Three phases of SaaS marketing: phase 3
The Factory Floor · Episode 6 · April 29, 2025 · 55 min
Transcript72 sections · auto-generated, so expect the odd wrong word
[Music] Uh hello everyone and welcome to the factory floor. Uh we are excited to be talking through our conversion factory process. We've already talked through phase one, we've talked through phase two and so we're going to review those and then we're going to hit uh some of the nitty-gritty stuff in phase three. Uh it's going to be awesome and we will go from there. The first and most important thing we need to talk about though is that Cory Haynes has a drink. It looks like it's from Chick-fil-A. What are you drinking? Chick-fil-A is the official sponsor of today's episode. What do you guys think that the drink is? I'm going to vote a SunJoy. No, I'm going with like it's just tea. Sweet tea or lemonade. You drink soda? I
don't think you drink soda. I don't even know what Sunjoy is. Also, I've never drink tea. Tea is disgusting. It's a lemonade. Okay. A Sunjoy is is their an Arnold Palmer. They can't call it an Arnold Palmer. So they have Right. Right. Right. Yeah. Sunjoy is very different though. Um Yeah. Official sponsor. So thanks Chick-fil-A. Yeah. All right. Uh Corey, why don't you walk us through phase one? Um just a recap of what we what we can expect. Sorry, ladies and gentlemen. Nick's having a little bit of technical difficulty here, but we'll keep rolling. Yeah. So phase one is all about the foundation. That's where we'll go through an audit uh and the key foundational elements like the branding, positioning, the homepage. Um that's
really just kind of setting the stage for the rest of your marketing. Um that's stuff that people don't like doing up front because it feels like a waste of time because there's not a lot of deliverables attached to it necessarily. Um, but they're super super essential. Phase two is our base phase. So, phase two is now about kind of expanding the funnel. There he is. He's back. And, um, I'm talking through the phases. Yeah, we're walking through the phase one and phase two. Uh, so phase two is the base phase. It's all about expanding our funnel. So, now we're building out the key marketing assets and making sure that you don't have a leaky bucket um in your marketing funnel. And then now what we're going to
talk about today is phase three which expansion. And this is really the phase of pouring gas on the fire. And now that we don't have a leaky bucket and we have a firm funnel where things are set up for success, we can actually like get a lot of traffic. We can actually now really grow and uh and go kind of pedal to the metal. So, um, and and keep improving things and tweaking things, but really this is all about, I think, more the the scale phase of a startup where they're probably more like series A, post series A, or if you're bootstrapped, you're over a million dollars in AR R by this point and you're really just looking for new channels and to make those channels work even better than before.
Yeah. Okay. So find fine-tuning the engine and then uh putting more gas in essentially. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's the it's the fuel. We have like a bunch of stuff on the list of what's in phase 3. Um our the name of what we do is we our name is conversion factory. So the good news is that the first thing is around conversion conversion rate optimization. Um, I feel like there's a lot of times we get on calls with people and they're like some of the things here in phase three are like the first things they want to talk about. You know, they want to talk about like, well, we're running ads and they're doing kind of good and they're sometimes they're good, sometimes they're bad or, you know, we we really want to focus on our SEO and
then we kind of like get further into the call and we're like, I hate to break it to you, but you got to do these other things. You know, we talked about the foundation and and that kind of stuff. Um, why is it that these things are so attractive to like the the mid-stage like we have enough, we think we have enough, so like let's go to the end and just buy all the gas, you know, like why is this stuff so much more attractive? Does that make sense? Yeah. I mean, it's always tempting to think that um you can kind of like fix your marketing funnel just by pouring more water into the bucket or like doubling the amount of water that goes into the bucket, but it kind of just ends up getting wasted in a
sense. Um, for example, we talk about this with ads a lot is uh actually the best way to make your ads more profitable or even profitable in the first place is to work on your landing page optimization, not your ad copy or your ad creative optimization necessarily. um because those are the things that are most in your control versus you know the Facebook targeting algorithm or um what happens to be kind of working as far as like ad copy and creative goes in that moment um might not necessarily scale super well but what scales super well is a high converting landing page right same thing with SEO people are like hey we're getting traffic now like hey we have pages that rank well in Google for
the target keywords but they're just not really turning into customers quite yet. But instead of going through the hard work of, hey, let's like interweave more product stuff into our blog posts, let's make sure that we have a funnel so that people go from our blog posts to our sales landing pages to our conversion pages and actually sign up for the product. Why don't we just write more blog posts, see if that helps, see if that works. You know what I mean? So, it's always easier just to kind of like brute force your way through doing more of something versus fixing that thing to make it work how it's supposed to in the first place. The funny thing about conversion rate optimization is that uh I feel like
everybody always attributes it to ads and to AB like a and AB testing, but conversion rate optimization could be any number of things. It's like uh it's the equivalent of like get healthy and you know uh what what do I need to do? Um and there's multitude of things. I think that just like somebody who is trying to lose weight or get in better shape u often times one of the first things to do is just have you they'll have you do an audit of are you sleeping like are you setting the foundation so that you have a um a welloiled machine that is going to burn calories and keep you healthy. Um and that I would consider that being healthy. So conversion optimization you could lump the positioning within that you could lump
