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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. Today, we are talking about things. We're gonna be answering questions that have been pondered for millennia by humanity, business owners, SaaS founders.
And we're going to go through the ultimate question. What is the meaning of life? First of all, we're going to cover that. The second thing we're going to cover is the three phases of SaaS marketing. So this is like the foundations of SaaS marketing. The processes we use to look through, do like a marketing audit essentially of a business where things stand, the health of the marketing engine for businesses, and just kind of go through those pillars one by one.
That's our goal in this podcast. So buckle up. And if you didn't notice, this isn't something that people have been pondering for millennia. It's just something that we've been talking about for a while. So we're going to go into that. Yeah, this millennia. Wait, when does the millennia start?
Corey Haines (01:03)
Maybe this millennia.
Zach Stevens (01:08)
at the end of a thousand years. one thousand, since two thousand.
Corey Haines (01:10)
Yeah, right. So since 2000.
Nick Loudon (01:15)
Okay, sweet. That's great. Okay. So yeah, that is true then. Yeah. For millennia singular, not millennials. Okay. So Corey, why don't you give us a roadmap of what are they called? What are these three things called or what do we call them? And what's the purpose of these three phases?
Corey Haines (01:16)
That's fair, actually.
Zach Stevens (01:20)
for this millennia.
Corey Haines (01:20)
This is the question of this millennia.
Sure, so I think marketing in particular suffers from like a where do you start problem more than other business problems because there's just so many different things you can do that you have to be able to prioritize and say like, where do we start? And then what's the sequence? How do we kind of like stack rank this so that we're doing this in the right order and we don't need like double back and redo something. We have all the right ingredients in the right process.
And so I've gone through this a couple of times and actually like since developing our three phase system, it like feels very obvious to me now because I was thinking the other day like, this is actually the same process that I went through every time I joined a new startup, but I just didn't have it like codified into something on paper in front of me where it was like, this is my playbook. And as I mentioned before, like I think this is actually
Nick Loudon (02:27)
Mm-hmm.
Corey Haines (02:37)
the question of the millennia for SaaS founders and marketers because like day one you get in on an, a new company and it's like, what do you do? Where do you start? Like, what is the playbook that you follow in order to get the results that you want, which is to grow the company and grow MRR. it's actually not very straightforward because what ends up happening for a lot of companies is they sporadically start to do random things.
I call them random acts of marketing. It's just sort of like, let's do this. Let's do that. Let's do this. And marketers field a lot of ideas too, where the CEO will come in and be like, Hey, why aren't we doing this? Or what do we think about that? And it feels like you have to say yes to everything because, you don't really have a good reason why you shouldn't say yes, because you don't have a playbook, right? So this playbook just kind of codifies like, all right, this is, the most
guaranteed process to achieving this outcome. And we can kind of like rinse and repeat cycle through this process multiple times if needed, if like assumptions were wrong in the beginning. But it just helps to create a game plan so that you're not going in blind and just sort of juggling a million things and then not really having much to show for it three, six, 12 months down the line, which happens pretty often.
Nick Loudon (04:02)
And
just to ask, like to kind of clarify something, this is like, it feels like a roadmap. Like you start at point A and you end up at point Z and there's all these like rank ordered things within here. But this isn't something that like, okay, you look at the roadmap and you like pull onto the highway and you're on point Q and you're like near the end and you can just like finish out the rest of them. It's something that any
It feels like, at least to me when I'm looking at it and when we do this kind of thing, that this is something where anyone who jumps in to this roadmap should probably just start at the beginning and power through. And it's going to kind of like give them the best odds of success based on the framework. Does that feel correct?
Corey Haines (04:48)
Yeah, that's, that's mostly correct. I would say with our three phases, like, so we have the phase one, which is like more the foundation and the fundamental pieces of like our base assumptions. Let's make sure that our, all of our base assumptions and kind of core ingredients are right here and that we have the right things to play with. And then phase two is all about building your base. And that's more about kind of expanding the funnel and fixing a leaky, leaky bucket and making sure that when you do want to pour gasoline on the fire, they actually have
some good, you know, some good pieces of wood burning in there. Yeah. Some good kindling. and then phase three is, I was all about expansion and that's really like, okay, now we're pouring gasoline on the fire. Now we're scaling efficiently and now we're trying to utilize all of the core fundamental and base elements that we have in the past. And so that that's definitely one of the mistakes I see a lot of companies make is they think that they have their foundation set, but really there's maybe a couple of core assumptions.
Zach Stevens (05:19)
fuel. Good.
Nick Loudon (05:20)
Kindling or whatever, yeah.
Corey Haines (05:47)
and core ingredients that are wrong and it's hurting them, it's crippling them. Or their base is good, but they don't really have a full funnel the way that they should. They have a couple of pieces there that they think are adequate, but really they need to expand on that to make sure that their bucket is minimally leaky instead of just like a little leaky. You want to like cover up as many holes and make them as small as possible as you possibly can.
