Offensive vs. defensive marketing

0:00Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the factory floor. I'm joined today by guess who? Am I going to say this every time? Guess who I'm joined by? >> I think you are. >> cut the stick and just uh keep it to >> Say it every time. The people expect it now, you know? >> Yeah. >> It's like it's a motif. >> I'm officially a host. I'm a host now. >> It's like Jeff in Survivor saying, "Come on in, guys." >> He doesn't say guys anymore. He just says, "Come on in." >> Oh, that's right. >> He does say the tribe has spoken. I We could >> We don't want to do this. Zach will get mad at you. >> I don't want to do this. Make too many Survivor references. [laughter] >> I mean, you could be I mean, if it you could be like Ryan Seacrest and be like,

0:41"This is American Idol. And you >> Yeah, it's all about the emphasis. >> And then it's about the emphasis. And then it's going to go bam badam badam badam. The factory floor. Like that. >> [laughter] >> Okay, I'll think of something like that. If for anyone listening, Corey and I love Survivor. If you like Survivor, you should message us about it and tell us your thoughts on Survivor 50, Hands on the Fans. Okay. Um today, we are talking about offensive versus defensive marketing. Um these are words that mean other things, offense and defense. Mean a variety of things. Um but how does it relate to marketing? This came up because we did an audit for a client and Corey was talking about offensive versus defensive marketing in

1:31that audit. And so, I was curious and we were curious to pick that apart. What is that? Which one should you be doing? How do they interplay? And all that good stuff. So, Corey, can you give us a little intro synopsis? Like, what is this? What are these words you said out of your mouth? >> Yeah, and what is this What is this offense? What is the defense? What is marketing? >> Did you mean offensive marketing? Like, buy this product or you're an effing idiot like that or defensive like how dare you not buy my product? Is that what you meant? >> Yeah, yeah, yeah, like like like gaslighting. >> Yeah. >> Gaslighting marketing. Gaslighting as marketing. Um yeah, it came up because I think that the client you guys could maybe refresh

2:13my my memory better, but uh he was like, "Oh, um we do these things well. We don't do things these things well. So just focus on the things that we don't do well." And but we take a a look over everything and we want to get a full picture. So I was looking at the things they do well and then the thought occurred to me, well, you want to double down on the things that you're doing well. You don't want to just like skip over it and ignore it and you want to make sure that the things you're doing well you keep doing well over time and this client in particular this was a software company who had kind of carved out this niche that they were starting to get some new startup competitors. So sometimes what can

2:55happen is like when you're building a startup, you're the new guy and so you're challenging the incumbents and you're you know, going up against the dinosaurs, so to speak, these like big slow-moving incumbents who, you know, kind of sell sell they don't do marketing very well. But then what can happen is if you're successful a little bit, then you become the dinosaur and now you have all these challengers who are trying to eat your lunch and these new guys on the block who are you know, encroaching on your territory and if you don't do anything about it, then they just might eat your lunch and the thing that was working well for you might not work very well anymore. And I kind of hear this often where

3:36it it's this trope that I that really bugs me when people are are like "Oh yeah, we we did this. We did SEO for a while, but then it stopped working and so now we do something else." Like it doesn't it doesn't just stop working. What do you mean it stopped working? Like it just I don't know, this magic faucet just turned off for you like No, there's so many variables at play. There's there's so much more in your control than it just stopped working one day and so you have to have these you have to tow the line between defending what's already working well for you and also be on the offense always trying to find new things that are working well for you in the future. >> Yeah. I've referred to This happens a lot in

4:21branding as well, actually. I refer to it as brands that are on fire and brands that are on ice. It's like, you know, brands that don't Like if you're on ice, it means that you're chilled. You know, you're not you're not moving. You are just kind of going through the rigmarole like the the status quo. Or if you're on fire, you're actually doing way too much and it's like you're you're scattered. You have no aim and nothing feels cohesive. Is that similar to this or is it >> Yeah. Yeah, maybe maybe another way to say about it, actually. It relates to what we were just talking about with MicroConf. One of the MicroConf talks was on uh growth ceilings. Uh it was talked about Jason Cohen who is a legend in the

