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Everyone wants to know how to grow...
How to find more clients, close more customers and see their revenue chart go up and to the right.
But the issue is... that they are asking the WRONG question.
Before looking for the new acquisition strategy, hack or hiring that new sales person... you need to understand why your existing customers are churning, or why they aren't buying again.
Remember:
.
In this episode of Confessions Of A B2B Marketer, Tom shares:
👉 Why this podcast has been quiet for the past 5 months
👉 Revenue numbers for both Fame & bCast
👉 Content planz for the future
Thanks for listening and hit me up on
if you have any questions!
So it took us about a, a year to get us to nine clients, and then over the summer from July onwards, we were adding between three and five clients a month. So you can see the kind of growth there.
Hello, and welcome back to the Confessions of a B2B Marketer podcast. My name is Tom Hunt, your host, and it's been about five months since we released the last episode the podcast. Is back, and in this next 10 to 15 minutes or so, I'm gonna share with you why we've taken the five month hiatus. What's been going on in the world of SaaS marketer in fame in Bcast?
What's gone well, what hasn't gone well? Revenue numbers, the income report, and then also what we are gonna be focusing on with those businesses, but also with this podcast going forward.
Okay, so I'll link to a pin tweet in the show notes that shows the Mr. Of bcast and Fame since the first tweet, which was November the 18th of 2020. Now, in that tweet, we show Bcast at $250 mrr, and we show fame at $14,000 mrr. And for those that are not familiar, you can go to Bcast at fm. It's a podcast hosting software for businesses, and Fame is a B2B podcast agency, so a service.
So you can follow through the tweet to understand where we were in terms of revenue for those businesses. The latest one was April the 13th, and Bcast was a 5 89 MRR fame with a 29.8 Mr. Now, the update today is that b a is about 2,200. Mrr, so it's about four x where we were six months ago, and fame is a little bit higher.
It's at about $59,000 mrr, so that's up to X from where we were about six months ago. The really the answer to the first question, where has this podcast been? Is that we haven't been recording. Because of the focus on the growth of those two companies, specifically fame, it took us around a year to go from zero clients to nine clients.
And for anyone's like awareness, we like a full service BT podcast agency. So if you are a btb company and you want to start a podcast, we'll do everything apart from Host It. And we charged per month for this. So it took us about a a year to get us to nine clients. And then over the summer from July onwards, we were adding between three and five clients a month.
So you can see the kind of growth there. And so obviously I'm the guest, the founder, CEO of that company. When that kind of growth happens, either I can continue doing other stuff like the podcast and promotion, et cetera, and I can like leave the fact that those clients would become successful to chance, or I could refocus my time and my resources into that company.
Hire the right people, build out the processes to ensure those clients are happy. And so that's really what I have been doing for the past six. Is focusing on the fame system, hiring the right people to serve those clients, and also servicing clients. That leaves, I guess less time to do other stuff, for example, this podcast.
But let's, while we're on the topic of fame, let's dig into a bit more. I know the audience here are like marketers, specifically B2B marketers, so you're probably wondering what we did to go from nine clients a year to five clients a month. And as with any answer to the question, how did you grow? There's never really one specific answer.
We focus like our number one value in the business is client happiness. And as we know, The golden rule of marketing or growth, in my opinion, is that retention is the foundation of all growth, and so we have a significantly low churn rate. And so when we bring on a client, we know on average they're gonna stay for X amount of months and spend X amount of cash.
And so that's really the focus of the whole company is client happiness, and therefore, if we get that right, we know we have like relatively good unit economics, and so we can then go out and spend more money to get customers. Now there's one page channel that is working and has been working for like a year.
I'm probably not gonna say it though because , it doesn't really make sense for me to share the pay channel that's working really, really well for. Because as soon as I say that, it could probably just get a bit more expensive and end. I'm not working if anybody else in a Zoom in a business wants to do that, so I'm not gonna imagine that.