the branding like I mean it's sometimes uh non direct indicators that uh we would be approaching. So it's all conversion optimization. I think that this is just hyper specific targeted conversion rate optimization of what's already been built. You know what I mean? Yeah, like now we're getting to like the really the nitty-gritty of like, well, what if we change this sentence and see how that impacts things? Yeah, it is true that like kind of everything is conversion rate optimization if you think about it hard enough. Um, maybe a better way to think about this is like macro conversion optimization versus micro conversion rate optimization where the macro is more like, okay, we're going to swap out
all the copy on the landing page and we're going to redo it based off of a positioning exercise. Um, or it might be like we're going to completely redo our onboarding funnel and or we're going to go from a demo request to a free trial or free trial to premium. Those are big sweeping macro changes that you're hoping result in more conversions uh at the end of the day that casc cascade down to revenue. But then there's these micro conversion optimization that's more AB testing, split testing. Um you know, does this testimonial work better or does this one does this headline work better or is this one um you know, should we put the uh the little floating thing in the bottom right right corner or at the top?
does a banner work better or does a you know so on and so forth, right? Um and and that's actually a really good point. I'm glad we're talking about this because a lot of people want to do conversion optimization from a micro perspective too early, right? If you just have a couple hundred visitors per month or a thousand visitors per month, there's no point in doing a split test um testing this version of the page versus that version of the page. um you're just not going to learn a lot and it's going to take too long to get enough data. Um so you want to make bigger sweeping changes like um let's let's ch let's test this positioning against that positioning. Let's have like a really ugly version of this
versus a really pretty version of this. Let's see what resonates, right? Um, but then fun, funnily enough, I feel like at later stages, there's still a lot of companies that have never done any micro conversion optimization and they've never even tested a headline or an H1 on their page and they're at, you know, $3 million in ARR and still don't really have an idea of like what messaging works best um for their audience. Yeah, I I was Sorry, you gonna say something, Zach? No, go for it. I I was going to ask cuz like CRO is like you never like get to the end of it. You know what I'm saying? Like it's kind of like what you were saying like it's you know you could uh everything is CRO or like you could always improve the rate.
Uh which is kind of a one of the problems. CRO is like an unending you can always improve to type thing in my mind which is kind of like part of its flaw like a fatal flaw is that you can always have a greater or better conversion rate. Um, is there something that you use particularly as like a marker of like, you know, it's it's less important that we focus on this opposed to the other things uh in this phase. Like if we, you know, say we get to phase three and it's like, you know, your conversion rate's actually pretty good. It's not really like as worth our time to focus on this as it would be to like start hitting ads really hard. Yeah. Yeah, I think it's important to have a a decent understanding of like
what the benchmarks are. That way, you're not chasing something that's completely impossible to attain. I think it's also important to recognize that your conversion rates are actually probably going to get worse over time the better or the more success that you find. This is something I learned at Bare Metrics where everyone would always come to me and be like, "It's so weird. A year ago, our conversion rate was 2% and now it's 1%. And we've grown a bunch. And so I don't understand what's happening. So I started digging into the numbers. And it's like, oh yeah, it's because you have like three times more traffic. You're still getting twice as many new customers, but technically your conversion rate went down, right? Does
that make sense? where like the more traffic you get and maybe the more brand awareness, the more times you go viral on Twitter, whatever it is that you know that's getting more people at the top of the door, inherently that also means that there's going to be more unqualified people checking you out and so your conversion rate is going to go down. Um, and that's okay even though that sucks. you know, the the opposite is that uh you know, the same amount of people who are qualified find you, but you get less and less unqualified people over time, but that just almost never happens, right? It's like you can't expect um to only get the most qualified people who sign up. It's okay to make some noise and have people check you out
who aren't necessarily going to buy from you right the second. Um, but yeah, I I think the biggest thing is are you in a healthy range? And if we had to kind of stack rank and prioritize these are the metrics that matter the most and maybe we have, you know, B and C already checked in good ranges, but A isn't, then let's not waste time trying to improve B and C even more, right? Um, we want to get everything to a relatively healthy level. I think maybe we could also think about it from the perspective of like the funnel stages as well where if you if you have a couple of funnel stages like all right traffic to a sign up and then sign up to paid and then paid to um upgraded and we already have good rates
on free to sign up and paid to upgrade but we don't have good a good rate on sign up to paid then that's the thing we should focus on the most you or take it for any one of those that might be missing and there's more granular steps in between. But um it's it's sort of it's the theory of constraints, right? Like find the weakest link, find the weakest point, the thing that's constraining it the most, the bottleneck, and then just attack that the most. That's right. Y that makes sense. Um I I do want to talk about the next one. I was just thinking through uh some of the other things in our uh in phase three. Um in phase three is uh go to market launches, campaigns, things like that. Um and on the list of like things like
that is like product hunt for example which uh from the outside I think product hunt feels a lot more like the one of the first things you do like you get just like the minimum viable thing and then you're like I or you know I'm trying to get this out there so that people start to see it like this is one of the first things I do I think from uh maybe from like an outsers's perspective and like a launch to me is like maybe one of the first things you know that takes place when you're like, "Hey, I just got a product. I launched a new product today. I just built it yesterday." Not like, "Hey, oh, I just did my branding. I did my positioning. I did all this other stuff and now I'm like launching or launching this new
