How Mouseflow Uses Customer-Centric Content to Stand Out in the Industry

It’s not enough to have a beautifully designed website. Businesses must look at factors like user experience, how visitors interact with different touchpoints on the website, where users convert or drop off, which hidden opportunities can be capitalized, etc.

Mouseflow makes this easy with its digital analytics platform. You can access session replays, and heatmaps, build custom funnels, and trigger forms and feedback surveys.

Eduardo Cassado, head of growth marketing at Mouseflow, shares what it’s like to be a growth marketer and how the domain helps Mouseflow compete with some of the top firms in the industry.

Mouseflow’s Success Highlights

• Mouseflow creates content based on each social media’s best practices which makes their content resonate with the audience and automatically bring conversions.
• Their focus on competitive analysis helped them understand their positioning and discover opportunities to strengthen their case.
• While content has been central to their overall demand generation strategy, they also work on positioning themselves strongly on review sites like G2, Capterra, etc.
• All of their effort goes first into understanding the audience and then creating content accordingly.

Hello Eduardo, thank you for taking the time to share your journey in Mouseflow. Before we get started, can you let the audience know more about you?

Can you tell us about yourself and how you started your journey in growth marketing? 

I’ve always been curious by nature. I started my journey as a musician and audio engineer, and while I won a Latin Grammy award in 2013, I soon started exploring other options. 

I worked in advertising as an account executive, a position I quickly realized wasn’t meant for me. My curiosity led me to discover the role of the account planner within the agency. As an account planner, I connected the audience and the rest of the advertising operation. Soon thereafter I transitioned to a digital marketing role where I did everything from content production to live tweeting the 2014 World Cup for ESPN Deportes. 

As I continued discovering who I wanted to be and what I wanted to do, I came across the role of product manager and its responsibilities. Turns out I was doing product before it was product; Only that I was doing it under another title.  

I played these major roles in several agencies and companies, learned different skills, understood how to grow a product, and how to run campaigns that bring results. While I can’t put a pin on when my growth marketing journey started, I realized that it is an area where I feel comfortable and can give the most to a company. 

Can you give me a background on Mouseflow and the impact it is creating?

Mouseflow is a digital analytics experience platform. It’s one of the early companies that pioneered the whole session recording industry. It started around fifteen years ago, with just a few people doing things and making it happen. When I joined 5 years ago, the company had no marketing engine whatsoever and grew by word of mouth. Our main advantage is that we have a great product-market fit. 

As soon as we started adding more features on session recordings, heatmaps, conversion funnels, feedback surveys, and friction score, all of it came together to build this mammoth product that competes with large players in the market to deliver insights that can make or break a business in terms of conversions. 

I was the 12th hire in the company five years ago, and the 2nd marketing hire in the company’s history Before that, there was never anybody running the marketing game, so to speak. Shortly after the head of performance marketing came in, we started to piece together the fundamentals we thought we needed to focus on for an effective performance marketing strategy. 

One of the biggest impacts Mouseflow makes is that we showcase exactly how people are using a product with high-definition, high-quality session replay that answers why things are happening on a website. I always say, “if a picture is worth a thousand words, imagine what a video of your customers interacting with  your website can do for you.”

When it comes to conversions, the biggest concern today is that everybody has smaller budgets. Everybody’s budgets are shrinking. And there’s a call to arms to find efficiency and be more effective. Quantitative data is great to start with, but when you really want to answer what is actually going on or why any number plummeted, that’s when we come in, and that’s when we say, “Listen, here’s the evidence for you to build your hypothesis. Here’s how you can do better.”

While the tool has solid features, when you think about its impact across your organization, it’s so large because it’s not just about improving conversions. It gives you a full toolbox that allows you to grow your business in a way that is more precise and effective. For example, we’ve had customers who, amid holiday campaigns, found out the Order button is broken on the website just because we tracked click errors automatically. 

What has been Mouseflow’s demand generation strategy?

We have just recently started working on our demand generation strategy. As I said, the marketing structure and fundamentals were barely there when I joined the company. So we couldn’t enter into a demand gen strategy right away. However, when we did start, we captured demand well through Google Ads, one of the main strategies we set out in the first couple of years. Managing our paid media strategy is one of my main responsibilities today.

