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Getting Your Paid & Organic Efforts in Sync with Lashay & Tas
275 Plays1 month ago
Organic and paid — how do we optimize and synchronize these two vital parts of our marketing strategy? We know it's about crafting content that converts and leaves a lasting impression. But where do we even start? And how do we stand out?
In this episode, Jess and Susan are joined by Lashay Lewis and Tas Bober who lay out their collaborative approach to building a rock-solid marketing foundation, using customer research to create targeted content, and optimizing landing pages for maximum impact. They share their secrets to navigating the complexities of B2B marketing through the constant checks and balances of content and paid.
In this episode:
- The importance of upfront research before executing marketing campaigns
- How to bridge the gap between internal and external perceptions to create effective, customer-centric content
- Strategies for leveraging landing pages, testing messaging, and measuring marketing performance holistically
That's Marketing, Baby is produced by Sweet Fish Media. Book a call at sweetfishmedia.com.
Transcript
00:00:00
Speaker
HockeyStack has a statistic that says, for a low ACV product, it takes 34 website touchpoints before they MQL. Before they decide to even contact you, they have to have 34 website touchpoints, right? So it could be visiting Lachey's blog 600 times.
00:00:19
Speaker
I know it could be like six times with her, three times on the landing page, five times on the homepage, whatever that is. And so laying the expectation of what they get in return, because you are asking for their most precious digital currency, which is their time, right? Or their information, or both. um what are they What are they getting in return?
00:00:47
Speaker
Hello and welcome everyone to another episode of That's Marketing Baby. I am here today with my amazing co-host Susan Wenegrad. Hey everybody. And she was joined by her team of lawn care. Yeah, i there's a leaf blower outside, so that's our third co-host today.
00:01:08
Speaker
sometimes makes it appear in first world problems. We are super excited today because we are joined by two incredible guests who we have. This show has been in the works for like months trying to get these two very in demand boss ladies on our show. We have Lachey Lewis and Taz Bober here, you all. Hello. Hello.
00:01:38
Speaker
Oh, this is amazing. So this just feels like it had to happen at some point. One, because I mean, we're all amazing. And two, because I think the thing that people love about this show or one of the things I think people love about this show is that Susan and I kind of live on both ends of the spectrum. right like I'm in the content world. She's in the paid media world. our our purposes and kind of paths combine a lot, right? there are There's a ton of overlap there, but we we have kind of those distinct perspectives. And that is exactly where you all lie as well. And I i love that um we're all able to kind of talk through those two kind of points on the on the range together today. So thank you so much for coming. So glad you're here. Thank you for having us.
00:02:30
Speaker
yeah Yeah, absolutely. I'm super excited. and Why don't you take a minute and just and and tell us about yourselves. Fine. um I was signaling to her, but she didn't catch she didn't catch my signals. Task over, task like SaaS, over like Sober. and um I spent 95% of my career in-house.
00:02:55
Speaker
um doing digital marketing and website stuff. So my claim to fame is I've somehow been involved in 400 websites from management to redesigns and strategy, UX, all of that stuff. And then I ah kind of left the corporate world and dove into consulting. And I was kind of doing like fractional digital marketing and website stuff, which was fine. And I was posting on LinkedIn, got a couple of clients from like my network and referrals and people I'd worked with previously. And then having some discussions with a few other people, ah they were like, man, you need to niche down and you know solve for a specific problem.
00:03:35
Speaker
And so i ah then married the paid outside and the web website side and started talking about landing pages and that's kind of where the growth started to happen ah in strides and then started.
00:03:50
Speaker
getting a lot of inbound coming in, asking about landing page help ah specifically with paid ads and develop some very strong POVs there. And that's kind of how that started. I found Lachey through listening to Dave Gearhart's podcast, which I've been listening to him for years and years and years before he knew I existed. Lachey was the only different voice at the time. He was interviewing like CMOs and leadership and stuff ah for a long time. This was like.
00:04:20
Speaker
This was like early exit five. So he had just moved from DMG, DG to like exit five. Lachey was on there and she was the only like solo woman person of color. And I just remember working out in the morning and I'm like, Oh, this is a different, you know, this is a different guest than he usually has. And so when I went out on my own, I reached out to her and I was like, Hey, want to be friends? And we, I think our first conversation was like three hours and this zoom, we were like on the free zoom. So we had to like.
00:04:50
Speaker
keep hurry up every 40 minutes. It was so embarrassing. um And we kept talking. My son's like running in the background, just ruining things. And we became fast friends and now we consider each other almost like unofficial business partners because um we just do a lot of brainstorming together and then suddenly realized our process has actually overlapped quite a bit.
00:05:11
Speaker
Um, which is something I didn't even realize when I was working in house, just not working with the content teams in that capacity, but being outside, you're just so much more creative. And so we did a lot of overlap there and that's kind of how it came to be. And we came to this moment here, but I won't steal your shine. You go, what's your perspective?