product." Um, why does it make more sense to put this stuff at the end or near the end of our process and not near the beginning? Yeah. Yeah, that's good. That's a really good question actually. Um something I talk about in my upcoming book, Founding Marketing, working title TBD. Yeah, you got to wet the appetite. You know, it's part of marketing. Um but the thing is because actually when we say like launches and like launch on platforms like Prodaton, what I mean is like what what I don't mean is wait to launch until now. What I mean is do your like last launch at this point. So what does it mean to actually launch a product or like a SAS product today? It means multiple launches over time. It
means like actually you're kind of always launching. There's almost never a time you're not launching, but you're launching in different ways and at different times. See if I can get this to focus. Uh the thing about launches for SAS products these days is that I think there's probably about five steps. you want to do like an internal launch where um if you're like a stealth startup or if you're really really early stage, maybe you're just launching to your co-workers, to your family, to your friends, to your close colleagues, your mentor, or some sort of like close-knit community, right? And then stages like two, three, four of launching are kind of iterations of that where you're um expanding who you're sending it out to.
Maybe now you're giving a couple of teasers on Twitter. Maybe you're um getting your listings up. Maybe you have a single page website now up. Maybe you have um X, Y, and Z. We're kind of slowly um peeling back the layers of the onion. And then the final one is more like your big splash. And this is really like once you have things dialed in and this is for real and now you want to make a big ruckus. Now we're going to do like everything. where it's a product hunt, maybe it's a PR, maybe it's getting featured in um a tech magazine or article, maybe it's going on a big podcast tour, right? There's a lot of different things that are involved with a launch. And then even then, you can still keep launching new features, you
can still keep launching new partnerships, you can still keep launching um new mini products or uh content material or, you know, anything like that, right? There's lots of things to launch, but um definitely don't wait to launch. It's just this is like once you want to put a lot of time and budget into this, then yeah, let's make a count. It sounds like it's pretty much anything that's new, like that's that's launchable, you know, like I mean, Web Flow does this all the time where I feel like when Web Flow ships new features, it's like a heyday on Web Flow Twitter. Same thing with Figma, you know, like if they I remember when they were gearing up for just interactions 2.0, which is a a pretty decent feature. Um, but they
had a full-fledged campaign around it. They had like social posts. They had a dedicated landing. They had a dedicated site specifically to interactions 2.0. And it was all to build up hype around this. And they did the same thing for ecom for web e-commerce as well. So these I feel like the reason that these are later is because they they are an expansive element like it it's continue like the continual launch and addition of new things. Um or maybe it's just a different way of thinking about your your product, you know, like maybe you have a a different story to tell that you end up building an entire campaign around. um you know like that that's really going to be emotionally stirring that you pair with a bunch of ads and
you have uh a continual throughine with all the assets that you create in particular for that campaign. So I I I feel like this is the expansion phase is things that just never end. You're always going to be doing these and continually iterating on them which is why they come at the end. Um not to say you won't do stuff in you won't reevaluate your positioning. won't flex your brand in different ways. You want to add new feature pages. But the reason that these are at the top is because there's no shortage of of use case for them. They will always be present. Yeah. Yeah. And you know like launch new positioning or sorry I just say like have new positioning launch it. Have a new brand launch it. Have a new
interesting point of view. Yeah. Have a new feature launch it. Um, it's true. Like I actually think there's a huge missed opportunity. I would love to do more work like this at conversion factory where SAS companies ship a lot and as product people you get used to pushing things in production where like okay now this is done and you check the box and then you just move on to the next thing because to you it's not a big deal. It's normal. It's like this is my job. This is what I do every day. Your customers, however, aren't aware of the things you're shipping unless that you tell them. And so there's so many things that people ship and they and they they launch quote unquote in the sense that
they like make it live in the codebase, but then no one ever uses and no one ever appreciates simply for the fact that no one told them to look at it and appreciate it. And so launching is just getting in the habit of like just let people know that you did a thing. even stupid quality of life upgrades too. Yeah. Like I I feel like people would be shocked if you know that you have an issue with u your software or like there's just there's a part of your process that's not as streamlined as it could be. The minute that you make that change, it's like a sigh of relief from your entire user base. Like I keep bringing up Web Flow, but I feel like it's because they are one of the tools that a I followed closely. And then when
they did launch things like this, it was really impactful. like it was something small and stupid like they made it so you didn't have to click you could get to your dashboard again from inside the web flow designer as opposed to having to go through like an initial an additional interstitial step. No, they made it so you could get to your site settings from the designer as opposed to just going having to go back to your dashboard, get back into your site settings. And my gosh, freaking people freaked out. everybody and their mother, dude. Like, it's like, wow, Web Flow, thank you so much for this. It made my day. Like, I love you. So simple and crazy. Yeah. And all they did was add another button.