Zach Stevens (06:11)
you
Corey Haines (06:17)
yeah, you kind of should always go back to the drawing board. because, your job as a marketer too, is to come in and challenge assumptions a lot of times, which is uncomfortable. And a lot of marketers don't do this, but a lot of people come into a new job and they think, okay. CEO already has positioning covered. Cool. I'm just going run with that. our, everyone already has like our branding set. Cool. Let's just run with that. so on and so forth that go down the line. the website's fine for now.
Let's just start running ads. Let's just start doing these campaigns. And then the conversion rates aren't great. The growth isn't there. And then it becomes even more painful to go back later and do those things because now everyone's like, well, hey, if these things were wrong, why didn't you say something? So you should always start in the beginning if you can.
Zach Stevens (07:05)
Well, I think that might be a transition to saying like, what are the, what are the ingredients to these phases? Cause the first one in phase one, which is the foundation is an audit, which is just doing a, you know, an analysis of what do we have looking at this list and checking all of our boxes and maybe like, so let's just do a run through of what do we have? What goes into the phase one, starting with the audit, then what's next.
Corey Haines (07:18)
Right.
Yeah.
So the audit is all about taking a holistic view across all of your marketing efforts and giving yourself essentially a score in each of those areas to understand what are the areas that there's like a room for a lot of improvement and what areas can we either check the box or like aren't worth the investment right now. Maybe we can punt later down the road. but those areas can be customer research, positioning, branding, look at the homepage.
Those are the other core elements of that foundation phase. But then we're going to also take a look at things further down the road in other phases, including your sales pages, conversion pages, competitor comparison pages, your sales and marketing collateral, onboarding, email marketing, pricing. Those are all in the phase two. And then at phase three, we'll take a look at, okay, what is your setup for analytics and conversion rate optimization? Does that include AB testing? Have you done that in the past?
Do you have the traffic to do that? What kind of go-to-market launches and campaigns have you run in the past? What are your ads look like and are they profitable right now? Your SEO content, the markets that you play in, are you just serving your local market or the US market, or are you doing more internationalization and how are you serving those international markets? And then kind of the state of your website and web development. Can you support CMS content? The organization is everything.
up to par from an SEO perspective, and especially on the technical side of things. And that audit looks at everything, just to get a lay of the land because, there's a lot of, again, this is why marketing suffers from a, where do we start problem? Because there are so many different parts of, so many different ingredients that go into this, that it can be very overwhelming if you're not taking a score of each one to start.
Zach Stevens (09:29)
Yeah, it's quite, I was just gonna say it's quite hard to figure out how to get to point B if you don't even know where point A is or where you currently are. It'd be like going into Google Maps and saying I wanna get to In-N-Out in Santee and Google Maps says, well, where are you? Because I can't give you direction unless I know exactly where you're at.
Nick Loudon (09:29)
I feel like there's sorry, go ahead.
there is almost no time ever that someone says the word audit and I'm like, yay, an audit. This sounds fun. So let's kind of dissect a little bit about what it means to start with the fundamentals because fundamentals are generally speaking boring. I'd say branding and revamping your homepage is the most fun part of the foundation.
fundamental stuff, but like you could go on Twitter and see a like tweet from someone that's like, we increased our traffic using programmatic SEO and blah, blah, blah. And all these like these things that come down the road that look fun and like, I could totally do that. Like I have the pieces of the puzzle to like make that happen and just not experience the fruit of it unless you had done the fundamentals. So like, how do we get people to know like, you definitely want to start here?
because that stuff won't matter as much. It's kind of like a snowball. You can't just pop the snowball at the end and it's going to be just too small. It's not going to build up the steam it needs. So I guess how can we convince people that they need to start at the beginning? Zatch, go for it.
Zach Stevens (11:03)
I have another
analogy for this. So I refer to this as the dirty dish problem, which is you always have a cook who wants to come in and immediately start making a mess, know, trying new spices, new ingredients, getting flour on the counters and all that. But at the same time, they have this giant pile of dirty dishes in the sink. And if they just clean the dirty dishes, then the working environment would be a lot nicer. They
would have more workspace. There wouldn't be rats coming and eating bits of food or cockroaches in their space. Cause that will eventually lead to things being shut down. And I think that the same thing happens inside of marketing where you currently have a dirty dish pile. And the reason we start with an audit is because you need to clean those dirty dishes first before we start making new messes. And then once you have that, at least under control to where it's not running rampant, then you can start
playing and making a mess in other areas, which is why those foundations are so key. It's cleaning the palette and trying to establish a slate that you can then expand upon.
