Andy Crestodina: Driving Growth with Search and Content Optimization

Sourabh:
Most of our audience are tech marketers. They're very specialized, pricey solutions, but they drive a ton of ROI, okay.

Is the company's Google search engine results page? Is there SERP ranking, even relevant when the buyers are specialized?

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Andy:
There are plenty of brands for which search is not gonna be a big driver. Search may be a big source of noise where the form submissions you get and the quality of the traffic is relatively low. But if you look at the opportunity cost of ignoring it... I gotta say that it should be something that we still pay attention to because there might be things that are kind of low hanging fruit, phrases within reach. Very niche phrases like, “You're writing a success story or a case study, and it's about e-commerce personalization for perishable goods”. I don't know, something like, long relative key phrase. I wouldn't ignore the key phrase, especially for those, long-tailed, very niche topics because it might hit the right person at just the right time. But there's certainly more to life than search.

Sourabh:
Okay. Perfect. I love that. There is certainly more to life than search, you know, despite what some very large search companies would have you believe. Okay. So let's move then from search, right, to the site, and then we'll go beyond the site. We'll go to syndication, we'll go to social. But on the site, totally unfair question for you. A tech company for tech marketers: What would you, if you had to guess, what would you say is the most important page on their site?

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Andy:
The page about the product that goes into the specifics of how it solves a problem and for whom it solves that problem. It's the sales page, the money page, usually the second click. So visitor gets a referral, “I might need this thing”. They land. They're on the top of the homepage. They not that likely to scroll. They want specific information to them, and they know that every time they click, they get more specific information for them. So the homepage has to quickly tell them that they're in the right category, where we are, we're in the right place, and that they're probably gonna hit a big dropdown and they're gonna see some options, some use cases, some specifics of the name of the product or the category in more detail. They click, they land. Now this page that they landed on, right, the second page of the visit is probably the most important page and the page for which it's critical to emulate a sales conversation. Answer the top questions as if they're having a call with your top rep. Add evidence to support all those answers, right? Testimonials, case studies, years in business, number of happy clients, all that good stuff. And then calls to action, both at the top and at the bottom. So it's the product page, or the main sales page, and it's the page that functions just like a rep who's walking them through answering questions ,addressing objections, and providing proof points.

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Sourabh:
‍Love it. Now, I'm gonna take this one step further, and this is controversial for a number of our attendees.

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Andy:
‍Okay, Great.

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Sourabh:
‍Should there always be a pricing page?

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Andy:
No, I don't believe so. You may see evidence that people want pricing information. For example, if you type in your brand, Google suggests the word “price”. “Oh, wow. People wanna know about price”. If you look at the navigation of people through your website, check analytics, you see people bouncing around, going to pages that seem to indicate, or they're using a back button, trying to find information about price. But that does not mean that you must have a pricing page, nor does it mean you have to show your pricing. You may be at a disadvantage if it's a crowded category and there's big players and people might just jump to another site to get the answer about the pricing over there. We have to acknowledge that if we don't give this information, people can go other places and get similar information.

But there are calls to action that can cleverly set the expectation that they're about to give pricing information. You know, speak toa rep about enterprise pricing, or ask us about subscription rates. The CTA can sort of tell the visitor that that's how they get the question answered, and that the bar is low for commitment. Just chat with an expert, right? “Chat with us about our pricing packages. Chat with us about subscriptions. Enterprise options available. Click here, talk to the Sourabh to find out how the CTA can sort of stand in as a proxy for price”. So yeah, you might be at a sited is advantage, but no, it's not true that everything has to have a pricing page. I don't think so.

