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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)
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the factory floor. I'm joined today by guess who? Am I gonna say this every time? Guess who I'm joined by? I should probably cut the shtick and just ⁓ keep it to. All right. Yeah. I'm officially a host. I'm a host now.
Corey Haines (00:10)
I you are.
Zach Stevens (00:14)
say it every time.
Corey Haines (00:15)
People expect it now, you know?
Zach Stevens (00:17)
It's like, it's a motif. You can't not.
Corey Haines (00:22)
It's like Jeff
and Survivor saying, on in guys. Like you just.
Nick Loudon (00:25)
He doesn't say guys
anymore. He just says, on in.
He does say the tribe is spoken. We don't want to do this. Zach, we'll get mad if we make too many survivor references.
Zach Stevens (00:35)
I don't want to do this.
I mean, it could be,
I mean, if it, could be like Ryan Seacrest, like this is American Idol. And then it's about being Fossus and then it's going to go bam, bam, bam, bam, The fact before.
Nick Loudon (00:54)
⁓
Like that. Okay, I'll think of something like that. If for anyone listening, Cory and I love Survivor. If you like Survivor, you should message us about it and tell us your thoughts on Survivor 50. Hands of the fans. Okay. ⁓ Today we are talking about offensive versus defensive marketing. ⁓ These are words that mean other things. Offense and defense mean a variety of things. ⁓
but how does it relate to marketing? This came up because we did an audit for a client and Corey was talking about offensive versus defensive marketing in that audit. And so I was curious and we were curious to pick that apart. What is that? Which one should you be doing? How do they interplay and all that good stuff. So Corey, can you give us a little intro synopsis? Like what is this? What are these words you said out of your mouth?
Zach Stevens (01:49)
Yeah. What is this? What is this offense? What is this defense? What
is marketing?
Nick Loudon (01:54)
Did you mean offensive marketing, like buy this product or you're an effing idiot like that, or defensive, like how dare you not buy my product? Is that what you meant?
Corey Haines (02:00)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, like, like gaslighting, gaslighting marketing, gaslighting as marketing. ⁓ yeah, it came up because I think that the client, you guys could maybe refresh my memory better, but, ⁓ he was like, ⁓ we do these things. Well, we don't do things, these things well. So just focus on things that we don't do well. And, but we take a look over everything and we want to get a full picture. So was looking at the things they do well. And then the thought occurred to me, well,
Zach Stevens (02:05)
That's definitely what Corning
Nick Loudon (02:07)
Yeah.
Corey Haines (02:33)
you want to double down on the things that you're doing well. You don't want to just like skip over it and ignore it. And you want to make sure that the things you're doing well, you keep doing well over time. And this client in particular, this was a software company who had kind of carved out this niche that they were starting to get some new startup competitors. So sometimes what can happen is like when you're building a startup, you're the new guy. And so you're challenging the incumbents and you're,
you know, going up against the dinosaurs, so to speak, these like big, slow moving incumbents who, you know, kind of something don't do marketing very well. But then what can happen is if you're successful a little bit, then you become the dinosaur. And now you have all these challengers who are trying to eat your lunch and these new guys on the block who are, you know, encroaching on your territory. And if you don't do anything about it, then they just might eat your lunch.
And the thing that was working well for you might not work very well anymore. And I kind of hear this often where it's this trope that I, that really bugs me. And when people are like, Oh yeah, we, we did this, we did SEO for a while, but then it stopped working. And so now we do something else. Like it doesn't, it doesn't just stop working. What do you mean it stopped working? Like it just, I don't know, this magic faucet just turned off for you. Like
Zach Stevens (03:48)
Mm-hmm.
Corey Haines (03:58)
No, there's so many variables at play. There's so much more in your control than it just stopped working one day. And so you have to have these, have to toe the line between defending what's already working well for you and also be on the offense, always trying to find new things that are going to work well for you in the future.
Zach Stevens (04:16)
new.
Yeah, I've referred to this happens a lot in branding as well. Actually, I've referred to it as brands that are on fire and brands that are on ice.
