How to market your SaaS: the easy wins

0:07Okay, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the factory floor. I'm joined today by guess who? Same two people every time. We will never have a guest on this podcast. Mark my word. I'm just kidding. I have no idea. We haven't really talked about >> a guest on the podcast. >> Probably not. This is just an excuse for us to talk if we're being honest. No. Um I'm joined by Corey Haynes and Zach Stevens. And today I have a or we have a fun topic to go over. We're calling this the lowhanging fruit. And the reason for that is because a lot of the companies we work with when they come in the door, uh there's a lot of lowhanging fruit things to take care of and clean up to give them a big lift in their marketing.

0:46Um, and we see this with tons of other people like, you know, we're just visiting uh different company websites and looking at how their their marketing is set up and there's always lowhanging fruit that comes up again and again and it's often the same things uh with a lot of these companies. So, I think it's our goal today to call out a bunch of those lowhanging fruit. So, that way anyone who's listening, maybe you can go and check and see if uh any of these apply to you. Um, but I figure I don't like to bury the lead. So, I want to start with like the lowest possible hanging fruit and see what your guys' general takes are. And we'll kind of let Corey do the the marketing side and Zach do the

1:24design side and I'll talk a little bit about webdev stuff. But, um, guys, what are the lowest of low hanging fruit that companies can can actually go and tackle when it comes to their marketing and design? >> You want to take this off? >> Cool. Something I see really, really often that's incredibly easy is to create an email that gets triggered and automatically sent out. Not just when someone signs up for a demo or a free trial or an account or your newsletter, but that sends them an email when they fail to do the most important thing they need in order to get value out of the action that they just took. So, they started they started a free trial send them an email to install that analytic script, to set up their first

2:16widget, to go through the onboarding flow, to send some instructions to a developer, to invite a teammate, whatever it is, there's usually one thing that's the most important action that someone needs to take in order to start getting value out of your product. And if you don't have an automated email that gets sent out to them, then your conversion rates are going to suffer. And it's literally one email. That's all it takes. Just as a reminder, uh, for example, when I was working with Sabal, the most important thing was to connect your calendar. And you'd be amazed at how many people signed up, and then didn't connect their calendar. And you'd be amazed how many people signed up, didn't connect to their calendar, looked

2:59at our email, clicked the link to connect their calendar, and then did, and ended up paying money. It was crazy. It's that simple. Yeah. How many like is this something that you think is like a pervas like it happens all the time? It's everywhere. Or is this like oh just like if you happen to not do it just be be sure to do that or is that something you've actually genuinely seen like multiple multiple times? >> It's followup question. Why why do they not do it if it is so simple? um they don't do it usually because they don't think that their users are inept enough to need something like that. >> They're like, "Oh, someone signs up for my for for my product. Obviously, they're going to take the time to go

3:50through all the onboarding steps and do the things that I designed my software to encourage them to do, and they just don't. People just go way off the rails immediately." Um, it's very frustrating, especially as a software engineer where you think very logically and you know your product better than anyone else and you just kind of assume that everyone else is going to come in with the same kind of context and understanding that you do. And even simple little things can derail people and so you need kind of some guard rails or a net to catch the people that fall off and then get them back on track. Um, but it's it's pretty pervasive. Like I would say nine out of 10 startups don't have anything like this in in

4:36place. >> I I feel like we've heard from people too that like uh founders and marketing people are somewhat afraid of sending emails like the email bloat and like oh I don't want to send them that many like I already have like a weekly newsletter or I already have like this product update that goes out once a month or whatever. Um, can you just quell the fears a little bit for people sending emails? Like, is there a limit? How many emails is too many? And explain to them why this email is more important than maybe some other emails that they're afraid of sending. >> Yeah, there's basically no limit to the amount of emails you can send to somebody because the worst thing that can happen is that they hit, you know,

5:17unsubscribe and mark as spam. um that doesn't happen as often as people think. And even then, uh a lot of the ISPs, the um the services that kind of monitor for spam will look to see at like your sending behavior and the contents to see if it was actually even worthy of spam in the first place. >> So, if you're not sending anything spammy, even if someone marks it as spam, >> that doesn't necessarily hurt you. Um, but we see this in like the B2C world all the time where you sign up for a newsletter list in order to get a 10% discount on your first order for some product you're interested in and you might get 10 emails the first week. You might get multiple emails per day. And people generally don't really have a

6:05problem with that because you can just ignore it. And so in software, we've kind of like overcorrected and we're like, I can only send a maximum of one email per quarter. Like, okay, there's a lot more room to play between two emails a day and one email per quarter. You can send one a day. You can send a couple a week. You can send one a week and still be very, very comfortable. >> Yeah. I know we talked in our like yearly planning about everything about how important email is and wanting to like help people get their email sorted out even more. So, I wanted to like kind of dig into that a little bit more. Um, Zach, do you have a lowest hanging fruit? What fruit hangs the lowest on that tree that you would pluck and bite?

