Author: Vlad Zghurskiy

22 September 2022

15 Min Read

The formula of product market fit search

This is not the case that we would like to demonstrate on the first page of our site.

This is not the case in which our actions completely corresponded to our own Account-Based Marketing campaigns frameworks.

And yeah, we even couldn’t tell you that we exceeded all the KPIs x10 times.

KPIs were achieved and our partnership with EMCD invest still goes on, but the real “ABM magic”* didn’t happen 🙁

*synchronization between teams and departments that reveals all the secret power of ABM

The client

emcd
If you’ve ever spent at least a few hours in order to understand what cryptocurrency mining is and how it works, you must have heard about the largest mining pool in Europe and the 12th largest in the world. But as you can see, the EMCD pool has no need to be advertised.So our campaign was dedicated to the promotion of innovative solutions from the team of EMCD pool – a turnkey solution that allows them to receive profit from mining without doing the mining.

The Audience

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>But what about the target audience of EMCD Invest? Neither we nor the EMCD team could know exactly which segment our advertising campaign should be aimed at. So defining this became our first and foremost challenge to deal with.
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number 1

Defining the target audience

number 2

Developing hypotheses without any retrospective data

number 3

Attracting leads with $100,000+ deal size

number 4

Creating the right messaging that will explain the comprehensive product in the easiest way

number 5

Developing the framework of sales&marketing synchronization

Solutions

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marketing tools
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LinkedIn outreach

Email outreach

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Content-marketing distribution

PPC warming-up

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How we did it?

number 1

How to invent your audience if your prospects are just a gathering of incognitos?

Every case we share with you is filled with details and a meticulous count of sources and processes we used in order to bring the best results for our client. This one is not an exception.

Before launching account-based marketing campaigns, we spend a lot of time with the clients in order to find out who represents the target audience, to learn their behavior patterns, location, age, and so on.

In this case, it took us enormously long brainstorm sessions with solely all the executives and other team members of EMCD Invest.

Since the product was entirely new to the market, the audience was unknown. Supposedly, these were people for whom EMCD created the product in the first place. You can tell it sounds a bit vague, right?

Right, because all that we had were assumptions, both from our part and from the client’s side as well.
Therefore, we turned to different audiences that somehow crossed, and divided them into three categories:

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Asset/wealth managers

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Entrepreneurs

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Miners

Life hack

Investment decisions need time, especially when we are talking about a significant amount of assets. But we are all human beings and we tend to forget and procrastinate. So if you are aiming not only at attracting more traffic, long term collaborations will bloggers and telegram admins seems to be your solution.

number 2

How to Choose Channels for Your Incognito Audience?

This is exactly where our expertise and blockchain marketing experience played for us. We’ve had an understanding of where and how we can reach our audience.

However, as we mentioned, the audience was extremely spread out, so we had to use different channels of communication, at some point even completely opposite to each other. Besides that, our client was interested in the leads that will be able to invest $100,000+. So we realized that even with the right channels of communication, we will never be able to ideally segment the audience based on the sum of money they are ready to invest.

Life hack

LinkedIn scripts shaped in the custdev fashion turned out to be a great help for us. The product was entirely new, we didn’t know nor how to sell it, nor what the triggers were.

Thus, for one audience, we launched scripts without any hint on the sale intentions. It was just a script with several questions that usually applied for custdev sessions.

Deep inside we were hoping to sell something, even though we weren’t entirely aiming at it. However, even with such an approach, we were able to bring a few hot leads. How? While these guys were merely answering questions, they came to an understanding that this product is very fitting to their needs. And… It broke the ice!

number 3

If the percentage of staking is on fire - ad creatives on Facebook will be working as hell

Considering that we were working with a new product, it was critical to test hypotheses. Hey, Captain Obvious.

We created a spreadsheet and recorded every move meticulously. For each variable, we launched a different campaign.

Example

if we chose the audience of asset wealth managers, we created 10 scripts and launched 10 campaigns. Besides, in one script we could test two CTAs.

Yes, at first we didn’t get a lot of value from it, because the data was too small. It was a long run. For a while, it was hard to claim something. But in the end, it helped us to find and validate the target audience of EMCD Invest.

Don’t rush to any conclusion, cause one more thing has played an incredibly meaningful role. Yes, we did our part and collected data. But the representatives of the EMCD team during calls where the sales manager talked to leads, succeeded in completing our efforts. How exactly?