Corey Haines (12:14)
Yeah. I think the real core issue is that anything that you do is going to fall flat unless you do have a strong foundation. So you have to go and do, your dirty dishes and you got to clean things up and get things to a good place before you can start making those investments. The reason why people like to skip this is because it's a lot of really existential questions that you have to ask yourself. Questions like,
Nick Loudon (12:43)
What are
we doing?
Corey Haines (12:44)
Why? Yeah, no,
it's literally like, why do we exist? Why do customers choose us over competitors? What are the, what is the feeling that we want to invoke with our customers? what do we stand for? Right? What is our, our mission and, how do we actually help our customers achieve their missions? Those are really, really hard questions to answer that a marketer who's a month into the job,
is not gonna be super well equipped to answer, which is why the very first thing that I always advise people to start with is on customer research. You can almost never do too much customer research, barring that it stops you from actually taking action on that customer research. But like, if you gave me a choice between five customer research, job to be done style interviews and 50, I'm gonna choose 50 every single time.
In fact, most of the time it's like, how can I like the problem is I can't get enough customer research. It's hard to get customers on the phone. It's hard to get people to respond to surveys. It's, you know, difficult to go and find the online reviews of competitors and get kind of market sentiment sentiment and slew through a bunch of Reddit, you know, conversations and threads. That stuff is hard. There's normally not enough that you want to go off of, but you need to hear from your customers because
Your point of view is subjective. It's what you think and you're going to have your own biases. You're going to have a curse of knowledge where you have all these assumptions and things that you already know because someone has told you, but those things might not be right or validated. You need to cross reference everything with a primary primary research source, which is your actual customers.
And that your customer research will inform your positioning, your branding, the copywriting on your site, the angles and offers that you make in your advertising, the content that you write about, like literally everything. It informs all the things. And that's the thing that people want to skip the most because they're like, this is going to take a month. We're going to have to bother our customers. And
our people, we got to design the survey, we got to analyze the survey. Thankfully, a lot of this is getting incredibly easier with AI. Like I'm saying like insanely easier. What used to take me months can now take me like a week thanks to AI. And it's not like AI is doing my job. It's just sifting through the transcripts of even ten, 30 minute interviews is painstakingly time intensive.
Zach Stevens (15:13)
Easier.
Corey Haines (15:37)
and trying to organize and tag and find quotes on this is really, really hard. But I digress. Customer research is the most important piece that informs everything else about your marketing strategy and at the most likely to be skipped in the process as well.
Zach Stevens (15:54)
sounds like a lot of people skip over this because there's not a real deliverable, you know what mean? Where it's like, well, what is the thing that we get at the end of it? But in most cases, it's like you get, I think that you would summarize that as an answer. You get an answer to really important questions, which will guide everything else.
Corey Haines (15:59)
Yeah, right.
Nick Loudon (16:15)
It's probably pretty likely that you started this business. You came up with the idea, you built it. You probably think you know what's good about it and what's not going good about it. You're like, haven't it all. I see all the stuff, so I know what's good and what's not good. But your customers are experiencing it from a completely different side.
And not only that, the side of it that makes the money and sells the product and gets used, not the side that builds it. So that side is actually what they think is way more important than what you think is good about your product even, which is kind of crazy. But yeah, I totally agree with this beginning point that it feels like there can't be enough time spent on this specific one. And it informs the next one, which is positioning.
Corey Haines (16:41)
Mm-hmm.
Nick Loudon (17:06)
You also have a worksheet that we go through with our clients and people that we work with, and you do a strategy call. What are the biggest, when we talk about this specific thing on the strategy call, that's the hardest point to get figured out? Do you have anything like that?
Corey Haines (17:26)
Yeah, mean, increasingly today, the hardest part about positioning is just figuring out like what are our actual unique differentiators from like a feature and product perspective, because features and software development in general is becoming very commoditized where we've solved a lot of the technical problems that were really hard thanks to machine learning, LLMs, AI in general, just being able
being like an API call away. There's so many things that are unlocked from that, from a product perspective that it makes it hard to truly have differentiated features. So you have to take a completely different angle. You have to say, we're the best for someone because of X, Y, and Z or the combination of our features, service, um, customer service, and our pricing is differentiated.
for this particular use case, so on and so forth, right? But a lot of people are like, they really want to, they're like, just sift through this and find the one killer feature that everyone's gonna choose us because we have this. And that's just not how people make buying decisions. They make buying decisions because there's a hundred different variables and factors at play, and they're weighing the culmination of all of those across one product and another.
all the different integrations, what does their uptime look like? You can't just distill it down into one core differentiated feature. And so when we go through this, it's normally like, hey, bad news, there's really no killer feature compared to your competitors. Good news is, is we don't need one because your competitors are focused on being like,
Zach Stevens (19:10)
You
Corey Haines (19:20)
a mile wide and in an inch deep. And maybe we can focus on being a mile deep in an inch wide or vice versa, right? We can be the best use case or we can be the best for this vertical, or we can focus on this particular, segment of the market, whether it's the lower end of the market or the top end of the market or so on and so forth. Right. but people are always hungry for like, this makes sense. We have this one thing. Now we just have to tell everyone about this one thing.