00:05:30
Speaker
A lot of the same, right? So I come from, you know, where Taz came from in-house, I come from more of an agency background, having to work on, you know, multiple clients at one time and everything. So um when I started consulting March of 2023, I came with an angle of bottom of funnel, because again, that's what interested me the most. That's what you know, drove the conversions and things like that. Started in e-com, which was fun, but it was too easy after a while. And I used to hate SaaS, right? I used to be like, oh, this is so boring and confusing. I'm like, how do people do this stuff? But I tend to be attracted to complex, difficult things. Sometimes I have to kick myself in the butt for it. but
00:06:15
Speaker
um Fast forward a little bit, I'm you know on LinkedIn talking about Bottom of Funnel, talking about SaaS and things like that. And then you know the inbounds started coming in, of course, after getting on Dave's show and speaking about Bottom of Funnel. And I found that there's such a huge gap in content teams with Bottom of Funnel, usually because Bottom of Funnel is deeply rooted in product marketing.
00:06:39
Speaker
and And a lot of times, content teams don't talk to the product marketing teams. It's like communication is siloed within the organization. um And because of that, they miss the opportunity not just to create bottom of funnel content, but really good bottom of funnel content. So when Taz reached out, of course, you know, started chatting a little bit and we wound up working with one client almost at the same time. Again, like she said, we kind of like overlaps a little bit, they'll come to me and then they'll go to her and then they'll come back. But after a while we started to see how the process is kind of like overlap together. And I had no clue. I mean, I knew that paid fueled organic, but just to see contextually how that happens was amazing. So ever since then, we just been kind of brainstorming tag team and back and forth. I'm like, okay, how can we execute this for companies in a way that makes sense and that delivers real results?
00:07:39
Speaker
I feel like you guys almost did it the reverse way that Jess and I did like Jess and I wound up as co workers that didn't know each other. And I was laughing when you're talking about how you guys would talk for hours because she and I just would never start we would talk all day long, like we would talk about marketing all day long we both had you know daughters running around and like it was so similar.
00:07:56
Speaker
And sort of the opposite of how you guys realized you had that, she and I kind of had to build that from the ground up together at a company. And then it worked really well. And we were like, this is like a completely repeatable thing that could be done at almost any B2B SaaS company. So it was like, we figured it out because that was our job too, as opposed to you guys figuring it out later. So it's kind of funny how it's like, we ended up on the same track, but we just did it in reverse. We are so happy that you found each other. We're so glad they're here with us. I think what we want to talk through is like that process that you kind of just described, right? like Someone comes to you and they're like, Cass, Lachey, we need some sort of campaign that you know is really well-rounded, includes organic, includes paid. like Let's just start there. Blue sky, blue ocean, whatever you want to call it. like where do you Where do you start? Where do you go? What does that look like for for you both?
00:08:46
Speaker
so one of the components i think ah so lasha we I always say she's like six months ahead of me um in terms of like where her business was, some of the reps and stuff that she managed to get. right And so anybody who hasn't downloaded her content marketing dashboard, I downloaded it way before I even met her. So please go download that, it's free.
00:09:08
Speaker
um but I downloaded that in that I noticed that she had a lot of this like product and customer research, which was also important in my process. And I did it a little bit differently where I mapped it out visually um in a Figma. And so I call it this like buyer's journey map.
00:09:29
Speaker
But what I ended up doing was I did my iteration and then I looked at her stuff as we were talking and I'm like, Oh, these are good questions to ask. And so I kind of married them both to create the spires journey map or canvas. And that is literally the start of our process working with any client, whether they want more of a content strategy, organic angle, or they want the paid angle.
00:09:52
Speaker
And um it was funny because it was more of a back end process and then a client I accidentally flashed it in front of a client once cuz I was like cuz I cuz when your internal letter company you have like.
00:10:06
Speaker
weeks where you onboard and you go through all the training and all that stuff. We don't have time for that as solos. like We got to show value very quickly and do the deliverables very quickly. How do you do that when you first meet with a company? know're like How can I expedite this and learn about their product as quickly um as possible? So when I started mapping these things out,
00:10:31
Speaker
And I was doing it more as a backend process flashed at the client's like, Whoa, what was that? What was that thing you just showed? Uh, and I was like, Oh crap. I was like, well, it's my chicken scratch, like kind of workbook stuff. And she's like, show it to me. And she's like, Oh my gosh, I could use this to onboard other.
00:10:48
Speaker
external partners, I'm like, yeah, totally. She goes, oh, this is ah also good information. We could use this to like pump organic social. I'm like, yeah, totally. So I'm like, I'm not going to do any of that for you, but you can take it and you can run with it and you can do whatever. And now it's actually the central part of our process for our deliverables because the blog articles and the paid landing pages.