Yeah. The design too small. The the like the whole idea of like a launch to me like I could see how it would be easy to be like, "Oh, like we're launching this new thing." And you just like you just say it and that's it. And I feel like part of the reason why it's like on our list, excuse me, and within our like process is because um these campaigns and launches um if done correctly with the right amount of time and work and like marketing gusto are bigger than just saying telling your customers what's going on or telling potential customers what's going on. It's like they can really actually become campaigns that bring in new customers versus just like saying something uh like you know to me
you know I'll see somebody on Twitter just being like this is here's my new AI agent app you know whatever it's you know they're launching something and I'm like cool thumbs up but if there's like a big like uh orchestrated uh to effort with a bunch of copy illustrations videos product demos that stuff is like If that is integrated within a launch or a campaign, it's going to be so much more effective. And I feel like that's why it's something that we keep on this list is like this is something you need marketing expertise with. It's not just you saying here's what's happening. Uh it's like bigger than that. Um yeah, but it's super interesting. I I really like uh whenever we get to do things like
this. Yeah. I want to hit ads now. Oh, are you going to keep talking launches? No, I was going to say we can't talk anymore about it for the sake of time, but I will just say one last thing about it, which is that um another like low hanging area, low hanging fruit is uh even just doing the bare minimum of following up with people who made a feature request can be like do wonders for your business and like getting new customers. Um, you'd be surprised just like how many people cancel because a feature is missing or don't sign up because a feature is missing. And then if you just say, "Hey, this exists now." They will pay you money. That's awesome. So great. Um, sorry I like almost cut you off, but
um, the next thing on the list is ads. Uh ads are like a really common thing that we end up talking about with uh on on calls with people because it's one of the first things like that they're thinking marketing agency equals ad agency. Um which is funny. But um ads falls pretty late, you know, on our list on this uh on all of our phases. Um why does it make sense to put them here? Not to run them earlier, not to run them like, hey, I just put up my landing page. like I don't have any features pages. I just have like a pricing section and you know I have my hero and that stuff and then like a couple testimonials and then like I launched and now I want to run ads. Uh why is it make sense to do it here after
a lot more of the the building blocks are in place? Yeah, because there's a 99% chance that it will just be wasted money unless you wait to do it after you have your foundation, your base set up. Um this is just my experience of you know talking and working with dozens of startups but I've almost I've never encountered a startup who was like huh yeah we just I don't know turned on Facebook ads and then just started bringing in new customers profitably at a at a good scale with our dinky little landing page. It just doesn't happen. Um, it might have happened like 10 years ago when the costs were so low that maybe you could. Um, today unfortunately the costs are so high that you almost can't afford to
take that risk. It's like you're basically just going to be flushing money down the toilet if you take that approach. So, assuming you have a strong foundation set up, a strong base, you don't have a leaky funnel, everything is all buttoned up, then we're more than happy to run ads for people and give that a shot. Still, there's a chance that they might not work strictly because of the economics of the ad platforms and just the state of media buying today because it's pretty expensive. Um, and the sales cycles can be so long that it's hard to do it profitably. Because here's what people don't don't like think about is that whether you're productled or you're salesled. If you're productled, you
might get someone to sign up from an ad, but then they might be a free user for 6 months and then start paying you $10 a month. Let's just say for example, if you're a sales lad, that also doesn't really fix your problem necessarily because someone might do a demo and then they might go through some sort of uh um you know, legal procurement um trying to get, you know, build a case for it internally and then 6 months later sign a contract with you and it still might be like a starter contract where you might go on to a pilot, for example. And so there's just such a huge amount of time on average usually from the time that you spend the money on the ad to the time that you get money for that customer that it takes a lot of
money to float that time. You know, on average like 6 to9 months, 6 to9 months is kind of the average payback period of acquiring a customer as a SAS product. So that's why it's like you probably should just wait to do this because um the odds are already like 50/50 at this stage if it's going to work for you. If you do it earlier, the odds are going to be like 95 to 5, you know? I wonder if the if like the paradigm is shifting on these a little bit where like ads used to be very um direct response oriented like extremely direct responseoriented and now I feel like the the landscape is shifting to where they're becoming more storytelling elements with some of the brand facts and uh like actually
marketing of the product woven into it. Mhm. Um, but I feel like the it almost makes more sense now to try and play that story writing storytelling angle because it's going to be the one thing it that is different um in the ad landscape that might actually convert more even if you think that it doesn't necessarily follow the triedand- trueue practices of you know uh what's the iata attention the you know what I'm talking about that yeah attention interest desire action. I think it is. Yeah. Well, see, I wonder I wonder if people would be better serviced trying to remember um e E, which is it's either educational, entertaining, um or emotional, you know, like that maybe your ads are supposed to
be geared more towards that way and that they become more of a brand play, less of a direct response play. Yeah. No, it's true. I I actually think that's that's why we follow more of a click testing process where we're not just trying to make an ad profitable and say, "Okay, how can we get people to go to this landing page and then sign up and then become a paying customer right away?" Step one is really how do we even create an ad that will get clicked on in the first place? Like what is a message and an audience that that message resonates with? That is step one to making profitable ads. So, you might as well not even think about how to make a profitable ad and any sort of direct response style of um of funnel before