Zach Stevens (19:49)
Yeah.
Corey Haines (19:50)
And it's never just one thing.
Zach Stevens (19:52)
And then there's a subjective side of it too, which is, know, well, everybody else has the same thing. then are they just going to pick based on personality? You know, I thought of this when I'm trying to pick between something like notion and click up. And the reason I picked notion was because, well, it's black and white and it's simple. And I'm not a, I'm not a flashy person. So therefore I'm going to pick the software that isn't flashy. They do the same things, but one of them is not flashy.
Corey Haines (20:22)
Yeah, that's definitely what happens when there is no differentiation whatsoever. You know, when you take a Coca-Cola versus a Pepsi, yeah, there's a taste difference, but if we're just talking about like soda, it's really about like brand value, right? There's so many other cases where like the brand becomes the only thing that people actually make a decision off of eventually, which actually is a nice segue into the next section, which is X.
Nick Loudon (20:22)
It's positioning, yeah.
Corey Haines (20:50)
And I think also a pretty, if I might say like a pretty overlooked area in marketing as well. We were talking about this a while back, but like, I think one of the things just to kind of tee this up from a marketer's perspective is that no one wants something to look ugly. Like the point isn't to make it not look beautiful and well-designed, but at the same time,
like the bar keeps getting higher and higher and higher. And so you have to have something that resonates, not just looks good. So I'll let you take it from here, Zach.
Zach Stevens (21:31)
Yeah. Well, the biggest, like from a technical perspective, one of the things that happens here is design debt where if you don't get this right, then you have stuff that feels disjointed in your backlog. Like, and then you have to go back. If you do want to step your game up at some point, you have to rework everything. Design is not one of those things that it's really easy to change. Just like a headline on.
website, it's like you have to overhaul so much stuff. Everything that you've done in the past now has to be reconfigured and redesigned to look like you want to now. So I guess the choice is like, wait? You could design adds so much more value upfront than it costs to implement in most cases. And it has trickle down effect into everything.
Like Corey said, the bar is getting higher and higher and there's not a single touch point that you don't want to be, to make a good impression. Like if it's a social post, if it's a landing page, if it's a piece of sales collateral, all of that is going to have a design touch to it.
And by picking and choosing your creative direction and giving yourself these constraints of like, are using these typefaces. This is our aesthetic. These are our colors. This is how we want people to feel. When we know these things, it becomes a lot easier to cohere that and then develop a more trustworthy and continual or a cohesive brand off of it.
Nick Loudon (22:55)
something I was going to ask because we started Conversion Factory, Zach, you're like, OK, we're to do a brand workshop. Like you did it for us, which was like so fun and actually really enjoyable for me because you have like we have like a whole worksheet that we kind of go through. And then we like, you you kind of take that and digest it and we talk about it and all that stuff. It was it was a very like enlightening experience. And it was like, it's so obvious how helpful this could be. But when I was first like filling out the worksheet, I was like.
Is this really gonna help him put a brand together? As a non-designer, I was like, I don't know. So I can kinda see how a random technical founder who built some, he's been sitting in his basement coding for months and he's got a product and he's trying to sell it he's like, I don't need to tell you what my inspirations are for these things, just make it look pretty, you know what I mean? So I wanted to ask if you've ever, how often you get in those brand calls?
Zach Stevens (23:46)
Yeah
Nick Loudon (23:54)
people kind of just being like, what, I don't know, whatever. Or if they're like, okay, no, this is it. Like I'm bought in. Do you have to get them bought in beforehand on their own brand?
Zach Stevens (24:03)
I've only ever had one do that. it's because, like, most people that want to do that, I've already shown them what it's like, and I've shown them the results. You know, like, if you can, you can not do that, and these are the results, or you could do this, and my method typically gets results that...
Nick Loudon (24:06)
Hmm.
Zach Stevens (24:22)
Again, it weighs on more subjective things, but it's, wanted to create something that, or I want to create something that customers are going to love, that competitors are going to envy and that founders are going to be really proud of. And the way that I've found, cause those are the really the key things. It's like, you, do customers love it? Do your competitors wish they had thought of it first? And do you as, as a founder, are you personally proud of this? And.
Corey Haines (24:43)
you
Zach Stevens (24:49)
My method, is the steal your brand method is to take the things that make a founder feel the way that they want other people to feel. And you use those as visual springboards and inspiration for guiding the graphics. Like you don't just pick random colors. You pick colors that mean something to the founder. And what you're looking for is this overlap between like, this is how I want people to feel. This is things that I like. And in between that Venn diagram, there's really good nuggets that you can then use.
to build the foundations of your brand. And it's taking things like, well, I the texture of this photo of Winston Churchill or something like that. Or I really love the typefaces in this album cover. And so let's find something that looks like that. Or even the artwork, know, like...
Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon has like these very solid geometric shapes and you can use that. like, okay, cool. Geometric shapes. Great. We can run with that as far as we want. And when we combine it with this color palette that maybe isn't a rainbow spectrum, like it isn't the Pink Floyd album, but maybe it's just a monochromatic thing of blues because you love the ocean. Then dang, we've got like a whole new visual mood board that wasn't created. It was just inspired and stolen from the things that you love. And that's what makes like, that's
Nick Loudon (25:48)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Zach Stevens (26:10)
the hardest part is that it's trying to get founders to open up a little bit about themselves and Say no, I do like these things. I do have a personality I'm not gonna put on this facade of like I just work all the time. That's all I do That's all I care about because it's not true for one and And two even if it is how would it how you are now, You have things in your past because you were a kid at one point and I guarantee when you were a kid you weren't spending 18 hours coding in
Nick Loudon (26:14)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Zach Stevens (26:39)
like in front of the desk, you were doing other stuff.
Nick Loudon (26:42)
Hopefully not. The biggest problem with branding. Yeah. The biggest problem with branding is how deep the rabbit hole can go and how we could probably sit here and we could have a whole nother podcast or you could about, about branding. yeah. Yeah.
Corey Haines (26:42)
somewhere but yeah but they're also playing video games and
Zach Stevens (26:57)
Well, we will. So we'll save it for another time.
Corey Haines (27:01)
Well, can I chime
in one more thing on that is that I think that a disconnect that hopefully will, the click for a lot of founders is when I was talking about positioning, everyone's looking for like, okay, this is the key differentiator. How do we talk about ourselves in the way that clicks for people that they know that this is a tool for people like them that gets in the outcome that they want and that's better and or
differentiated from their competitors. But then if you make it look like every one of your other competitors, that's also going to like dilute the effectiveness of all of your copywriting and your positioning that you're trying to relay. Right? Imagine like there's, think it's just a, such a subtle little psychological phenomenon that happens. But if you like say these things are different, but then they look exactly the same at face value.
your brain is just like, no, those things are the same. What are you talking about? Or like, or.
Zach Stevens (28:04)
Yeah, looks
like a duck, walks like a duck, talks like a duck, must be a duck.
Corey Haines (28:08)
Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
The branding really, really helps the positioning like shine. And I see this a lot when companies pivot and when they change their positioning, but then they don't change their branding to reflect that. And then it just feels very surface level and very like cheap, you know, sort of just like a little, it feels like a miss to be honest.
Zach Stevens (28:35)
Yeah.
Nick Loudon (28:35)
Mm.
Corey Haines (28:38)
And it's not like you need to rebrand every single time. But again, if, you're like, we're a, let's just say like, we're like an email marketing tool for people who are not marketers. no. Okay. Actually I have a really good example. If, I, if I'm Canva, right? Canva is the design tool for non-designers, right? Layman's like me use Canva, not Zach. Zach's probably never even opened Canva before, right? Canva's
Nick Loudon (28:42)
Refresh, at least.
Canva's great.
Zach Stevens (29:05)
I've opened Canva.
Corey Haines (29:07)
Canva's value proposition is it's like, look, everything's done for you. It's easy. It's approachable. It's for anybody. And we're going to take care of you. Right. And imagine if Canva's branding was like black and white space, really, you know, clunky, thick typography. You would just be like, is it approachable? Is it for someone like me? Like it just doesn't look like it's it. And imagine if it's the opposite, right? Imagine if there was like a,
Zach Stevens (29:31)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Corey Haines (29:37)
I don't know, Adobe premier, figma kind of has, I think a bit of a playful brand, but they also have some sophistication to it. but I think of tools like cursor, for example, the coding ID that everyone's talking about right now, which I'm a huge fan of and cursor, the whole idea of cursor is like, Hey, this gives you superpowers. Like this is a literal portal into building whatever you want to build. And their branding is
like black and white, it's spacey, it's sophisticated, it's very like futuristic and it feels like a hefty tool, you know?
Zach Stevens (30:15)
It's a challenge. It's a challenge to
make you better. know, that one, it's it's judging you.
It's saying you could be better. whereas Canva is more nurturing, you know, like a, it's a masculine feminine archetype where like, no, I'm calling you to be something better and challenging you, making you achieve the next level. That's more paternal and masculine versus a feminine approach, which is what Canva is, which is I've got you. I'm going to hold you close and I'm going to take care of you no matter what you do, baby. Cause I love you so much.
Corey Haines (30:24)
Right. Right.