00:11:13
Speaker
They are highly dependent on the inputs at the buyer's journey level, the quality of the output. right and so um Basically, we walk through like understanding what the product category is, understanding the ICPs that they're targeting and what the what the primary use case is. right And then understanding the market and the landscape.
00:11:36
Speaker
so What are they doing today if they're not using a tool like this? How are they solving the problem? And then if there are other solutions in the market, what's the difference? like How do they win? ah What are their strengths, weaknesses? How do we win? So pulling out those like differentiated value themes and then using you know the Fletch PMM value proposition canvas that those guys let us borrow. so graciously um to understand products, not to do anyone's positioning and messaging. That is not in our purview. They do it way better than we would, um but to understand the product. So we map that out. We pull out what the value themes are, of value propositions.
00:12:17
Speaker
understanding the social proof around that so not just what the company provides us but also from agnostic sources like g2 cap terror trust radius if you know some of those are pay to play we get it but for the most part anyone else other than you talking about your product. Reddit, any of that would be bad. Totally brutal. Answering any objections in terms of FAQs, finding other keyword opportunities within those objections and FAQs. And then finally, the ask. What are you asking them to do? And so Leche and I don't deal with the top of funnel stuff like white papers, webinars. I feel like most marketing teams have that covered. You can run CRO-type work and drive traffic. We are talking about stuff that is going to
00:13:04
Speaker
be time and resources you invest once that give you dividends forever. So my paid campaigns and my foundational landing pages, they should never be ones that you turn off. Her Bofu articles are going to give you dividends like months and years from now, right? So it's kind of an input once forever get, right? The output. And so that's kind of laying out that process.
00:13:27
Speaker
gives you the framework or like pumps into the framework what you'd want as a buyer to understand before you evaluate this SaaS tool and put them on the shortlist for evaluation. So that's kind of our whole methodology and everything starts with that canvas and that map.
00:13:46
Speaker
And I just want to like double click on something like, we haven't actually even started any kind of production execution yet. And I think that's important. There's a lot to be done upfront. And I think that's what where that's why what you both do is so valuable. Because like you say, like if you're putting this amount of time and effort and input and information in upfront,
00:14:09
Speaker
you get way bigger dividends on the back end, right? And so notice everyone listening, like we have not already started jumping in. We're not writing yet. We are doing our research. We are getting everything down on paper. We're building a foundation first. Awesome. Love it. Great. And I think some of that too also comes from I don't want to say it's like laziness. It's not that. But I think that everybody just assumes that by the time they the buyer potential buyer gets to that point in the journey, they're like, oh, they're really, really close. We just need to push them over the edge to buy. And it's like, not really. not I mean, not with B2B SaaS because it's confusing, right? Sometimes it's very hard. Jess, you and I ran into this a lot. Sometimes it's hard to explain what this thing does without showing it very explicitly.
00:14:52
Speaker
They might be running all the top of funnel stuff in the world and people are still going. I don't really understand what it does But what does it do? Yeah, and it's and and it's funny how there's and it's easy to fall into that trap when you're in-house because you know the product So well your brain automatically starts filling in gaps that someone external still has so that's the other problem that I see it's in just and I've talked about this before but that's also the peril of when product managers kind of are able to overreach too much into the consumer side because they know everything about this product and they see it from their point of view and they don't really understand the buyer's perspective sometimes, not on purpose, but they're just too, too, too close to the product. That marriage that Leche and I bring that perspective of.
00:15:40
Speaker
This is how you view yourself internally. You view yourself as XYZ company, but then we're holding a mirror up because the information that fills that canvas is both from the internal docs, but also what the external perception is.
00:15:56
Speaker
And so I'll give you an example, which I love to use the client that we worked on together ish. One of the things is ah they call themselves like a security automation, security questionnaire automation software.
00:16:14
Speaker
But then what a user is actually typing in and looking for is vendor risk assessment, which has four times the search volume, totally different vernacular, same product, right? In their mind. So I think that's when we come in and we're saying, okay, we did this for Sandoso as well. So and we did a workshop. You can go find it on YouTube. Lashay and I did a workshop using Sandoso as an example. And Sandoso can call itself like a send automation platform.
00:16:44
Speaker
Sometimes it's direct mail. Sometimes it's gifting automation. But what are people actually looking for? They're looking for corporate gifting platform. right So those small nuances can change the entire way someone finds you, someone thinks about you or reads about you. So for us too, it's making sure that we're putting all the things that you think you know about your product, putting it in context of what a buyer needs to accomplish and what a buyer is calling you, what a buyer needs to solve.
00:17:16
Speaker
Um, and so that's something that we're also trying to do is, is marry that internal and external perception. And it's like, the only way to do that is to interview these internal teams, or at least get that internal documentation because, and we say this all the time, like my competitive positioning is against agencies, because a lot of the time agencies don't take the time to do the internal customer research. They're more of like, okay, how many people can I close this month?