you can nail the copy, the messaging, the creative and your target audience, which is really what the click testing approach is all about. And maybe you might actually have to do something that's legit like a YouTube video ad or like a real ad, not just a like, you know, a GIF of, you know, I mean, not to say it couldn't be a GIF. I think there's there's very creative ways to use um simple design elements and simple creative assets. More what I'm getting at is that you you might have to think a little bit more creatively um and less along the lines of like I'm expecting this to get a response. You might not. I think that instead you might just get eyeballs on you and interest which is what you need
to to obtain more customers and to build something that they will not only take interest in but then share that interest with others. Yeah, it seems like ads are hard. That that's the thing ads are hard but when they work so like you just never know what you're going to get. I feel like it's such a mixed bag. Like you could have someone that comes in that's just says like, "Dude, our ads are killing it. Like we it's awesome. We just need to like fix our CRO, like work on our landing page." Or they could be like, "Oh yeah, we dumped like 50k a month with this agency and then we did this one and like we just been like flushing money down the toilet for months, so we're we ads don't work for our product." Like we're just done. Um
it's just so weird that it's never consistent. I I do wonder that I feel like that the phrase will never work for a product. I feel like that gets thrown around with a lot of different marketing efforts and I don't think it's true for any of them. I think that any like any and all advertising and marketing efforts can work. it it's just a like at some point it becomes a numbers game no different than sales like where you have to be willing to put in the time and play long and make sure that you're actually like you're experimenting with them uh and I don't know I wanted to get that out there I don't think that any of these efforts are a nogo but you might just have to think outside of the box
for them and understand that the whole point of marketing is getting your name and rec and recognition out there as a viable solution to a problem. And that's a multi-stage that's a multi-stage process. If ads don't work, it's not that they don't work, it's they don't work for you right now at this price point or considering all the other variables that we don't or the way that you're or the way that you're doing them or the way that you're doing them. Right. Right. Exactly. you might have to like really think outside the box or you might have to um experiment with things that you don't have the infrastructure for. Um there's a you know right there's so many parts to it where just like I was talking
about like being productled versus salesled. It could be that you can't make ads work for you on a productled model but maybe you could with a free trial or maybe you could with a demo request or maybe you could with a interactive demo. Do you have the infrastructure and the time and the appetite to test that? The answer is usually no. And I understand why. But again, it's it's not that ads don't work. It's doesn't work for you right now given the way that things are going. Yeah. Um after ads, next thing on our list, I want to just keep keep rolling because we are spending extra time on everything. Sorry. um is another great buzzword, SEO, baby. SEO is like a huge word to just like plug in. Um but specifically on our
list, it's SEO content. Uh so it's like content focused uh around SEO. Um thankfully like I I think like SEO in mind is like woven into a lot of the work we do like from the beginning you know all the way through like building feature pages and building out you know we when we're copyrighting like we're thinking a a little bit about like hey how's this how does this fit into uh keywords and making sure that we're doing all the right things. Um what we have things like programmatic SEO on the list here and and some other things. What can you explain a little bit how this piece SEO content is different than just like we need to get our SEO better? What does it mean to have actually SEO content instead? Right. Right. Yeah. I
mean like you could say you have good SEO if someone Googles your brand name and your brand name comes up on the first page. Does that mean that that's going to lead to customers? Not necessarily. um because people would have to know your brand and be looking for you in the first place, which maybe they're going to do that because your other marketing efforts, but um the the the odds are kind of low, right? Normally, they're going to come in through channel, another avenue. So when we say SEO content, we mean creating content, usually blog content, specifically for the purpose of ranking in Google for keywords that we think qualified customers are probably Googling. And now we can sort of come
up, we can serve, we can answer their questions, we can be a trusted source of information and maybe even have a call to action within that content that gets them to try out our product. and now it's a profitable acquisition channel. There are sales pages and feature pages that can also rank for relevant things. Um I wouldn't call that it is content but I wouldn't call that content in the terms of like um purely educational um resource, right? Those are more like sales resources. So SEO content is very educational uh and it's geared towards Google not hoping that you're going to get shared around on social media. I was going to ask um because I feel like a really in-depth feature page can serve as a source of SEO
uh and and that's totally viable. Same thing with like broadening the scope of what does SEO mean in terms of a a software business's website. It could be things like case studies. It could also be things like your product documentation or absolutely you know like help docs that which are because if someone's going to be searching how do I change XYZ in you know this product and if your documentation shows up showing them how to do that that's that's really good rather than maybe a competitor who is you know targeting you and saying like oh this sucks um by the way we don't have this problem on ours so maybe you should just use our product instead. Um, what else would you include that you because blog is kind of a generic term.
