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The Factory Floor is hosted by the three co-founders of Conversion Factory, the marketing agency at the forefront of SaaS growth, marketing, and tech trends. Episodes are released on Twitter one day early, @coreyhainesco.
Every other week Corey, Zach, and Nick break down what’s working right now in SaaS marketing, share real-world lessons from the field, and give you the strategies you need to outpace the competition.
You can also find us on YouTube, X, and everywhere you listen to podcasts!
Don't fall behind. Subscribe. Like. Drop a comment. Or not. The ball is in your court.
Nick Loudon (00:00)
Hello everyone and welcome to the factory floor. 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 some of the nitty gritty stuff in phase three. 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 Corey Haines has a drink. It looks like it's from Chick-fil-A. What are you drinking?
Corey Haines (00:29)
Chick-fil-A is the official sponsor of today's episode. What do you guys think that the drink is?
Nick Loudon (00:32)
yeah.
Zach Stevens (00:35)
I'm going to vote a Sunjoy.
Nick Loudon (00:38)
Okay, I'm going with like, it's just tea, sweet tea. Do you drink soda? I don't think you drink soda.
Zach Stevens (00:42)
or lemonade.
Corey Haines (00:45)
don't even know what Sanjoy is. Also, I've never drank tea. Tea is disgusting. It's a lemonade.
Nick Loudon (00:52)
Okay, same.
Zach Stevens (00:52)
Okay. A Sunjoy is,
is there an Arnold Palmer? They can't call it an Arnold Palmer. So they have a Sunjoy.
Corey Haines (00:59)
right,
right. Yeah, Sunjoy is very different, though. Yeah, official sponsor. So thanks Chick-fil-A.
Zach Stevens (01:07)
Yeah. Corey, why don't you walk us through phase one? 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.
Corey Haines (01:19)
Yeah.
Yeah, no problem. So phase one is all about the foundation. That's where we'll go through an audit, and the key foundational elements like the branding, positioning, the homepage. that's really just kind of setting the stage for the rest of your marketing. that's the stuff that people don't like doing upfront because it feels like a waste of time because there's not a lot of deliverables attached to it necessarily.
Nick Loudon (01:21)
Hello?
Corey Haines (01:48)
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 I'm talking through the phases.
Nick Loudon (01:59)
Sorry.
Zach Stevens (02:02)
It's okay. Yeah,
we're walking through phase one and phase two.
Nick Loudon (02:03)
Okay, hit it.
Corey Haines (02:06)
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 in your marketing funnel. And then now what we're gonna talk about today is phase three, which is 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, and go kind of pedal to the metal. So, and, keep improving things and tweaking things, but really this is all about, I think more 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 ARR by this point. And you're really just looking for new channels.
and to make those channels work even better than before.
Nick Loudon (03:05)
I
Zach Stevens (03:06)
So
fine tuning the engine and then putting more gas in, essentially.
Corey Haines (03:11)
Yeah,
yeah, yeah, it's the fuel.
Nick Loudon (03:15)
We have like a bunch of stuff on the list of what's in phase three. The name of what we do is, our name is Conversion Factory. So the good news is that the first thing is around conversion, conversion rate optimization. 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, 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 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 that kind of stuff. Why is it that these things are so attractive to like
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?
Corey Haines (04:10)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, I mean, it's always tempting to think that, 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. for example, we talk about this with ads a lot is, 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. Because those are the things that are most in your control versus the Facebook targeting algorithm or what happens to be kind of working as far as like ad copy and creative goes in that moment 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.
Zach Stevens (05:44)
Yeah.
I think the funny thing about conversion rate optimization is that, I feel like everybody always attributes it to ads and to.
AB like an AB testing, but conversion rate optimization could be any number of things. It's like, it's the equivalent of like get healthy. And you know, like what, what, what I need to do. and there's a multitude of things. I think that just like somebody who is trying to lose weight or get in better shape, oftentimes one of the first things to do is just have you, have, we'll have you do an audit of, are you sleeping? Like, are you setting the foundation so that you have a, a well oiled
Corey Haines (06:12)
Mm-hmm.
Nick Loudon (06:14)
you
Zach Stevens (06:31)
machine that is going to burn calories and keep you healthy. that I would consider that being healthy. So conversion optimization, could lump the positioning within that. You could lump the branding. I mean, it's sometimes, non direct indicators that, 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? Like.
Corey Haines (06:58)
Yeah,
yeah, no, it's very true.
Zach Stevens (06:59)
Now we're getting
to like the really, the nitty gritty of like, what if we changed this sentence and see how that impacts things.