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Sourabh:
Love it. And then you're really well recognized expert in this space. You've had tremendous success, right, with a lot of successful brands. So I think this is really helpful because as you know, as marketers, right, we focus on B2B. We drive value for our B2B customers, but the noise that we get hit is predominantly consumer marketing. You're dead without a pricing page. So I think it really helps to understand this, that it's about the buyer's specific journey, and like you said, that best emulates a good sales conversation. So picking up on that sales conversation, right? Many of our clients, they syndicate their best offers to a dedicated, set of buyers in our database that's showing intent for a solution they're trying to solve. Now, this is happening, right,

very much “off our site”, at least it's starting with an email. Going to a landing page, which normally isn't asking them for information we already know, it's asking about pain points, right? And timeline. How are you gonna use this solution? Imagine yourself doing that. When they've got that, when they've got a really satisfactory piece of content that's really explaining how the product would help them, our clients would love to take that conversation to sales. I think we all get that right? They're urgent, just get out of the way.

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Andy:
Yep.

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Sourabh:
What do you think is the second best call to action. If they're not ready to talk to sales, should we be taking them? Should they be looking at how another customer made this step? Or should we be trying to take them deeper into the pain point? What have you seen work?

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Andy:
‍Well, one of the things that's happening in the psychology of the visitor who clicks, and lands in that landing page and finds the story, and it's maybe like a use case or case study kind of a success thing, and they get details about how that can solve a problem for someone similar to them. First of all, I think you could improve the click-through rate on there, or the conversion rate on that call to action, by making it more, immediate. You know ,“Chat with an expert”, or more personal, “Talk to Sourabh”. Put the face, whatever that down— if it was a landing page with the download, make sure that the download, the PDF file, has a CTA in it, right? Or that the landing page suggests that you'll be back in touch within 24 hours if they fill out this little form, you'll talk to them right away.

I think people aren't really working hard enough on the primary CTA generally. Either make the impact of taking that action seem bigger, find out how, or make the expense or cost of that action seem lower. “Chat with Dave, doesn't cost much”. “Talk to now”. “Download immediately”. These are things that reduce— basically everyone's doing an ROI calculation in their brain before they click on anything. If there was a different thing that might be useful. So let's say I'm making this landing page, this PDF, and they're not ready for that yet. You just offer them more similar examples. It's like you're on a sales call where they didn't hang up the phone yet. You're just gonna keep telling them how this can work for them, what problem it solves, the impact that it had for them, right?

You're basically interspersing the anecdotes or the little use cases of how the amazing utility this has. There's a personality type on a disc test that's a high seed that just wants more information. There are hoarders of information, they're not done yet. You've gotta keep giving them more and more and more. So, this is the case for making long pages. This is the case for building long funnels. This is the case for that sales sheet being more than a one page thing. And intersperse it with links that go to similar sales pages about how you solved a very similar problem for someone else, or you solve the exact problem for someone who's very similar. Just keep going deeper with similar assets and that high information buyer will eventually have enough trust.

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Sourabh:
I love it. Okay. And I've seen this firsthand, Andy. I've sat in on sales meetings and intro discovery meetings at the world's largest networking company, right? In my marketing life. And I've seen how masterfully the sales team will pick up on small nuances and throw in, “Alright, well let's talk about a healthcare example”. And I've been sitting there naively as a marketer, it's like, “Wow, these guys are in cybersecurity. Why are they talking about healthcare?” Because they respect the healthcare decision maker. They know how hard it is to make that work, right? So that one little story is open. And what normally happens is the client now starts to unleash their question, once they've got a good example,

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Andy:
And something else that just makes that same point is that the person who's engaged may not be the person who's not yet sold. There might be more. This is a high tech sale, right? This is a big ticket item. It's a major decision with major implications and a lot of decision makers. Long sales cycle, multiple decision makers. That's when you need more content, more assets, more examples, more case studies, more success stories, more datapoints, more statistics, more testimonials. Because that person might just belike, “Oh yeah, my boss isn't sold on this yet. I really want it, but I've got another decision maker behind me who really respects healthcare. If I could find a case— Oh, there it is. Great! I can send that along”. Enable them to sell internally. That's partly what you're doing here. Don't assume that the decision maker is actually the person on the screen. It might be right behind them.