Um, when I think blog, I think of things like I wrote an article about, you know, the these these keywords and, you know, here's step one, two, and three of how you can do it, too. What would you say are some of the areas where you could use like where coming at it with an SEO perspective? Um, and it's content, but it's not things that um, particularly like technical founders or uh, you know, other product people would consider as SEO content. I'm sorry. Ask a question one more time. Sorry. What What would you consider SEO content that other people typically would not consider SEO content? Oh, I see. Um, well, you mentioned a couple.
Product documentation is definitely a big one. Um, integrations pages definitely have a big SEO potential. Uh, competitor comparison pages or roundups of competitors can be really good as well. Even just sort of blog content about other tools and u things kind of adjacent to what your product does. But it might not be a tool. It might be more of like um a workflow or a process or a um you know a a DIY approach to something. Um but I've just seen time and time again the best SEO content in other words like educational content specifically and primarily created for search engines is pretty much always things oriented around answering a question, solving a problem.
um or showing how to do something that your product does without your product. Um like it it always works every single time. I don't know if that'll ever change and I'm kind of glad because it's it's such a good um such a good channel. Like SEO makes me feel good because you can treat your product, you can treat your content like a product in the sense that people are looking for something and you can help them with that thing by creating the content and then also you can show them how they can do it that thing usually better with your product. So it's a win-win in that sense, right? There's no like interruption, there's no manipulation, there's no sleazy sales tact tactics involved. Um, it's all uh
educational and um and and value ad driven. Yeah. Well, and then if you apply some CRO tactics to your blog and to this content, you actually have a way higher likelihood of getting people to the sales. And we had a we had a client who had a 152day sales cycle for large enterprise contracts. And after we did some CRO work on their blog, which was getting a lot of traffic, uh things like quizzes, uh ample opportunities for them to take an action to book a demo, that decreased by 85% from I don't I don't know the exact numbers off the top of my head, but I know that it decreased by 85% and went from 150 something days to it was either like 23 day. It was 23 days or 32 days. One of those. dyslexic.
Yeah, I'm not dyslexic. I just don't remember which one it was. Um, so I think that SEO content is extremely powerful in that it it gives you gateways, especially if you give just the right amount of push for somebody to then take action. That was going to be a question that I had is Yeah. 23. There we go. 23 days. Is uh that interplay like I'm not a copywriter. How big is the gap between SEO copywriting and optim conversion copywriting? How big is that gap? Like is it so big that it's like it kind of feels like uh clunky if you're like and here's my product or is it like hey I can kind of meld these and they both work really well.
