensive customer persona including:
1. Three most common pain points with verbatim quotes
2. Decision criteria ranked by importance
3. Information sources they trust most
4. Triggers that move them from awareness to consideration
5. Objections that prevent immediate purchase
6. Language patterns and terminology they use naturally

Format the results in a clear, actionable document optimized for marketing strategy development.

Remember: AI helps uncover patterns at scale that might be invisible in small sample sizes, but human validation remains essential. The best personas emerge from the interplay between AI-driven pattern recognition and human emotional intelligence.

Mapping Out The Customer Journey

It’s rare for someone to wake up in the morning and suddenly decide to buy your enterprise software. If that happens often for your company, let me know, I want to invest. In most cases, though, they go through some decision-making process, the journey.

While the customer persona answers the ‘who’ and ‘why’, the customer journey is the missing piece that answers the ‘how’ and ‘when’.

Here’s a quick overview of what the journey might look like for your customer. This is an example for Thinkific, a company I worked at that lets people create and sell online courses. We didn’t actually map out the journey when I was working there, and I developed this entire process only after I left, but I imagine this is what it would look like.

Problem Unaware

The journey begins with your potential customer not knowing they have a problem you solve. In Thinkific’s case, for the online blogger persona (they had many personas), it meant that she wasn’t aware that she could be making a lot more money from her blog.

Problem Aware

At some point, due to some trigger, she realizes she has a problem. She could be monetizing her blog audience and creating a full-time income. Now she starts doing some research to answer the question, “how can she generate more income?”

Solution Aware

As she does her research, she becomes aware of various solutions. She could sell services, or physical products, or online courses, or something else. She decides to try the online course route and needs to figure out how to set one up.

Product Aware

As she explores the online course world, she learns of various platforms and tools that allow her to set one up quickly and affordably. There are marketplaces like Udemy, and there are platforms like Thinkific. Which one is best?

Decision

In the final step of the journey, after researching all the products, our blogger makes a decision and picks Thinkific.

The journey does continue after this into retention and referrals, but that’s outside the scope of this post.

The whole exercise gives us valuable insights into what our customers are thinking about at each step and, by extension, what they care about. This is why there are situations when a direct sales pitch to someone who seems like the perfect customer doesn’t work. They don’t think they have a problem yet.

Meanwhile, if you’ve ever been in a situation where you’re trialing a software and you know you want to buy it, but you’re redirected to a salesperson who goes into the full sales pitch, you know how frustrating it is. You can’t blame the salesperson, though. They’ve been trained on Glengarry Glen Ross and will always be closing.

https://youtu.be/AO_t7GtXO6w

So when we combine the persona with the journey, we can create campaigns specifically for each stage, knowing who our customers are, where they are online, and what they care about during that stage. Our content, our ads, our entire messaging strategy, and the channels we use, are derived from this.

One example of this is a startup I worked with that targets high-volume Shopify stores. We realized that if a store was low-volume then they were likely to be pretty happy with a competitor solution. However, once they started doing more business, they’d have problems because those solutions couldn’t handle it.

That’s when they’d become problem aware and start looking for better software, which meant it would be the perfect time for us to reach out. So instead of blindly marketing to every Shopify store, we monitored their web traffic and reached out when it was the right time. Better leads for less work!

Tips On Mapping Out The Journey

I’ve broken the persona and journey into two separate steps in the process but they go hand in hand and you should create them at the same time. The best way to create both is to talk to actual customers. Get on the phone with them and while you’re asking them the questions you normally would for a customer persona interview, throw in some questions around their journey.

https://twitter.com/jasonlk/status/958737948995813378

Ask them to think back to before they bought your software. They would have been in the Product Aware stage then. Ask them what other products they were looking at and how they made their decision. Then ask them to take another step back into Solution Aware and find out what solutions they were considering and how they did their research.

Keep going back until you’ve got the full picture. Do this with at least 10 customers to get a composite view and extract trends.

Customer Journey Mapping With AI

Before AI can work its magic, you need some data to feed it:

• Customer Support Conversations: Transcripts from calls, chat logs, or support tickets
• Sales Call Notes: What questions do prospects ask? What objections do they raise?
• Website Analytics: Which pages do people visit before converting? Where do they drop off?
• User Interviews: Even 5-10 conversations with actual customers can provide valuable insights

This doesn’t need to be perfect—even partial data will give you something to work with.

