Hi there! 👋
Let’s face it: 2022 has been a hard year. 😔
Just as we thought it was going to be a year of growth at the beginning of the year, things took a drastic turn for the far less ideal at the end of Q1.
There’s no shame in admitting that instead of staring at the budget for next year, all you really want to do is kick off those shoes and have a drink (or two…but we’ll get there).
Or maybe you just really want to crawl under a blanket and bawl your eyes out at a soppy movie. That’s a-okay. That’s human. That’s normal. It’s been a tough year. Give yourself a pat on the shoulder for making it this far. 💖
As we wind down for the holiday season, we thought we’d:
🚀 Take a look at our collection of broken dreams for this year i.e. the year-end walk of shame. Why? Because we’re not perfect. We don’t always hit the mark. But the only way to grow is to learn (and sometimes laugh at our failures) and do better the next time.
🚀 Have a drink together. We created a Christmas drinking game last year. If you feel like you need a drink, don’t worry, it’s timeless and still feasible. Bottoms up! 🥂
🚀 Remind you that now is not the time to cut back on your marketing. Instead, focus on nurturing your brand — the anchor that will carry you through the turbulence.
Ready to join us on our walk of shame down the boulevard of broken dreams? Let’s go!
The Top 3 least performing things we did this year even though we thought they were good
1️⃣ Webinars. Yes, you read it right — Webinars. You may have noticed that we’ve been doing more webinars this year. Don’t get us wrong. We love doing webinars! It always excites us whenever you interact with us during the sessions or let us know you’ve learned something. It makes us feel appreciated knowing we’ve done at least something right.
But let’s also be honest. Webinars are a great way to attract leads which we have been missing the mark on. Simply because we weren’t fully utilizing the functions on our webinar platform. 🤦♀️
While the speakers work hard to impart knowledge, there are behind-the-scenes work that needs to be done to make sure we can continue nurturing the audience AFTER the webinar.
Alas, every new webinar is a learning experience. So what did we learn?
When planning a webinar, engage the audience using the right functions on the webinar platform. Make sure the data doesn’t fall through the crack because it’s crucial to building a nurturing path.
Check, double-check, and even triple-check the technical setup before launching the next webinar (it’s happening on January 12, 2023, by the way. Stay tuned!).
2️⃣ Blog posts, articles, e-books. Oh, written content, one of our greatest loves. Again, don’t get us wrong. Good content is the heart and soul of every story.
We’ve published some pretty great stuff to read throughout the entire year. For example:
🖋️ B2B SaaS website: the pathway to your sales funnel
🖋️ No paid advertising, no growth marketing. Here’s why
🖋️ SaaS positioning: everything for everybody vs. something for somebody
🖋️ GA4 for SaaS marketing: how to do the switch effectively?
🖋️ Customer lifecycle marketing: How to maximize the LTV of your B2B SaaS customers
However, not everyone consumes content the same way. We also noticed that we’ve not been paying attention towards other content formats we’ve been talking about.
Some time mid-year, we drank our own kool aid and started dabbling with videos like these:
📹 Trailer for our podcast episode on Google Analytics
📹 Behind-the-scenes videos of our Growth Hub Podcast
📹 More in the making
Yes, we diversified our content. But what did we learn?
Even if it’s a piece of diversified content from an existing piece, you still need paid promotion to drive results.
3️⃣ Newsletters. When we started with our newsletters, we wanted to make sure we delivered value to our readers. We swear, we even have a document defining what ‘value’ means…from our point of view, which is sharing as much knowledge as we can.
So we started link-dumping everything we thought was interesting onto our newsletters. But guess what happened?
Our data told us otherwise — the readership and engagement were low, and readers started dropping off before they hit 50% of each newsletter. 😭
We’ll be frank, we’re still trying to figure out what topics excite you most. And we’re starting to have an inkling. But if you want to save us the headache, you could also hit the reply button and let us know directly! 😉
What did we learn?
Keep it simple. Curate tightly. While we’re eager to share with you everything (and we mean EVERYTHING) on our reading list, our readers simply don’t always have the time to read all of them.
To wrap it up 🌯
Your brand is the insurance that carries you through tough times, and it’s more important now than ever to focus on nurturing your brand.
As tough as this year has been and as tempting as it is to shrink your marketing efforts, DON’T. Nothing is permanent, including the hard times. This, too, shall pass.
Take some time to rest, unwind, and replenish some much-needed strength this holiday. Our resilience will carry us through this. 💪
Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! See you in 2023! 💗
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