Nick Loudon (30:24)
Yeah.
that's
so sweet. I feel like in this foundation, we spent a lot of time on the first phase. These are all like, the things we've already covered are all like tools in the tool belt. And they kind of like lead up to like your first, like you're going to build your first like asset out of the tools that you put in your tool belt with the audit, with the customer research. And you're like, okay, I got the positioning now. I got the branding figured out. Like what's the first asset I need to build? And that's your homepage.
that's like part of the foundation is like, okay, let's see all this in action in one place and like put our money where our mouth is essentially and like we use a certain framework, generally speaking for homepages and leading customers through a homepage and kind of putting them on there. Anything you want to touch on on the homepage revamp, I know it's kind of like one of the things that we talk about a lot is that framework we use for the homepage.
Corey Haines (31:47)
Yeah, it's the combination of all the things we just talked about, right? With the customer research, the positioning, the branding, trying to turn that into copy and illustrations, in order to convince customers to actually give you a shot. Right? And so like you said, let's put our money, let's put our, our money where their mouth is. No, how does it go? Now it sounds weird. And when you say it out loud, I'm like, what? Yeah. Now we put rubber to the road.
Nick Loudon (32:06)
That's what I said. Yeah, our money where our mouth is. Yeah, like, yeah, that's it.
Zach Stevens (32:08)
Hmm
put rubber on the road, like rubber meets the road.
Corey Haines (32:16)
And we see how effective this actually is. And this is again, a core part of our philosophy is we are conversion factory, not traffic factory. We want to get you more customers and we want our copy and our branding and the culmination of that on a homepage to actually result in a higher conversion rate. And the homepage is just going to be the place where, like Zach says, it's the centrifuge for all of your marketing. So that's the thing that
you're going to see the biggest results the quickest. And that validates then all the other things we're going to do in things like phase two, which are all about sales pages and expanding the funnel and taking the learnings from the homepage and expanding that out to all the other marketing assets that you have.
Nick Loudon (33:04)
Bye.
Zach Stevens (33:04)
Yeah, I feel like we're just for the sake of time, we're not going to be able to jump into phase two and phase three as much as we'd like to. but we did want to talk about the like.
Corey Haines (33:09)
Yeah, I know.
Zach Stevens (33:15)
Why we came up with this process of having the foundational elements first, having your base established, and then working into expansion because we've seen this happen where people come to us and then leave and we feel like, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa, hold on. Like we just sent the rocket or like we just built the rocket. It's not even launched yet. You know, like we still got stuff to do. so what are some of the things Corey that you had? Cause you wrote down a list and.
Corey Haines (33:37)
Mm-hmm.
Zach Stevens (33:44)
There's things that were top of mind for you of why this process is so important
Corey Haines (33:50)
Yeah. Yeah. I think part of it is for us, like our goal is to help our clients be more successful. Right. And I think what we've realized and what a lot of other service providers realize is that a lot of it comes down to helping people get out of their own way and stop shooting themselves in the foot. Not to say that clients are like, you know, dumb or misinformed or anything like that. There's so much bureaucracy and decision making that happens and
hiring a marketing agency is a huge investment and there's like a lot of trust involved in it. And what we want is we want to cultivate even more with that. So there's been instances for, for example, someone has a really myopic focus on just one project and we're like, great, in order to do that project, we're need to kind of, we're going to need to go back to some of the foundational elements and make sure there were a button up there. And they're like, can't we just like,
create a couple of these pages and then just be done. Like we could, but we wouldn't be doing you a favor by doing that. We would be taking a risk because we don't, we don't, can't guarantee that this is in your best interest and that the outcome of these pages is going to be, it's going to get you the results that you want because we haven't done these foundational steps. That happens pretty often, especially when people come to us for conversion rate optimization.
They're like, Hey, help us optimize this one page on our website. We're like, great. In order to do that, we're going to need to understand why the customers choose you. like how, like all of your branding elements are kind of all over the place and the way you talked about your products all over the place. We need to go back to the foundation. there's, I think on the flip side too, there's a lot of instances where we do a lot of the foundational elements and then we never get to phase two, phase three on the base and the expansion.
of like, sweet. Now let's take this. And like Zach said, we're like, we built the rocket. Now let's send it up, up into space. Let's, um, let's really like get some work out of this. Uh, let's really pour gasoline on the fire. And they're like, Hey guys, thumbs up. Great job. Killed it on that. Now I'll, you know, let you know how it goes. Like, wait, there's so many more things to do. Right. We're just like at the tip of the iceberg and now you want to peace out.
Nick Loudon (36:07)
Yeah, it's like cuts you out under the legs. Yeah.
Corey Haines (36:15)
Those are a couple that come to mind. So it can go both ways. Like either people don't want to do some of the foundational elements that we realize we just end up having to come back and do later anyway. So we have to be better about insisting on that. Or the vice versa where we do the foundational elements and then they don't want to expand from there. And that's really just where things start getting good and fun.