00:17:42
Speaker
What growth goals do we need to hit? It's like, okay. And I've had clients, multiple clients that have worked with some pretty prominent agencies that you might see on LinkedIn or other places like that. And they're like, well, you know, we weren't that happy with the results and things like that. And it was because they didn't take the time to do the customer research. And I used to be the same way. I used to be like, ah, I just want to write the article, right? Like, why do I got to dig so much into customer research, like, jeez, it's so boring. But when you realize like how much of a role that plays in the actual content production, again, it's like, if you're not interviewing the internal teams, how do you know what pain points you're targeting, right? Because product might not always know the exact pain points. I like to go to sales to find out what pain points are they're talking. Yeah, Jess and I have talked about that a lot.
00:18:33
Speaker
Right. It's like what they're talking to the prospects every single day. It's like, why would you not go to them to understand what pain points your potential prospects are dealing with, right? And it's like CS understands the benefits because they're in the the tool every day and they're helping the customers and things like that. And it's like product team understands the capabilities and it's, you know what I mean? So it's like, you have to dig across these teams in order to consolidate this information. I think That was my whole idea with the dashboard. It was like,
00:19:05
Speaker
Information consolidation, um because when I was working across agencies, we didn't do this part, right? We just did the keyword research, okay, let's try to like match up what they do with a keyword. And it's like, yeah, you can rank, but what does ranking mean if you're not gonna convert the person once they get on the page? Just can't emphasize enough how important that internal customer research is. And as Taz said, like marrying the external perception with the internal,
00:19:34
Speaker
reception is so very very important. There is something to be said too where there's been a lot of times to your point where it's like I look in the search query reports and I see how people are searching for them and it's a valid search term but it is used nowhere on their site because it's not how they see themselves. So they don't understand you know i'll bring it to them and say hey people are searching for this The click-through is great, because I have ads that speak to this, but there is absolutely nothing on this page that uses this term or really delves into this. That's why you're not getting leads, right? So it's connecting those dots. Because to them, they're like, but it's the same thing. And I'm going, but it's not to the person that searched for it. They don't they immediately have programmed themselves to scan for this term they searched for. And when it's not there on the page, they are out of there. So I think it's it's an interesting two-way street of education to help them understand this is how people look for what you do, even if it's not what you call it.
00:20:24
Speaker
um And that's where I think that, you know, to your point, the landing pages become important because it's like, we're not saying you have to change your entire brand and change all of your vernacular, but you might want to replicate this one landing page, but but some different language on it just to kind of help them.
00:20:40
Speaker
yeah Yeah. Help them through the door, you know? You have to connect the dots. You have to help someone understand. We, you know, we understand you came here searching for this. We are kind of that. We're a little, right? Like you have to put that education out there, but you have to get them there first. I think it's a battle of egos too, though, because somebody internal is like, I don't want to be just a sales enablement tool.
00:21:02
Speaker
i am a I am a revenue sales education platform. Sweetheart, no one's calling it that. You can be a revenue education enablement platform, but you will get approximately zero people coming there. Well, maybe five, all internal at the company who came to review your landing page, right? And so I think that's the other piece where landing pages can be powerful because Lachey might lose that battle, right? Where they're like, no, we want we want to call it.
00:21:32
Speaker
the ex-automation platform and she's like, okay, great. But then you could run and a landing page and a paid ads experiment where you have a lot more autonomy and you can be like, yes, five stakeholders, nodding, nodding, nodding. Create a little landing page. It's an isolated experience. Not everybody and their brother in the company can get to that page. You cater to that search volume what the buyer wants. You come in, they you get kind of significant engagement.
00:22:00
Speaker
better engagement, better traffic, your ICP is there, maybe they're submitting requests and now you have data as the growth person to go back and say, well, look, I think we should go optimize that SEO article that's doing decently, but I think we should call it this because based on the data on experiment that we ran with 2000 of our targeted ICP that came to this landing page, they actually respond better to this terminology. And at the end of the day, do you want to choose your ego or do you want to Choose cash flow. and
00:22:32
Speaker
I mean, that was like an easy answer, but but it's i mean sometimes it's going in with the data and and saying, we've gotten a lot more quality people who fit our ICP here. um And then getting into the details and saying, well, actually they came here because of this term that we didn't want to call it. And it's a tough conversation to have. There's tact when you're going in there with how you want to present that because somebody is going to be wrong, likely a stakeholder who thought they knew better.
00:23:00
Speaker
um But money and data speak louder than words, and so sometimes it is that. So it was finding a way to give marketers in-house the autonomy and data to actually back up some of the things that they innately already know, but they're working against those like political nuances that Lachey and I don't have coming in.
00:23:23
Speaker
you know We don't, we're uninhibited. So we get to be the third party objective opinion in there and the marketer sitting there like, eh, told you And the other person's like, okay, I mean, I'm spending money to get their consulting and their advice and this is what they're seeing. It's less threatening coming from us than it is the internal marketer.
