#70 - Write your SaaS Growth

Your landing page needs to sell, not just look pretty.

Nov 25, 2023

Welcome 375 SaaS Founders, Tech Entrepreneurs, and Marketers to the 70th edition of Write your SaaS Growth Newsletter:

In this edition, we discuss:

Google Ads: Scale your SaaS with Google Ads
Copywriting: Why landing pages are important for your SaaS
Sales: 2 myths on sales that is stopping you sell your SaaS
SEO: How MailChimp s crushing SEO: A Case Study
Social Media Marketing: 4 steps to better hooks

Let’s GO!

Btw, today before we begin today - It’s a festive season to shop and sell! 🥳
I hope you all are having some great Black Friday deals going.

I’m incredibly grateful to the sponsors who help run this newsletter. I’m having 2 slots open for the next 3 months for my newsletter sponsorship. To my exclusive readers, I’m offering a BLACK FRIDAY 50% OFF for $49 to get featured 4 times in the coming 4 months. If you’d like to sponsor any of the upcoming editions, just reply to this email and I’ll share more details. Coming to today’s sponsors:

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Google Ads 📈

Scale your SaaS with Google Ads:

Collin says here’s how to Overcome B2B Lead Gen Scaling Challenges in Google Ads (Live Account Breakdown)

Background For You:

we have been scaling every 14-21 days for the last 2 months
up to $300/day in spend at our desired CPA (tCPA is $60, aCPA is $59 with conversion lag)
maintaining 40% Search IS so we knew we could scale
#2 in overall Search IS compared to 12+ competitors

What We Did

with BFCM being a big seasonality trend in search volume (products to be delivered by EOY), we wanted to test an aggressive market capture
so we raised budgets from $280/day to $400/day (we didn't touch anything else, just a budget change)

WHY

in the previous 5 days, Google was OVER spending at $300/day WHILE being under our goal, and we wanted to capitalize on this

What Happened (8 Days Post Change)

Primary Metrics Ad Spend: $1,153 (-36%)
$280/day to $144/day Leads: 22 (-27%) CPL: $58 (0%) CVR: 9% (-18%)
Secondary Metrics Clicks: 216 (-21%) Impressions: 1,635 (-23%) CTR: 13% (+3%) CPC: $5.34 (-19%)
Competitive Metrics Search IS: 25% (-28%)
- Search Lost IS (Rank): 75% (+15%)
- 1st Position: 19% (-14%)
- Top 4 Position: 81% (+1%)
- Click Share: 20% (-28%)

So What Did We Do?

Optimization Idea #1 (4 Days Post Change)
- we noticed the budget go lower and lower after day 1 of the change
- we discussed 3 options and ended up deciding on the safest, just letting Google have more time to see if, naturally, Google spends more each day (using the Segment By Days option)
- 4 days later nothing happened in our favor. Google continued to spend less and less per day (now in the $70-$80 range, a massive drop in just over 8 days)

so why is this happening? it's pretty unusual...usually after an aggressive bidding change, we see tCPA/aCPAs be the thing we watch...not the actual spend the reason why it's not spending isn't due to the daily budget,

It's these 2 things:

Google, for some reason, doesn't believe it can achieve the tCPAs we have set (so it's slowly killing itself in spending because it's not confident in achieving the goal we set)
Because Google doesn't think it can be profitable, it's lowering the CPC bids, which then is hurting us even more DUE to the increase in competition/bids with BFCM basically here

So we have 3 optimization ideas we can now try:

Opening tCPA to $60-$70 to let it breathe (aCPA is still $59)
Remove bidding restriction (tCPA) and go to Maximize Conversions (+ lower budget from $400/day to $250-$300/day so not a huge jump)
Remove smart bidding completely and go with manual CPC, losing background info BUT can force higher bids since that's a huge reason why we are losing out on searches (Lost by Ad Rank)

With capitalizing on the search volume + want faster clicks, #2 or #3 is the way to go if you want to try and stay stable with CPL, #1 is the way to go (but it will be slower spending up).

Copywriting 📈

Why landing pages are important for your SaaS:

Jackson says landing pages are where good products go to die. I see it all the time... A killer product... Great Google Ads set-up, and then... A landing page that couldn’t sell water in a desert.

Let's talk about how to fix it.

Product. Forget everything you think you know. Your landing page needs to sell, not just look pretty. You need to be brutally honest with what your product does and who it does it for.
1. Pain points are your gold mine
2. Speak directly to them
3. Your headline shouldn't be vague
4. You need to drill right into what keeps your customers up at night.
5. And the solution? Your product.
Now, let's talk visuals. You can use them to stand out in the marketplace quickly. But only when they're done right. I see a lot of brands post their images directly from Alibaba. Or slightly edit stock images. Don't.
1. Show your product in action
2. Include before-and-after shots
3. Or user-generated content—real people with real results. This will help help you address objections and build trust.
Next up, trust. You want to build up trust fast. Especially if you're targeting a colder audience. Which you'll do in your prospecting and awareness ads.
1. Scan through your reviews
2. Find the ones that tell a story
3. Put them just under the hero or incorporate it
4. Even include the not-so-perfect ones with a response that shows you're listening and continuously improving
  The faster you can build trust, the faster you sell.
Lastly, I want to talk about form-fields. Your checkouts. Your opt-ins. The fewer the fields, the better. Don’t build a maze between customers and the checkout. Simplify it. If you can, allow your customers to check out as guests.