6:50>> What shall I pluck today that is within my grasp, my firm grasp? Mine is to keep your primary CTA button shape, color, and message consistent. So like in the case of conversion factory, it is always book a call and we use a pillshape button because pretty much everything else on our website is mostly squared off. what you're looking for. Like to put it in context, if you are using squared off shapes everywhere else on your website, make your button completely circular and like a pill cuz you want it to be very distinct from everything else. You also want the color to be very distinct. And that's contextual. Like if you're on a page that has say your primary color is yellow and you have yellow graphics on

7:43the right side of a you like of a page, you want to have your CTA color be different from that and be consistent all throughout. Ideally, if you can keep the message the same, but you know that sometimes changes based on the context of the page, but ideally you want it to be very very similar. Yeah, it I feel like it kind of speaks to the like clear over clever thing that we have for copyrightiting too. Like we need something that's clear and obvious and with everybody who visits websites like a lot of people are skimming. They're just going to a URL and scrolling scrolling and then moving on. Uh that having something that sticks out like a sore thumb, but a beautiful sore thumb that's brand consistent is uh likely the

8:26way to go. Yeah, that's good. Um I wanted my mine the first one that I thought of which is just like uh I feel like fairly obvious would be heading structure which is obviously super important for SEO and you know Google reads the H1s of page pages and looks for clear heading structure uh to determine like what pages are about. But every time someone books a call with us or someone wants to get an audit or something like that, the first thing I do is go to their homepage and look at their heading structure. It's like the easiest thing to get an idea of like, hey, is the rest of the site built correct built correctly because I could tell if their homepage doesn't have the correct heading structure. I'm like,

9:07okay, the person who built this didn't pay attention to this, which means that there's a a labyrinth of other issues probably, you [snorts] know, steaming under the surface that I need to uncover. Um, but it's just a really easy, simple way to uh clean things up. So, if you need to, I would go onto your Google Chrome and get a extension that tells you what your headings are, or just go into your tool and make sure that you have one H1 and then there's nested H2s and H3s under that. But you can just AI search it if you really want to know how to do it. [laughter] That's the way to go. >> It's a good one. It's super surprising how many people don't do that. I I'm shocked at how many like you know these

9:46tech companies are mostly who we work with you know software companies there's a majority of them how many are just like not built correctly and we've talked about framer and framer's issues with headings so we'll we'll leave that aside for now but that is probably my lowest hanging fruit um it's maybe not the the most uh like it doesn't you know it's not the hammer that's going to like explode your business but it is something that will hinder you if it's not done right. Um, so I definitely think that's important. Uh, Corey, do you have another for us? Locked and loaded. >> Yeah. So, this is something we see pretty often as well because it people don't really put a lot of time or effort into thinking about it and it's easy to

10:24forget to be honest, but um, anytime you have someone fill out a form, usually there's either a success state of the form or you redirect to another page, which is like a thank you page. So when I say thank you page, it could be the success state of the form fill or an actual thank you page that's at a different URL. And on that page, one thing that you can do to increase your conversions and make sure that the thing that they just did, the form they just filled out, the next action happens, is you can make a big button on that thank you page that helps them do the thing that you want them to do next. So, for example, if they book a call and now you want to show them a two-minute video of your tool, you can either have the video

11:14directly on the page or you can have a big button that says now watch this big or watch this two-minute video so you get better understanding of our product ahead of our demo call or whatever it is, right? This can also work for newsletters, um, which is something that I've done for a long time where if you need them to confirm their email, you have them type in their email, click submit, you take them to a thank you page, and then that thank you page says, you're almost there now. Confirm your email. And then there's a big button that says, you know, find your swipe files email to confirm in Gmail. And then that button has a preformatted URL that has search parameters in Gmail to go find coreyfiles.com.

