Are you listening to what your consumers have to say?
If you’re not, you may be missing out on the opportunity to generate better leads and close more deals, thus generating more revenue for your company.
Your consumers have the insights you need to make sure your messaging and outreach are striking a chord with the right people. They’re the ones that can tell you, “It’s not clear what your product does, so I don’t feel confident in buying.” Or, “I loved the e-book you have on your website. It answered most of our questions upfront before we even had to talk to sales.”
This invaluable feedback can be what propels your start-up forward. Ashley Crowder, CEO of VNTANA, drops some advice in our latest interview on how start-ups can accelerate growth.
She talks about:
If you’re ready to start prioritizing growth and scalability for your start-up, take the 5 minutes to tune into the video now.
CAROLINE: Hi, welcome to Growth Marketing Chat. Today, I am here with Ashley Crowder. She is the co-founder and CEO of VNTANA, and she's been really successful since she founded her company, I'm really excited to have her today. Ashley, thank you so much for being with me.
ASHLEY: Yeah, it's so great to be here.
CAROLINE: So I guess to start, can you give us a little bit of background on VNTANA? What is it about? What do you guys do?
ASHLEY: Yeah, sure. So VNTANA is a SaaS platform that makes it really easy to create and distribute 3D E-commerce experiences. So the simple way to think about it is just like Vimeo and YouTube, making it really easy to upload, embed, and share the video. We make it really easy to upload, embed and share 3D and augmented reality experiences, which have proven to double conversion rate and increase cart size.
CAROLINE: Nice, yeah. That's, definitely quite an awesome tech and definitely both as a consumer and a marketer. I think it's pretty exciting stuff. Okay, so maybe, can you tell us more about how you got started and how did you evolve since you kind of launched VNTANA?
ASHLEY: Yeah, so I, my background is engineering. I've been working in the 3D XR space for over a decade,and we worked with a number of brands over the years, creating different mixed reality experiences, and nobody ever had the right 3D files of their products to do anything with. They were always way too big and not in the right formats. And then starting in 2018, 2019, we started seeing, phones getting good enough to do some pretty decent augmented reality. You have Snapchat and Facebook starting to support AR filters in web design to support 3D. And we realized, the software we wrote for ourselves could actually help any company easily use 3D on the web. And so we launched our SaaS platform really in the beginning of 2020, right before COVID.
And then with COVID shutting down retail stores and shutting down logistics, really the need for better visual content online, just skyrocketed. And so we've been able to grow pretty fast since that launch.
CAROLINE: All right. And so you've been, obviously you've been pretty successful, right? You are working with huge brands. So, congratulations. My question to you is obviously like the pandemic probably like that was good timing, but, what are the key, the keys to success in your, in your opinion to kind of achieve that kind of growth?
ASHLEY: Yeah, I think the biggest thing is listening to clients. We, our whole team is a bunch of like serious, 3D nerds and engineers. And most of our clients at the end of the day, are people running E-commerce websites and doing sales and marketing. So when we first started, approaching them saying. "We have this patented 3D optimization software". And they're like. "We don't know what you're talking about". So try to keep shoving that messaging down. We were like, all right, this is not resonating. Why, and after we got some of those first clients, which luckily, Hugo Boss is a client, they actually have some amazing, like 3D CGI experts within their company who were like, "We understand what you're doing. We need this". So you can find some of those champions within those big enterprises, but then after that it was listening.
Okay, well, the sales and marketing team who's using this? Why do they want it? Like, well, it's easy to use. It's the same way that I know how to put video on a website, but now it's this new interactive content and it's increased my conversion rate and that's what I care about. And so it allowed us to kind of, interview customers, listen to them, change an AB test our messaging at scale with things like, automated LinkedIn messaging and outbound email, but doing those kind of AB testing within messaging that, that resonated and worked with people who didn't know the tech.
CAROLINE: All right, great. That's such a very important point to really understand who's your actual buyer, do you often, sometimes it's not the same as your user, right? Or one of your users, so that's great. Great advice. Okay, so to finish, I'd like to kind of have your advice on, like, what, have been the most impactful marketing activity that other entrepreneurs can leverage?
ASHLEY: Yeah, I mean I think I told you, like, I think part of this is also COVID and people being bored at home, but LinkedIn has just been amazing and there's multiple tools out there to help automate that process of reaching out to people and doing that, LinkedIn messaging in a way that's not annoying and spammy. But no, it feels like it's, it's truly coming from you and you're interested. So that's been important. And then even just posting, I mean, for us, because we are bringing a somewhat new technology to a group of people who aren't necessarily very in depth into that, into 3D and AR.
Writing blogs and creating how to videos, and just anything that helps teach people about the tech and how to use it and why they should use it. And then posting across Twitter, LinkedIn, social media is really, what's worked the best for us, and it's not just posting features on our product. It's posting informative content that teaches people, something that is useful to them within their business.
CAROLINE: Great, great. Well Ashley, thank you so much for sharing all of this with us today. Really appreciate it.
ASHLEY: Yeah, thank you.