“If I were to break it down, the first thing is having a strong product. The better the product, the cheaper it is to acquire customers, and vice versa. We have a strong product that achieved product market fit and grew by sheer word of mouth in the early years. ”

But with the initial growth that has already happened, we are looking to grow more. We want to strengthen our authority in this niche. 

Thankfully, a lot of attention has been driven to behavior analytics in the last couple of years. Heatmaps and session recordings are becoming a ‘need to have’ more than a ‘nice to have.’ 

All of these things have come together, making demand already high. So that’s the growth strategy that’s worked for us – a strong product, strong referrals, and capturing demand at the bottom of the funnel where we know there’s intent to buy already and then having effective content and good marketing around it. 

When it comes to the metrics we prioritize at Mouseflow, I’d say we are not reporting on CAC (customer acquisition cost) for example. Instead, the growth metric we prioritize is ARR.  And then customer churn rate and customer satisfaction score (CSAT), but these are mostly controlled by other teams at Mouseflow.

Which strategy has worked best in getting people to sign up for Mouseflow’s free trial? 

One of the first things I did when I started was competitor analysis. I needed to know who we were playing against inside out. I created documentation, understood how they were talking to customers, how easy it was to accomplish a task in their product vs ours, what ads they were running, and which market they were targeting just by virtue of the content they were putting out. I understood what their vision was. That’s how I became well-versed in the vocabulary, the type of personas used in the product, and the problems they would solve. 

This analysis helped identify and solve one of the first challenges – we were very good at talking features but not at talking benefits. That is how we shifted the whole vocabulary and the tone of the website. 

So, I think sign-ups come because of several levers. It’s not one thing. For a trial sign-up to happen, you need to have the right vocabulary, understand who you’re targeting, ensure your segmentation is right, ensure your message is resonating, etc. Then, you start optimizing. Test different messages, test your bidding strategies if you’re doing PPC, figure out if you need customer stories, how you can experiment with social selling, etc. All of this has resulted in Mouseflow having a great visitor-to-trial conversion rate.

Another strategy that worked for us was improving our positioning in review sites like G2, where we previously had no activity. Thankfully, we have great customers who love the product and have no problem going out and giving us strong reviews.

How does content feature in Mouseflow’s growth strategy?

Our blog’s role is to capitalize on organic traffic. That’s the first thing. We want to generate awareness and attract people looking for solutions in our category. Right now, our blog acts as a means of distribution more than it is part of our growth strategy. 

At the end of the day, it’s all about convincing decision-makers because these are expensive tools. These are not tools that are easy to purchase. And the bigger the company, the harder it is to get it through. So, our blog is a means to recollect our content so that we can use it in campaigns. 

So that’s our content strategy. It’s about pushing out great content; content that people are searching for, content that resonates well with our target audience. For example, we did a campaign directed toward CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization) professionals. I remember meeting with the team and telling them, “Listen, I don’t want people to leave LinkedIn. I want to deliver them good content and keep them on LinkedIn where they are.”

Then we designed the campaign, and the day we launched the campaign, we managed to drive a thousand people on the first day to the website. There was no hard CTA on the LinkedIn posts. We just left a comment that said, “Hey, if you want to read the full story, read here.” So it’s a matter of creating great content that matches the platform, making sure that you understand how they’re spending time there and what topics they feel inclined to talk about. 

I’d rather get engagement on social, get the word around, and let people know there’s great content here.

What do you think makes up great content? Are there processes you follow at Mouseflow to ensure your content ranks? 

I’m not a big SEO guy. It’s one of those skills I have yet to master. Yet, whenever I think or write content, I make it for people. I don’t write content for the crawlers. Me and our content manager, Alex, work together to come up with topics that are right but might not get a lot of search volume. And sometimes, these are the topics that end up getting ranked or stealing a featured snippet. 