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Sourabh:
Exactly. And we may not have that person, but they—

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Andy:
‍No, right? Yeah.

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Sourabh:
Okay. So let's go a little bit further into something you mentioned, which is crowded marketplaces, right? Most technology buyers that are buying a solution that almost looks identical to a dozen others have started to get really savvy on reviews, right? Third-party site reviews. Now for really good products, and especially for companies that have figured out a really, really quick sales cycle with strong customer support, because they're not that hard. They get a lot of good reviews. But Andy, these reviews are happening on other sites. How do we leverage those reviews in our outbound journeys or in our content? What's the best way to do that?

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Andy:
Well, the big picture here is that we want to avoid making unsupported marketing claims. So every important sales point that you're making, every important question that you're answering, should be supported with some form of evidence. And it should be supported with evidence nearby the answer. So it's a similar question, “How do I get testimonials?”, or, “How best to use testimonials?” The tip here is to not put them on a separate place, but to build them into that sales page so they appear in the flow. It's not why the visitor came, but you're injecting these things into their field of vision while they're here. Reviews, I don't know the legality of it, but you can mine some of these things from other sources and try to get permission or reach out to that person or... some sites allow you to use the badge that kind of summarizes it, like the G2 thing. There's millions of them.

But generally, reviews are powerful social proof. Probably the most powerful social proof is a video testimonial, which would be far more impactful than just reviews. I mean, we're all triggered by a good star reviews when we see them. And if you have trouble getting social proof, reviews, endorsements, testimonials and reviews or these kind of videos, then look for other types of evidence. How many installations do you have? How many total users do you have? How many years have you been in business? How many ticket shave you closed or whatever the ROI, or dollars an hour saved or whatever the thing is. So there's qualitative and quantitative evidence. Reviews are powerful, qualitative. Qualitative is usually better, but also there's another type of buyer that just wants a lot of data. And by filling the page with both types, qualitative and quantitative evidence, you're gonna have a stronger chance of converting that visitor.

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Sourabh:
Love it. Now, I'm gonna do a quick reminder because our audience always forgets and then they ask me questions afterwards. Right? So if you have a question, please get it into Andy because we will go into the next three or four, and then we'll run out of time. Okay? So Andy, I'm gonna switchgears from the inbound buyer and the marketer's role to how, especially for those of us running campaigns on account based marketing campaigns for a set of accounts where we're working hand-in-hand with sales all the way through the funnel, and sometimes even post purchase, right?

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Andy:
‍Good. Yeah.

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Sourabh:
Validation, right? What kind of content is what we're talking about? Produced well, right. Easily visible. It's minimal friction. It's really easy to consume. What kind of content should we be giving our sales team for them to be following up with the folks that are coming in on these journeys?

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Andy:
‍Sure. This to me is a feedback cycle. So when the marketer goes to the sales team and says, “What kind of questions are people asking you?”, salespeople sometimes are able to give the answer. I find it more useful to ask the salesperson, “What questions are you just sick and tired of answering?”, because it's gonna kind of trigger an emotion and they'll vent a little bit and they'll tell you like what they keep hearing. That's what you need. If you could produce content that answers the sales questions, you can publish that and give it back to them that they can use in that journey, right? In the sales funnel. They can use it to address objections in our world. So we sell a relatively high ticket. These are website redesigns for mid-market businesses. So when I publish and clients ask us stuff like, “Oh, I'm changing domains”.

I've got a very detailed article that explains everything you should ever do about when you change your domain name. That is very useful during sales because you can show it to the client even after the kickoff meeting once they're already a client. “This is useful”, or “Best practices for homepages”, or , “Best practices for sales pages”. These are directly relevant to our offer, to our service. And they're frequently used by the sales team. The best sales team's kind of had that circuit built into their brain already, and they'll go to the marketing team and say, “God, I wish we had an article about ‘x’”. And so you have to really collaborate with the sales team. If there's no collaboration, my best advice is to go lock them in a closet and steal their laptop and look at their sent mail folder. Their sent mail folder is filled with content ideas. That's exactly what they need. They're already producing content, these one-to-one context, but if you can produce content that answers the questions they're getting in their email, then you're going to give each of them superpowers for their next conversation.