5:02space, founder of WP Engine and uh Smart Bear. And he talked about how like why startups plateau. Startups plateau because you find one marketing channel that works and it kind of goes up in a hockey curve. But then at some point you get to diminishing returns and then it plateaus and then like in at best it kind of can continues on that plateau but more likely than not it's actually going to start to perform worse over time and go down again. And so you have to keep stacking these marketing channels, finding new ones, and trying to make sure that they plateau as little as possible um over time. But but eventually every marketing channel does have diminishing returns because of competitors, because

5:53of algorithm changes, because of uh market saturation, because of pricing and inflation, economic downturns, so on and so forth. Uh And so yeah, you have to always be on the offense looking for new ones and have to always be on the defense making sure that every new channel you find doesn't just fall off of a cliff a couple months later. >> Well, this is this is Jason Cohen's elephant graph curve, right? So it's like you have one comes up in hockey stick and then flattens out and it makes this silhouette of an elephant. What was really cool about that, him and Einar showed this which is you stack them on top of one another and it's almost like, you know, you as soon as one growth channel starts plateauing, then you add

6:36another on top of it and you get this additional like, you know, phase of growth. It's kind of like layers on the cake where it just goes up and up and up and up and up and up and up. And I think the cool thing about that is that there will always be new growth channels that you don't even you're not even aware of right now. You know, like Yeah. >> Mhm. >> Yeah. And there And there's channels where let's just say something like SEO, for example. Someone might have some good early success with blog posts, let's just say for example, and they start to see the curve go up into the right. They're like, "Yeah, more traffic, more conversions, more sign-ups. This is great. This is awesome." And then it starts to plateau

7:12a little bit. That doesn't necessarily mean that you should abandon SEO altogether. Maybe you need to find another layer within SEO, another curve within the curve to keep that hockey stick going back up into the right again. So instead of just doing blog posts, now you layer in something like programmatic SEO or maybe you layer in um more bottom of funnel landing pages and sales pages. Maybe you layer in templates. Maybe you layer in uh yeah, fill in the blank, right? These these pillar topics. There's a lot of different plays in SEO besides just blog posts. And that can go for any one of these channels, any one of these growth curves. We always have to be on the offense. It reminds me, I mean, sorry for the sports

7:58analogies cuz I know a lot of people in tech are not super super into sports, but it reminds me a lot of football because um, in football they always say like the best defense is a good offense. And there's this whole like defense wins the championship thing, but like if if you're always on offense, then uh, your defense that doesn't have to be on the on the field. Right? So, like the best defense is a good offense. And I feel like it's very similar in marketing where when you're always pushing forward, when you're always exploring new channels, testing and busting, reinvesting more, then you don't have to worry as much about losing what you have going on. What worries me and what stresses me out

8:40is when companies find a little bit of success and they kind of saturate and squeeze every uh, every ounce out of the lemon that they can. And then they just let their foot off the gas pedal a little bit. And they're like, "This is fine. I'm just going to coast here for a while." As soon as you start coasting, that's when you have to start playing a lot of defense. And if you get lazy in your defense, you're going to let the other team catch up to you. Like don't blow the lead. Don't play this uh, prevent defense where you're just letting them get these easy passes, easy runs, and chipping away at your at your lead. And I see this so often in marketing where they just stop investing. And now the

9:26thing that was working for you might not work for you a year from now. And it's really hard to regain that. >> I it it [clears throat] makes me think of just calls we have with people that are they're pretty committed to this idea of a like set and forget type marketing system where they can put something in place that auto does X, Y, and Z or you know, if we have certain messaging and then certain ads running, you know, whatever X all the way down the chain like through their funnel that they can essentially like stop doing more things and they'll produce the same result um all the way through until the end. And I almost want to be like, you know that like doesn't exist and while, you know,

10:13there's working with us is like uh you know a lot of times a long-term engagement even if you stopped working with us and or just stopped doing marketing like you need to figure that out on your you need to keep going. There's no such thing as like stopping marketing. >> [laughter] >> It doesn't or if you do, you will be stopping like a lot of other things. Um I I don't know. I When you said offensive versus defensive, I was thinking more tactics. Like these tactics fit into offense. These tactics fit into defense. Do you think there's the same argument to be made there? Or is it just purely on like the messaging of that cuz when you're talking about it, I'm thinking you're talking more messaging of marketing.