I remember writing ChatGPT prompts for sentiment analysis. That was something I was doing for a webinar on the voice of customers. I was like, “Well, this is a good application for AI, so why not create content around it?” We did that, and it’s ultimately ranking on position 1 and getting clicks. It might be very long-tail and not even directly related to session replays or heatmaps. But we have the capacity to do things and say stuff that our competitors can’t because of their size. And that’s the brand we want. We don’t make content just to rank. We make content that resonates.

For me, what makes great content is something that people can relate to. I know it’s very cliche, but I go back to the CRO campaign we recently did. We spent a decent amount of time talking to people and understanding what were the different things that drove them. We plainly asked them, “What do you like on Instagram? What do you actually press like on? What do you comment on? What are the things that you like on LinkedIn? What other channels are you using?” 

We ended up creating a journal. It could have been a Word doc with all the entries, but we took it a step further. We said, “Okay, so of all these entries, let’s pick the ones that we think are most valuable. Let’s make a journal with all of them so that people can consume it and go through it in their own time. And for a select few, let’s create collectible or trading cards that showcase CRO in a different light”. And people bought it, loved it, and shared it. We created a community of CRO professionals around our brand basically with one campaign. So, I think it’s a matter of understanding your audience to create great content.

“In my case, it’s about being bold. It’s about being different. It’s about, ‘If I’m going to say the same thing that everybody’s saying, I’m going to say it differently.’ I’m never content with “oh, yeah, we should do a webinar.” No, hold on. Yes, that’s what everybody would do. What can we do differently? And that’s kind of my role inside the company as a growth head. It’s to push those boundaries, to push that limit.”

Any advice you’d like to give growth marketers, especially in the SaaS industry? 

I would tell people not to let impostor syndrome take over. Everybody has their own rhythm. Everybody has their processes. And our backgrounds are so unique that even if you look up to anybody in growth, you’re also special in your own way. 

Another thing is not to be afraid of making mistakes. If you’re in a company or an environment in which mistakes are not valued or encouraged, as a growth person, you need to leave. Because the only way you’re going to grow is by making mistakes. You can’t have 100% accuracy in the experiments you do. We all spend our time looking for that moment in which everything unclogs, runs, and fires at the same rhythm, and you reach your goal. But it’s about the process, about failing, learning from your mistakes, and ultimately getting something right. 

“One thing that I wish somebody told me was that you need to change the outlook of failure. I think that to push and become better, you need to stop looking at failure as failure. You need to start looking at failure as learning. 99% of the time, you fail. But to get that 1% bigger and bolder, you need to go through those fails.”

How do you think AI will impact content marketing? 

I think AI is a tool. I don’t think it will get to a place where it will be so smart and would have learned so much that it would really replace content writers. For example, I use it as a tool and ask it to do research, come up with outlines, or write, but I never use that output as it is. I think that’s irresponsible, especially for the company that I’m working for. 

I also think AI can play a central role. It can help with grammar, sentence structure, translation, etc. But I don’t think it’s going to kill content marketing. Because it’s one thing to do good content, but what is the strategy? AI can come up with it, but it cannot bring a human touch. When my gut tells me this is what I need to do, AI won’t be able to replicate that. You need that human touch to make great content because you’re creating content for humans, not machines. 

SaaSy Tidbits from Eduardo Cassado

• Focus first on where there’s intent to buy already. For example, bottom-of-the-funnel content can drive conversions for your company.
• Understand your target audience and create content that solves their problems. You’ll naturally get people to act on your CTAs.
• Don’t be afraid to make mistakes. Only when you experiment and fail, you find strategies that make the most impact.

By experimenting and focusing on customer-first content, Mouseflow has built a business that naturally attracts people and drives them toward the product.

As a SaaS content marketing agency, we believe in creating targeted content that actually solves the target audience’s problems, and we’ll continue to work on that with renewed enthusiasm.

If you have any questions about how Mouseflow works or want to know more about their journey, we recommend visiting their website or connecting with Eduardo on LinkedIn.

Keep checking out our SaaS Expert Interview space for more SaaSy updates.

Author

Nidhi Parikh

Nidhi is a freelance content writer with an experience of over 4 years. She uses a strategic process to come up with well-researched and value-driven long-form content for SaaS brands. When not working, you can find her finishing entire novels in a day and binge-watching the latest web series.