Creating Signature Offers
Getting your offer right—for YOUR target, with the most enticing carrot at the right time in the customer journey—can change the trajectory of sales success for any business. Core competencies under this fundamental include everything from upselling and cross-selling to connecting your offers in the customer journey.
Signature Offers stand on 4 pillars of success
Creating Signature Offers is our superpower. We've been creating them for hundreds of brands over the past 35 years across every step of the customer journey. Signature Offers are strategically solid offers that stand on 4 interconnected pillars of success to attract your audience and compel your prospect to take action, no matter the step of the customer journey.
What are the 4 pillars?
- The structural skeleton: the reward you're offering
- The muscular mechanics: the interactive engagement tactics
- The emotional heart: the psychological triggers that drive action now
- The physical appearance: the creative presentation
When you get all 4 right, you create a Signature Offer that gets the attention of your ICP with an offer that motivates action commensurate with their next step in the customer journey. But when you fail to hit one or more pillars, your offer and campaign will underperform, and your CAC will rise.
Amazon Prime Day
Amazon Prime excels in limited-time offers and special events like Prime Day, which takes place on a random day in July. Offers like these create a sense of urgency with prospects, which compels them to buy. According to Adobe Analytics, over $12.7B in merchandise was purchased in the US alone during the 2023 2-day event.
McDonald's Value Meals and Happy Meals
Limited-time offers aren't the only way to create an offer. McDonald's gives a masterclass on marketing strategy with both the Combo Meals and Happy Meals. Combo meals are designed to maximize revenue per customer through bundling, while Happy Meals are kid bundles that change every 6 weeks to create a sense of newness and the need to collect the rewards. As you consider creating offer bundles, ask yourself how to make a bundle that feels like a "no-brainer" to prospective customers.
Gamification: Sweepstakes, Games, and Contests
Relying on sweepstakes, games, and contests at the top of the funnel is an effective strategy to control your budget. Unlike a gift-with-purchase (GWP) incentive where everyone gets something free, games of chance and contests (games of skill) offer a fixed prize pool. Typically, games of chance (and skill) don't drive conversions further down the funnel particularly well because of the imbalance between what you're asking the prospect to do and their immediate reward for doing so. That's why it's become commonplace to offer a gift card to prospects to do a demo or customers who complete a review.
Strategic outperforms generic
The reward is the skeleton of your offer. When you get strategic in how it's delivered and presented emotionally and creatively, you begin to connect your brand more thoroughly with your prospect or customer, increasing conversions, lowering CAC, and reducing churn while increasing LTV.
Imagine you've budgeted to give a prospect $25 for taking a demo. You can offer an Amazon GC. It's quick and easy, and everyone uses it. While that's true, it's also true that your competitor can do the exact same thing. But let's say your USP is your personalized service (perhaps through AI enablement). What if you instead offered that same $25 in the form of a GC to the prospect's favorite sports team (which you know through your ABM campaign or in your CRM), or you deliver a monogrammed pocketknife or valet (still within the price point)? In both cases, you've delivered a reward for the same budget that reinforces your USP and better connects with your ICP.
Finding and Reaching Prospects and Customers
This topic is not a core competency on paid traffic and ads. Instead, we cover email marketing best practices, collaborations with adjacent partners, and trade show strategies.
Traffic is a game of numbers.
As you know, traffic is a game of numbers. No matter what, you must get in front of many people to convert a small percentage. The key is to optimize by getting in front of YOUR ICP and then hitting them with a Signature Offer at the right step of the customer journey to convert. Seth Godin, a master at choosing the channels and platforms where your audience hangs out, says, "You need to be where your audience is, not where you want them to be."
Collaborations
One of our favorite core competencies for the Reach Fundamental is collaborations. That's when you partner with a product adjacent to your SaaS, or is one your audience uses, perhaps in conjunction with your product. Collab and share assets with your partner so your cost is lower than straight advertising. Plus, prospective customers perceive the messaging as more authentic when you collaborate.
Collabs can take many forms, from dropping exclusive offers in a newsletter to guesting on a brand's podcast, sharing a trade show booth, or running a joint webinar. One key is ensuring the collab is mutually beneficial and provides value to your customers and prospects.
Trade Show strategies
The trade show line item is significant for many companies, and ROI can sometimes be challenging to prove. The most effective trade show offers are:
- Novel: people crave novelty
- Relevant: relating to your brand's USP and campaign messaging
- Branded: so you can be remembered
- Engaging: to break up the grind and be memorable
- Crowd-attracting: people are drawn to crowds. It triggers FOMO, social validation, curiosity, and emotional contagion
Getting strategic about your trade shows improves the ROI on this already significant investment and can help you attract and engage your ICP so you can move them down the buyer's journey, even after the show.
AI enablement in marketing
Naturally, generative AI is wide open, changing rapidly, and delivering new use cases daily. Nevertheless, in today's world, it's already a must-have as a Demand Gen marketing fundamental if you want to deliver results better, faster, and cheaper.
Generative AI today
Generative AI offers seemingly limitless potential for improving marketing efforts across the board. No one yet knows what it can do. But what we are seeing so far is that it works best in the hands of those with a specific area of expertise. That is, rely on it as your sidekick, not your CMO.
Garbage in, Garbage out
Agency people have a saying, "Garbage in, garbage out." It means that the quality of output is highly reliant on the quality of the input. The creative output will suffer if you don't give good direction as a client or an AE.
We've been working with Open.AI daily for the past several months. It is accelerating some of our internal marketing efforts, but it's not replacing us, yet. In short, we're utilizing it as an unpaid marketing intern who's helping with everything from coming up with alternative metaphors to assisting in copy and brainstorming to creating social media posts that will resonate with our specific ICP. The better the input, the better the output. From there, we still must edit.
Support with personalization, customization, segmentation
Demand Generation requires a multitude of touches. AI enablement can accelerate those touches by getting more personal with the messaging, better connecting messaging with prospects, and using proven response tactics. And that's just the beginning.
Demand Generation Fundamentals 7-9 recap
The final 3 Demand Gen marketing fundamentals you must master to scale your B2B SaaS past 100, by increasing conversions and lowering CAC are:
- Creating sizzling Signature Offers for your ICP at every step of the customer journey
- Efficiently finding and reaching prospects
- Employing AI enablement as your unpaid marketing intern.
What's next?
If you missed part 1 or 2 of this series on Demand Gen Marketing Fundamentals every B2B SaaS Founder needs to know to Scale Past 100, visit https://xpromos.com/blog for review.
9 in IX Marketing Scrum
B2B SaaS founders face enormous pressure to grow their customer base while minimizing customer acquisition costs (CAC). Many are tech geniuses but lack foundational marketing knowledge. That's why we've designed the 9 in IX Marketing Scrum as bite-sized, fluff-free content drops to bridge that gap.
Interested in more? Join our 9 in IX Marketing Scrum for twice-weekly 9-minute content drops to help you scale your B2B SaaS past 100. Visit https://mastery.xpromos.com/scrum for more details. Act fast to join as a Founding Member for a special discounted introductory monthly subscription. Space is limited, as we are increasing prices based on total community size.
Signature Offer Offer
Need a bespoke Signature Offer for your brand to increase conversions but don't know where to start? We are currently offering Signature Offer creation kits for only $7500, but only to the first 5 customers who sign up. Check out the details at https://mastery.xpromos.com/signature.