SaaS Marketing: How a Branding Refresh is Driving Growth at MeetEdgar

When SureSwift acquired MeetEdgar from rockstar entrepreneur Laura Roeder, we knew we were getting a great product. In our two-plus years operating the business, we’ve learned so much more about what sets MeetEdgar apart from the competition and what it means to users, reinvesting in the product and its marketing strategy based on our model of long-term growth. This year, MeetEdgar welcomed Tracie Clayton to the team. Tracie has helped to not only optimize MeetEdgar's marketing strategy, but is leveraging her many years of growth marketing experience to help develop established practices and playbooks across SureSwift Capital as part of our Exceptional Operators Framework. I had the pleasure of sitting down with Tracie, who is now MeetEdgar’s Marketing Director, to discuss the product’s journey so far and its future.

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Launching a SaaS Marketing Strategy

When Laura Roeder founded MeetEdgar, she had already built a thriving business around teaching other small business owners and entrepreneurs how to leverage social media marketing for their brands. An early player in the space, she watched client problems evolve from “what is a tweet?” to “how do I manage a full content calendar?”. Recognizing the time-intensive nature of most social media strategies, she decided to build a tool that would go beyond scheduling, supporting users with smart evergreen automation across their chosen social media platforms. Now, clients could let “Edgar” do their social media, so they didn’t have to.

Laura grew the product, leveraging her own social media presence to connect with other solopreneurs and side-hustlers who were looking for an easier way to manage their social media marketing.

After running the business for six years, Laura sold it to SureSwift in 2021. Earlier this year, Tracie Clayton joined the MeetEdgar team as their Marketing Director, and she immediately saw an opportunity to continue evolving the product, starting with their product positioning.

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Product Positioning is Key

When Clayton joined the MeetEdgar team, she noted a lack of clarity in the product positioning. “We were pushing MeetEdgar out there as being the best, but we can’t be the best for every customer on the market – they’re each looking for something different. Looking at customer attrition and retention was a struggle because people were signing up for MeetEdgar, but their needs were actually quite different from what we offer.”

The issue goes back to the fact that internally, the team was unclear about what MeetEdgar was, compared to what they started out as. This is a trap that is easy for any business, but particularly SaaS models, to fall into as they scale. Between small teams, demands on the back end, and feature creep, a business can evolve into something new before anyone notices the change. At that point, it’s necessary to take a step back and reevaluate. An outside perspective can be a huge asset in this, and that’s exactly what SureSwift and Tracie brought to the table.

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Revisiting the Customer Profile

The customer profile that Laura Roeder had built was based largely on customers with a very small agile team, or a one-person shop, like a solopreneur with a side hustle. However, over the years, the product’s customer base had expanded, and the business was due for a positioning revamp.

The very first step to MeetEdgar’s refresh was developing a comprehensive understanding of the space. Tracie and her team undertook a deep dive on the competitive landscape, mapping out direct competitors and determining where those businesses were fitting into the space – seeing what their product offerings, price structure, and typical customer looked like. She spent time with competitor socials, seeing how they interacted with customers and how users were interacting with them. Over several months of intense social listening and research, Tracie developed a strong understanding of the competitive space.

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With the big picture clear, Tracie began focusing on MeetEdgar and where they fit into the landscape. She looked at their existing customer list, their verticals and social media community. She also closely analyzed churn data – who was leaving the product and why. For MeetEdgar, everything needed to begin with that informed data. Before the team made a single change to the product or its messaging, they knew they had to be clear about who they were talking to.

The result of all this research was a new ideal customer profile (ICP), dubbed Ella Heart by the team. This profile reflects the evolution of MeetEdgar’s customer base. Where the product had originally focused on coaches and bloggers, the team found that freelancers, entrepreneurs, small businesses, and even social media teams were using the product. While many of these people and teams remained concentrated in the life coaching, fitness and wellness industries, they were also seeing more users in marketing, social media management, real estate, and blogging.

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With Ella in mind, Tracie and the team began running a series of 24-hour sprint tests with updated messaging, and they were able to quickly identify what was resonating with users. Based on initial results, they began narrowing the variants down until they identified a winner. While historically product messaging had focused on Edgar being woman-founded and perfect for solopreneurs, these sprint tests showed that customers were responding to completely different aspects of MeetEdgar – specifically, that it’s fast, easy, and affordable.

It’s also not created for everybody – MeetEdgar is more organic and authentic, more personable, and built for people who aren’t necessarily looking for an Enterprise or completely automated AI solution but still need something that supports their fundamental scheduling needs and saves them a ton of time. With this now clear, the team was able to move forward with a unified voice that actually resonated with users.

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From ICP to Superuser

Moving beyond the ICP, the MeetEdgar team began to identify current customers that fall into the category of superusers. These are folks who truly know Edgar well and rely on it daily to manage their social media, and they want to showcase how they’re benefitting from it.

One of these users is Annie Schiffman, owner of Downstage Media, a company that handles social media strategy, storybranding, and email marketing. Annie began using MeetEdgar because she needed a way to maximize her client’s social media marketing efforts for events with minimal time cost.

MeetEdgar gave her the tools she needed to accomplish this, and she began sharing her unique method for social media marketing using Edgar. It’s both a new business opportunity for her, and a great new partnership for MeetEdgar.

By focusing on their redefined ICP, MeetEdgar will be able to attract more users like Annie – customers who are looking for exactly what MeetEdgar has to offer, and who will be long-time users and ambassadors for the product.

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What's Next for MeetEdgar

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As for what’s next for MeetEdgar, Clayton has a strategy that focuses on performance and brand marketing.

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Implementing brand adjustments

The team will continue to optimize MeetEdgar’s branding and ICP. Right now they’re focused on making it “more people-focused, less transactional and more relationship-based,” Tracie explains. With a clear new direction that’s based in research, the team has been putting in significant work, and is excited to see the results of their new, consistent strategy.

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Partnerships and collaborations

Engaging and connecting with the tool’s superusers who fall within the product’s ICP is a big opportunity. These superusers don’t necessarily think the tool is the solution for everyone but they see the market and the ideal customer it’s been created for, and lean into that. They know Edgar is perfect for them and want to help others who could benefit, based on their knowledge of the tool. The MeetEdgar team will lean into this cohort, building partnerships with users to deliver webinars, cooperative blog posting, backlinking, and to launch a new version of their affiliate program.

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More support and community for specific user groups

The team also started creating more customer-focused communication pieces, like newsletters that provide tips and tricks, best practices, and other information to help MeetEdgar users. ”This effort is meant to build community so that once you have the account, you don’t need to be a power-user to figure out how to do all these little things. You can just jump into the community and it’s all conveniently right there for you,” Clayton explains.

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Compounding Learnings with our Exceptional Operators Framework

Knowledge sharing based on proven processes and expertise is a big part of the culture and operations at SureSwift Capital. By leveraging our subject matter experts like Tracie to create data-driven processes, playbooks, and tooling, we take the guesswork out of strategic decision making for our businesses, resulting in sustainable growth. Additionally, we utilize a guild model to connect employees working in similar functions across our different businesses, creating an open forum for collaborative problem-solving, sharing learnings, and developing best practices. By bringing in talented subject matter experts like Tracie and codifying their processes, we're able to build a library of repeatable, proven processes that support growth across our portfolio.

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Want to see MeetEdgar for yourself? Book a Demo with their Customer Happiness team or start your 7 day Free Trial today (no strings attached, no credit card required).