It's like brands that don't, like if you're on ice, it means that you're chilled. You're not moving, you are just kinda going through the rigmarole, like the status quo. Or if you're on fire, you're actually doing way too much. And it's like you're scattered, you have no aim, and nothing feels cohesive. Is that similar to this, or is it?
Corey Haines (04:49)
Yeah, yeah. Maybe another way to think about it actually related to what we just talking about with MicroConf. One of the MicroConf talks was on growth ceilings. I was talking about Jason Cohen, who is a legend in the space, founder of WP Engine and SmartBear. And he talked about how, like why startups plateau. Startups plateau because you find one marketing channel that works and it kind of goes up in a hockey curve.
but then at some point you get to diminishing returns and then it plateaus and then like, at best it kind of continues on that plateau, but more likely than not, it's actually going to start to perform worse over time and go down again. And so you have to keep stacking these marketing channels, finding new ones and trying to make sure that they plateau as little as possible over time.
But eventually every marketing channel does have diminishing returns because of competitors, because of algorithm changes, because of ⁓ market saturation, because of pricing and inflation, economic downturns, so on and so forth. ⁓ And so yeah, you have to always be on the offense looking for new ones, you know, to always be on the defense, making sure that...
Zach Stevens (05:57)
saturation.
Corey Haines (06:14)
Every new channel you find doesn't just fall off a cliff a couple months later.
Zach Stevens (06:18)
This is Jason Cohen's elephant graph curve, right? So it's like you have.
Corey Haines (06:22)
Yes.
Zach Stevens (06:23)
one comes up in hockey sticks and then it flattens out and it makes this silhouette of an elephant. What was really cool about that, him and Einar showed this, which is you stack them on top of one another and it's almost like, you, as soon as one growth channel starts plateauing, then you add another on top of it and you get this additional like, you know, phase of growth. It's kind of like layers on the cake where it just goes up and up and up and up and up and up and up. And I think the cool thing about that is that there will always be new growth channels that you don't even, you're not even aware of right now. You know, like.
Corey Haines (06:53)
Yeah, yeah. And there's channels where, let's just say something like SEO, for example. Someone might have some good early success with blog posts, let's just say for example, and they start to see the curve go up into the right and they're like, yay, more traffic, more conversions, more signups. This is great, this is awesome. And then it starts to plateau a little bit. That doesn't necessarily mean that you should abandon SEO altogether. Maybe you need to find another layer within
Zach Stevens (06:54)
you
Corey Haines (07:22)
SEO, another curve within the curve to keep that hockey stick going back up into the right again. So instead of just doing blog posts, now you layer on something like programmatic SEO, or maybe you layer in ⁓ more bottom of funnel landing pages and sales pages. Maybe you layer in templates, maybe you layer in, ⁓ fill in the blank, right? These, these pillar topics. There's a lot of different plays in SEO besides just blog posts. And that can go for
any one of these channels, any one of these growth curves, we always have to be on the offense. It reminds me, mean, sorry for the sports analogies, because I know a lot of people in tech are not super, super into sports, but it reminds me a lot of football because ⁓ in football, they always say like the best defense is a good offense. And there's this whole like defense was champion just thing, but like if, you're always on offense, then ⁓ your defense doesn't have to be on the, on the field.
Zach Stevens (08:03)
you
Corey Haines (08:21)
Right. And so like the best defense is a good offense. And I feel like it's very similar in marketing where when you're always pushing forward, when you're always exploring new channels, testing, investing, reinvesting more, then you don't have to worry as much about losing what you have going on. What worries me and what stresses me out is when companies find a little bit of success and they kind of saturate and squeeze every, ⁓ every ounce.
out of the limit that they can. And then they just let their foot off the gas pedal a little bit. And they're like, this is fine. I'm just going to coast here for a while. As soon as you start coasting, that's when you have to start playing a lot of defense. And if you get lazy in your defense, you're going to let the other team catch up to you. Like don't blow the lead. Don't play this, prevent defense or you're just letting them get these easy passes, easy runs and chipping away at your
Nick Loudon (08:56)
Thank
Zach Stevens (09:09)
for it.