10:59Like hey, we're on the offense or um the cadence of marketing. Like hey, we're constantly on offense. We're constantly doing things. Versus what type of thing we're doing? Like these are defensive things. These are offensive things. >> Yeah, I don't know if I would put them in like offense versus defense buckets tactically. But there are like yeah, there's the high-level attitude of offensive and defensive marketing and trying to straddle both of those Mhm. Um simultaneously. You know, you want to do them both concurrently. Uh where for example, we saw this with SEO and the AI SEO. Um and I knew that everyone was going to make a mistake here, not everyone, but a lot of people are going to make a

11:40mistake where they started to see that ChatGPT was eating Google's lunch and they thought, "Oh my gosh, I guess that Google's dead. I should just stop investing there." No. What are you talk You think that Google's just going to you know >> Heel over. >> bend over and and just let it happen? Like Obviously, they're going to figure something out. For two, we've seen that everything that works for traditional SEO also works for AI SEO. And so there's no reason Now is an even better deal. It's a two-for-one. It's a invest in SEO and you also invest in AI SEO. Invest in AI SEO, also invest in SEO. So like yeah, high-level, you want to make sure they're always on a on offense and defense. Well, more tactically, for

12:27example, just keep on this SEO theme. Um this client in particular we're doing the audit for, I saw that like they were already ranking well for a lot of the relevant keywords. Um but they were their their positions were kind of volatile and there wasn't like a huge huge difference between the pages they were ranking for and what their competitors were starting to rank for. It can happen sometimes where there's a very obvious winner where this you take a search keyword like SaaS marketing agency for us, right? And the number one result uh might have 10 times more backlinks than any other page on the first page of Google. That's an obvious lead, right? They're playing good offense, right?

13:16Um but imagine two or three of those other pages, those other competitors, start to build a lot of backlinks. If you're not continuously building backlinks, then eventually it's going to be overtaken. And if it that's the difference, right? You don't The difference between being the number one in a Google search result versus being the number two is a huge difference. It's like 1/3 of the traffic, 1/3 of the clicks. And again, overtaking that is hard. Marketing is really a game of inertia. Like you're trying to build a lot of inertia for yourself, then you're trying to keep your competitors from slowing you down and you're trying to slow your competitors down from building inertia. >> Fascinating. How many of the items in

14:02140 SaaS marketing ideas would you characterize as offensive? >> Ooh. >> You have them all logged in your head, right? >> Yeah, right. >> Is it Does it feel like more Does it feel like Does it feel like more of a blend or cuz some of the ones that are in there are quite like What's the postman one? Manga comic as marketing? >> Mhm. >> Right? So that's >> That's awesome. >> Yeah, that's like That's an offensive tactic, right? Where you are Okay. >> Yeah, probably most of them >> The cadence in which you do them makes them offense or defense. >> Yeah, I think it's like it's the cadence and also the the context, right? So if you have the lead in anything, then whatever you're doing to keep that

14:46lead is going to be I guess sort of like offensive and defense because offense is the best defense is my point, right? Um There's no purely defensive marketing tactic or purely offensive marketing tactic. >> Okay. >> I'm going to throw down I'm going to throw down some some of the deliverables that the marketing team puts out, and I just want you to kind of like rapid-fire like Is this offensive? Is this defensive? Is this both? Positioning. Nailing that. >> Oh, man. I would say it's it's a lot of both because you're planting a flag in the ground and saying, "This is how we're different and this is how we're going to cut through the noise." Then you're also trying to ward off people from saying,

15:30you know, "Oh, you shouldn't go with those guys." Uh because you're you're trying to have a defensible mote around your positioning and why people should choose you. >> Okay. Feature releases. Like launch campaigns. >> Yeah, probably very offensive. >> Okay. Competitor comparison pages. >> Very offensive. >> Could it also be defensive? Too? >> Yeah. Um but I think for Okay, so this is what I tell people every time they're like, "Oh, competitor comparison pages, aren't we going to get in trouble? Our competitors are going to complain, legal's going to complain, whatever." It's like, "No, your your customers are looking for a comparison. Do you want the narrative to be controlled by Google or some random blogger