But I would say that retention is a foundation of all growth. We are starting to rank for organic search for terms like podcast agency, which is a good sign. I haven't been able to track clients directly back to that, but I'm seeing impressions and clicks going up. So it's probably. We don't actively ask clients to refer, but we obviously have had word of mouth or we've had clients that have started say a second podcast, so that's been helpful.
So yeah, that's really like there isn't a secret source if you're in a B2B company and you're looking to grow. I would recommend first focusing on retention, focusing on how you can make the clients happy, reducing that churn rate, that will help drive word of mouth and referrals. And then once that's done, I would go to look at other channels, whether it's paid, whether it's content, seo, et cetera.
And then just take one channel at a time, spend months on it, get it to work for moving on to the next one. That would be my advice. In terms of other new that fame, we've expanded the kind of full-time team probably from. Six to 10 over this time period, the hiring's gone incredibly well. We had our first offsite in the UK and in the Philippines last week.
It was amazing. So everything is good with fame. But one other point I'd also make, this is probably specific for like B2B companies, is that getting, like when you're looking to bring on customers or bring on clients, is to really understand who is the client that you can really serve well that is really easy for you to get them good results, because if you do that, your delivery, like your profit margin is probably gonna increase because you know exactly how to serve this client, but then also your likelihood of success increases.
And so this feeds back into the retention number You're. Get much better results for your clients and therefore they're gonna reduce churn. You can spend more to acquire them. And so actually understanding that and then rejecting clients that you don't think are right. Now, obviously this depends on your cash position or the aggressiveness of your revenue goals, but if you have cash in the bank and you're not like super concerned about hitting an aggressive revenue goal, I would recommend actually rejecting people that come to you because they're not the right size, they're not the right industry, it's not the right style of service that they're looking.
If you do that, everything, all the rest of your metrics will. So that is the update on fame. And now obviously the other company is Bcast. Now Bcast is podcast hosting software for high growth businesses. It's podcast host for essentially business podcasts. And so the way we build, I'm the product manager for Bcast and obviously I'm working with fame clients every day, so I really understand what a business wants from their podcast.
And so we feed that into the product development for b A. Now, as I mentioned, we've four Xed MRR in the past six or so months. So the question is, how is that happening mainly through organic traffic? And I can kind of share this one. I'm happy to share this channel because it's very hard to recreate. And I'll just give you a taste of the kind of terms of the volume that we've managed to do with Bcast Organic.
So we've gone from roughly, if we say when we've released the last episode of this show, we were probably hitting about a hundred clicks a day from organic. And out of right now we are averaging around 800. So we've eight xor Organic clicks to the site Over the past six months, how have we done this?
Just writing a lot of great content. So we have a content machine that we built. We have a cup of writers, we have someone managing the process, and we do keyword research, look at compared to content, and then try to make it a little bit better. We produced about six blog posts a month on. And it's just, I'll try and link to a screenshot of the organic graph, but it's pretty awesome.
All of the organic metrics are going up, referring domain. And also like impressions, clicks, and our AHS domain ranking is also going up consistently. So we're gonna double down on that. We also, there's some virality in the product. Everyone, where everybody, every podcast is putting their content on our domain so we get back things, et cetera from that.
So that's also helping. So the more customers we bring on, the more likely we are to get future customers. So here's the viral flywheel that works with specific SaaS products where. Taking content from your users and then putting that publicly on the internet so that fly will start working once we get users.
But to get users, we are doing the organic content. Those two flywheel are connected, right? Because when a user comes, they will put their content into Bcast. That helps us with organic. That means we can get more people coming into the organic flywheel and then more people going into the very reality flywheel.
So that's kind of working on the acquisition side in terms of the business focus. Yeah. We heavily focused on creating a podcast, those for business podcasts, and we know what. Podcasts want because we have fame. We spend all our time working with businesses to help start and grow their podcasts. So that's the focus of the product.