This isn’t rocket science. But most brands forget that your landing pages are as important as your ads.

Sales 📈

2 myth on Sales that can help you for your SaaS.

Jeremy says the world of sales is full of misinformation. Here are the 2 biggest myths you’ve been told... (A thread).

here’s a lot of broke people trying to teach sales. You must be careful who you listen to. When I worked as a W-2 salesperson I made 7-figures a year in commissions for 10 straight years. And there’s two sales myths I want to debunk today.

Myth 1: Selling is a numbers game: I will tell you that selling can indeed be a numbers game for you. If all you know is traditional selling techniques. Look…

This myth dates back to when the telephone was first invented. Salespeople would call all day and be rejected left and right. So the managers would come up with the excuse that: “Selling is just a numbers game.” All to make their people feel better.

Think about it. If sales was a numbers game… I wouldn’t be broke at 21 selling door to door. I would be filthy rich with the amount of doors I’ve knocked on. You see… With the new way of selling I’ve been using for years… I don’t need to be pushy, and I don’t make the call about me or my company. I make it all about my prospects and their problems.

The better I become at persuading, the more I sell. It’s not about numbers, it’s about making the numbers count.
Myth 2: Rejection is just a part of sales: Why do you accept rejection is just something you have to accept in selling, when it doesn’t have to be? What if the reason your prospects rejected you was because you were actually triggering that rejection?

Look… You’ve been taught by the “experts” that rejection is part of the process. But it doesn’t have to be. I’m not saying there’s a sale in every sales call. But what if you could stop triggering that rejection?

99% of the time… It’s the way you communicate that makes prospects reject you. That’s why I’ve been teaching people how to avoid these triggers so they can eliminate them from their sales conversations.

🧰 Marketing Tech Stack to Add this Week! 🧰

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SEO 📈

Case Study: How MailChimp is crushing SEO.

The Boring Marketer says Mailchimp is crushing SEO. 584K keywords driving $9.9M in traffic each month. The secret? Leveraging the power of a few SEO strategies. Here’s how they do it:

Killer branding - 15% of their organic traffic is branded - 29.5% of their traffic (worth $1.6M) goes to their homepage. - Years of brand building, quirky branding elements, and focus on EEAT have got them here
Broad informational keywords - 30.4% of their organic traffic goes to their blog - almost 20% of organic traffic goes to informational keywords - Instead of only focusing on keywords related to “email marketing”, they are using TOF keywords - Keywords such as “make money online”, “what is competitor analysis”, and “catchy slogan analysis.” - Such keywords would work great for people in the “problem unaware” or “problem aware” stages.
User-centric content - Their organic traffic saw a significant boost after Google’s Helpful Content update in Dec 2022 - This, again, can be attributed to how authoritative and valuable their content is
Marketing Glossary - Mailchimp’s content hub on marketing glossaries gets 11.9% of their organic traffic
Focus on international SEO - Only 31.8% of their traffic comes from the US - Their organic reach expand to 184 different countries!
50M backlinks - 12.9% of their backlinks have the anchor text “MailChimp” - 2% of their backlinks target their website homepage

Social Media Marketing 📈

How to write better hooks?

Erica says last week, a hook stopped me in my tracks. I became totally immersed without realizing it. And then I read the entire post even though I'm NOT the target audience. It was so good I have to share it and explain why it worked.

It hit all 4 'great hook' principles:

Pokes at the pain
Piques curiosity
Adds credibility
Leaves the reader wanting more

Let's break it down line by line:

LINE 1: “If you gave your 10 year old kid nunchucks” It immediately opens a curiosity loop. I know this isn’t going to be about nunchucks. So I want to know where it’s going. Also, "nunchucks" brings up a specific image. If she said "a toy" it wouldn't hit nearly as hard. ***Specificity***

LINE 2: “And they chased their little brother around the house with them relentlessly” It keeps me invested. We’re in the moment now. I can’t leave until I know where she’s taking this. More specificity working here, too: "little brother" "around the house". If she said "sibling" and didn't give me a setting, I wouldn't be able to picture it as easily.

LINE 3: “You’d take the nunchucks away.” I’m nodding. “Duh.” This is a brilliant way to get everyone agreeing with a common experience to frame what you’re about to compare it to.

LINE 4: “That’s pretty much what Google just did to Sales & Marketing teams who have been using cold email as a spam cannon.” Boom. Like I said, I’m not the target audience. But it’s so well constructed, I want to know more. It also builds her credibility. She’s responding to a real time event.

THIS IS HOW YOU HOOK PEOPLE.

You make them feel something. You keep them invested. You center a common experience that annoys, delights, or confuses us. And don’t let your audience ever wonder “why should I care?”

BUT MOST PEOPLE MESS THIS UP

I’ve edits thousands of hooks over the past 2 years. Most of them are a hot mess. Mostly because you assume the reader knows what you know, so you don't get specific enough, and you don’t tug on emotions. You struggle because it’s a skill you haven’t yet learned.

YOU CAN LEARN IT

You simply need to understand, principally, what makes a great hook. And review 100s of examples of great hooks just like this, accompanied by breakdowns, so it sticks. And, practice writing your own with an AI trained assistant.

How can we help each other? 🥅

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Thanks for reading! SaaSwrites is a humble attempt to help SaaS founders and marketers grow their SaaS.

See you next Saturday.

Ricky,

SaaSwrites

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Write your SaaS Growth