16:17or your competitor? Or do you want to control the narrative? So like it's already happening. There's already offensive like being played against you in that sense. >> Mhm. Mhm. >> Um so yes, of course that's defensive. But >> competitor comparison. >> We did. >> We already did a whole podcast on it. >> Yeah, we did. >> I'm just asking the question. >> offense. >> I think it's offense. >> It maybe Okay, here here's maybe a better phrasing for this. If if a lot of your competitors haven't created these pages and you create the page, it's like super offensive, right? Cuz you're the first one out there controlling the narrative. If you're the last one to create a a comparison post against your competitors,

16:57>> defensive. >> Now it's very defensive. >> Mhm. >> Fascinating. >> Where would you put It's like um I feel like like a brand awareness campaign that's very defensive. Right? But it could also be offensive. Is it cuz so the way that I have seen this is like I've always compared it to marketing is a push, like you know, marketing goes out and tries to get things, but then branding has always been a pull mechanism, like it draws you in. But it doesn't seem like this is the same kind of uh duality where like it's a little bit harder to characterize them because like some offensive things become defensive. And that And that happens, you know, like the defensive team on a sports team can score, particularly like, you know, something

17:42like football, you catch a a fumble and then you run it in for a touchdown. And it sounds like these marketing tactics can swing both ways. But you should be playing both. >> Yeah. Or think about the Super Bowl, right back in February where we had a lot of AI ads. In particular, OpenAI and Anthropic kind of going head-to-head against each other. >> Right. >> And just the different ways that they tried to portray themselves and themselves against everyone else. And you had Anthropic, for example, has a couple of really, really good commercials where they were trying to be like the the anti-cliche AI. Right? Where you had these like it doesn't feel like AI with these very robotic, like "You're absolutely right. Duh, duh, duh,

18:28duh, duh." Like Claude was trying to They were trying to paint Claude as not that. >> Right. >> And yeah, it swings both ways because there's a lot of people, obviously OpenAI has a huge, huge lead as far as brand awareness. So by Anthropic putting out a Super Bowl commercial, they're going on the offensive, like, "Hey, we need to build more of this brand awareness." But then defensive in the way of "But we're not like OpenAI. We're different." >> So it sounds like you would characterize it more as like anything that is in the pursuit of gaining new customers is offensive marketing. Anything that is in the pursuit of retaining your current customer base. >> Yeah, that's Yeah, that's probably Not

19:10way to summarize it. >> Okay. >> Right. Interesting. That's They do definitely swing both ways. You you'll have some actions that, you know, like if you do a feature release, that might be something that retains an old or an a current customer, but then maybe they upgrade. So does that become a offensive or defensive? >> Yeah. The point being is that you should just be doing marketing and a whole bunch of it. >> [laughter] >> That that is actually the main point. It's like I'm so tired of people playing scared and playing small with marketing. They're like, "Oh, I'm just going to do the bare minimum. I'm just going to do enough. I'm just going to do the things that I'm comfortable with. I'm just

19:49going to do the things that I can directly control myself for that I have a skill set that I can do." It's like you should be doing everything that you possibly can within your means at all times. >> Yeah. >> What is the point of playing small and and limiting yourself there? >> Mhm. And having a business that doesn't grow. >> Like what's your deal? >> Yeah. Like yeah. We're not We're not like don't don't like blow your freaking load on like, you know, stuff you can't afford or something stupid. You know, like when we did Yeah, when we started doing sponsorships for conferences because that was a good thing for us to do. But it took us a a bit to get to the point where that felt economically

20:37viable and reasonable for us to drop five figures on a sponsorship, but it's going to be totally worth it. >> Mhm. >> Um It's fascinating. I think it's really >> Go ahead. >> Sorry, I was going to say that that's a good point actually because you don't want to get ahead of your skis. And going back to football, another sports analogy here, like when a team becomes too aggressive, too offensive, you start taking too many risks, then it backfires, right? And then you're just like giving the other team an opportunity to intercept, to fumble, to you know, to run it back, to to get good field position. Um and we've seen this with startups, too, where we had um there was this startup called Icon. icon.com