Um yeah it's it's sort of like being a mechanic for a car and being a mechanic for an airplane. It's like you're totally different. Yeah. You're you're mostly doing the same types of things but completely different things in different ways for a different purpose. Um like conversion copywriting is is very salesoriented. SEO content is completely educational oriented. Now, with the caveat that really, really good sales copywriting is also educational. Like, you're also teaching along the way. And when you're doing really good SEO content that's educational, you're also selling along the way. That's what actually makes it, you know, profitable and in a marketing strategy and not just a a nice helpful
resource um that's a freebie. But, uh yeah, they they're they're very different. Like I don't know a lot of copywriters that do both. I know copywriters that are really good at writing SEO content. I know copyriters that are really good at writing landing pages and they tend to be different types of people with different skill sets and um different processes, different beasts. Yep. Yeah, totally. Um okay, let's keep rolling. Um the next thing on our list is internationalizing uh the website. Um we probably don't have to go like too too deep into this this one. Um, but I I guess like in my mind I'm thinking, okay, like we, you know, there's a tested product, it's in, let's say it's in the US, it's doing well. It makes
sense to like open that door to other countries, other payment methods and things. Um there are some businesses that early on have like a wide variety of users in a wide variety of countries where to me it would feel like well you kind of need like some sort of internationalization earlier. Uh do you think that's the case or do you think it's best for them to focus in on their primary market and then like widen their their array uh later on? Yeah. So the the benefit of most US startups is that most of the world in a business sense speaks English or at least understands English well enough and they know that the US makes the best software and so they're kind of googling and looking for things and
they're always uh looking for what US companies, US people recommend from a software perspective as well. So that makes things easy. Um, if you're if you're a startup and you're getting customers from Brazil, from um from I don't know Switzerland, from Germany, from Singapore, cool. Like, you don't have to do anything, right? But for one, if you're a non US or non-n North American company, you're trying to sell to the US, you need to to broaden, right? And two, if you feel like you've tapped out the US market and you do want to internationalize, you can't just expect everyone to um you know, magically expand your salesunnel uh overnight, right? You have to be intentional about it. You actually
have to then go and internationalize the site. And the reason why I think this is such a big deal, it doesn't really feel like a big deal, but it actually is a really big deal, is because there's a lot of ways to do this poorly that actually end up hurting you. Um, and it is an intentional thing you have to do. Um, and and there's definitely a lot of optimizations that can be made. For example, you don't want to use subdomains, you want to use subfolders. For example, um you can use and adopt other payment methods that allow you to collect local currencies versus just the US dollar or whatever your, you know, native national currency is for for your startup. Um and those two things alone are really hard technical
challenges. How do you do that? What logistically how do you go about bringing that on? And then once someone is in your product, now what about your all the you know the language options within your product? Now what about your help docs? Now what about your chat and customer support? Like it's a pretty strategic move for a company. And so internationalizing isn't just providing you know a translation. It's really a larger uh you know it's it's one project in a larger uh strategic initiative for a company. Even the even within just the translation, you know, you can get very specific with, you know, I think you have a difference where you are you have the same landing page for the US, for Argentina, and then
you have it for Singapore. And you can get to the point now where you can change the images on those specific translations as well. So, I'm thinking of things like, you know, on our um the abstractions that we do of interfaces, you have to change the copy in those as well to be in Chinese or to be in Portuguese or uh or in Spanish. Um and they also have to take into account things like, well, people in Singapore don't really look like people from Texas or New York. You know, you want this to feel like it is for them. Um, especially if you are being if you're going to go so far as to translate your entire website, you should have some kind of visual cues as well that this is for them. Mainly in the form of do the
people that are using this look like me? Uh, especially like if you're going for these hyperargeted segments of people where there's ve a very clear distinction between the US market, the South American market and the like uh and the Asian market. Yeah. Yeah, from a copyrightiting perspective too, um, a lot of what makes good copywriting in English does not necessarily make for good copyrightiting in another language. Um, a lot can get lost in translation. And so you have to be careful. You can't just push it through Google Translate. I mean, no, especially I mean it it's it's kind of a catch 22 in a way. And I and I wish it wasn't like this, but you know, in English, a lot of good copywriting is kind of clever. It's
using word play. It's making these short quippy sentences. Um, but that doesn't work in German where all the words are, you know, uh, combinations of each other. Exactly. Even things like alliterations, cuz alliterations are my favorite kind of tactic in copywriting. It just makes everything sound smooth and cohesive. It's harder to do all ititerations in other languages and or it might not even make sense to do it because there's not the same kind of word choice or flow with that syntax. So, um yeah, you you have to be very very intentional. Yeah. Uh should we hit the last one? I think we should. Okay. We development. Um, this is a very broad obviously like the web development has been taking
place like through many of these things because we're building the landing page, we're building feature pages, we're doing SEO content, we're you know doing a bunch of stuff. Um, so when this is at the end and this is like we're focus less on the word web and more on the word development in my mind like okay let's make this thing like like a a super machine uh for of a website. Um, what comes to your mind when we get to this point? Like that is the most important things that like you know we have all this other stuff and now we need to like you know plug in do these a bunch of thirdparty plugins and we need to like build these cool little elements that sit on different pages. What what are the things that sit within this
