A Peek into Edward Ford’s Marketing Journey with Supermetrics: From €10M to €20M ARR in one year
Edward Ford, Marketing Director at Supermetrics, joins us for this episode of GrowthFit. Edward began his journey as a corporate language instructor. He experienced a lot of things after he joined his first job right after university at a digital agency. He was one among the two-team marketing teams serving six different European markets at a cloud computing company. Then, he switched gears to work with an agency specialized to serve SaaS companies. He started a podcast to interview other great marketers before joining Supermetrics, a high-growth global SaaS company headquartered in Helsinki, Finland, as one of the early-stage employees.
What is Supermetrics?
Edward: In his own words- “We have products that help marketers, analysts, and engineers spend less time moving data and more time using data. Their marketing and sales data is moved from siloed platforms to wherever they need it, such as analytics and reporting tools like spreadsheets, dashboards & BI tools, as well as data warehouses. It enables marketing teams to have access to their data so they can make more important decisions backed by data and identify opportunities for growth.”
When we started, we were more focused on product creation and now our focus is on sales. Now, marketing focuses on communicating to customers how Supermetrics can help marketers solve their problems. We are visible whenever people are trying to find out how to move data and Google spreadsheets or Twitter/Linkedin data to spreadsheets or build a dashboard.
Don’t Skip Strategy - “What do you mean by that?”
Edward: It is about understanding as a company where you are going, what is the goal, how are you going to achieve this? It is about bringing everyone together and figuring out how we are going to hit the target. That is a strategy in simple terms. It is about understanding where the growth is coming from, what is the buying process and just getting that company-wide alignment. In all this, marketing plays a crucial role.
As a marketer, you think about messaging, how you want to be perceived, who you are, what is the top of the funnel that you are following. It’s also about gearing the leadership. It’s more about getting the basics right and setting the foundation.
Measure what works and what doesn’t
Edward: We use Supermetrics to understand what works and what doesn't and which channels fetch us the best opportunities. A go-to-market strategy that powers demand generation engine is effective content. The foundation of content strategy is knowing what people think on Google. Our performance marketing teams are heavily crunching numbers of different campaigns, different acquisition costs and combining it with conversions. If you are not looking at conversions, then you are in a trap of just analyzing traffic. It is just about having systems and processes in place where you can come back and see what are you looking at on a monthly, quarterly, half-yearly, and annual basis.
Data points used to create Content
Edward: It is about looking at high keyword volume with different search intents. If there is a search term that can be made into an article where we can show how we can solve a problem when they read our article, then we go behind that. We do a lot of customer and audience research on what content needs to be created and try to find out what is converting well.
Tracking your Ideal Customer Profile and being there for them
Edward: We have a good idea who our ICP is for different segments. You can pull a lot of data from Supermetrics for a lot of different ads, which means performance marketers and digital marketers who would be interested in us. We recently launched a Shopify connector and this would benefit e-commerce performance marketers. We talk to ICPs who don’t know about Supermetrics. I look at their Linkedin profiles and see how my ICP behaves before we start targeting.
The Experience of hosting a Podcast
Edward: You need to understand your customer before you start marketing. We have interviews of two types. One is where we interview an expert or marketer who is really good with something that they do and start diving into it. We then build a framework or playbook. The other type is more about story, kind of an episode where we speak to a CEO or founder where we understand everything behind the scenes.
First Principles of Marketing
Edward: In a recent Linkedin post, I shared about the first principles of marketing. It is easy to forget about reviewing some foundational principles, so we were able to do that when we recently hired our CMO.
- Brand: This is about everything that your company stands for. This is not just about marketing the company. It is the story, the narrative.
- Funnel: What journey do they take? Model the customer journey in the best way you can reflect reality. Find out touchpoints, set the KPIs, and then check the conversion rate. Helping you understand where to focus.
- Data and MarTech: Have access to data to provide KPIs and you need the right tools and tech stack that supports you to do the job better instead of slowing you down.
- Pillars: This is the roadmap. What are the 3 to 5 things to focus on now? Put your energy into just those few things.
- Operating Model: Tells how as a team you should operate. It tells you what and how you work on an annual, half-yearly, quarterly, monthly, and weekly basis. Figure out the model that makes you move faster. Have touchpoints so that you ensure that you are not slowing down.
Data and MarTech: How do you decide what works for you?
Edward: We don’t necessarily use tools to hack all the way. Though we use them to detect where we can convert better. We recently used a workshop where we split our teams into three-member groups. We told them to come with ideas on how we can increase the conversion of a page where we were getting a lot of traffic.
So the teams came back with ideas and we used Sean Ellis’s framework called ICE that helped us score the ideas based on impact, the confidence of success, and ease of implementation.
Advice to entry-level marketers
- Solve problems, making yourself very valuable to the company
- Don’t ask for permission
- Never stop learning
“Solve problems, making yourself very valuable to the company ”