Now let’s put AI to work by having it analyze these conversations to identify the natural progression customers follow. Here’s a prompt you can use with ChatGPT or Claude:

“Based on these customer conversations, identify:

1. The initial trigger that made them look for a solution
2. The main questions they had before considering our product
3. The key concerns they needed to overcome before purchasing
4. The deciding factors that finally convinced them to buy”

Now comes the fun part. Use AI to analyze the journey map you created above and identify specific opportunities:

“Based on this customer journey map, help me identify:

1. The biggest drop-off points where we’re losing potential customers
2. Content gaps we should fill for each stage
3. The three highest-impact improvements we could make immediately
4. How we should adjust our messaging for each stage”

Real-World Example: How We Used This Approach

For a SaaS client selling to marketing teams, we took their messy support tickets and chat logs and fed them into Claude. We asked it to identify common questions at each stage of the journey.

The surprising insight? While they were creating tons of content for the Problem Aware stage, their customers were getting stuck in the Product Aware stage with very specific technical questions that weren’t being addressed.

We created a simple FAQ page addressing these questions, and conversion rates jumped almost immediately. Sometimes the biggest wins come from filling the most obvious gaps!

AI Journey Mapping on a Budget

If you’re short on resources, here’s a bare-minimum approach:

1. Interview 5 customers (record the calls with permission)
2. Feed the transcripts to ChatGPT with the prompt: “Identify the stages these customers went through before purchasing, what questions they had at each stage, and what ultimately convinced them to buy.”
3. Create a simple spreadsheet with journey stages and key customer questions
4. Check your content against these questions to identify gaps
5. Fill the biggest gap first and measure the impact

Ideation and Prioritization

While our persona and journey maps give us excellent insights into which channels we should pursue, we can’t do them all, especially at a startup. Except if you’re backed by Softbank. Then you can do everything and have money left over for free beer.

With limited resources, we need to pick our battles carefully lest we end up like the amateur poker player. 

We start by listing out all the ideas we have so far. Many of these come directly from our persona and journey, as listed in the Triggers section of the journey. But you can turn this into a fun group exercise for your marketing team, and even your entire startup team. Have them go over the persona and journey and generate ideas based on that.

For prioritization, there are multiple methods out there. The ICE framework (Impact, Confidence, and Ease) is a popular one but I’m not a big fan of it because you end up with numbers that are mostly pulled out of your… back regions.

I prefer instead the much simpler bullseye framework that Gabriel Weinberg suggested in his book, Traction. 

In the context of this process, all the channels targeting people in the Product Aware stage of the customer journey fall under the Inner Circle.

The Promising channels are all those that target people in the Problem and Solution Aware stages. Finally, our Long-shots are channels targeting Problem Unaware.

We may end up with too many ideas in our Inner and Promising Circles, so even within those, I’d further prioritize them starting by channels that a more scalable or more cost-effective to implement.

Here’s what it ends up looking like for Thinkific based on the triggers from the customer journey exercise. Obviously, it might look different for you.

AI-Powered Idea Generation

Start by letting AI help you expand your thinking beyond the obvious channels:

Tools you can use:

• GPT-4 or Claude: For general ideation based on your customer insights
• Midjourney: To visualize concepts (surprisingly useful for marketing ideation)
• Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet: Especially good at understanding industry nuances
• Ahrefs with GPT integration: To identify content gaps your competitors have missed

Here’s a prompt template that works surprisingly well:

“Based on our customer persona [briefly describe persona] who is currently in these journey stages [list stages], generate marketing channel ideas that:

1. We might not have considered before
2. Have shown strong results for similar businesses in our industry
3. Would specifically address the pain points of [key persona challenge]
4. Could be tested with less than $1,000 and two weeks of effort”

Testing Ideas

Even with our research and prioritization, we don’t want to go all-in on the best idea on our list. Instead, we need to test each one on a smaller scale, calculate the ROI on them, and then pick the one with the best ROI to scale up.

A good framework for this part is the Growthhackers high tempo testing process.

We’ve already done the unbridled ideation and prioritization piece in the previous section. Now it’s time to launch tests on each one. 

First, we need to set up a hypothesis. This needs to be specific, measurable, realistic, and sensible. SMRS. I just made that acronym up.

The hypothesis states what you expect will happen, and the metric you will need to determine if the test was a pass or fail. 

