📰 This Week in AI & SaaS 📰

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Read of the Week: The Encyclopedia Project, Or How To Know In The Age Of AI

An interesting article that examines society's biggest problem with AI: Determining what’s real and what’s not.

“Our lives are consumed with the consumption of content, but we no longer know the truth when we see it.”

Read it

💡 Marketing Moments with Mounier 💡

In my recent visit to the Hard Corps Marketing Show, we took a deep dive into the real-world application of growth marketing, debunking some common myths and exploring when a company should really hire a growth marketer.

Simplifying Growth Marketing

We addressed the misconception that all companies need a growth marketer from the start. I argued that early-stage, pre-revenue companies should focus first on achieving product-market fit. Hiring a growth marketer comes later, when there's enough data and a customer base to build upon.

Growth Marketing vs. Growth Hacking

Growth hacking is about quick, often temporary solutions to boost growth. Growth marketing, on the other hand, involves a long-term, sustainable approach that includes setting clear goals, using data wisely, and continuously testing new strategies.

When to Hire Marketers

Practical Example: Transitioning to Digital

I shared a case study from the automotive industry where I helped a company grow significantly by shifting from traditional to digital marketing, focusing on building a digital-first brand presence.

Creative B2B Marketing

Contrary to the idea that B2B marketing has to be stiff and boring, integrating creative, consumer-like strategies can make it much more effective and engaging.

Career Insights

Drawing from my diverse background and experiences, I emphasized the importance of resilience and learning from every role to build a robust understanding of both marketing and business growth.

For actionable insights on refining your marketing approach and understanding the timing for expanding your marketing team, this discussion is packed with valuable advice.

👉️ Listen to the full episode here for a comprehensive take on strategic growth marketing.

👾 TOFU Quick Bytes:  Streak Teardown 👾

Streak teardown

Founded in 2011, Streak is a cloud-based CRM platform for Gmail that enables users to manage everyday tasks, such as customer interactions, support tickets, leads, projects, and partnerships, all from within Gmail.  

Strategy overview: 

Streak mainly targets B2B sales and marketing teams predominantly in the financial industry, with a multi-faceted marketing strategy, centered around email marketing, lead generation, and customer engagement tactics.  

Performance Analysis:

How have they achieved this? 

Critical Teardown:

What does Streak do well?

Email marketing segmentation: Streak segments its audience based on interests, behaviors, and past interactions and tailors all email communications to each segment, making the interactions more personal, addressing key pain points, and offering targeted solutions. They also always A/B test subject lines to improve Open rates and CTRs.  

Lead generation strategies: Streak not only captures leads through traditional channels, like newsletter sign-up forms, but they also gather leads by offering valuable resources, like free guides, templates, free trials, and demos and they often run giveaways and leverage pop-ups, triggered by user behavior, to encourage email sign-ups. 

Sales funnel optimization: To increase conversion rates, Streak adopts a cohesive approach when creating content for each stage of the sales funnel: They create awareness through regular social media posts and blogs, they capture leads by offering high-value content and giveaways, they nurture their leads with personalized email campaigns, and they close their sales with a direct,121 interactions.   

Engagement and retention: Streak prioritizes customer retention to maintain interest and encourage repeat business by continuously engaging with their customer base through loyalty programs, exclusive offers, and automated follow-ups and check-ins. 

What doesn’t Streak do well? 

Limited real-time data access: Although Streak provides powerful backtesting and deployment tools, it may have limitations in terms of real-time data access and integration.

A steep learning curve: Streak has a simple, user-friendly interface, but new users have reported problems when using the more advanced features, especially the automated trader platform, and often struggle to reach their ‘aha moment’ without a significant time investment. Streak might want to consider offering dedicated in-app support, advanced training webinars or sessions, or even adding in-depth hotspot tips to specific features, to ease friction.  

Patchy customer support: Despite carefully nurturing leads through the sales funnel, and heavily investing time and resources into proactive retention strategies, users have reported issues with the lack of customer support availability, although this may have changed as they have since integrated a customer support chatbot to help with common user queries.  

Lack of user success stories: As a business that offers such a wide range of complex, but useful features, covering a wide range of tasks and business areas, it’s surprising that Streak doesn’t have any success stories or case studies explaining how their platform has helped with performance. They list large companies and boast 750k customers. Not having one customer story, interview, or use case may be significantly impacting their adoption by larger organizations.

AI integration

Email segmentation: Streak uses AI to analyze customer data to segment their email lists based on criteria such as past interactions, purchase history, and demographic information which allows them to send personalized emails and create content that resonates with each segment, increasing engagement and conversion rates. 

Automated follow-ups: AI-driven automation allows Streak to trigger timely follow-ups and responses, based on user actions, to ensure users receive relevant information, quickly, to increase customer satisfaction and engagement. ​

Predictive analytics: Streak uses AI-powered predictive analytics to forecast customer behavior and predict future trends, like predicting which customers are more likely to convert or churn, helping them intervene at the right time and effectively tailor their marketing strategies. 

Key takeaways: 

What campaign or content marketing strategy would you like to see torn apart, next? Let me know! 

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