Corey Haines (07:08)
Yeah, it is true that like kind of everything is conversion optimization. If you think about it hard enough, maybe a better way to think about this is like macro conversion reoptimization versus micro conversion reoptimization, or 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. or it might be like, we're going to completely redo our onboarding funnel and, or we're going to go from
Nick Loudon (07:10)
you
you
Corey Haines (07:37)
Demo request to a free trial or free trial to freemium. Like those are big sweeping macro changes that you're hoping result in more conversions at the end of the day that cascade down to revenue. But then there's these micro conversion optimization that's more AB testing, split testing. You know, does this testimonial work better? Does this one, does this headline work better? Is this one?
You know, should we put the, little floating thing in the bottom right corner or at the top, does a banner work better or does a, you know, so on and so forth. Right. 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.
Zach Stevens (08:26)
Mmm.
Corey Haines (08:34)
testing this version of the page versus that version of the page. You're just not going to learn a lot and it's gonna take too long to get enough data. So you wanna make bigger sweeping changes. Like 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?
But then funnily enough, 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 for their audience.
Zach Stevens (09:12)
Hmm.
Nick Loudon (09:22)
Yeah, I was sorry you're gonna say something Zach I was gonna ask is like CRO is like You never like get to the end of it. You know I'm saying like it's kind of like what you're saying like it's you know, you could Everything is CRO or like you could always improve the rate Which is kind of one of the problems.
Zach Stevens (09:25)
No, go for it.
Corey Haines (09:42)
Next cut now for me.
Nick Loudon (09:44)
CRO is like an unending, you can always improve 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. Is there something that you use particularly as like a marker of like, you know, it's less important that we focus on this opposed to the other things in this phase? Like if we, 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.
Corey Haines (10:26)
Yeah, I think it's important to have 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%.
Zach Stevens (10:35)
You
Corey Haines (10:57)
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, 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
Zach Stevens (11:14)
Mm-hmm.
Corey Haines (11:26)
that there's going to be more unqualified people checking you out. And so your conversion rates are going to go down. and that's okay. Even though that sucks, you know, the, opposite is that, 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, to only get the most qualified people who sign up.
It's okay to make some noise and have people check you out. aren't necessarily going to buy from you right this second. but yeah, 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.
we want to get everything to a relatively healthy level. 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 sign up and then sign up to paid and then paid to, upgraded. And we already have good rates on free to sign up and paid to upgrade, but we don't have a a good rate on.
sign up to paid, then that's the thing we should focus on the most, you know? Or take it for any one of those that might be missing and there's more granular steps in between. 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.
Nick Loudon (12:58)
Hmm.
Zach Stevens (13:18)
That's smart.
Nick Loudon (13:18)
Yeah,
that makes sense. I do want to talk about the next one. I was just thinking through some of other things in in phase three. In phase three is go to market launches, campaigns, things like that. And on the list of like things like that is like product hunt, for example, which 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, 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, maybe from like an outsider's perspective and like a launch to me is like,
maybe one of the first things that takes place when you're like, hey, I guess I got a product. I launched a new product today. I just built it yesterday. Not like, hey, I just did my branding. I did my positioning. I did all this other stuff and now I'm launching or launching this new product. 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?
Corey Haines (14:24)
Yeah, yeah, that's good. That's a really good question. Actually, 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. but the thing is, because actually when we say like launches and like launch on platforms like Protestant, what I mean is like, what I don't mean is wait to launch until now. What I mean is
Nick Loudon (14:32)
Little plug.
Yeah.
Corey Haines (14:51)
do your like last launch at this point. So what does it mean to actually launch a product or like a SaaS product today? It means multiple launches over time. 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.
Zach Stevens (15:04)
Mm-hmm.
Corey Haines (15:14)
the thing about launches for SaaS products these days is that I think there's probably about five steps. You want to do like an internal launch where, if you're like a stealth startup or if you're really, really early stage, maybe you're just launching to your coworkers, 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. We're expanding who you're sending it out to. Maybe now you're giving a couple of teasers on Twitter. Maybe you're getting your listings up. Maybe you have a single page website now up. Maybe you have X, Y, and Z. We're kind of slowly 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 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.
new mini products or content material or anything like that, right? There's lots of things to launch, but 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 it count.
Zach Stevens (16:54)
It sounds like it's pretty much anything that's new. Like that's, that's launchable, you know, like, I mean, Webflow does this all the time where I feel like when Webflow ships new features, it's like a heyday on Webflow 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 pretty decent feature.