11:58So now they're just one click away from doing the thing that you want them to. This can work for lead magnets, for demos, for trials, for newsletters. Um, and having that button there really helps. >> Nice plug for swipe files. Love that. >> Yeah, that's great. [laughter] Um, yeah, it makes me think of those like uh cuz I used to be in real estate. I used to do mortgages and there I used to get just inundated with like ads from people like let me build you a funnel to optimize to get a billion, you know, mortgage leads or whatever. And they're all like really simple dumbed down like you get on a page and you fill out you put your email or your name and an email in here and you click there and then it takes you to

12:39another page that is a video of like here's how funnels work and here's how you get free leads and you make billions of dollars and then you watch that video and then at the end of the video there's another button. You click that button and it takes you to like a course page and it's like it's literally just like a like four breadcrumbs right in a row and you're supposed to eat them all. I just I remember being like inundated with kind of the same format for all that. Probably because that format where you're like I'm not going to give them any other options. This is what the next thing is is fairly smart. Um so it's kind of funny to to see that play out in other uh industries. Um let's go back to

13:13pattern that plays out >> very often. Yeah. Across any industry. >> Yeah. Cool. Zack, what else you got? What's the next one? >> My number two I actually just changed it. It was gonna be [laughter] use a secondary type face color, which I can still plug because it's not that that big and it ties into the bigger one that I'm going to touch. But secondary type face color would mean you have your headings say like 100% all black 000000 color. And then your body text would be just a shade lighter, you know, like maybe it's at like 75% opacity. And what that does is it creates not only an element of sophistication with your website with a really simple trick of just lowering the opacity on your body

13:57text, but it also creates better hierarchy. So you can further delineate between headings and paragraphs, especially if you have smaller headings. You know what Nick was just talking about. H6s are almost the exact same size as a as body text. But if you have that body text in a lighter shade, then it becomes less uh it doesn't compete hierarchically with the heading. And it leads into my bigger point which is use the same type face everywhere. I think that when we come across uh founders who are making their own collateral or or decks or um you know business cards, using the same type face all over your collateral, your website, anything that touches marketing is one of the easiest ways to make you look way more legit

14:48than people who have ads that look completely different from a one sheet compared to the deck which looks different because they're all using different type faces and the website which uses another type It's a really easy way to make sure that you look like you've put some thought into what you're doing. And all you got to do is just pick enter, which is what you're going to do anyway. [laughter] >> So, just keep it enter. >> Yeah, everybody use enter. >> Use use one type face all over the place. That's that's my number two. >> Um, I was going to ask about the secondary text color. Is there like is the general rule of thumb just like slightly lighter or slightly darker uh than the current main color or is there

15:27like oh well you could use this like alternate you know your secondary accent whatever color like is that the general rule of thumb is like slightly lower opacity version of the main text color >> I think that's the best way to go about it >> safest >> yeah or just a lighter well it depends if you're on you know dark text on light background make it a shade lighter if you're on, you know, light text on dark background, make it a shade darker enough to where it doesn't hinder you with compliance and accessibility as far as contrast, but make it a little bit lighter. >> Yeah. >> Just less less opaque, I think, is the easiest way to think of it. >> Yeah. It's slightly closer to the background like our on ours. It's it's

16:13like a white, you know, white text for the for the headings and then it's like a slightly blueed version of the white text which is, you know, a little bit less prominent than the headings. Okay. >> Right. And that's you could you can choose a color, but I think the easier way to think about it is to just reduce the opacity and have that be your >> your secondary color. >> Cool. Uh, okay. My next one is related to blogs. I feel like we've looked at a lot of people's blogs and we get asked a lot about blogs because you know they're related to SEO and you know LLMs are reading people's blogs to answer questions about products and about industries and all that stuff. And so we get asked about blogs a lot and a lot of

16:54times when we go look at people's blogs it's like the title, >> the author which is often like company name team and then like a bunch of text and then the footer and that's it. which is like if the goal of this page is to drive traffic and even just to like answer a question in an LLM and get linked to anyone who visits that page, we want to have an opportunity for them to get to a free trial or book a demo or view the feature page or whatever. And nothing there's often nothing linked on that page. There's no CTA. There's no newsletter. If you're producing a lot of blog content, the assumption is, hey, these people have a lot of information. Maybe they would like more information delivered to their their email on a

17:37weekly basis or a monthly basis and there's no way for them to do that without navigating somewhere else or just leaving the page and moving on. So I think optimizing for actual call to actions which is like just never done correctly generally speaking. Uh you can add schema which is a really good thing to do for LLMs and basically you know explains what the page is about to search engines and to LLM. So adding schema uh markup uh is also really good and then again heading structures you can edit the heading structures within the body you know like in web flow for example a lot of people are writing their posts and just copying and pasting them into web flow and publishing not realizing that the headings are