Corey Haines (09:19)
at your lead. And I see this so often in marketing where they just stop investing and now the thing that was working for you might not work for you a year from now. And it's really hard to regain that.
Nick Loudon (09:33)
It makes me think of just calls we have with people that are, they're pretty committed to this idea of a like set and forget type marketing system where they can put something in place that auto does X, Y, and Z, or, you know, if we have certain messaging and then certain ads running, you know, whatever, X all the way down the chain, like through their funnel, that they can essentially like stop.
doing more things and they'll produce the same result ⁓ all the way through until the end. And I almost want to be like, you know that like doesn't exist. while, you know, there's working with us is like, you know, a lot of times a long term engagement, even if you stopped working with us and or just stopped doing marketing, like you need to figure that out on your you need to keep going. There's no such thing as like stopping marketing.
It doesn't, or if you do, you will be stopping a lot of other things. I don't know, when you said offensive versus defensive, I was thinking more tactics. These tactics fit into offense. These tactics fit into defense. Do you think there's the same argument to be made there? Or is it just purely on the messaging of that? Because when you're talking about it, I'm thinking you're talking more messaging of marketing.
Corey Haines (10:47)
Mm. Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Nick Loudon (11:01)
on the offense or ⁓ the cadence of marketing. Like, hey, we're constantly on offense. We're constantly doing things versus what type of thing we're doing. Like, these are defensive things. These are offensive things.
Corey Haines (11:14)
Yeah, I don't know if I would put them in like offense versus defense buckets tactically, but there are like, yeah, there's the high level attitude of offensive and defensive marketing and trying to straddle both of those simultaneously. You know, you want to do them both concurrently. Uh, where, for example, we saw this with SEO and with AI SEO. Um, and I knew that everyone was going to make a mistake here. Not everyone, but a lot of people are going to make a mistake.
where they started to see that ChatYPT was eating Google's lunch. And they thought, my gosh, I guess that Google's dead. I should just stop investing there. No. What do you talk? You think that Google is just going to, you know, bend over and, just let it happen. Like obviously they're going to figure something out for two. We've seen that everything that works for traditional SEO also works for AI SEO. And so there's no reason.
Zach Stevens (11:58)
Heal over.
Corey Haines (12:11)
Now it's an even better deal. It's a two for one. It's a invest in SEO and you also invest in AISCO, invest in AISCO, also invest in SEO. So like, high level. You want to make sure they're always on offense and defense. One more tactically, for example, just to keep on this SEO theme. ⁓ This client in particular we do in the audit for, I saw that like they were already ranking well for a lot of their relevant keywords, ⁓ but they were,
positions were kind of volatile and there wasn't like a huge, huge difference between the pages they were ranking for and what their competitors were starting to rank for. It can happen sometimes where there's a very obvious winner, where you take a search keyword like SaaS marketing agency for us, right? And the number one results ⁓ might have 10 times more backlinks than any other page.
on the first page of Google. That's an obvious lead, right? They're playing good offense, right? But imagine two or three of those other pages, those other competitors start to build a lot of backlinks. If you're not continuously building backlinks, then eventually it's going to be overtaken. And if that's the difference, right? You don't, the difference between being the number one in a Google search result versus being the number two is a huge difference. It's like,
one third of the traffic, one third of the clicks. And again, overtaking that is hard. Marketing is really a game of inertia. Like you're trying to build a lot of inertia for yourself and you're trying to keep your competitors from slowing you down. You're trying to slow your competitors down from building inertia.
Zach Stevens (13:59)
How many of the items in 140 SaaS marketing ideas would you characterize as offensive?
Nick Loudon (14:08)
You have them all logged in your head, right?
Corey Haines (14:08)
oooo
Yeah, right. Scanning, scanning.