Nick Loudon (36:39)
Yeah. Go ahead, Zach.
Zach Stevens (36:42)
There was a, well, I, I wanted to harken or harp back to the myopic focus on just one project because often more often than not, is why the audit is so critical is because you don't know. You might not be happy with the results you're getting, but you have no idea what is actually causing the symptoms. The, like, what is the, the true issue that is making you sick? Like what that's making your marketing engine not operate the way that it should be.
And what we'll find is that people might have like a complaint that surface level, know, like, like, just need to redo like our copywriting or we need to redo our aesthetic and we'll come in and look at it and say, well,
I mean, your positioning's off, you know, like you, you're complaining about these scrapes that you have on your elbows, but you have a tumor in your stomach. And until you let us operate on that and work with it and get rid of it and solve the problem that's in, you're going to die. I can put as, I can put as many band-aids and neosporin on you as I want, but it's not going to make you live longer. And it's not going to make it so that it's not going to make it so that you can be optimal.
Nick Loudon (37:42)
You're gonna die.
Corey Haines (37:44)
You
Zach Stevens (37:56)
That's the key thing is that I think that they like when those surface level problems are the ones that are addressed first is that it might look better. might feel a bit better, but it's not going to perform. It's not optimal. It's not healthy. It's not running the way that it's supposed to.
Nick Loudon (38:16)
gap that I think we can all feel when we have a client that is like, we know that, okay, they're really bought in from the start and we walk them through kind of the whole roadmap, front to back. like the, I guess the feeling of like, okay, as we're like, as the rocket is like, you know, it's taken off and now it's like entering into the atmosphere or whatever.
Like we, it's like, okay, we really are like on the same team. This is so fun. This is so enjoyable. And there's like so much like camaraderie about it. And they're the, like the level of trust is like so much different than like someone who just shows up and he's like, I need you to like rewrite these things. And like, I'll talk to you guys and maybe I'll know a couple of months. It's like, you're just like spinning in circles, like stop, just stop spinning. Like let's run like in the same direction together.
Just that feeling is so different. So I don't know, just was thinking about that as you were talking about the differences that we have in some clients versus others. Is there anything that you wanted to hit on? Because I know we're running out of time because we're talking too long on the foundations. Is there anything we wanted to really focus in on the second or third phases?
Corey Haines (39:23)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Well, I think one of the other really big issues that I've personally experienced too, and I think pretty much every marketer does experience when they're on a shoestring budget and or a marketing team of one or really small and lean is that, sometimes they can't keep up with us, which is funny, but, but also sad a bit because it feels like, dang, we did, we did too good of a job almost where we're like, we shipped all these pages.
or we have the pages ready to ship. In other words, the copy is done, the design is done. We've gone through a lot of the foundational elements, a lot of these, and a lot of these cases, but they're like, okay, cool. Now it's going to take a while for this to actually be launched or be implemented. And so like, let's keep working on other things, but this is going to, we need to like hand this over to someone else on the team and, or we need some dev help or what, or whatever it might be, right? It's just, it's, it's not in our hands to ship.
for them on their behalf. And that could be due to website platform issues, not being on a web flow, namely, it's one of the big boo-boos we see pretty often. And or just, they have such a big backlog of items because there's some other bottleneck in their process that is stopping them from getting value out of a lot of the things that we're doing, which we ship at a pretty fast rate, I would say. But to me, it feels like,
this is how every marketing team should operate. This is the rate that everyone should be shipping at. Anything slower than this feels like a snail's pace to me. I'm also just incredibly impatient about everything all the time. So maybe that's like a me issue. but my perspective has always been like, there's, we're never doing enough for shipping fast enough. And so, I mean, part of my whole goal with conversion factory is like, Hey, we can finally work through the marketing backlog.
we can finally be shipping things at a similar rate as your product team. Like when the marketing team isn't shipping, just things aren't happening. Conversion rates aren't changing. Growth is stalled or plateaued. Traffic is stagnant. It's like, you got to be putting stuff out there. And once you finally can, it's amazing. But oftentimes we're not the bottleneck. Something else within an internal workflow is the bottleneck, which is frustrating.
So yeah.
Nick Loudon (42:08)
Yeah, think, yeah, I personally, phase two is like kind of my favorite phase. So I'm kind of bummed that we ran out of time. Like, there's just like, hey, let's just put out all these pages. Like, look at all these pages we're going to put out. And that's the stuff that I get to jump in on the most that I really enjoy. We go through pricing, email marketing, onboarding, and then obviously in phase three, it's all that stuff we already talked about. We've gone much longer than we usually do.
Zach Stevens (42:15)
Hmm.
Nick Loudon (42:39)
Because in my head, I'm trying to put myself in someone else's shoes. And I said at the beginning, anyone should start at the beginning. But you could start at the beginning and do the audit, the self-reflective audit, even in your own business, and say, did a bunch of customer research recently. And I actually, when looking at it, my positioning is pretty good and I like my brand.