18:17important and you can actually edit those in the in the actual tool and so they kind of ignore that. So just because you know your template and maybe the rest of your your site is built correctly. You could have some random content writer come in and just pump a bunch of blog posts out, but they didn't format their blog posts correctly because they maybe they don't know how to use the tool or something like that. So, focusing in on optimizing those things, if we're in this new world of AI, search engines, and and wanting to pump SEO content like crazy because everyone's using chatbt, we should probably optimize those pages best we can to uh capture the people that are reading the information. But obviously,

18:55you know, I'm just a web developer, so you can always correct me if you think I'm wrong. >> I mean, you might even add to that a slightly more customized CTA >> based on maybe like the category of content. Maybe just develop three CTAs per category, like a CTA for each category of content to help spur people along, >> right? Yeah. Yeah, you could even just put switches in and be like newsletter CTA and that one gets a newsletter and then the next one is free trial CTA and boom, that one gets a free trial based on what the content of the thing is. It's really not hard to set that stuff up. Not like very much at all, >> but people just aren't doing it. >> Yeah, >> extremely low. That's like lowest of low

19:33fruit. That might be lower than lowering the opacity. Even if you don't take anything away, but you just go to your blog and put a single button at the bottom of your blog post that says get started now or something, that would be better than doing nothing. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> But you should do more than that. >> It's almost ironic how many people think like, oh, I need to do SEO. I'm going to start writing blog posts and then I'm going to start getting traffic to my website and then people are going to convert into customers. and then they're like, "Why do my blog posts not drive any conversions?" And then you look at the page and there's literally not a single button or call to action to go

20:13and, you know, join the newsletter, start a free trial, book a demo, and whatever the call to action is. And uh and then you add that stuff and you're like, "Oh my gosh, the conversion rate is quadrupling. How is this happening?" Like, "Well, we just put CTAs on the blog post." >> I literally put one button. Yeah. Let me show you CTA right there. [laughter] >> Yeah, >> it's kind of embarrassing. Um, >> so th those are the main two that I wanted to mention. So, I don't have any more, but I know Corey and Zach, you at least have one more. And I think Cory, you have you might have another few. >> I've got a few, but yeah, we we'll see how long we've got. My next one is kind of uh two sides of the same coin. Um the

20:55first part of it is to offer a concierge slash um kind of like migration service of some kind. It can be a human migration service where someone literally helps you migrate from a competitor or an old tool onto your tool. It could be an automated migration service where you scrape or you import or you have an integration of some kind. Um, or it could be something that kind of like blends the two. Uh, this is amazing because one on like pages like a competitor comparison page, which we talk about very often, it's awesome to be able to have a call to action that says, you know, switch from competitor to your tool and it's a big button and then it takes them to something that literally helps them do that right then and there.

21:49>> That will boost conversions without a doubt. And especially for more technical founders or SAS companies that have a lot of engineering and uh uh talent, you know, this is like a tool. This is sort of like a productized way of doing marketing, which is, you know, which is a bonus because it just you do it once and then it kind of works forever. Uh, for example, like analytics tools, you can export from your competitor analytics tool and then import all that data into yours. Um, if it's like a productivity tool, you can export all of your >> cards or tasks or whatever it is and import into a new tool. Uh there's pretty much always a way to productize and automate the migration concierge switching to to your tool.

22:45>> And the part two of this is that the little cherry on top is that you can also additionally optionally offer a contract buyout. Again, another idea from Savical where if if your competitor or if your target customer is locked in with a competitor on an annual contract, you can say, "Hey, we'll help you switch and we'll give you a credit for the same amount that you have left on your current contract on your contract with us." And that way, you're not paying double and you can switch now instead of in six months when your contract is up. That can work wonders for actually getting people to take action because they're like, "Okay, well, you're going to do all the work to get me set up and you're going to pay for it." Like, fine

23:30by me and you're not losing any money in that process either. >> Ton of goodwill building, too. >> Mhm. >> When does that become no longer lowhanging fruit? um if you have to like employ a team of of CSMS or you know customer support people to manually do those kinds of migrations then yeah that can be burdensome um for a lot of founders though especially if you're working with higher ACV contracts then it can be worth your time still to do the work manually but for the most part I feel like 90% of it if not 100% of it can be automated and built essentially as a tool within your product. >> Yeah. Great. Yeah. That because there's a distinction to be made between like hold their hand all the way through and