Zach Stevens (14:12)
Is it, does it feel like more,
does it feel like, does it feel like more of a blend or, cause some of the ones that are in there are quite like, what's the postman one manga comic as marketing. Right. It's like, that's yeah, that's like, that's an offensive tactic, right. Where you are. Okay.
Corey Haines (14:23)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Nick Loudon (14:24)
That's awesome
Corey Haines (14:28)
Yeah,
yeah, probably most of them.
Nick Loudon (14:30)
Maybe it's the
cadence in which you do them makes them offense or defense.
Corey Haines (14:35)
Yeah, I think it's like it's the cadence and also the context, right? So if you have the lead in anything, then whatever you're doing to keep that lead is going to be, I guess, sort of like offensive and defense because offense is the best defense is my point, right? ⁓ there's no purely defensive marketing tactic or purely offensive marketing tactic.
Zach Stevens (14:49)
defensive.
Okay, I'm gonna throw
down some of the deliverables that the marketing team puts out and I just want you to kind of like rapid fire. Like, this offensive, is this defensive, is this both? Positioning, nailing that.
Corey Haines (15:17)
⁓ man. I would say it's, it's a lot of both because you're planting a flag in the ground and saying, this is how we're different and this is how we're going to cut through the noise. Then you're also trying to ward off people from saying, you know, you shouldn't go with those guys. ⁓ because you're, you're trying to have a defensible moat around your positioning and why people should choose you.
Nick Loudon (15:19)
both.
Zach Stevens (15:34)
Hmm.
Okay, feature releases, like launch campaigns.
Corey Haines (15:46)
Yeah, probably very offensive.
Zach Stevens (15:49)
Okay, competitor comparison pages.
Corey Haines (15:51)
very offensive.
Zach Stevens (15:54)
Could it also be defensive too? ⁓
Corey Haines (15:56)
Yeah. ⁓ but I think
for, okay, so this is what I tell people every time they're like, competitor comparison pages. Aren't we going to get in trouble? Our competitors are going to complain. Legal is going to complain, whatever. It's like, no, your, your customers are looking for a comparison. Do you want the narrative to be controlled by Google or some random blogger or your competitor? Or do you want to control the narrative? So like it's already happening. There's already offensive, like
being played against you in that sense. ⁓ So yes, of course it's like defensive, but.
Zach Stevens (16:27)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Nick Loudon (16:29)
I think we already did a deep dive
on competitor comparison. Didn't we already do a whole podcast on it? But it is offense. I think it's off.
Zach Stevens (16:33)
We did. Yeah, we did. I'm just asking like.
Corey Haines (16:35)
Yeah, he did.
Maybe,
okay, here's maybe a better phrasing for this. If.
If a lot of your competitors haven't created these pages and you create the page, it's like super offensive, right? Cause you're the first one out there controlling the narrative. If you're the last one to create a comparison post against your competitors, now it's very defensive.
Zach Stevens (16:52)
Mm. Mm-hmm.
You're defensive. Yep.
Fascinating. Where would you put, it's like, I feel like a brand awareness campaign that's very defensive, right? But it could also be offensive, is it? So the way that I have seen this is like, I've always compared it to marketing is a push. know, marketing goes out and tries to get things, but then branding has always been a pull mechanism. Like it draws you in. But it doesn't seem like this is the same kind of,
Corey Haines (17:25)
Hmm.
Zach Stevens (17:31)
a duality where like it's a little bit harder to characterize them because like some offensive things become defensive and that happens. You know, like the defensive team on a sports team can score, particularly like, know, something like football, you catch a, a fumble and then you run it in for a touchdown. And it sounds like these marketing tactics can swing both ways, but you should be playing both.
Corey Haines (17:51)
Yeah, they can definitely swing. Yeah.
Or I think about the super bowl right back in February where we had a lot of AI ads in particular, open AI and anthropic kind of going head to head against each other and just the different ways that they had tried to portray themselves and themselves against everyone else. And you had a anthropic, for example, has a couple of really, really good commercials where they were trying to be like the, the anti cliche.
Zach Stevens (18:03)
Right.