There is a certain number of things that people can skip through. I want to give people somewhat of an out when they do the audit to say, no, I can fast forward to where I should stop on this list. Is that the case? you think?
Corey Haines (43:25)
I think there's certainly cases where you can fast forward or at least we can do an audit of what you have and make at least a couple of recommendations around, Hey, let's shore up a, B and C, which are pretty minor issues. And then let's just earmark X, Y, and Z as things we want to be careful of in the future. As we go to validate this positioning and make use of this branding and use the existing infrastructure that you have.
so that if later those things become issues, it's like it's not us, that's you, that's on you, right? And so that we can remind them, hey, maybe we do actually need to go back to the foundational elements. But certainly, it makes our jobs a lot easier when people have that already done. It's just, I think that because those are the most fundamental, existential questions that you have to ask yourself, they're the most likely to be off and or incomplete.
And so it's, there's not a lot of cases where you can really skip. I think that the cases where we've seen, or we can actually skip it is if they've worked with another service provider in the past on these areas and they've really knocked it out of the park or they have just enough and they have a experimental attitude like, Hey, let's go in.
create our positioning on the fly as we validate it through advertising. For example, it's like, okay, cool. Let's put our click testing to work and let's see which value proposition propositions resonate with these segments. Let's see what kind of messages really seem to be the strongest. And then we can go and kind of create the house as we go. But
Zach Stevens (45:16)
That'd
be the S tier version of this.
Corey Haines (45:19)
Yeah, right. Not for the
faint of heart, like be, you know, user, what's it called? What's the little warning label on devices? Yeah. User discretion advised.
Nick Loudon (45:23)
Yeah.
Zach Stevens (45:26)
Yeah. Use user discretion. Yeah. Well,
Nick Loudon (45:30)
Yeah.
Zach Stevens (45:31)
that's especially because I would say that, and you said it, Corey, that's an experiment. Like we do those things when those are for companies that are like,
have a bunch of money in the bank and they're like, we're testing this stuff because we have the money to throw at it. And we're okay losing with this. If you are like, this is your founder, this is your one gig that you're working on and you've finally got enough traction to where you're like, I have something here. I don't know how to communicate its value to the rest of the world so that more people want to buy it. You're not going to bet like that on it because you can't, you need it to be more, take a road that's more reliable.
And it's like, you're not gonna fly the experimental jet, you're gonna get in a commercial aircraft because you know it's gonna get you there. And yeah, the experimental aircraft might work. Might blow up too.
Corey Haines (46:22)
Yeah. Yeah. Right.
Nick Loudon (46:25)
Go out in a blaze of glory.
Zach Stevens (46:27)
Yeah, and unless you're maverick, that's okay.
Corey Haines (46:28)
There's, there's an element. There's an element of like, what do people have appetite for as well? Not a lot of people, it takes a very specific appetite for positioning to be like, yeah, let's spend a month and really dig into this. It takes a very specific appetite for branding, for customer research. Like it's hard to sell those items, right?
When people really want that, it's very easy. It's like, okay, sure. A lot of the times we have to do a little bit more of the convincing that this is necessary. But also like we have to, we tell clients all the time, we'll take as much or as little creative liberty as you want us to. So for example, I mean, we just started working with a client who their first two requests are around revamping a really important email sequence.
and creating ads, neither of which are performing well right now. And so we're, not just going to take a stab at the dark, right? And just do something similar to what they've done before. We're to do something very, very different. In that case, we're going to discover some of the positioning gaps that they have. We're going to discover the messaging and copywriting along the way because what they have the appetite for right now, what they can sell internally is
this, not doing a positioning workshop. Right, so we can do them simultaneously in a lot of cases. It's just gonna be a little bit more of a scenic route and potentially more expensive to be honest, you know, takes more time.
Zach Stevens (48:07)
scenic routes typically are so that's not surprising
Corey Haines (48:10)
Yeah, yeah, that's
reality.
Nick Loudon (48:12)
Take the scenic route. That's how it is. Okay, I think these phases are amazing. Obviously they're our brainchild. Any last thoughts before we close out the episode and say au revoir or however you say it to our listeners?
Corey Haines (48:30)
you
Zach Stevens (48:32)
Au revoir, au fin de seigneur, sayonara, take your pick, you know, we got plenty. I think that the thing that we'll say is just stick around for the next ones, because we'll be going even deeper on these in coming episodes.
Nick Loudon (48:36)
There you go. Yeah. Any of those. Yeah.
Corey Haines (48:38)
deuces.
Nick Loudon (48:45)
Yeah.
Yeah, let's do it. Okay. Thanks for listening to the factory floor and we will see you next time.
Corey Haines (48:55)
au revoir
Nick Loudon (48:56)
Michael, cut it.