2 ways Cognism broke landing page best practices – and why it works
05/09/23 • 6 min
Landing page best practices? Useful. But not always the best
This page by Cognism is almost perfect
And it breaks a lot of the best practices that you'll find in an article about making B2B SaaS landing pages
✨ Best practice 1: Keep your landing page copy short
Cognism's response: here's a wall of text
Their homepage hero currently comes in at 116 words. Compare that to ZoomInfo which comes in at 33 words
The best practice assumes the reader doesn't have time to make a choice but when they're buying a tool like this, they *need* to make a considered choice
There's potentially millions of dollars resting on the choice because the data quality and usability of that data matter in their own sales process
That Cognism spend the time to go work through objections right from the top of the page and at depth shows how clearly they understand this
✨ Best practice 2: Shallow on the homepage, go deeper later
Cognism's response: Grab your snorkel and dive in!
Every section on the homepage ought to help a customer qualify or disqualify themselves quickly
But the common practice of giving shallow info about the product in the hope that the prospect stays to learn more is so weird to me
What Cognism do feels bang on the money: help people learn whether the product's for them ASAP
They do that by giving answers to common objections, adding a section on who their product *isn't* for and also including use case based information
Crucially: none of it is skimmable – you've got to work to get that info.
I believe that these two approaches to landing page design have probably caused a huge number of prospects to book a call with Cognism
Honestly, incredibly impressive work
===
SaaS Marketing Bites is produced by B2B SaaS marketing agency Powered by Search. It's hosted by Head of Growth Marc Thomas. You can follow @iammarcthomas or Powered By Search CEO Dev Basu @devbasu on Twitter for more updates and marketing insights.
If you enjoyed this episode, you can do the following things right away:
1 Claim your Free SaaS Scale Session. If you’d like to work with us to turn your website into your best demo and trial acquisition platform, claim your FREE SaaS Scale Session. One of our growth experts will understand your current demand generation situation, and then suggest practical digital marketing strategies to double your demo and trial traffic and conversion fast.
2 If you’d like to learn the exact demand strategies we use for free, go to our blog or visit our resources section, where you can download guides, calculators, and templates we use for our most successful clients.
3 If you’d like to work with other experts on our team or learn why we have off the charts team member satisfaction score, then see our Careers page.
4 If you know another marketer who’d enjoy reading this page, share it with them via email, Linkedin, Twitter, or Facebook.
Landing page best practices? Useful. But not always the best
This page by Cognism is almost perfect
And it breaks a lot of the best practices that you'll find in an article about making B2B SaaS landing pages
✨ Best practice 1: Keep your landing page copy short
Cognism's response: here's a wall of text
Their homepage hero currently comes in at 116 words. Compare that to ZoomInfo which comes in at 33 words
The best practice assumes the reader doesn't have time to make a choice but when they're buying a tool like this, they *need* to make a considered choice
There's potentially millions of dollars resting on the choice because the data quality and usability of that data matter in their own sales process
That Cognism spend the time to go work through objections right from the top of the page and at depth shows how clearly they understand this
✨ Best practice 2: Shallow on the homepage, go deeper later
Cognism's response: Grab your snorkel and dive in!
Every section on the homepage ought to help a customer qualify or disqualify themselves quickly
But the common practice of giving shallow info about the product in the hope that the prospect stays to learn more is so weird to me
What Cognism do feels bang on the money: help people learn whether the product's for them ASAP
They do that by giving answers to common objections, adding a section on who their product *isn't* for and also including use case based information
Crucially: none of it is skimmable – you've got to work to get that info.
I believe that these two approaches to landing page design have probably caused a huge number of prospects to book a call with Cognism
Honestly, incredibly impressive work
===
SaaS Marketing Bites is produced by B2B SaaS marketing agency Powered by Search. It's hosted by Head of Growth Marc Thomas. You can follow @iammarcthomas or Powered By Search CEO Dev Basu @devbasu on Twitter for more updates and marketing insights.
If you enjoyed this episode, you can do the following things right away:
1 Claim your Free SaaS Scale Session. If you’d like to work with us to turn your website into your best demo and trial acquisition platform, claim your FREE SaaS Scale Session. One of our growth experts will understand your current demand generation situation, and then suggest practical digital marketing strategies to double your demo and trial traffic and conversion fast.
2 If you’d like to learn the exact demand strategies we use for free, go to our blog or visit our resources section, where you can download guides, calculators, and templates we use for our most successful clients.
3 If you’d like to work with other experts on our team or learn why we have off the charts team member satisfaction score, then see our Careers page.
4 If you know another marketer who’d enjoy reading this page, share it with them via email, Linkedin, Twitter, or Facebook.
Previous Episode
How to make the most of lifecycle in SaaS
Most B2B SaaS companies spend too much time on new customer acquisition and too little time on expansion, retention, and referral.