Corey Haines (18:20)
AI, right? where you had these, like it, doesn't feel like AI with these very robotic, like you're absolutely right. Like Claude was trying to, they were trying to paint Claude as not that. And yeah, it swings both ways because there's a lot of people, obviously open AI has a huge, huge lead as far as brand awareness. So by anthropic putting out a Superbowl commercial, they're going on the offensive, like, Hey, we need to build more of this brand awareness.
Zach Stevens (18:21)
Mm-hmm.
Right.
Corey Haines (18:50)
but then defensive in the way of, we're not like open AI, we're different.
Zach Stevens (18:54)
Okay,
so it sounds like you would characterize it more as like, anything that is in the pursuit of gaining new customers is offensive marketing. Anything that is in the pursuit of retaining your current customer base.
Corey Haines (19:09)
Yeah, that's probably a good way to summarize it.
Zach Stevens (19:12)
Okay, right, interesting. That's tough. They do definitely swing both ways. You'll have some actions that, you know, like if you do a feature release, that might be something that retains an old or a current customer, but then maybe they upgrade. So does that become a offensive or defensive? The point being is that you should just be doing marketing and a whole bunch of it.
Nick Loudon (19:14)
Okay.
Corey Haines (19:29)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That
is actually the main point is like, I'm so tired of people playing scared and playing small with marketing. They're like, I'm just going to do the bare minimum. I'm just going to do enough. I'm just going to do the things that I'm comfortable with. I'm just going to do the things that I can directly control myself for that. I have a skillset that I can do. It's like, you should be doing everything that you possibly can within your means.
all times. What is the point of playing small and limiting yourself there?
Zach Stevens (20:12)
And having a business that doesn't grow. Like what's your deal? Yeah. Well, we're not like, don't, don't like blow your fricking load on like, you know, stuff you can't afford or something stupid. You know, like when we did, yeah, when we started doing sponsorships for conferences, because that was a good thing for us to do. But it took us a bit to get to the point where that felt economically viable and reasonable for us to drop.
Corey Haines (20:14)
Yeah, like.
Zach Stevens (20:41)
five figures on a sponsorship, but it's gonna be totally worth it. It's fascinating. think it really, go ahead.
Corey Haines (20:47)
That's a good.
So I was going to say that that's a good point actually, because you don't want to get ahead of your skis and go back to football. Another sports analogy here, like when a team becomes too aggressive, too offensive, you start taking too many risks. Then it backfires, right? And then you're just like giving the other team an opportunity to intercept, to fumble, to, you know, to run it back to, to get good field position. ⁓ and we've seen this with startups too, where we had, ⁓
there was a startup called icon icon.com. ⁓ you know, a pretty like, I guess, high profile founder, huge, huge fundraising made a big splash, made some big promises, was very aggressive, a lot of creative ad campaigns. And a year later we're bankrupt and the website was down. Why? I think that they were
Zach Stevens (21:23)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh-huh.
They're huge.
Corey Haines (21:49)
too aggressive. They spent too much money too fast on things that didn't convert well and didn't steward their resources as well as they should have.
Zach Stevens (22:00)
It's one of the reasons why we are such big advocates of going from the bottom up on your funnel. Like fix what's lower because that's people who are already coming and coming, like getting into your net, into your funnel. You fix those ones because you have a higher likelihood of converting them before you start sending more people to it.
Corey Haines (22:20)
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Nick Loudon (22:20)
Yeah,
that was kind of my take is that the funnel is like an offensive ⁓ offense to defense funnel. Like the things at the bottom are more defensive. Like I have a thousand people that come to my site every month and I need to convert X percent of them. The more you know, I can convert from there. That's almost like a defensive action. Like they're here. How do I get them in? It's like making your net bigger to make sure that they get caught. And then up the funnel is like run ads.
offense. That is obviously offense. Like, so it kind of becomes, you know, less defensive as you go up. But you were saying me of about icon made me think of there's, there's this whole new startup culture of virality, like virality makes for like a hyper offensive. ⁓ know, people want to blow up on TikTok, they want to be like, kind of like virally famous.
and then convert that, it converts, my guess is it converts pretty bad. I've seen like three or four like viral AI startups where I'm like, dude, you got a lot of eyes, like this is sick, like awesome. And I never thought about it again. And I'm in the world of like AI and tech. So I don't know, I feel like that's almost too offensive as an example.