00:23:42
Speaker
We have the the dashboard, the Figma, we have all of this kind of set up. We have our foundation. And now like, how do you both get to work? Like, LaShay, how are you building like that content engine based on what you know now about these buyers and tasks? How are you kind of creating the the campaigns around that? Where was the crossover? Like, let's jump into that a bit.
00:24:02
Speaker
Hey, I want to take a quick second to tell you about our friends at Sweetfish. Content marketers, just a friendly reminder, your job is not to hook the 3% of your audience who are ready to buy. It's to pique the interest of the 97% of your audience who are not ready to buy yet. With compelling stories, interesting points of view, and practical advice that helps them be better at their jobs. And that is where Sweetfish comes in.
00:24:25
Speaker
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00:24:52
Speaker
Okay, back to the show. Well, at least from my end, it's like once we have that canvas down again with like the pain points and the benefits and capabilities, it's like we take that information and it's fed directly into the bottom of funnel articles. So what I tell a lot of people is that the reason marketers get bottom of funnel content wrong is because the knowledge level of bottom of funnel is way, way higher than it is for top of funnel. If they're searching for a bottom of funnel term, a lot of times they've been tasked by a higher up or an exec to go find a solution.
00:25:28
Speaker
And what I find is that the person has been in their field for quite a while as well. So it's like it's almost like the difference between somebody typing in what is sales enablement and best sales enablement software. It's like if they're typing in best sales enablement software, they know what sales enablement is. They know why they need it. They know the benefits. But now you have to start to connect that with actual capabilities of your product specifically. And what I see so many times is that companies will create a bottom of funnel article and it'll say, Oh, what is sales enablement? And how can it help you? It's like, you've lost me already. You know what I mean? It's like, I don't need to know. And the cool thing is that yeah a lot of the time close the history in today's current landscape sales enablement. It's like, get them on already like hit him right out the gate.
00:26:21
Speaker
Yes, yes. And when I tell people all the time, it's like, you need to hit them directly with paying points as soon as one they come to the article. And it's like, you know, they get a little bit uncomfortable with that because they're like, Oh, but we're just pushing the product. Like, what about our brand story? And it's like,
00:26:36
Speaker
They don't care, you know what I mean? It's like, and again, it goes back to what Taz said about the whole ego thing and just them getting over themselves. It's like the moment that you center the product as the solution, but not just do it where it's like, okay, here's all of our features. We're just going to feature dump everything. Like just be able to clearly articulate how your product connects to each one of their pain points is a game changer. And again, it's like the knowledge level of the person searching a bottom of funnel article is how hire. So they're probably going to know more about the industry than a freelance writer that you're going to go and find and bring in to do it. And it's like, that's a big gap. What teams, they think they can go find a freelance writer and say, okay, well just create this article, you know, article for us, we'll rank and we'll convert. But it's like,
00:27:24
Speaker
The freelance writer probably hasn't, and this is no shade to freelance writers, but they probably haven't taken the time to dive into the internal documentation, talk to the teams again, cause they have other clients. A lot of the time the companies aren't paying them what they need to be paid. Like that's a whole nother conversation.
00:27:42
Speaker
but they don't do the due diligence. And it's like, they think that they can just bring somebody in from the outside and say, okay, write about our company. And, and again, that, that was another reason for the content dashboards or a freelance writer could come in and have all the questions that they need to be able to understand what the product is, what it does and how it helps. And if everybody agrees on those things at that point, you have alignment. But the problem is a lot of teams don't even have alignment. So it's like,
00:28:08
Speaker
You can expect for a freelance writer to come in and be able to save your organic campaign just you know what i mean it's like you have to get your stuff together first and i think that's what we really. Help teams to do so we have the canvas everything gets filled in there.
00:28:26
Speaker
The way the Bofu article is set up, the Canvas plugs directly into the article. So the pain points are here, benefits are here, features are here. Same with Taz, and I'll let her dive into that. But again, it's almost like a hub and spoke model.
00:28:42
Speaker
It's like the hub is the canvas and the spokes are the landing page and the bottom of funnel article. And the cool thing is if you have people coming to the bottom of funnel articles, which you can do is the people that did not convert on the article, you can retarget them with a similar landing page to be able to capture some of those conversions that you wouldn't have on the front end.
00:29:07
Speaker
I think that was a nice, that was, that's over to you, Tass. Yeah, that's for you. That was a good little lob, like, and how we do that is? Yes, come on. We're going to lob to you. Man, it's like we've done this before. ah From the landing page perspective, there's a little shift, right? So Lachey's writing for like, we're going to write it. We're going to put it out there. The landing page instead is going to work now as your little sandbox environment, right? Because you're not trying to capitalize on everybody coming in there. You are trying to test the effectiveness.