Corey Haines (16:58)
Hmm? Yeah.
Zach Stevens (17:15)
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 e-comm for Webflow e-commerce as well. So these, feel like the reason that these are later is because they, are an expansive element. Like it's continued, like the continual launch in addition of new things. Or maybe it's just a different way of thinking and
about
your product. Maybe you have a different story to tell that you end up building an entire campaign around. That's really gonna be...
emotionally stirring that you pair with a bunch of ads and you have a continual through line with all of the assets that you create in particular for that campaign. So 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. 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 a use case for them. They will always be present.
Corey Haines (18:33)
Yeah, yeah. And you know, like launch new positioning, or sorry, I was just saying 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. 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 SaaS companies ship a lot. And as product people, you get used to.
Zach Stevens (18:45)
feature.
Corey Haines (19:02)
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 code base, 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.
Zach Stevens (19:37)
even stupid.
even stupid quality of life upgrades.
too. Like I feel like people would be shocked if you know that you have an issue with 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 Webflow, but I feel like it's because they are one of the tools that a I follow closely. And then when they did launch things like this, it was really impactful. Like they it was something small and stupid like
Nick Loudon (19:52)
you
Corey Haines (19:59)
Mm-hmm.
Zach Stevens (20:12)
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 additional interstitial step. No, they made it so could get to your site settings from the designer, as opposed to just having to go back to your dashboard, get back into your site settings. And my gosh, freaking like.
Corey Haines (20:29)
Mm. Mm-hmm.
Nick Loudon (20:30)
Mm-hmm.
people freaked
out.
Zach Stevens (20:37)
Everybody and their mother dude. It's like it's like wow
Corey Haines (20:37)
Ha
Zach Stevens (20:41)
web flow. Thank you so much for this. It made my day like I love you Yeah, and all they did was add another button Nothing too small
Nick Loudon (20:44)
which is just so simple and crazy.
Yeah.
Corey Haines (20:52)
Yeah, right.
There's nothing too small.
Nick Loudon (20:55)
The whole idea of a launch, to me, I could see how it would be easy to be like, we're launching this new thing and you just say it and that's it. And I feel like part of the reason why it's on our list, excuse me, and within our process is because...
these campaigns and launches, 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 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.
orchestrated 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. It's like bigger than that. But it's super interesting. I really like whenever we get to do things like this.
Corey Haines (22:14)
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, I want to do more of it in.
Nick Loudon (22:20)
I want to hit ads
now. are you going to keep talking launches?
Corey Haines (22:26)
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, another like low hanging area of low hanging fruit is, 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. you'd be surprised just like how many people cancel cause 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.
Zach Stevens (22:55)
Mm.
Nick Loudon (22:59)
That's awesome. So great. Sorry, I like almost cut you off. But the next thing on the list is ads. Ads are like a really common thing that we end up talking about with on on calls with people. Because it's one of the first things like that they're thinking marketing agency equals ad agency, which is funny, but ads.
falls pretty late on our list on all of our phases. Why does it make sense to them here not to run them earlier, not to run them like, I just put up my landing page. Like don't have any features pages, I just have like a pricing section and I'm a hero and that stuff and then like a couple testimonials and then like I launched and now I wanna run ads. Why is it makes sense to do it here after a lot more of the building blocks are in place?
Corey Haines (23:52)
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. This is just my experience of 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 good scale.
with our dinky little landing page. It just doesn't happen. It might've happened like 10 years ago when the costs were so low that maybe you could. Today, unfortunately, the costs are so high that you almost can't afford to take that risk. It's like you're basically just gonna 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. and the sales cycles can be so long that it's hard to do it profitably because here's what people don't like think about is that whether you're product led or your sales led, if your product led,
Nick Loudon (25:02)
you
Corey Haines (25:21)
You might get someone to sign up from an ad, but then they might be a free user for six months and then start paying you $10 a month. Let's just say, for example, if you're sales led, that also doesn't really fix your problem necessarily because someone might do a demo and then they might go through some sort of, you know, legal procurements, trying to get, you know, build a case for it internally.
and then six months later, sign a contract with you. And it still might be like a starter contract where you might go onto 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 six to nine months.
six to nine months is kind of the average payback period of acquiring a customer as a SaaS product. So that's why it's like, probably should just wait to do this because 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 five, you know?
Zach Stevens (26:43)
I wonder if the, I feel like the paradigm is shifting on these a little bit where like ads used to be very, um, direct response oriented, like extremely direct response oriented. And now I feel like 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. Um, but I feel like the.