Zach Stevens (23:25)
have.
Corey Haines (23:25)
yeah.
Zach Stevens (23:27)
Thank
have an opinion on this concept of mine or less so, more of Corey's. Well, I think one of Corey's best lines is marketing is non-deterministic.
Nick Loudon (23:46)
I love opinions.
⁓ take it or leave it. What do you got?
Zach Stevens (23:59)
and specifically people who are in the software industry or anybody who deals in the more mathematical where it should be in a math. You'd expect marketing to work like a math equation. X plus Y equals Z. And that should be formulaic, right? And you should be able to extrapolate that out. You should be able to scale it quite well, but it doesn't because it's like the...
The crux of marketing is stuff that's completely out of your control, all the way down to the fickle emotional rationalizations of people who want to buy your product, which it could just be something like, well, this person should have converted because they went through the same path as this other person who is almost an identical match. But you know what? They had like.
one less chicken nugget in their kid's happy meal and their kid like went on a tantrum that day. And so as a result, they didn't click the buy button or activate themselves in the tool. And stuff like that happens. the multiple, like the multitude of factors that go into somebody making a purchase decision is exponentially odd and random. and it's a miracle if you get
Nick Loudon (25:07)
Mm-hmm.
Zach Stevens (25:11)
any semblance of a repeatable business pattern. And it reminds me of, you guys are familiar with the song Dreams by Fleetwood Mac, the cranberry juice, ocean spray, skateboard guy, yeah, yeah, So that song was made in like 1977, right? Popular song at the time of release, still like probably on the undercurrent, but then you get some dude who goes on Instagram,
Nick Loudon (25:15)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Cape port guy.
Zach Stevens (25:40)
with long hair and, you know, I was drinking ocean spray cranberry juice, listening to Fleetwood Mac. And I just looked it up in 2020 when that like came to fruition, ocean spray guy, skateboard guy, 230 million plays in two weeks. Like if that song came out now, like it was released now, it'd be platinum. It'd the biggest, one of the biggest songs in the world. But.
Corey Haines (26:04)
Yeah, right.
Nick Loudon (26:04)
Yeah, it'd be the biggest song in the world.
Zach Stevens (26:10)
Could you predict that? No. So what you have to do, this is, think this ties into things like blog posts or just doing some of the stuff that's maybe a little bit more boring, but you know yields a lot of fruit down the line because you don't know when it's going to rain and then your crops are finally going to blow past the surface.
Nick Loudon (26:13)
Yeah.
Yeah, there's, feel like with like what you're talking about, there's like, there's a hundred variables that are hidden underneath each of the like, each of that equation, the A plus B equals C. There's like a hundred hidden variables that affect A that you don't realize. And then a hundred hidden variables that affect B and then a hundred hidden variables that affect C. And like, you just, you can't possibly see those things, but the value that you get is you take more shots on goal.
Zach Stevens (27:00)
Yes.
Nick Loudon (27:04)
play more offense, you know, you're, you're like, Hey, second down second and nine, and we need to throw, let's throw the ball. Let's try to go let's go for broke. And then on third, you're like, you're willing to say, hey, we need to run to get to try to get to get to a first down. And you kind of like you, you balance it hard enough, actually makes it really valuable. Something I thought of while you were talking, Zach is when I used to work in real estate, I used to work in a mortgage, the mortgage industry.
⁓ There was this podcast I listened to, this super niche podcast, guy basically talking about how to grow your business in mortgages. And he used to talk about how many businesses are like a, it's like a farm. They're all just farms. You plant crops and you do the necessary work to make sure that those crops would grow and you plant as if they will, but you plant more crops.