00:29:49
Speaker
of the messaging that comes out of the canvas, right? So if you come up with five, six, seven, eight problems that this ICP has, you're not going to talk about all eight problems on the page, but how do you choose which one is most impactful? How most marketers do it? They say, well, these sound like the most compelling ones. I'm just going to go with these ones, right? Like you just kind of assume because you're close to the product. You're like, these are obviously the most important pain points.
00:30:19
Speaker
But i I say like flip that, why don't we try and see what actually resonates with the ICP. So from the landing page perspective, instead of trying to get a perfect right away, my biggest thing is let's give our first iteration the best shot of success.
00:30:35
Speaker
Right? Because the problem with landing pages and testing is that they start off as a stakeholder soup. It's all vague and, you know, a bunch of saying a lot of words that mean nothing. And then we're like, let's test all the hypothesis that come from this. It's like, that is going to be a long road. Okay. You're going to play the game of life, right? Like a more game. Yeah.
00:30:59
Speaker
I have 17 kids. That's why I'm like, you got to give yourself the best chance of success. So my frameworks aren't as rigid. They are more so giving space to each of those components that we talked about. So for example, you have the hero, you start off with the most compelling capability. And the first iteration is typically like, what's your gut reaction telling you? Or if you have some data to support it, cool.
00:31:26
Speaker
But ultimately, you might have six value proposition ideas. You're not going to put six on the page. You're going to lose people, right? So you're starting off with the first three, and you're saying, these sound like they're the most compelling to me. Let the let the people tell ah tell me what those are. And then you have a problem but ah problem block. You might have six problems. We're going to start with three that we think are the most compelling. Let's see what people say about that.
00:31:51
Speaker
We are going to have these relevant proof points. These are the logos that we're going to feature on there. This is the relevant proof point. If we're targeting marketing, we're going to put marketing specific proof on the page. And then the biggest mistake I see is, well, you know, it's funny. I i just realized that I say the biggest mistake on like every podcast, a lot of things that they're always a different mistake. 100 biggest mistakes I see.
00:32:15
Speaker
One of the hundred biggest business mistakes or landing page mistakes. Okay. Um, but one of the bigger mistakes that I see is that not laying the expectation for the process because typically if you're working with SaaS, it could be a $5,000 ACB product. It could be a $200 product, right? Or it could be a $100,000 product. In which case, nobody is converting on the landing page itself.
00:32:43
Speaker
Not the first time, not the sixth time, not the 20th time. HockeyStack has a statistic that says for a low ACV product, it takes 34 website touch points before they MQL, before they decide to even contact you.
00:32:59
Speaker
They have to have 34 website touch points, right? So it could be visiting Lachey's blog 600 times. You know, it could be like six times with her, three times on the landing page, five times on the homepage, whatever that is. And so laying the expectation of what they get in return, because you are asking for their most precious digital currency, which is their time, right? Or their information or both.
00:33:25
Speaker
Um, what are they, what are they getting in return? So laying those expectations on there. Now you ship that page. You put in the relevant keywords that you would typically run for organic, but also for paid, right? You're doing it both. And Lachey is going to take those like most compelling initial value propositions, put it on there. Paid runs.
00:33:48
Speaker
We're looking at consumption data on the page. So while B2C is very focused on CRO from a conversion rate optimization perspective, we are looking at consumption rate optimization. Are they consuming the information on the page? Because in B2B, consumption leads to conversions. It is not conversions alone. And so we are looking at heat map data, screen recordings, right? How are people interacting with the page? What blocks are they most interested in? Are they making them their way down the page?
00:34:19
Speaker
You know, that kind of stuff. We're looking at those things. And then we decide, okay, we've had a good sample size. This is getting some good traction. Now let's test a single hypothesis. We have value proposition four that is not on this page. Let's swap one of those out and see if that's more compelling. And so now we're starting to do like more message testing versus like, let's change the color of this button and see.
00:34:45
Speaker
Engage with it more like, okay. um And so now we changed the value proposition. Maybe that one generates a lot more engagement. And now we can go back to Leshay and say, Hey, we're doing this. And Leshay can either add it to the article or replace one, but likely she will add it because Bofu content can be long form. So now she can go and do all of it. Alternatively, she could just have six value propositions within a Bofu article.
00:35:14
Speaker
you we see that it's generating enough engagement, we can then take those value propositions and put them in more of a shorter form version on the landing pages because we're seeing that it's got traction from the, from the organic side. So there's a lot of ways where just looking at the right places for those signals of consuming information, what resonates the most with your ICP and then going back and forth. And everyone's always like, well, how are you going to determine, you know, the effectiveness of your paid campaigns? And I'm like,
00:35:45
Speaker
look at the overall left and hand raisers on your one right. It's like the tide, what's the saying? The rising tide lifts all whatever. Yeah, lifts all boats. Yeah, that one. So it's literally that. it's just It's like how is marketing performing as a whole for the company? And I think the another big mistake we do is try to measure them in silos.