So let’s say you want to test Google Ads. Your hypothesis would be something like “With a budget of $1000 over the coming week, I expect to generate 10 leads at a cost of $100 per lead.”

As you can see, this hypothesis is very specific and measurable. We’ll know if it passes or not if we hit our target numbers. It’s realistic for many companies to generate $100 CPLs on Google Ads. Whether it’s sensible or not depends on your customer LTV. You should be trying for a 3:1 ROI for any of your experiments.

Always make sure you have the hypothesis and the means to track it accurately before you run your experiment.

One of the ideas we’d come up with at one client was to create an online course as a lead magnet. It had worked well at other companies I’d worked with.

However, instead of creating a full-blown course with high production quality, we decided to test an email course and screencast videos. We set a target for our signup rate.

We found that people weren’t interested in taking the course so we dropped it in favor of running webinars, which ended up working better. This saved the company time and money on creating the whole course.

Want a #growthhacking Silver Bullet? It's High Tempo Testing. https://t.co/aUSqICJwHt pic.twitter.com/OcVWbJFr2x

— Sean Ellis (@SeanEllis) May 21, 2015

Once you’ve found a winning strategy, it’s time to scale that up.

Scaling Up

This is where we get our 10X results. We go from The Rock bringing down Triple H in WWF to Dwayne Johnson nearly bringing down a helicopter with his bare hands in Hobbs and Shaw.

Most startups really only need one or two channels at scale to grow rapidly. This is why at the start of this post I said you don’t need to be playing every hand chasing long-shots. By following this process we’ve systematically figured out our highest potential channels and we can focus on those until we saturate them.

There are three ways to scale.

Automate

Start by breaking down your strategy into its component pieces. For example, if you’ve decided to scale content marketing, you’ll have strategy (like identifying topics to write about), writing the post, editing and publishing it, and promoting on social media.

This is a high-level breakdown but even here you can identify pieces like promoting on social media that can be automated with tools.

With one client, we had identified that webinars was a good channel. To set one up we would need to invite an expert as a guest speaker, set up a landing page with a signup form, connect it to our webinar platform, and then email the link to our list.

Most marketers do this manually, and I myself had done it manually in the past. This time, I wanted to scale and do multiple webinars a month, so we automated most of it.

We had a list of experts in Coda who we would automatically receive an invite email with the click of a button. If they said yes, another click would activate the webinar set up via Zapier. It would create a new landing page on Webflow dynamically, create a new Zoom webinar, connect the two, and then email our list with the link.

You’ll notice that all of this was done without coding. There are a ton of no-code tools out there that allow you to set up automated processes like this.

Why no-code is more than just side-projects…

Automate repetitive work & impress your boss:
-Lead gen & management
-Dynamic dashboards
-Analyse customer personas w/ Machine Learning
-Dynamically generated Docs
-Customising your CRM

Our newest bootcamp: https://t.co/3N0HgMoG4o pic.twitter.com/WyWlQmrm6N

— Ben Tossell (@bentossell) April 24, 2020

Of course, now with AI and AI Agents, it has become even easier to automate large parts of your marketing processes. Of course, that would take an entirely new blog post, but if you’re interested in learning more, feel free to contact me.

Outsource

Anything that can’t be automated will need to be done by a human. If it’s a task that doesn’t require knowledge of your product or brand, it can be outsourced.

In the content marketing example, this would be the content writing piece. Many companies also outsource ad management and PR. Just make sure you have someone in-house to manage your freelancers or agencies and ensure they stay on brand.

Two excellent resources for finding high-quality marketers to outsource to are GrowthMentor and Growth Collective.

With GrowthMentor you can find experts in marketing who can get on calls to guide you or give you specific advice. And if you want to hire someone for a project, Growth Collective has a curated list of top marketers.

Before you commit to an in-house marketing hire or sign on with an agency, give us a chance to introduce you to some incredible freelancers! https://t.co/TEnEo0UQx3

— Max Ade (@adesome) February 5, 2020

Hire/Delegate

The final step, if you’re in the leadership team, is to delegate the remaining tasks to someone on your marketing team or to hire for that role.

For our content marketing example, we’re left with the strategy, and editing and publishing tasks.

Early on at Thinkific, we realized influencer partnerships were a powerful channel. To scale that up, we hired someone who’s sole job was to connect with influencers and get them to promote us. That one hire fueled a lot of our early growth, and freed up my time to activate other channels.