The PE-backed companies we work with get this playbook. Here's what we do:
1. Measure these 4 areas for customers
NPS – it's a leading indicator of how much people like what you do and we think it's linked to churn (high NPS is correlated with low churn)
- Products subscribed – how embedded is the platform you're selling in the client's business. If there are multiple 'products' in use, then not only is your expansion revenue growing but you're also likely to see less churn as the switching risk increases
- Seats sold – pretty simple. If more people are using your product in a business, there are more voices to protest on your behalf if someone wants to switch to a competitor. Get those seat numbers up!
- Last price increase date – companies expect prices to rise most years. Everyone acts outraged when it happens but real talk: raise your prices periodically. You'll see more revenue and almost no-one will care long term. The trade off between losing some customers and gaining a lot of revenue is an obvious one most of the time.
2. Prioritize growing by doing the following:
Reach out to the happiest customers first
- Show them how subscribing to product B if they already pay for A has a "better together" effect.
- Recruit more of their teams into the product suite.
- Add new features to renewals on the existing platform to reward customer loyalty, and then sell through higher pricing on product B.
3. Some of this is CS work, so how can marketing help?
Target high NPS customers with email and revenue expansion ads.
- Show high NPS customers a webinar highlighting product B
- Use marketing automation to ask a question (sent from AE's inbox) to activate customers who have partial org adoption
- Create a calculator to pinpoint the total value added since the inception of the relationship (money made, money saved, time saved)
Demand generation isn't just "paid ads" or "email marketing". It can be so much strategic and impactful than that.
===
SaaS Marketing Bites is produced by B2B SaaS marketing agency Powered by Search. It's hosted by Head of Growth Marc Thomas. You can follow @iammarcthomas or Powered By Search CEO Dev Basu @devbasu on Twitter for more updates and marketing insights.
If you enjoyed this episode, you can do the following things right away:
1 Claim your Free SaaS Scale Session. If you’d like to work with us to turn your website into your best demo and trial acquisition platform, claim your FREE SaaS Scale Session. One of our growth experts will understand your current demand generation situation, and then suggest practical digital marketing strategies to double your demo and trial traffic and conversion fast.
2 If you’d like to learn the exact demand strategies we use for free, go to our blog or visit our resources section, where you can download guides, calculators, and templates we use for our most successful clients.
3 If you’d like to work with other experts on our team or learn why we have off the charts team member satisfaction score, then see our Careers page.
4 If you know another marketer who’d enjoy reading this page, share it with them via email, Linkedin, Twitter, or Facebook.
Next Episode
How to improve executive communication about your marketing work
As a marketing leader, a large part of your ability to get the job done is in proving that you're delivering value already But it's also an area of marketing leadership that many get wrong Are these 3 communication errors killing your ability to prove the value of your work?
1. Stating an observation without impact, importance, or insight
2. Using passive vs active voice
3. Giving inputs more airtime than outputs
🚩 Stating an observation without impact, importance, or insight
It's extremely easy to notice something and report it. But all you're doing is giving metrics, not meaning.
By understanding the importance of a metric, we can make a choice about what to do next. Want an example?
❌ BAD – Traffic is up, conversion is down
✅ GOOD – Traffic is up, but conversion is down indicating that there's a misalignment between our ICP's pain points and the topic of our most recent blog posts
🚩 Using passive vs active voice
Generally, you should avoid using the passive voice when reporting
It weakens the entire point you're trying to make by removing any sense of agency from that message.
Make yourself or someone else the owner of the action rather than the benefactor and you'll see a great improvement in your executive communication. Want an example?
❌ BAD – Changes are being made to XYZ
✅ GOOD– We are making changes to XYZ
🚩 Giving inputs more airtime than outputs
No one pays you to be busy. They pay you to produce results.
But the majority of your reports are likely focused on what you did rather than what you produced.
In fact, this is the most common problem with executive communication.
If you're suffering from this consistently and have tried to change it, ask yourself:
if I can't produce results worth reporting, am I doing the right things in the first place? Here's an example:
❌ BAD – We created 5 new ad campaigns this month and we refreshed 15 creatives
✅ GOOD – We generated 329 new SQLs by refreshing ad creative and running new campaigns
===
SaaS Marketing Bites is produced by B2B SaaS marketing agency Powered by Search. It's hosted by Head of Growth Marc Thomas. You can follow @iammarcthomas or Powered By Search CEO Dev Basu @devbasu on Twitter for more updates and marketing insights.
If you enjoyed this episode, you can do the following things right away:
1 Claim your Free SaaS Scale Session. If you’d like to work with us to turn your website into your best demo and trial acquisition platform, claim your FREE SaaS Scale Session. One of our growth experts will understand your current demand generation situation, and then suggest practical digital marketing strategies to double your demo and trial traffic and conversion fast.
2 If you’d like to learn the exact demand strategies we use for free, go to our blog or visit our resources section, where you can download guides, calculators, and templates we use for our most successful clients.
3 If you’d like to work with other experts on our team or learn why we have off the charts team member satisfaction score, then see our Careers page.
4 If you know another marketer who’d enjoy reading this page, share it with them via email, Linkedin, Twitter, or Facebook.
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