00:36:12
Speaker
Yes. And Jess and I have talked about that. That's one of the hardest things I think about being a paid person is that everyone just assumes, I mean, we laugh all the time because I always say it's like, but I put money in the magic money making machine. Like why, why didn't I, I put in $5. Why didn't 10 come out? I'm like, cause it takes six months for the $10 to come out. I don't know what to tell you.
00:36:33
Speaker
so it's But it's the companies that get that. like I'm wrapping up um i just didn an an advising engagement with a company that's actually pivoting, and they totally get it, and it was so refreshing to work with. like they knew they're They're not placing unfair expectations on their content or unfair expectations on their media.
00:36:51
Speaker
and They really understood, they look we have to look at this incrementally. like Let's just figure out, what do people even engage with first on LinkedIn? Do not worry about lead gen first, do not worry about conversions first. You have to take baby steps because you're trying to make your paid media and your content do everything in one shot and you're going to be disappointed. every you'll never You'll never follow through with anything because you're going to keep looking at it going, up didn't do it, pull it after two days, up didn't work, we'll pull it after three days. it's like you will never gain traction doing it that way. It is a flywheel, and you have to be so patient. And that's the hardest part. I think think that's been one of the things that Jess and I did the two-parter on was, what should I be measuring to know if it's even working? right If it's going to take six months for this to pay off into something that we'll never really be able to trace back, what are the things I should be looking at week over week? And then what are the things I should be looking at as the months go by? Because it's two completely different yardsticks.
00:37:41
Speaker
But there are things you can look at short term to understand, is this doing something? Instead of just always going to, they didn't opt in, didn't get a customer. It's like, you can't measure everything on that, right? It's all these little pieces that you don't see working together to create all those touch points you mentioned.
00:37:57
Speaker
Yeah, positive and negative indicators. Are they coming back to your website? Has your return visitor rate gone up? You know, those are small things that will tell you we're doing something that's driving, but that's the problem. It's like paid is dead because someone isn't coming directly from a Google ad or I use this example, which was when I was evaluating software internally.
00:38:22
Speaker
I can't make decisions without my boss is buying so when she sends me out to go evaluate different options and say hey bring me a list next one on one. But I'm doing the prep work ahead of the one-on-one. So it's Monday. I've evaluated some partners that I think, oh, they this could be a ah cool you know software that could help us with this. Well, I can't reach out to them until I talk to her about it. So my one-on-one's on Thursday. So now I bounce some poor marketers at this company like, I'm going to kill this campaign because people are just bouncing.
00:38:54
Speaker
Because they you know but and the reality is I've consumed all the information, I've taken notes, and I've put it away because I have my own process to follow internally in my company. I go to my boss, I talk to her, she says, yeah, this is great. Love these five that you have on the list. Go pursue the rest of the process. Amazing.
00:39:12
Speaker
I can't find the landing page again because likely it's either the campaign was killed or I just don't find the ad again. I go back. I search for the company, go to their homepage, sign up for a demo. And then suddenly it's like, yeah, direct traffic. We don't need aid. Let's kill paid. And then suddenly you're like, Hey, how come my organic traffic's dipped since we cut paid by $800,000?
00:39:37
Speaker
100%. That's one of the things I always tell them to measure is if you're going to go into LinkedIn in earnest and be doing, we're talking about thought leadership ads and all this stuff, do not measure what is tied back to LinkedIn. You have to look at organic search, you need to look at brand traffic, and of those two things, you know direct traffic. if those If those things are increasing, keep doing what you're doing, but no one connects those dots. so like Well, LinkedIn says there were no conversions. It's like,
00:40:01
Speaker
F-linked in. I don't care what it says. like Do not pay attention to that. Pay attention to what is actually happening overall with your marketing machine on your site. I read this quote um because I'm reading conversion code right now and um he says, paid can either be a slot machine or it could be an ATM machine.
00:40:20
Speaker
But it just depends on what you do before that right and your mindset going into it so if you're just gonna sit there and be like I'm just gonna gamble this money and just like try to get as much as I can out of it with zero input strategy or thought behind it. Versus like this is my actual debit card I have a single play and I'm just gonna put put it in and then get what I want out of it.
00:40:42
Speaker
um willing to lose a 3% ATM fee, but outside of that, you know? um And so that's kind of the angle and approach you have to take. It's like, are you gambling or are you actually going to be intentional about this? um And I think at the end of the day, that's what where we're doing is trying to help them be a little more intentional about how they create content and how they do landing pages because we walk in and we're like, just FYI, 80% of our engagement is not going to be about landing pages.
00:41:12
Speaker
I'm like, all right. And it's like landing page is a throwaway. You just replace landing page with email, article, whatever. But if you don't start with the buyer and your product and your customer, like it doesn't matter what what we do. Yeah, it does.