So the theory is that we can serve that customer segment better. That customer segment is large enough for us to build a good business, and that's the theory with pcast. Okay, so I hope like gives you a bit of a flavor for what's going on with the business right now. Obviously SaaS market is like the content asset, uh, the content brand, and that has actually been going pretty well without much kind of effort going into it.
We haven't added a blog post onto the site, I think for the six months. Haven't really been engaging that much in the group. But the great thing about Facebook groups and blogs, well actually specifically Facebook groups, is that they do grow over time the energy or the value being added by the users.
Once you get that right, it's hard to get it set up. But once you get to a critical mass, that does start kind of working. And so the group's been growing like pretty steadily over this time, and the engagement has still maintain. And so these, like the theory here is that we can build this content asset.
It's easier to get attention with a brand that isn't related to a service or a product, and then we can build this self-containing community and then siphon off the attention from that community, like in a clear and ethical manner to either sponsors or to the products or services that we. So right now we don't have any sponsors, but if you are looking, if you're happy to sponsor like a vibrant SaaS marketing community, get in touch.
Tom SA market. I also, what I will say during this time is that the organic. Traffic on all three domains. So SaaS market IO fame, so, and Bcast, ifm have all been floating increasing. And this is what I kind of realized with online businesses is the longer you stay in the game, the more love you will get from Google.
And so even if you do need to take six months off and you're like publishing schedule, it's probably okay because when you come back, You ideally will have more referring domains. You'll ideally have a greater domain authority, and ideally we'll have more organic traffic because Google values domains that are older.
And so despite the fact we haven't really published any content on the fame or sales market domain really for six months, we are now in a better place organically to go forward. Just because the domains are older, we might establish and Google likes. So that's super interesting that I wasn't really aware of.
And so if you are a content marketing manager, SA marketing person, then the longer you have a domain up and running, the better. And so if you need to take a break rather than like giving up on a blog or on a project, then I would recommend doing that because when you come back, you're probably gonna be in a better place.
So focus going forward. I'm kicking off the content machine. It's been running very well for bcast. I'm kicking that off for SaaS market and fame. BCO content is gonna be focused around business, podcasts. Fame content is gonna be focused again around B2B podcasts. SA market content is obviously gonna be focused around SaaS marketer.
This podcast is gonna be focused on B2B marketing, and so myself and others are gonna be starting creating content that is aimed at adding value, like content that's unique, different, and is aimed adding value at the specific persona, whether that's a B2B podcaster, a SaaS marketer, or a B to B marketer.
So that's gonna be coming out on those various. Going forward and that is gonna be the focus now, that kind of the system, the growth is happening with b A. The system is in a much better place at fame. And I'm looking to go to the South market community because I think it's adding value and I think it can be profitable, let's say, for other sponsors and also for our businesses.
That is what you can expect going forward from all the brands. Uh, from this podcast, I'm gonna keep updating on what I'm learning about BT marketing here and probably like Pepper in some entrepreneurship. So if we do have any entrepreneurs listening or founders listening, there should be some stuff as well that I would pepper into the show.
And then as we progress and I learn slash meet other people in the B2B marketing sphere, obviously I'll bring them on to understand what they're learning, how they've grown their service or SaaS companies so that you. Can also do the same.
Anyway, I hope this episode slightly different was of value to you if you are in the world of online entrepreneurship slash B2B slash podcast marketing. Any feedback? Come at us with an Apple Podcast review. I'll start reading them out again on the show. So just search for confessions of a B2B marketer on Google or an Apple podcast, and you'll find us leave a rating and review and I'll get you shouted out on the next show.
You have to ping me a screenshot of the review or message Mellington with a review, and I'll make sure you get shouted out on the next show. Apart from that, I wanna thank you so much for your time and attention. It means a lot to me. It means a lot. I wanna thank you for listening and have a wonderful day.