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Sourabh:
Love it. I'm gonna step back a little bit for our friends that have cracked the code on driving a subscription-based entry. And what I mean by that is they've figured out how their product can be used in a free trial. Big shift in buying models, especially for cloud and cybersecurity. If customer can even get a little taste of what it's like post-install, post use, you're way ahead of the competition that's still coming over for your sales meeting. Okay?

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Andy:
Yep.

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Sourabh:
So for a client that can drive a customer from prospect to using to user through their website, they don't need to have initial sales engagement. What have you typically seen as like the biggest issues with websites that are trying to drive a free trial or immediate use case? What things stand out to you, Andy, that you are sick of having to fix?

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Andy:
Well, when you get to that visitor, if you can get them to... Your job there is to lower the commitment so that they grab onto the freemium offer, right? Or the trial period, or, you know, put in their credit card. So you're really trying to build the page in a way that shows them that they're almost there. That they can use this immediately, right? The benefit to them is their perceived use case for the tool, which might be high or low. It's what it is. It's hard to change what they're looking for in the moment. But the cost to them is something that you could definitely participate in that psychology with them by reminding them that they can use it immediately or reminding them that it's only a dollar for the first three months or whenever the, you know, keeping the friction low.

The next thing that happens, though, is also really interesting because now your job is to reduce churn. The best SaaS models have incredible education as soon as you get inside. So I'm writing an article now about finding blog topics. It's almost a roundup of MarTech tools. And so I'm getting free trials of a bunch of these tools to write this article. And when I'm inside, it's fascinating. Some of them, I'm quite tempted to keep. I signed up the free trial because I wanna make a screenshot because I'm writing an article, but once I'm inside, this thing looks awesome because it's educating me as I go. This was a tip I've heard years ago about cell phones. People's likelihood to stay with their current cell phone carrier at the time was a function of how many apps they used on their phone.

You wanna really pull them in and make them kind of addicted to the insights that they're gonna get or the utility of the tool. They came in for one thing, usually, right? They have a narrow use case, but while they're there, chat bot, message blurbs, dialogue boxes and hover states to tell this person what else they can get, how useful it will be, try this, next steps, continue. And that's I think how to make someone sort of addicted to the product and to keep them on the hook after they sign up for the free trial.

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Sourabh:
‍I've got to say, Andy, I'm guilty of this too. I just recently had to set up another subscription for a client. I've used this software for years, but it was my first time coming back as a first-time user because it was email for them and I didn't need to look at the highlighted features, but it was so easy to.

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Andy:
Yeah

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Sourabh:
‍I ended up looking at all of them. I got training on a product I'm already using because of better design.

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Andy:
Matters so much. Right? And how much time did that take? I know, yeah, it's so quick. And how much visual friction? I mean, it's visually noisy, right, to have little message boxes appear, but it's the first time in the tool. Yep. Right? Y almost feel a bit of gratitude when it's done nicely. I've got two tools right now. There are tabs right in front of me. It's gonna hurt a little bit to end my free trial on these because I've gotten to know them pretty well just from that in-context demo. Really powerful.

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Sourabh:
I love it. So I'm gonna take this a step further into something that's very hard to design visually, but it's the cornerstone of enterprise tech sales, which is not the... It's not the, the connection, it's not the demo, it's not the trial, it's not the validation. It's expansion. Andon our websites, most of us really struggle with where to put the content and the journeys for existing customers to be upsold and cross-sold. So, I'm just gonna start there, Andy, what are we supposed to do? These pages are buried.