Conclusion

By following a systematic approach, you’ll escape the trap of always having to find the next 10X growth hack. Instead of constantly throwing darts at the wall and hoping something sticks, you’ll know exactly what to be doing to grow every week.

More importantly, you’ll ensure your long-term growth. Because, unless you’re defrauding your investors like Theranos, you probably want to still have a company next year.

I’ve created templates you can use to implement my framework here. And if you need any advice, reach out to me!

Before we begin I want to let you know that this isn’t a COVID specific post. I mean, yes, it’s timely (that’s why I’m writing this) but the principles I cover in this post can be applied to any moment of crisis your SAAS startup faces, whether it’s a global pandemic or just a temporary weakness in your sector.

A client of mine recently mentioned that their board of directors had advised them to cut all sales and marketing spend. They went so far as to suggest laying off the entire marketing and sales teams.

https://twitter.com/jasonlk/status/1252807814004662279

Their rationale was that it’s a tough time to sell software, as buyers were cutting down on spending, so it’s better to focus on supporting existing customers and not waste money on marketing.

Like Jason, I’m seeing it across the board from past, present, and prospective clients. One company, an email marketing solution, even mentioned they were afraid to spend more on advertising, despite the fact that their competitors were seeing spikes in signups.

That reminded me of this famous quote –

Be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful.

Warren Buffet

How does that apply to your SAAS, and how can you grow when things look grim? Well first, let’s figure out what kind of product you sell – obvious or non-obvious.

Obvious Or Non-Obvious

Simply put, given a certain environment, an obvious product is something that everyone predicts will succeed in that environment, usually a product that solves a first-order consequence of the crisis. A non-obvious product is one that can succeed in that environment but it’s not immediately apparent how, because it solves a second or third-order problem.

An example of an obvious product, during the current global pandemic, is Zoom, the video conferencing software. The first-order problem is that companies are working from home and employees need a way to communicate. Zoom solves that problem.

Another example is Slack. Again, as more people work from home, Slack is a must-have to enable instant communication. Stewart Butterfield recently wrote an interesting Twitter thread on how the crisis has impacted their business.

https://twitter.com/stewart/status/1243000487365861376

A second-order consequence of the quarantine is that many businesses have had to shut down or lay off staff. This, in turn, leads to an uptick in unemployment claims. Thus, a product that helps governments process unemployment claims faster, becomes a non-obvious product. More on this later.

Note that the obviousness or non-obviousness of a product is dependant on the current environment. The pandemic has lead to people working from home, which is why Zoom and Slack are obvious products.

However, if we turn the clock back to the previous crisis, the depression of 2008, Zoom and Slack would not be obvious products, though they might have been non-obvious.

If your company doesn’t make an obvious product, chances are that you make a non-obvious product. You just need to look carefully.

How To Market If You’re An Obvious Product

If you’re Zoom in 2020, you can do no wrong. While the rest of the market tanked, Zoom’s rise doesn’t seem to be stopping, despite issues about its security.

But for every Zoom, there are other products in the same space that haven’t done quite as well. The product itself has a lot to do with it, but that doesn’t fully explain it. There are alternatives to Zoom with similar bells and whistles, like backgrounds, great UI, built-in virality and so on.

Before the COVID outbreak and the lockdowns, Zoom wasn’t a household name. However, they did have a large customer base in tech companies. Most tech companies, if they didn’t already use Zoom, knew about it.

The moment the lockdowns started happening, tech companies were the fastest to shift to working from home. And because Zoom already had a dominant mind share position, they defaulted to using it.

That initial spike, when compounded with its virality, social media, and PR, then snowballed into mind share in the broader market – non-tech companies and consumers.

So as an obvious product, your job is to make sure you’re top of mind for your market. Awareness is the name of the game here. Once customers know about you and trust you, the sale is easy. They obviously need you.

If you don’t already have a sub-category cornered like Zoom, you can still build up that awareness pretty quickly. Here are some strategies – 

PR

I have never been a fan of big, expensive PR campaigns, and I rarely recommend it to the startups I advise. But these are unprecedented times and for large-scale awareness campaigns, it’s hard to beat a good PR strategy. Again, look at Zoom. 

The key here is to create a campaign that addresses the issues caused by the current crisis. The Uber Eats zero-dollar delivery fee campaign, Google Stadia extended free trial, Disney virtual rides, are all examples of this.