21:22>> Yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh-huh. >> Uh you know, a a pretty like I guess um >> Or huge >> high-profile founder. Huge, huge fundraising. Made a big splash. Made some big promises. Was very aggressive. A lot of creative ad campaigns. And a year later, we're bankrupt. And the website was down. Why? I think that they were too aggressive. They they spent too much money too fast on things that didn't convert well. And didn't steward their resources as well as they should have. >> It's almost It's one of the reasons why we are such big advocates of going at from the bottom up on your funnel. Like >> Yeah. >> fix what's lower because that's people who are already coming and coming like getting into your net

22:12into your funnel. You fix those ones because you have a higher likelihood of converting them before you start sending more people to it. >> Yeah. Yeah, exactly. >> That was kind of my take is that the funnel is like an offense a offense to defense funnel. Like the things at the bottom are more defensive. Like I have a thousand people that come to my site every month and I need to convert X percent of them. The more you know, I can convert from there. That's almost like a defensive action. Like they're here. How do I get them in? It's like making your net bigger to make sure that they get caught. And then up the funnel is like run ads. Offense. That is obviously offense. Like So, it kind of becomes you know, less defensive

22:55as you go up. But you What you were saying me of about Icon maybe think of um There's there's this whole new startup culture of virality. Like virality makes for like a hyper-offensive um you know, people want to blow up on TikTok. They want to be like kind of like virally famous and then convert that, but it converts probably My guess is it converts pretty bad. >> I have >> I've seen like three or four like viral AI startups where I'm like, "Dude, you got a lot of eyes. Like this is sick, like awesome." And I never thought about it again. And I'm in the world of of like AI and tech. So I I don't know. I feel like that's almost too offensive um as an example.

23:42>> I have I have an opinion on this content. >> Oh, is it mine? Or >> Ah, [laughter] take it or leave it. What do you got? >> More of Corey's. Well, I think one of Corey's best lines is marketing is non-deterministic. Like and specifically people who are in the software industry or anybody who deals with something like more mathematical where it should be in a math like you'd expect marketing to work like a math equation. X + Y = Z. And that should be formulaic, right? And you should be able to extrapolate that out. You should be able to scale it quite well, but it doesn't because it's like the the crux of marketing is stuff that's completely out of your control all the way down to the fickle emotional rationalizations of

24:30people who want to buy your product. Which it could just be something like well, this person should have converted cuz they went through the same path as this other person who is almost an identical match, but you know what? They had like one less chicken nugget in their kids Happy Meal and their kid like went on a a tantrum that day. And so as a result, they didn't click the buy button or activate themselves in the you know, in the tool. And stuff like that happens. Like the multiple like the multitude of factors that go into somebody making a purchase decision is exponentially odd and random. Like And it's a it's a miracle if you get any semblance of a repeatable business pattern. And it reminds me of

25:17Um you guys familiar with the song Dreams by Fleetwood Mac? The cram cranberry juice ocean spray >> Skateboard guy. >> Skateboard guy? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, that song was made in like 1977. Right? Popular song at the time of release. Still like probably on the undercurrent. But then you get some dude who goes on Instagram with long hair and you know, he's drinking ocean spray cranberry juice listening to Fleetwood Mac. And I just looked it up. In 2020 when that like came to fruition ocean spray guy, skateboard guy, 230 million plays in 2 weeks. Like if that song came out now, like it was released now, it'd be platinum. >> Yeah, it'd be the biggest song in the world.

26:05>> It'd be the biggest one of the biggest songs in the world. But could you predict that? No. So, what you have to do this is I think this ties into things like blog posts or just doing some of the stuff that's maybe a little bit more boring, but you know yields a lot of fruit down the line. Because you don't know when it's going to rain and then your crops are finally going to blow past the the surface. >> Yeah, there's I feel like with like what you're talking about, there's like there's a hundred variables that are hidden underneath each of the like each of that equation that A plus B equals C. There's like a hundred hidden variables that affect A that you don't realize and then a hundred hidden variables that