It almost makes more sense now to try and play that story writing storytelling angle because it's gonna be the one thing that is different in the ad landscape that might actually convert more even if you think that it doesn't necessarily follow the tried-and-true practices of you know What's the eight? I ate a attention the you know, I'm talking about that Ada. Yeah
Corey Haines (27:37)
Ada. Yeah. Attention, interest,
desire, action. I think it is.
Zach Stevens (27:43)
Yeah. Well, see, I've wondered, I wonder if people would be better service trying to remember, EEE, which is it's either educational, entertaining, or emotional, you know, like the, 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.
Nick Loudon (27:44)
Action.
Corey Haines (28:04)
Yeah, no, it's true. 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?
Nick Loudon (28:25)
you
Zach Stevens (28:28)
Yeah.
Corey Haines (28:32)
That is step one to making profitable ads. So you might as well not even think about how to make a profitable ad in any sort of direct response style 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.
Zach Stevens (28:53)
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, know, Oh, I mean, not to say it couldn't be a GIF. 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. think that instead you might just get eyeballs on you and interest, which is what you need to.
Corey Haines (29:00)
Yeah.
Zach Stevens (29:29)
to obtain more customers and to build something that they will not only take interest in, but then share that interest with others.
Nick Loudon (29:37)
It seems
Corey Haines (29:37)
Yeah, ads are
hard. That's the thing. But when they work, they're phenomenal.
Zach Stevens (29:40)
Ads are hard.
Nick Loudon (29:41)
Yeah, the feedback is so
like you just never know what you're 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, 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. we're, ads don't work for our product. Like we're just done.
It's just so weird that it's never consistent.
Zach Stevens (30:17)
I do wonder that I think that the phrase "will never work for a product." I feel like it's thrown around with a lot of different marketing efforts and I don't think it's true for any of them. think that any, like any and all advertising and marketing efforts can work. It's just 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 no-go, 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 recognition out there as a viable solution to a problem. Uh, and that's a multi-stage, that's a multi-stage process.
Corey Haines (31:08)
Yeah.
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 have a lot of control over.
Zach Stevens (31:21)
Orn.
Or way that you're
doing them. Or the way that you're doing them.
Corey Haines (31:28)
Right, right. Exactly. You might have to like really think outside the box or you might have to, experiment with things that you don't have the infrastructure for. there's a, you know, right. There's so many parts to it where just like I was talking about, like being product led versus sales led, it could be that you can't make ads work for you on a product led 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 not that ads don't work. It doesn't work for you right now, given the way that things are going.
Nick Loudon (32:15)
Yeah After ads Next thing on our list. I want to just keep keep rolling because we're spending extra time on everything. Sorry Is another great buzzword SEO baby SEO is like a huge word to just like plug in But specifically on our list, it's SEO content. So it's like content focused around SEO
Thankfully, think SEO in mind is woven into a lot of the work we do, from the beginning, all the way through building feature pages and building out. When we're copywriting, we're thinking a little bit about, how does this fit into keywords and making sure that we're doing all the right things? We have things like programmatic SEO on the list here and some other things. Can you explain a little bit how this
piece SEO content is different than just like, we need to get our SEO better. Like what does it mean to have actually SEO content instead?
Corey Haines (33:18)
Mm-hmm.
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 gonna lead to customers? Not necessarily, because people would have to know your brand and be looking for you in the first place, which maybe they're gonna do that because your other marketing efforts, but the odds are kind of low, right? Normally,
they're going to come in through another avenue. So when we say SEO content, 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.
Nick Loudon (34:12)
you
Corey Haines (34:20)
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. I wouldn't call that, it is content, but I wouldn't call that content in the terms of like purely educational resource, right? Those are more like sales resources. So SEO content is very educational.
and it's geared towards Google, not hoping that you're going to get shared around on social media.
Zach Stevens (34:57)
I was going to ask, because I feel like a really in-depth feature page can serve it as a source of SEO. And that's totally viable. Same thing with like broadening the scope of what does SEO mean in terms of a software business's website. It could be things like case studies. It could also be things like your product documentation or, you know, like help docs, which are...
Corey Haines (35:23)
Absolutely.
Zach Stevens (35:26)
Cause if someone's going to be searching, how do I change XYZ in 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 targeting you and saying, Oh, this sucks. By the way, we don't have this problem on ours. So maybe you should just use our product instead. What else would you include that you, cause blog is kind of a generic term.