category for you? Mhm. Mhm. Well, you guys are more the domain experts in this area. So I want to hear a lot of your thoughts especially using client examples. But one of the big things comes to my mind from a marketing perspective is one, you just don't want a CMS to get in the way of you shipping things as a marketer. Uh I've been in multiple scenarios where I was using a platform like WordPress, for example, not to name names, but they're the worst. WordPress. And uh and it was like, hey, we have this feature that's coming up. I'm going to build a landing page for it. Oh, the feature is done. Where's the landing page? Oh, it's still stuck in the dev queue and they're not going to get to it for another couple of
months. Cool. So, actually, we're not shipping that feature. You know what I mean? Or even things like blog posts. Like, it shouldn't be hard to go and add a blog post. Um, it shouldn't be hard to go and whip up a new X, Y, and Z, right? You just don't let your CMS get in the way of you doing marketing. And number two is really just about um site speed and page performance because that is another big determining factor for conversion rates. If you have a really slow, sluggish page, that's going to drag it down and that's going to um not only just poorly reflect uh your brand, but it's also going to discourage people from taking action. and it's gonna be a negative signal to Google, so you're not
going to rank as high. So, it's important stuff. Yeah, I think on the SEO or on the CMS content thing that you mentioned, um I do think that's super important. I think like as someone who's building the site, I'm often thinking like how, you know, my first my gut is like how can I make this really awesome and easy to build and I can just pump out a bunch of great, you know, CMS uh based pages, but then like thinking about thinking back on it and being like, okay, no, I shouldn't do it. Like, I should build it so it's great for me, but also great for some random marketing hire who's been hired to pump out 10 blog posts a week. like I need to make sure that this has everything it needs for them to flip a switch and add a CTA
somewhere in the middle of the page or to flip this switch and switch the hero image on the blog post to a podcast recording and they could just paste a link and it'll zap right to the top of the page like so building it so that it's really easy for a marketer to use which is why we use web flow is because the handoff process to someone else is really uh can be super smooth. Um, and then I also think that like uh just adding fun little like, oh, we added this like calculator or a slider for the for the pricing, which might encourage someone to click a little bit faster or to like slide it to the end and be like, oh, they have custom pricing. Like, what does that look like? And click this button. And um there's just a lot of
little things that you could do. And I I think to the thing you mentioned about page performance is that a lot of websites these days are over um over interactive, overly interactive, I guess, is what I'm looking at. Hyper interactive. Hyperactive, I don't know. Um where they just go crazy with all these visuals that slow the page down. I like them because I get there and I'm like, "Ooh." And I build websites and look at websites all day. Um, but the average Joe who's like, "Hey, I'm looking for a solution here. I'm not looking for some amazing, beautiful, perfect thing." Uh, wants the page to load fast. And provide them with the information they're looking for. So, it's kind of a catch22 with, uh, that kind of thing.
But, Mhm. Yeah. I think my my favorite thing about uh all this stuff is the interconnectivity between different data segments within your CMS. Uh because I I get fascinated with keeping people entrenched in your site and having them spin off to other pages and just like trying to think through if I'm on this page, what if like if I'm on this blog page, what kind of feature page could I then link to and add add here? And that's really easy to do if your CMS is well configured and you have all of those different data sets pointing to each other like you know hey here's a a feature and it uh and here's a case study where this feature was uh essential to them getting these results. So I think that what you'll notice is
that the more you can utilize and interconnect that that data the better your site's going to be. And that's I think the whole point of a CMS is to show that not only make it easy to create the content but then link it together. Yeah. Walk the walk the visitor through a journey on the site. Yeah. Yeah. I think a really cool example is the uh the funnel envy playbook um where they have all these tactics and that's a cool case study I think of like how the CMS opens up new ways for people to interact with your website and you know showcase your expertise, showcase your product, showcase your services where it's not as like boring but also just it's the right tool for um how's this thing go? Uh,
I don't know. Right tool for the right purpose. You know what I mean? Like, you shouldn't just have to make everything a blog post. You should be able to get more creative with how the information is displayed. And a good CMS and a good system or how to use that CMS allows you to um kind of wow people and make it like a a true customtailored fit for the information. Yeah, obviously I like web development. I love I love getting to this point where it's like let's tweak a bunch of stuff and like play with it. It's very a fun time and like getting to the end and being like, "Oh, let's start uh just going crazy on this thing." But anyway, um okay, that is the end of phase three. Um that's the end of what
we're uh going through today. Um what a journey we've walked through. Great work, y'all. Um I know. And we'll see you on the next one. The next one will be a complete mystery. You will not know what the next topic is. Uh well, it might it might be about SAS marketing. Maybe. Maybe. No. Uh-uh. We don't we don't talk about that. Okay. But uh yeah. Uh any final words before I cut both of you off. Um I would just say listen to phase one and phase two as well. Get the get the full picture of what you need to do and don't try and jump from step one to step 10 because you'll fall. You'll chip your teeth and then you'll be right back where you started. Only you'll be hurt and we will laugh.
We won't laugh. That's rude. Maybe Nick might laugh. Yeah, I'm I'm a nice guy. Come on. Um, okay. Well, thanks for joining us everyone and we will see you next time. Peace. [Music]
Phase three is scaling the wins: CRO testing, upsell flows, expansion revenue, referrals, deeper nurture. Growing LTV rather than just adding logos.