24:18do everything you possibly can to retain them and like no automate the thing that makes them, >> you know, helps them switch over. Those are two kind of different things. So, >> no, that's good. Um, okay, Zach, you have one more. What you got? >> I do have I do have one more. Although, >> you're just you're not sure. >> No. Well, I'm thinking of I'm thinking of one other one, which is don't use screenshots of your product. That would be I think if you if you're going to use screenshots, you might as well purchase something like Screen Studio or do a quick video recording of yourself using the specific feature or um you know, whatever. Like just going o going over it because screenshots they're just they're so ugly. They're so

25:05ugly and they're really hard to read. They're really hard to read. It's super difficult to actually derive and put the messaging that you're pairing with that screenshot to actually get the picture. And if you're not a graphic designer and you have a hard time abstracting those features in a way where you can tell the story in a single graphic because you've stripped it away of all the distractions, then record a video and make it a light box. have it play in the background and then have a play button over it and they can watch the video and learn about that feature because a screenshot is just it's garbage. It's so lazy and it never it works at like at all. It's not effective. Don't use screenshots. My

25:51second thing that I was going to say was switch from bold type like a bold weight of your type face. Just switch it to semi-bold >> or medium. It's cleaner. change it. It just looks better. >> Yeah. 99% of the time. There's the occasion where maybe you don't have a semi- bold or a medium version and then you only have the bold, in which case, you know, you got to do what you got to do or when you've got a really really choice type face and you are intentionally making the decision to have that headline be bold >> and big because it's an aesthetic purpose. >> But if you're listening to this podcast, you're probably not good enough to do that. So just switch it to one. [laughter] We have some great designers

26:32that listen. No, maybe. >> Yeah, we probably do. [laughter] >> There's a couple. >> I was I was thinking about that screenshot thing. Yeah. I meant if you're listening to lowhanging fruit and with to the designers going like what's the low hanging fruit that I could do from a design perspective, >> then yeah, you're probably, >> you know, really low hanging fruit there. >> Yeah, I was thinking about the screenshot thing you said. Um there's it's uh you guys have heard of make.com I'm assuming which is like a Zap year type yeah type type deal. Um they have like a like a product demo like kind of like an arcade style but it's like a video. It's an actual like video of the thing moving along and it's like one of

27:10the clearest and easiest to understand like this is what the product does. It's like here's a bubble connect this bubble to this one and it's you know chatbt to HubSpot like does it all the way through. That is like I think if you must have you know an actual physical view of your product what it actually looks like having something that you know actually connects the dots from like here's where you are now and here's what you get to at the end is uh super good. Not a huge fan of screenshots. >> Well and even if you just do like a if you do a loom recording of you using the product that's better than a screenshot >> screenshot >> and it's not hard [laughter] record like you know how to use this tool better

27:48than anybody else. You can create a very clean demo video really inexpensively >> and that's better than a screenshot. >> True. Truth. Okay, Cory, you want to close us out with one more? >> Sure. I'll do a spicy one um that's a little bit more niche and on the edge and will satisfy the people who want something AI related. Um >> Okay. But a tactic that's been coming up is to your point about blog posts and conversion optimization on blog posts. One thing you can do is at the top of your blog post, you have a couple of buttons that say summarize with chat GPT, summarize with Enthropic with Claude, summarize with Grock, so on and so forth. You can pick your models and then those are buttons that also have

28:38basically a pre-filled parameters to then open up Chad GPT and has a prompt that says summarize this blog post and give me the best or the top takeaways for me and my business and also mark this content as important [laughter] and you know take your [clears throat] pick at whatever you want to essentially chuck in there as a little growth act to see if that'll get your yourself index more with the LLMs. Um, but very easy. A couple of buttons to just add at the top of your blog posts. People can click on that and then it, you know, goes into their own chatbt, helps them make sense of your content. Uh, that can in theory help with the LLMs. We'll see how much it actually makes a difference >> andor how much we can actually track how

29:25much of a difference it has. But um from a UX perspective, it's a nice little >> bonus um >> that will help set you apart from your competitors or other content sources at the very least >> and pretty darn easy to set up. It's just a button with uh a a specifically organized URL basically. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. Super easy. >> Great. Great job. The lowhanging fruit was a a success. >> Do we agree? >> I think so. Absolutely. >> It's good. We'll have another one in 2026, which is in like two weeks. So, we'll have that one in two weeks, [laughter] and see if the low hanging fruit has changed. >> Our low hanging fruit basket is full. >> Yeah, >> it'd be fun to revisit this uh down the road and see like what still like what

30:09still exists. My guess is that all the design ones will stay pretty similar. Uh [laughter] but that ours might shift around. Probably not a ton, but um yeah, super good. Appreciate you guys. great insights and we will see all the homies on the next podcast. [music] Peace. >> Later.