Even if your company is not that big, you can still do something news-worthy to get media attention. A great example is ConvertKit’s Creator Fund. They put together a $50,000 fund to support content creators (their target audience) during this crisis. Many other influencers and small PR sites promoted it.

Advertising

With traditional companies pulling back on advertising, the costs have dropped dramatically. Again, I usually wouldn’t suggest putting ad dollars behind broad awareness campaigns, but as an obvious product, it makes sense.

Promote content to lookalike audiences on Facebook and Instagram. Create display ads on Google Display Network, and video ads on YouTube.

On Google Search, target all your buyer intent keywords, brand keywords, and competitor keywords.

I’ll be writing an entire post on how to run profitable ad campaigns for your SAAS, but for now, you can get my templates to help you structure your campaigns.

Partnerships

The Convertkit campaign wasn’t just good PR. It also harnessed the power of partnerships. They roped in other software products to contribute to the fund, helping the fund grow and generate even more PR. Of course, the partners benefited from the PR as well, so it was a win for everyone.

One of my favorite ways of marketing via partnerships is using webinars and virtual summits. The virtual summit has become popular with every IRL event getting canceled, and it allows you to tap into your partners’ audiences for outsized exposure and awareness.

How To Market If You’re A Non-Obvious Product

As a non-obvious company, the first thing you notice is the demand dropping off. And your first instinct, like the client I mentioned in the introduction, is to cut sales and marketing.

What’s really happening is that your target market has changed. But there is an audience out there who needs your product now more than ever. You just need to figure out who that is, and it’s usually by following the orders of consequence.

Earlier, I mentioned a second-order consequence of the current crisis was businesses shutting down, including restaurants. For CFO2, a company that provides analytics tools for multi-unit restaurants, this could be fatal. Most of their potential customers, well-known sit-in restaurants, are closed and demand plummeted.

However, there are still many restaurants delivering food online, and they need analytics now more than ever to cut costs. So CFO2 may have lost its original client base, but there’s a new audience they can target.

Figure Out Your New Targets

Before you can start marketing, you need to figure out who you’re marketing to, and it may not be the same audience you’d go for during normal times.

One way to find this out is by following the orders of consequence. If you know that there’s going to be more businesses working from, or that local businesses will shut down, or that unemployment will rise, what are the problems that follow and how does your product solve those problems?

Let’s look at Eventbrite. With no one running offline events, 90% of Eventbrite’s revenues vanished, forcing them to lay off half their staff. However, the second-order consequence of events getting shut down was that organizers moved them online. Had Eventbrite switched to target the virtual events market, they could have avoided this.

On the other hand, HeySummit, a virtual conference software, is seeing a big uptick in usage. They quickly targeted the conference organizers that Eventbrite should have and are now reaping the benefits.

Adapt Your Messaging

Now that you know who to target, you’ll need to adapt your messaging to appeal to them. More specifically, talk about the problems you solve that they’re experiencing because of this crisis.

Let’s take a look at SeamlessDocs, a software that helps governments convert PDF forms into digital forms. Having understood that they need to target government agencies on the frontlines of the COVID crisis, they whipped up a new feature in their software that allows government agencies to create custom Coronavirus portals.

The messaging here is very specific to the problems government agencies face right now – handling a larger than average volume of queries from citizens. With the Portal feature, Governments can create a help section of sorts on their websites for citizens to find the resources they need.

Start Marketing

With the new targeting and messaging, we can finally get back to the marketing strategy. Most crises are short-lived (relatively speaking), so I’m partial to short-term strategies here. 

Just as with Obvious products, advertising and partnerships are two powerful channels. Remember that with ads you may need to create entirely new campaigns, with new targeting rules for audience and keywords, and new messaging.

Another strategy is creating small products or tools as marketing channels, much like the Coronavirus Portal by SeamlessDocs. The idea here is to build a tool that helps customers with a problem they’re facing now, but can be offered for free and doesn’t give them the kitchen sink. The ones who can’t afford it can use the free tool, while those who can will upgrade to the full version of your product.

COVID Consulting

I’m providing free 30-minute sessions during this period to SAAS companies. In this session, I’ll help you understand if you’re a non-obvious product and what strategies you can execute to keep growing.

PS – You can learn more about me here and check out my references.