Marketers of Technology
00:10:52 · Andres Figuera, Travis Cameron
[00:10:52] S1: No, I get that. And since you have, for example, this project manager agent and these different types of utilities for AI, how big is your team that you have helping you out with all this endeavor? [00:11:02] S0: Yeah. So we're about a team of eight internally today. You know, it spans product marketing through to content editorial staff, media internally, SEO internally and then marketing operations. [00:11:15] S1: Amazing. And in general, how big is AIA Contract Documents? [00:11:20] S0: We're a little over 100 people as it stands right now. So we're slightly under about 10% of the staff, of AIA. And so and then on a yearly basis, you know, we've got almost 40,000 customers that are buying from us and we process probably over $100,000,000,000 worth of payment contracts on a year by year basis. [00:11:43] S1: Okay. And also Travis, when it comes to the customer journey with you guys, how does that work? If potential customer is interested in what AIA Contracts is offering, like how do they go about using you and understanding how to really work with the company?
00:12:01 · Travis Cameron
[00:12:01] S0: Yeah. So we're a lot like kind of your smaller end or your SMB SaaS type of tool, right? And so, you know, today it's a really interesting business in that the front end is an e commerce engine. So where we list the 300 contracts for sale. And so in a lot of ways, we're similar to an e commerce business there where we are trying to find that right user for the type of contract that they need for the job that needs to be done. And you think of like jobs to be done framework of saying, this person needs to get an agreement signed. They need to kick off a project. They need to do a change order on a project and get a new billing and agreement signed. They need to get paid on that project. And finally they need to close out that project. We align kind of the documents into those things that need to be done and try and find the right point to sell them at. Once we've sold somebody and we get them used to using that document, we refer to that internally as document on demand or DOD. That's effectively like you would think of it as a trial in your normal SaaS sense. Then it's the job of how do you get them from that trial or that first time using to becoming a subscriber. And subscription for us is, hey, you essentially have an all you can eat bucket for $2,400 on a year by year basis per seat to access all the documents that you and your company needs. So back to education element, the first step is how do I get them in, get them comfortable with using that first agreement? How do I then educate them on the other documents that they can use and then turn it into that they're using us for every construction project and with every contractor or agreement that they're doing is on AIA ACD paper.
00:13:39 · Andres Figuera
[00:13:39] S1: Okay. Okay. And Travis, whenever you're trying out a new strategy or a campaign or trying to just build more, what's it called, like more information regarding the company so that customers understand, what are the metrics that you value the most? And especially since you're into the data and analytics side of marketing? What do you look for when you want to know if something was successful or if it's failing and you prefer to just try something else? Like when do you decide that?
00:14:05 · Travis Cameron
[00:14:05] S0: Yeah. So we try and reserve like 10% of our budget, 10% of our time for testing. Right. How do we figure out if it works or not? One of the first things I've been here for about a year. And so one of the things I did was say, we need a really robust prospect database so that we can move to predominantly first party targeting. We were trying to do platform targeting. It really wasn't working for us. So we moved to say, let's build out this entirely first party prospect database that covers about 60% to 70% of our TAM. That allows us to give a little bit more time for testing because we know we're targeting the right people. Then like when to cut it, when to not, and what are the data points that we looked at first? It's like, how do we get in front of these people? And what are the channels by with that, by with that will work? And so we start with always audience ideation. Who's the person that we want to go at? How big is that audience? Next step is where can we find them and are we getting a match rate? If we can't find that audience through match rates with Google, with Meta, with anybody else, that almost kills it at that point, because you don't want to create a campaign that only might have, you know, 500 people that you're able to get after in it. And as I said, we're a lower price point product, so we're not doing kind of mass expensive ABM type campaigns. Then once you're getting it live, are we getting kind of the viewership? Say it's a video. Are we getting the extended length view of that video or are people cutting it after three seconds? Are we able to get clicks through to the website or is that just coming through as 100% fat finger click bounce rates? Right. So what's that type of engagement? And are we able to get that click to purchase? That's not really my objective, but it's great if it happens. It's more so are we getting some of that view through that we've been exposed to that ad? We know they haven't been a buyer before and now they're making purchase. That's where I really start to say that campaign has legs and that's really starting to work. Let's start to put more money behind it.
00:15:58 · Andres Figuera, Travis Cameron
[00:15:58] S1: So it's understanding then that what you're doing isn't just having somebody who was already interested finalizing the process, but rather just making sure that somebody who doesn't even know you guys gets really interested and therefore proceeds within the marketing funnel and then to the sales funnel and everything like that. [00:16:14] S0: A 100%. I mean, that's ultimately like my job as, as running marketing demand here is how do I find that incremental new user? It's great to get the people that are already buying from us, buying more and expanding, but really it's how do I fill that top of the funnel with more users or with newer users that haven't purchased from us in the past. Right. That's really what's going to drive incrementality in the business. [00:16:36] S1: And do you have any specific examples of a campaign you ran that went really well or a campaign that showed a problem that you had to solve or any, or any example that you can give us in that regard?
00:16:47 · Travis Cameron
[00:16:47] S0: Yeah. So we actually just, wrapped up one. We called it the I Use ACD campaign. And so this brought in a few new elements for us. One, it was a heavily social proof campaign. So we actually spent time at the AIA Conference in June and before that filming about 20 different testimonial videos from our customers. We then used that to actually feature in this IUse ACD campaign with different quotes, different results, different ROI statements from these individuals. We then targeted that by our ICP, so architect, general contractor, subcontractor, owner, landing pages, and different purchase funnels all the way through. We also almost doubled the number of channels that we ran this across. So as I said, we were traditionally working predominantly in the Google, LinkedIn meta ecosystem. For this one, we actually expanded it into Spotify with audio ads, into CTV, where we used Vibe, into TikTok to expand. And so it actually delivered far and above our best months, or two months span, since we've been running that campaign. So that was really exciting to see drove about, of the new users that we signed up over those period, about 80% of them were part of the audiences that we had just gone out and like purchased and created with this. And so that was really the proof point back to us of they might not have clicked, like done a direct click through from the ad to purchase, but they hadn't bought from us before and they were part of this prospect database and first party targeting plan. That's really where I say, Hey, that's where I connected up. That's what success looks like. We're we're driving a lot of incremental new users who had not bought from us before through this campaign, both on the targeting and then the creative aspect of it.