00:41:28
Speaker
You know, I was going to say you bringing that up about like them not converting the first time and maybe having to go talk to a senior or something like that. It reminds me of what one of my clients just went through. So they sell, they sell law enforcement software to government agencies. So you can imagine the sales cycle on that. so yeah And it's like the ultimate procurement department, our government. but Yeah. ah You know what I mean? And it's like,
00:41:58
Speaker
We had someone come to a bottom of funnel article in April and stay on the page, maybe about three or four minutes, and then they bounced away. And I'm just thinking, like imagine if we wanted to go in and switch that entire article because we've seen somebody came in, they didn't convert right away, but that same person came back, I want to say maybe in August and converted on the same piece that they came in in April on. um but And I think that just goes to show it's like, even with Bofu content on the blogging side, like they might not convert the first time they read the article, right? And I think
00:42:35
Speaker
That's why our strategies overlap and play together so well, because just just because they didn't convert on the article the first time doesn't mean that they're not interested, that the campaign's a flop, that they won't convert at all. And using paid ad landing pages to retarget that person, you might just have to nudge them a little bit more. Like Taz said, they might go to somebody else and their one-on-one might not be for the next two weeks. Maybe the exec goes on vacation and they got to wait two or three weeks. You know what I mean? So it's like a bunch of different internal factors that could play into why they didn't convert immediately.
00:43:10
Speaker
But I think, and it's, and it's funny cause I always get on her. I'm like, Oh, people are willing to spend 30 K a month on ads, but don't want to spend five on organic. so andrew Yeah. And it's funny what she just mentioned about like people with the expectation of wanting the conversion right away, even with paid because with organic, at least they kind of expect for there to be a little bit of a lag. Um, typically. I can get results a little bit quicker, and I say that lightly, but it's usually because the intent is there. So imagine people that are trying to target top of funnel terms, and they're like, oh, this isn't converting, and we're not doing this, because some people don't understand that this level's in total. You know what I mean? It's like, oh, you know what is sales enablement? OK, I'm expecting to see you know an increase of however much this month in MQLs. And it's like you're not even targeting the right
00:44:06
Speaker
Type of term to see that and even if you are targeting the right term again that person might not convert that first time but it's about delivering the information to them in a way that makes sense in a way that puts them first and not the search engine and i say that all the time it's like.
00:44:23
Speaker
The acronym SEO usually stands for search engine optimization, and I call it sales enablement optimization because again, it's like you can rank all you want, but but if the content isn't positioned in a way to convert that person, and again, maybe not the first time, but if you do a good job the first time, they will remember you. They'll bookmark it. They'll do something, and they may you know turn around and come back to that article again and say, oh, you know what?
00:44:53
Speaker
This was really, really helpful. And then I want to dive into something else, but Jess, I want to let you go because um I know you wanted to say something, but I want to talk about repurposing too from a bottom up funnel perspective. Yes. That's where I was coming in. Yes. You read my mind.
00:45:10
Speaker
So with bottom of funnel content, it's like, I like, I'm a very like pragmatic type of thinker where it's like, I think Taz and I are both like very data-driven, her more than me. Like she's a numbers queen. I can't do the numbers and the spreadsheets and the charts. And I can't, I, my brain just... Sounds like Jess and Pops out. Literally, I cannot do it. But the thing is, it's like if you have a bottom-up funnel piece that's converting well and you see that, you can take that content and repurpose it into an email, repurpose it into a webinar, repurpose it into a YouTube video. it's like There are ways to to be able to stretch the content more than just a blog post. And again, if we go back to what Taz was talking about with landing pages, it's the same thing. it's like
00:45:55
Speaker
one fuels the other one, but not just from a landing page perspective, but it can run over into every faucet of the business. So much marketing collateral, you know what I mean? So it's like, if you have that information that says, okay, this type of messaging converts, you leak that messaging into all your other collateral. And then that's when the changes start to come, I believe. Yeah.
00:46:17
Speaker
ah Okay, this is amazing. We could talk forever and ever. Tass, because she's amazing, has a client call. Of course, she's busy. She's she's in demand. um We're gonna let you guys go. Thank you so much for coming. I think this is gonna need a part two. So we'll get it on the calendar and maybe we'll make it happen in like November.
00:46:38
Speaker
and We need do a lot of part two, so I am also amazing. i'm this isn' for sharinging Thank you both. Appreciate you. Thank you so much for having us. Thank you so much. Best marketing, baby.
00:46:51
Speaker
See you guys next time. Yes. Thanks for listening to that's marketing baby. If you dig what we're putting down, be sure to subscribe and share with your marketing besties. Cause you know, hot marketers don't gatekeep. And if you're like, this is not enough. I need more. We got you. Ransom raves is the official newsletter of that's marketing baby. Every week, Susan and I share one thing we love and loathe in the world of marketing. Get on the list at that's marketing baby.com. Okay.