When I think blog, think of things like, I wrote an article about, you know, the, these, these keywords and, 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 we're coming at it with an SEO perspective. and it's content, but it's not things that, particularly like technical founders or, you know, other product people would consider as SEO content.
Corey Haines (36:24)
Sorry, ask the question one more time.
Zach Stevens (36:26)
Sorry. What would you consider SEO content that other people typically would not consider SEO content?
Nick Loudon (36:27)
haha
Corey Haines (36:35)
I see.
Well, you mentioned a couple product documentation is definitely a big one. integrations pages definitely have a big SEO potential. competitor comparison pages or roundups of competitors can be really good as well. Even just sort of blog content about other tools and things kind of adjacent to what your product does, but it not be a tool. It might be more of like.
a workflow or a process or a, you know, a DIY approach to something. 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.
or showing how to do something that your product does without your product. 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, 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.
Nick Loudon (37:46)
you
Corey Haines (38:06)
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 tactics, tactics involved. it's all, educational and, and, and value-add driven.
Zach Stevens (38:31)
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. mean, we had a, we had a client who had 152 day 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.
Nick Loudon (38:34)
.
Zach Stevens (39:01)
I don't know the exact numbers off the of my head, but I know that it decreased by 85 % and went from 150 something days to it was either like 23 days or 32 days. One of those. Yeah. I'm not dyslexic. I just don't remember which one it was. So I think the SEO content is extremely powerful in that it gives you gateways, especially if you give just the right amount of push.
Corey Haines (39:13)
Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah.
Nick Loudon (39:13)
Dyslexic.
Yeah
Zach Stevens (39:31)
for somebody to then take action.
Nick Loudon (39:34)
That was gonna be a question that I had is, yeah, 23, there we go, 23 days. Is that interplay? Like I'm not a copywriter. How big is the gap between SEO copywriting and conversion copywriting? How big is that gap? Like, it so big that it's like, it kind of feels like clunky if you're like, here's my product, or is it like, hey, I can kind of meld these and they both work really well.
Corey Haines (39:34)
23, by the way.
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, you're, you're, yeah, you're, you're mostly doing the same types of things, but completely different things in different ways for a different purpose. like conversion copywriting is, is very sales oriented. SEO content is completely educational oriented.
Nick Loudon (40:12)
Totally different.
Corey Haines (40:34)
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 nice helpful resource. that's a freebie, but, yeah, they're, they're, very different. Like
I don't know a lot of copywriters that do both. know copywriters that are really good at writing SEO content. I know copywriters that are really good at writing landing pages. And they tend to be different types of people with different skill sets and different processes.
Zach Stevens (41:19)
beasts.
Nick Loudon (41:22)
Okay, let's keep rolling. The next thing on our list is internationalizing the website. We probably don't have to go like too deep into this one. But I guess like in my mind, I'm thinking, okay, like we, you 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. 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. 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 array later on?
Corey Haines (42:13)
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 U S makes the best software. And so they're kind of Googling and looking for things. And they're always looking for what us companies, us people recommend from a software perspective as well. So that makes things easy.
If you're, if you're a startup and you're getting customers from Brazil, from, from, 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-U.S. Or non North American company and you're trying to sell to the U S you need to, to broaden. Right. And two, if you feel like you've tapped out,
the U S market and you do want to internationalize, you can't just expect everyone to, you know, magically expand your sales funnel, 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.
And it is an intentional thing you have to do. and there's definitely a lot of optimizations that can be made. For example, you don't want to use sub domains. You want to use sub folders. For example, um, you can use and adopt other payment methods that allow you to collect local currencies versus just the U S 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, although 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. so internationalizing isn't just providing
you know, a translation, it's really a larger, you know, it's one project in a larger strategic initiative for a company.
Nick Loudon (44:49)
Mm-hmm.
Zach Stevens (44:50)
Even
within just the translation, you can get very specific with, I think you have a difference where 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, 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.
Corey Haines (45:19)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Zach Stevens (45:24)
Or in Spanish. 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 you want this to feel like it is for them. 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, the people that are using this look like me? Especially like if you're going
Corey Haines (45:33)
All right.
Nick Loudon (45:33)
you
Zach Stevens (45:53)
for these hyper-targeted segments of people where there's a very clear distinction between the US market, the South American market, and the Asian market.
Corey Haines (46:06)
Yeah, yeah, from a copywriting perspective to a lot of what makes good copywriting in English does not necessarily make for good copywriting in another language. A lot can get lost in translation. And so you have to be careful, right?