26:53affect B, and then a hundred hidden variables that affect C. And like you just you can't possibly see those things. But the the value what you get it is you take more shots on goal, you play more offense. You know, you're you're like Hey, second down, second and nine, and we need to throw. Let's throw the ball. Let's try to go Let's go for broke. And then on third you're like you're willing to say, "Hey, we need to run to get to try to get to get to a first down." Um and you kind of like you you balance it hard enough actually makes it really valuable. Um something I thought of while you were talking, Zach, is when I used to work in uh real estate, I used to work in a mortgage the mortgage industry,

27:33um there was this podcast I listened to was super niche podcast, a guy basically talking about like how to grow your business in mortgages. And he used to talk about how many businesses are like a it's like a farm. It's They're all just farms. You plant crops, and you do the necessary work to make sure that those crops would grow, and you plant as if they will, but you plant more crops after that season of planting is passed, you plant more, and you plant more. Like you just keep planting crops, and you harvest everything that grows, you harvest. That's it. Like you can't you can't force the growth, you can't force the harvest, you can only force the planting. That's the only thing you can do. And so that's like the um

28:21kind of the same analogy. Like you can only take shots on goal, you can only take the right steps, and then take enough of them so that enough of those steps end up paying off in the future. So that's kind of what you you're advice had me had me thinking of. Sorry, Courtney. >> May- maybe one more analogy just to make this way overly dramatic. Marketing is like war. So [laughter] Bring it down. to when you're trying to like >> [laughter] >> when you're trying to take over a country, you're going to war, right? You're trying to like gain ground in enemy territory. You go on the offense where you you gain some ground, you push. You try to overwhelm the enemy, you you sneak into the nooks and crannies, you find little

29:10advantages where you can build a foothold. And then you make sure that you can keep that ground. And then now that that becomes like your new starting point to go, you know, to your next uh offensive move, right, that you're going to do and take some new enemy ground. So offensive marketing is like building the ground that you're gaining in enemy territory. Defensive marketing is keeping that ground to make sure that it's still going to be there tomorrow while you're out finding new ground to go gain. >> Mhm. What do you say to those that say, "Offense wins games and defense wins championships?" >> [laughter] >> I say that offense is the best defense. >> Yeah, what is that ridiculous analogy

29:56comparison? Like one says the opposite of the other. >> Yeah, I know. I do think it's kind of a silly um like it's it's a false dichotomy. You don't have to do like one is better than the other. You only do what like >> Obviously you need both important. Yeah. >> Yeah, but you don't want to be playing defense most of the game. You want to be playing as much offense as you can. >> I have every sport. Well, I have heard as well. So, this is a I think it's a popular um method in tennis, which is when you're first starting out you are not taking shots to win, you're taking shots to not lose. Like and that's the game. And I think what it comes down to is when you first start out, you are playing more

30:40defensively. Like you were you're doing the fundamentals that you know like, I know this works. I can I'm comfortable like I can do this. This is a thing that I'm capable of fulfilling. We see the same thing happen in jiu-jitsu, right? Where it's like the I'm not going to try some crazy like Imanari roll to figure four to a heel hook my first day. I'm going to try and just not get my guard passed. >> Mhm. >> So >> Don't get choked out today. >> Just don't get choked out today. But seriously though, like that is the like really like you you spend 6 months, probably more than that. I still go into class saying, Let's just not get choked out today. Now that that sounds like a good plan. >> [laughter]

31:25>> Yeah. How little can I get choked out today? >> How how many how few times can I get choked out or arm barred or worse? Um but then as you gain more confidence and those things become second hand nature, then you start doing some crazy things. It's kind of like what we were talking about earlier where when Conversion Factor just started out it was like post on socials, write newsletters, um you know, do things that were very low cost and were probably going to perform well, uh but not like not reach a virality component like at all. >> [sighs and gasps] >> But then when you get your base, then you can start playing taking shots to win. And doing things that are a little bit more obscure and interesting and

32:14different because you now have that foundation to to play off of. >> Mhm. >> Cuz then it does become play where it's not as structured. It's a little bit more free flowing and almost a form of expression rather than something that's a like a definitive tactic. >> Yeah. Hey, awesome topic. Thanks Corey for I know this spawned out of a one off random conversation with a client, but definitely worth the deep dive. Super interesting and thanks for for y'all and thanks for joining the the factory floor. We're going to close it out. God bless. See you next time. >> [music]