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Episode 308: How to Leverage Customer Feedback for More Innovative Marketing with Derrick Hicks of ConvertKit

Episode Summary

You could say that data has informed most of Derrick’s professional decisions — starting with his first job as an SEO specialist.

Derrick moved his way up the marketing ranks before eventually joining ConvertKit, an email marketing platform that makes email easier and more robust for professional creators.

As ConvertKit’s Marketing Director, he helps online creators grow their businesses to earn a living online.
During Derrick’s first year at ConvertKit, the leadership team noticed a dismal lack of growth. Taking a look at the data, they decided to drastically change their core product.

“We decided to innovate by leading with a core product change to achieve a better product market fit,” says Derrick. This didn’t come without challenges. He notes, “Our current customer base wasn’t super excited about it. Part of that was because of our market positioning.”

In this episode, Derrick discusses how ConvertKit revamped both its product and business model, and how this shift affected its marketing strategy. Besides product changes, he’s seen the brand’s marketing evolve considerably in just two and a half years.

For instance, when Derrick first joined, ConvertKit relied heavily on affiliate marketing. It has since expanded its marketing avenues to include organic search, podcasting and video storytelling. Now, Derrick’s team is focused on product marketing; to complement ConvertKit’s strong brand advertising, they hope to better convey how its product brings value to users.

Guest Profile

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Key Insights

Episode Highlights

“We also got a lot of feedback from our current customer base that wasn’t super excited about it [ConvertKit’s new product]. Part of that was because of our market positioning. Our customer base knows us as an email marketing company. And so they wanted that free product to include email sending, which it didn’t at first — it was just free landing pages.”
“There’s a framework that the leadership team at ConvertKit uses every week when we do get together on a director’s call and we talk about people’s process and performance. There were a lot of changes that we had to make within each one of those. There was a lot of internal training we needed to do to help shift the mindset of everybody on the team.”
“There’s a ton of process changes that we had to go through and are continuing to go through. On the performance side, we’re really shifting what we look at and what we measure as success. When we had the free trial perspective, it was all about generating new trials and seeing what the conversion rate of those trials was 30 days later.”
“We’re beginning to act more and more like a media company and that’s really a big shift in our thinking. That’s come after this ‘freemium’ change where we’re looking at the ConvertKit flywheel. This is a core driver for us internally. We’re looking at all the content we’re creating and how it fits within how our business operates.”
“One bit of advice I would give is to have a crucial conversation. And then a second piece of advice would be to chart a path towards success. Maybe there’s an iterative approach you can take. It’s difficult because that can take time and building a brand inherently is hard to measure. You need to find some common ground with your leadership team.”
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