Nick Loudon (46:11)
you
Zach Stevens (46:18)
Mm. Mm-hmm.
Yeah
Nick Loudon (46:23)
You can't just push
it through Google Translate.
Corey Haines (46:27)
I mean, no, especially,
I mean, it's kind of a catch-22 in a way, 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 wordplay. It's making these short, quippy sentences.
Zach Stevens (46:47)
that doesn't work in German where all the words are you know combinations of each other.
Corey Haines (46:49)
Yeah.
Exactly.
Even things like alliterations, because alliterations are my favorite kind of tactic in copywriting. It just makes everything sound smooth and cohesive. It's harder to do alliterations in other languages and or might not even make sense to do it because there's not the same kind of word choice or flow with that syntax. So, yeah, you have to be very, very intentional.
Nick Loudon (47:20)
Yep. Should we hit the last one? Okay. Let's do it. Web development. 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. So when this is at the end and this is like, we're focused less on the word web and more on the word development in my mind, like,
Zach Stevens (47:23)
I think we should.
Nick Loudon (47:50)
Okay, let's make this thing like a super machine for of a website. 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 third party plugins and we need to like build these cool little elements that sit on different pages. What are the things that sit within this category for you?
Corey Haines (48:14)
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 that 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. 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. And,
Zach Stevens (48:39)
WordPress.
Corey Haines (48:42)
And it was like, Hey, we have this feature that's coming up. I'm to build a landing page for it. the feature is done. Where's the landing page? 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. 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, 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, not only just poorly reflect 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 gonna rank as high. So it's important stuff.
Nick Loudon (49:47)
Yeah, I think on the SEO or on the CMS content thing that you mentioned, I do think that's super important. think like, as someone who's building the site, I'm often thinking like, how, 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 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 the 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. So building it so that it's really easy for a marketer to use, which is why we use Webflow, is because the handoff process to someone else can be super smooth. And then I also think that just adding fun little, we added this calculator or a slider for the pricing, which might encourage someone to click a little bit faster.
or to like slide it to the end and be like, they have custom pricing. Like, what does that look like? And click this button. there's just a lot of little things that you could do. And I think to the thing you mentioned about page performance is that a lot of websites these days are over, over interactive, overly interactive, I guess is what I'm looking at. Hyper, hyper active. I don't know. Where they just go crazy with all these visuals that slow the page down.
Zach Stevens (51:26)
hyper hyper interactive.
Nick Loudon (51:35)
I like them because I get there and I'm like, ooh, and I build websites and look at websites all day. 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. Wants the page to load fast and provide them with the information they're looking for. So it's kind of a catch 22 with that kind of thing.
Zach Stevens (51:57)
Yeah, think my my favorite thing about
all this stuff is the interconnectivity between different data segments within your CMS. Cause 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.
that's pointing to each other. Like, you know, hey, here's a feature and here's a case study where this feature was essential to them getting these results. So I think that what you'll notice is that the more you can utilize and interconnect 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.
Nick Loudon (52:58)
Yeah, walk the walk the visitor through a journey on the site.
Corey Haines (52:58)
Yeah.
Yeah,
I think a really cool example is the, the funnel envy playbook, where they have all these tactics. And that's a cool case study. think of like how the CMS opens up new ways for people to interact with your website and, 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, how's the single,
Nick Loudon (53:33)
I don't know. Sounds good.
Corey Haines (53:33)
It's the right tool for the right purpose. You know what 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 kind of wow people and make it like a true custom tailored fit for the information.
Nick Loudon (53:55)
Yeah, obviously I like web development. 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 a very fun time and like getting to the end and being like, oh, let's start just going crazy on this thing But anyway, okay, that is the end of phase three That's the end of what we're going through today What a journey we've walked through great work y'all
Corey Haines (54:20)
I know, we made it.
Nick Loudon (54:20)
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.
Zach Stevens (54:26)
Well,
it might be about SaaS marketing. Maybe.
Corey Haines (54:29)
Maybe.
Nick Loudon (54:30)
No,
we don't. We don't talk about that. But yeah, any final words before I cut both of you off?
Zach Stevens (54:33)
okay.
I would just say listen to phase one and phase two as well. 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.
Nick Loudon (54:46)
Totally.
And we
will laugh.
Zach Stevens (55:02)
We won't laugh, that's
rude. Nick might laugh.
Nick Loudon (55:05)
Maybe. Yeah,
I'm a nice guy. Come on. Okay, well thanks for joining us everyone and we will see you next time.
Corey Haines (55:14)
Peace.