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Andy:
‍Yeah, it's a great question. So basically, the job of the website is to satisfy the visitor's current information needs, right? They have a question, you gotta answer that question. If they don't find the answer, they'll leave and go find the answer somewhere else. That's fundamentally what websites are there for. That's why the visitor is on the page. True story in the life of every visitor, you've gotta know what that story is to satisfy their information needs. So the question here is, how can you expand their understanding, educate while they're here on the page? What can we do to go from X to X + 1 with what their experience here? The mistake people make in this is that they try to push that too hard too early. You have to really give them what they're looking for first and then invite them deeper through UX

This is just the design. This is a design question. One of the ways that this becomes easier is a lot of sales pages get down to a page block or module that has some case studies in it. And the case studies are sometimes really boring titles. What we did for Company X, Company Y, Company Z. The company name is not what they care about mostly, right? They care about the impact. So the best case study titles are things that, “How we grew, you know, this MarTech company 800%”. When that is the title of the case study, when that's the name of the click, when that's the visual cue that I see as I scroll, I got value from your case study even without clicking. Name the case study the juiciest eight words from the case study. Make that the subhead, the title of the case study.

Now you're gonna have higher click-through rate on that. When the visitor lands, you have a chance now to tell the full story. What drove the impact? Yeah, it was what the main thing was, but it was also this other feature, this other tool, the upgraded subscription. We did more for them. So once the person is ready for that bigger explanation, that bigger story, that big case studies, that success then you have the chance that they're leaning in more, right? And that there's less visual noise around them that you're better able to expand their understanding of the value.

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Sourabh:
‍I love it. And I mean, Andy, I know you help marketers. You've been doing it, you know, a long time as long as I've been doing it, right, it's two decades. I mean, I'd be convinced you're a sales guy because when you look at emails sent from sales teams, that's exactly what they do with marketing content. They have to put the result ahead of the link because normally, the titles and links aren't helping. So the sales team has to sell the content.

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Andy:
The sales team knows what works, right? We gotta listen to them. Look at their sent mail folder and they're doing it, right? Marketers geta little bit clever. They're a little bit enamored by the brand, you know, where they write this headline, “Flipping the script on HR”. What? Who cares? That doesn't mean anything to me. Right? Reducing onboarding costs by 85%. Wow, that is really why I'm on your website, right? That is impact, that's a numeral which stands out in the line of text. I's the point of the of the product and of the service. I made that one up, but you get the idea. Clever is worse than clear. Be clear and use numbers, use psychology, right? Work in the impact. Make it sound, you know... You're trying to trigger an emotion here. So I think the best marketers really sort of give up the market. They get very, very close to that sales language, which was your point.

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Sourabh:
And so this is probably gonna be our last question because we do hold these to 25 minutes. I might go a minute over.

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Andy:
‍Wow. Okay. That was fast.

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Sourabh:
It does go quickly, Andy. International. Most of our clients, these are the top 100 tech companies in the world, right? Their campaigns are focused on Europe or North American, but then they're all over the Middle East, South America, Australia, Asia-Pacific, and Japan. Right? So what mostly happens, I'm just being really candid with you on global campaigns, is the first or second entry point is translated. And we got nothing. Especially when it's a new product or a new release because it's not ready. What have you seen as a good strategy when you're trying to cater to international buyers or visitors coming in? What works and what would you say is just not gonna work?

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Andy:
Well, you'd have to get lucky for what works in one market to work in another, right? Your best approach is, as usual, find out what wins. This is nice way to sum this all up: What wins the sales conversation for that audience? If you don't know that, you're gonna struggle in marketing. If you know what wins the sales conversation for that audience, or in this case, in that market, that geospecific market, then you got a chance to tailor that page for that audience. You know, you can make a version of that offer. And in some cases, it's actually like a variation of the product. We did a big website for an IOT company, massive global brand. What they do in India? Totally different. Different technology, different price point, different buyer. So it did not make sense to lead with the North American message. Unsuccessful. So you have to adapt that content for the specific audience, the same as anything else. This is the same as anything else. It's just the geospecific version of it.