I'm Nemanja. I took Funky Marketing from $0 to $25K MRR in 18 months. Closed 40 deals inbound. AMA!
Nemanja Zivkovic
22 replies
I've started Funky Marketing to change the B2B industry. We create demand generation programs primarily for B2B tech-based companies in the growth phase and enable them to generate consistent revenue growth, increase their deal size and shorten their sales cycles using inbound and content strategies.
In 18 months, we reached $25K MRR by focusing on LinkedIn and Inbound Marketing. It got me to close 40 deals (with some of them being top 20 MedTech companies, unicorns, and Series A to Series D companies), and attracting a great team to work with me.
I've created a B2B content machine that got me to those results.
In August, we'll publish an ebook to help you create content pillars and create the ability to get the right people on your website, those with buying intent, instead of focusing on high-volume keywords and people interested only in education.
I'd love to tackle questions about B2B marketing, inbound, content distribution, marketing & sales alignment, LinkedIn, etc.
AMA 🤘
Replies
Mark Evans@markevans
What are your thoughts on gated vs. ungated content? When should they be used?
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@markevans Don't gate content gate resources. I recently had a conversation about it with @ognjen_boskovic and we agree on that.
I'll quote him here with an example.
"I'm reading a post about how to write the landing page, let's say, and content is good. That's the first requirement you need to have. Content is good, I'm enjoying the article, and then somewhere halfway through it, I get an inline, opt-in, or a slide-in or even a pop-up, doesn't matter, really, and I'm being asked - you seem to be enjoying this article, do you want 9 or a single best performing best-converting landing page template. And if I'm reading about writing a landing page, I could definitely use the highest converting template these guys have. Chris Von Wilpert calls it a content upgrade, I call it gated resources, doesn't matter what you call it, but basically, it's something on top of the content, not something that will kill the vibe of your content consumption like a lot of media outlets now do. You get to their website, you read the first two paragraphs, and then bam, you got to subscribe to read the rest of it. That's a horrible experience. You won't see that person visit your stuff again."
So don't gate content except for resources that are like an upgrade after reading and consuming the content, but figure out those resources very well so they tell you important information about that person (that will allow you to classify them better).
Where do you stand with this?
@nemanja_zivkovic great content as always Nemanja 🔥. We're connected on LinkedIn but thanks to the algorithm I hardly get to see your content...I'll be asking some questions in-line
@oluadedeji thanks! If you interact with me more there, you'd see the posts. That's how the alghoritm works. ;)
Hi N, hope you're doing well. For a B2B SaaS founder with limited time and you can recommend only one thing to do in terms of promotion, what would it be? Also, what are the top three promotional things to do with the same time constraints?
@emke_ all is good! I became an uncle this very second! :) You?
Hm, let me say this: use what you're best at to get the core revenue. That's what you do first. It can be content, it can be advertising, or it can be something else, like a community.
But get to the core revenue first, then start working on brand, awareness, and playing with other creative things.
If I know nothing about the company and I need to say a few things, I'd say start with sharing your journey on LinkedIn aka building in public. Founder's account is the most powerful tech company can have.
Then, assuming I know exactly who my ICP is, I'd focus on creating content and figuring out the distribution, potentially with ads. I'd hire someone who can do a job between creating demand, content, and ads, as well as acting like a customer support and talking to customers to get the insights.
Founder's activities should help you find that person, too, as well as his experience.
And then I'd hire an agency to help me accelerate things and to make sure I focus on the right ones to scale further.
Celebrating, writing in short. :)
Warmup Inbox
How are you able to create "consistent revenue growth" with inbound?
I get that you can get nice revenues from inbound, but inbound is not a predictable channel, isn't it? How do plan revenues from inbound?
@fabian_maume it can be predictable. We're doing it by creating B2B content machine and doing a smart distribution with subject-matter experts that are your employees. Additionally, we don't do it, but we do it for the clients, using ads to distribute content to the right people and making sure they consume it. I've added links in the answers, you can find more details there.
@nemanja_zivkovic Hello Nemanja, thanks for your time and congrats on your success.
I need to know how did you go about acquiring users? In other words, what strategies did you adopt to acquire users.
Thanks
@dsarkar thanks for asking! We don't have users, just clients, but let me try to explain. The most important thing is - we leveraged LinkedIn organic. I reached a little less than 2 million people in a year, and my team did the same, so 5 of us reached around 10 million people with our highly targeted content. Not many companies have been able to leverage LinkedIn the way we did.
I root for the theory that the top of the funnel content doesn't exist. With our LinkedIn content, we're, at the same time, attracting new clients and increasing the LTV of the existing ones, since all of them are on LinkedIn and reading what we say.
We change their perspective, educate them, and we have a call only when they reach out to us by scheduling a call or sending us DM on LinkedIn.
On Calendly, we further classify them, by asking them about the budget and the way we can help them. And we have pricing packages, so they're coming to us with an already established mindset.
Here are the 2 links telling more about the processes.
How to create a B2B content machine: https://funkymarketing.net/how-t...
How to shorten sales cycle and increase revenue: https://funkymarketing.net/how-t...
Aaaand, here we go. ;)
@jaydesai let's break it down because I think there's a fact that most people won't think of. We're based in Europe, so our celeries are lower than in the US, which allow me to get more money back to the business.
But a few things are important to mention.
1) Leveraging LinkedIn's organic reach by creating a hub inside the company
2) Creating persistently good content and figuring out the distribution using subject-matter experts from the company
3) Seeing the gap in the market (B2B is foggy, mystic, focus on sales and MQLs, no humanity, features over problems, etc.) and jumping early on demand gen train, at the moment when B2C is knocking on B2B doors
4) Doing things differently - being funky and doing things that won't scale (aka creating a dark funnel)
5) Creating packages and pricing page based on the company's advertising budget
I think we can sum it in these 5 points.
40 inbound deals! Did you first go outbound and then inbound? What did you do to generate inbound interest?
@prateek_mathur no outbound at all. Check the other answers I've already shared the answer. ;)
Hi Nemanja,
Hope you are well
Just wanted to know apart from leveraging organic linkedin reach.
Did you do partnerships with companies/orgs that compliment your services to have cobranding and co-marketing activities?
If so, what do you keep in mind while partnering and how do you find the right companies?
@parekh_tanmay no. The first people I've hired are video editor and @ivan_dimitry who was managing a team of 20 content writers in the past. I've outsourced only PPC to the two guys I work with for years and a bit of design. We're focused on what we do, not doing what everyone else is doing, and we're trying to end the way agencies work today.
Neuton AutoML
Hi Nemanja, thanks for sharing! Did PH help you to achieve such success? We launched today, hope it will bring good results.
@andrey_korobitsyn definitely not. I didn't use it for us. I did for clients. But this post is a start, I'll use it to take us to the next level.
well, let's start with the obvious questions so that perhaps we have a little more context and can get into the nuances from there. You mentioned what you did, but could you provide a general idea of how you did it first? What was your marketing mix and strategy that helped you accomplish all of those things?
Good point! It was my first post, so I didn't figure out the way I can share links. I can copy it here, but I can't add photos, so here are the links.
How to create a B2B content machine: https://funkymarketing.net/how-t...
How to shorten sales cycle and increase revenue: https://funkymarketing.net/how-t...
@nemanja_zivkovic perfect. Thank you for sharing. I'll be sure to read them.