They had very friendly conversations, kindly explaining that the product might not be perfect, so it would be great to hear a client’s opinion and feedback.

astronaut

Life hack

There is no way that you can avoid entering data. The only way to boost the efficiency of your campaign is to record data every time it appears during the process. Just do it in real-time, update every day, otherwise you can really confuse yourself by correcting this mess later.

Here is the results of testing hypothesis, where type of the audience are the main criteria:

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Consequence:
At the end of our campaign the biggest part of our leads belongs to asset/wealth managers, despite the fact that the percentage of positive answers after first touch was lower than usual.

What does it mean?
After conducting a few custdev sessions we realize that asset/wealth managers are exactly the audience we need. But the benefits of EMCD invest aren’t really obvious to them in the very beginning.

How did we optimize the interaction with this audience?

  • Maximize social selling approach and personalization
  • Encourage SDR to pay more attention to this audience in order to “grow their demand”
  • Laid more time for “growing the audience” because of long decision making cycle
  • Customize our offer for a perfect fit to the needs of the audience
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Consequence:

In the very beginning we made an assumption that EMCD invest could be a n ideal way of diversification for entrepreneurs, even those who weren’t facing the crypto world before. But with the length of time we understand a few things:

1. Average entrepreneur receives around 5 outreach messages in Linkedin per day, so with the high probability they won’t pay enough attention to your offer, especially if it has the word “crypto”.
2. It’s simply don`t resource efficient to spend such amount of time for communication with the audience that is not too familiar with the world of cryptocurrencies, while 280 million people are already using cryptocurrencies for diversification purpose

How did we optimize the interaction with this audience?

  • Segment entrepreneurs that are related to the fintech business
  • Launch campaign in the automated style without making deep dive into personalization and customization
  • Maximize the usage of pre-warming up with Facebook in order to acquaint the audience with the product before receiving the message in the LinkedIn

Consequence:

The truth is that the main share of EMCD invest customers are miners, but as you could see from the chart, results of Account Based Marketing campaign don’t seem to be the best here, besides of the fact that the percentage of positive answers is higher than for other audiences.

What does it mean?

After spending some time outreaching the audience of miners we understand quite a simple thing – LinkedIn doesn’t seem to be the channel market fit for them.

How did we optimize the interaction with this audience?

  • We didn`t stop LinkedIn outreach, instead we created direct scripts. Yes, that wasn’t the best move for reply rate, but that is what helps us to communicate just with the leads that shows considerable interest to the product
  • Launch Facebook campaign with aggressive remarketing
  • Currently we are in the process of discussing Telegram outreach for this audience
number 4

How to Synchronize Marketing and Sales Departments (Without Messing Things Up Like We Used To Do)

The Bible of ABM is very clear: “It has been said – sales department and marketing department should be the one, and by “one” I mean synchronized”.

However, this task is quite challenging. Even within one campaign. Our task was x10 harder – we had to synchronize not only our departments but also align with sales from the EMCD team.

Even though we were educating EMCD Invest on the issues considering ABM campaigns, somehow we failed to explain the importance of the involvement of their sales managers.

No one can present the product better on some important call than the representative of the company. Even the most badass marketer couldn’t love and know the client’s product the way the representative of the company feels about it. But even the most badass sales manager from the client’s side will not be able to present the product at a decent level if he simply doesn’t understand what the hell is this ABM?

As we mentioned earlier, EMCD Invest was a new product that was just going through its pivot phase. It also means that it wasn’t the main monetization source for EMCD team at that moment, and when the deadlines became closer, all the resources of EMCD were aimed at those projects that brought resources to them, and EMCD Invest wasn’t among that list.

However, even despite lack of synchronization, we reached the predefined KPI without doing any warming up, further social selling, etc. Does this mean that these procedures are not required? Totally nope. It means that EMCD Invest brings real value to the audience we decided to target so that 50% of required resources can bring quite good results.

If you understand a little how the sales process works, then you could realise how little manipulation has been done by us to bring the leads with 100k+ deal sizes.

Yes, we managed to bring leads, but what is more important, we found our audience. So that the results we achieved could be scaled several times. But… it wasn’t possible, due to the simple fact – our synchronization was very poor.

insight

If you bring a new concept to a company you work with and offer a new marketing model, then it is vital to identify responsibilities, form a manifestation, make as many calls as needed, so each part of the team has a clear understanding of what they are supposed to do. If you don’t do that, it’s always possible that your client will make everything perfectly well, but… due to their vision. Unfortunately, this is not something to bring satisfying results.

Testimonials

“We supposed that it’s grueling to establish contact with our target audience. Our opinion has not changed 🙂 But this fact did not become a problem for the Solus team

You can check out full review from Waves exchange on Clutch

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