When to do a complete website overhaul… and when not to
In my B2B SaaS conversion copywriting world, “aspirational behavior” + “temporal landmarks” almost always equals “new website copy in Q1Q2.”
But is it the right thing to do, right now, for your startup?…
Adding power words to your B2B SaaS website headlines won't fix conversions. Do this instead.
I’ve reviewed dozens of early-stage startup websites and worked with Series A and bootstrapped companies on their web copy and messaging, and in all cases, tweaking hero section headline was not the answer.
The answer was figuring out why the website was actually underperforming — and how to fix that.
The “how” will depend on your product and your audience. But the website sections that are neglected are almost always the same.
When what you don’t know hurts your conversion rates
You can’t scale effectively without answering these questions:
“What do we say to our audience?”
“How can we position ourselves in a way that makes sense to our audience?”
“How do we differentiate ourselves from other solutions?”
“How can we stand out — and present our product in a way that makes our prospects want to find out more?”
“How can we persuade our prospects to reach out?”
And very often, as I start answering these questions for my clients, this is where we uncover those potential issues that would otherwise have stayed invisible.
A rocketship launch or a leap of faith?
Trying to speed up your startup growth may be slowing it down. If you’re focusing on quick fixes and not pattern-finding.
When my prospects say: “We have no time for this,” “We already know everything about our customers,” “We’ll just A/B test it,” or “Can you just write it?” — what I hear is: “We’re flying blind and kinda like it that way.”
(I have yet to work on a project where all of the research data lined up neatly with assumptions and guesses about conversion drivers for a specific target audience. Never ever has it happened — which is why we need the research phase in the first place.)
5 signs your B2B SaaS startup isn't ready to scale — and how to fix it
Unpopular opinion: moving faster is easier when you have a solid foundation.
It runs contrary to the “move fast and break things” motto — but as you go from startup to scaleup, moving fast and breaking your ad funnels costs conversions without opening up new opportunities.
For the purposes of this post, we’re assuming that you already have happy customers, found MPF and have developed a growth strategy.
If not — running fast and lean experiments makes a world of sense.
But if you’re at the point when it’s all about growth, then read on to find out about a (tragically undervalued) document that’ll take your growth foundations from shaky to rock-solid — and help you scale faster and without driving CAC through the roof.
You’re Doing
Growth
Wrong
For startup founders and marketers tired of learning about growth the hard way
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Content and copy are frequently treated as separate skillsets, and sometimes content gets broken down even further by channel, fragmenting messaging and making it hard to align on how to talk about the brand, the product, and its benefits.
But what if instead we treated all of the content, from ads to knowledge base articles, as one ecosystem?
This is how Erika Kramarik and Daniel Prindii approach this task in their work. In our conversation, they’ll take us behind the scenes of helping Omnivore (now acquired and shut down) go from speaking predominantly to early adopters start attracting, converting, and retaining early majority users.