After that season of planting is passed, you plant more and you plant more. Like you just keep planting crops and you harvest everything that grows, you harvest. That's it. Like you can't force the growth, you can't force the harvest. You can only force the planting. That's the only thing you can do. And so that's like the ⁓ kind of the same analogy. Like you can only take shots on goal. You can only take the right steps and then take enough of them so that enough of those steps.
end up paying off in the future. So that's kind of what your advice had me thinking of. Sorry, Corker.
Corey Haines (28:39)
Yeah.
Maybe one more analogy just to make this way overly dramatic. Marketing is like war.
Zach Stevens (28:47)
What?
Nick Loudon (28:50)
Bring it, God.
Corey Haines (28:50)
When you're trying to,
when you're trying to like, when you're trying to take over a country, you're going to war, right? You're trying to like gain ground in enemy territory. You go on the offense where you gain some ground, you push, you try to overwhelm the enemy. You, you sneak into the nook and crannies. You find little advantages where you can build a foothold and then you make sure that you can keep that ground.
Zach Stevens (28:54)
So train you, Jiu-Jitsu.
Corey Haines (29:19)
And then now that becomes like your new starting point to go, you know, to your next, ⁓ offensive move, right? That you're going to do and take some new enemy ground. So offensive marketing is like building the ground that you're gaining in enemy territory. Defensive marketing is keeping that ground to make sure that it's still going to be there tomorrow while you're out finding new ground to go gain.
Nick Loudon (29:43)
What do you say to those that say offense wins games and defense wins championships?
Corey Haines (29:49)
I say that offense is the best defense.
Nick Loudon (29:53)
Yeah, what is that ridiculous analogy comparison? Like one says the opposite of the other.
Corey Haines (30:00)
Yeah, I know. I do think it's kind
of a silly, ⁓ like it's a false dichotomy. You don't have to do like one is better than the other. only do like, obviously you need both. Yeah, but you don't want to be playing defense most of the game. You want to be playing as much offense as you can.
Nick Loudon (30:12)
They're obviously both important. Yeah.
Zach Stevens (30:19)
I have heard as well, so this is a popular ⁓ method in tennis, which is when you're first starting out, you are not...
Nick Loudon (30:19)
Right. Every sport.
Zach Stevens (30:33)
taking shots to win, you're taking shots to not lose. And that's the game. And I think what it comes down to is when you first start out, you are playing more defensively. You're doing the fundamentals that you know, like, I know this works, I can do this, this is a thing that I am capable of fulfilling. We see the same thing happen in Jiu Jitsu, right? Where it's like, I'm not going to try some crazy, like,
Iminari roll to figure four to a heel hook my first day, I'm going to try and just not get my guard passed. So just don't get choked out today. Seriously though, that is the, like really, like you spend six months, probably more than that. I still go into class thinking, let's just not get choked out today. Now that sounds like a good plan.
Corey Haines (31:10)
Mm-hmm. Just don't get choked out today.
Yeah. How little can I get talked
out today?
Zach Stevens (31:28)
how few times can I get choked out or arm barred or worse. But then as you gain more confidence and those things become secondhand nature, then you start doing some crazy things. It's kind of like what we were talking about earlier where when Conversion Factor just started out, was like post on socials, write newsletters, do things that were very low cost and were...
Nick Loudon (31:29)
the
Zach Stevens (31:55)
probably going to perform well, but not reach a virality component at all. But then when you get your bass, then you can start playing, taking shots to win. And doing these are a little bit more obscure and interesting and different because you now have that foundation to play off of.
Because then does become play, where it's not as structured, it's a little bit more free flowing and almost a form of expression rather than something that's like a definitive tactic.
Nick Loudon (32:31)
⁓ Hey, awesome topic. Thanks, Cory. ⁓ I know this spawned out of a one-off random conversation with a client, but ⁓ definitely worth the deep dive. Super interesting. Thanks for you all. Thanks for joining the factory floor. We're going to close it out. God bless. See you next time.