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After taking the day off yesterday to eat at Radar and inadvertently help its owners celebrate its 7th (49th in restaurant years) anniversary, I’ve reflected some more on how (and why) to productize services.

That’s because one of my readers asked me: 

• If a service can be productized, what exactly is the difference between a service and a product? What makes it different? ((I have another question for you – can a product be “servicized”?))

Which I’d like to talk about today, along with these two accompanying questions:

• What is high-touch vs low-touch sales?
• What is high-touch vs low-touch delivery?

The difference between a product and a service. Here’s the problem: there’s no clear-cut difference, especially in the context of B2B solutions.

That’s because all products come with some degree of service which affects their value. This is true whether the buyer is a business or an individual buying a non-business item, like Zappos shoes. B2C sales like this are not the context of this newsletter but offer perspective. Because every time you’ve bought a “product”, you have also bought “service” with it.

So what’s the difference? Degree – of two things in particular.

High-touch vs low-touch sales. In the ideation worksheet I sent yesterday, I talked about high-touch and low-touch sales in devising productized services. 

Touch is the amount of interaction but also the length of time they span. In the extreme case, a customized services sales cycle can span a year or more. Prime examples:

• enterprise custom software and/or website development
• enterprise software platform adoption and data migration
• the construction of high-employment office complexes or factories

And even in less extreme cases than those three, services tend to have can last a long time and involved many conversations. This is what you’d call a messy sales process. I say messy because there’s no repeatable way to structure, anticipate, or organize this level of complexity.

Messy-ness is equally inevitable for a $5,000 website, a $50,000 website, or a $500,000 one. Meetings, presentations, emails, memos, conference calls, proposals. And plenty of miscommunications. Most of us have witnessed SomethingSomething_v18-Final(3).pdf. That’s the typical cruft of the high-touch sale of services.

Enterprise software product businesses also have slow-paced and multi-touch sales processes. That’s because they always sell services with their products. Salesforce is a prime example.

First, a qualifying call. Then a basic product demo or two. Then perhaps a solution prototype demo, more calls, estimates, interviews, etc., to define things like product implementation, migration, integration, etc.

In the above scenario, the product per se might be sold low-touch, in theory, but the solution as a whole is a high-touch sale.

In contrast, standalone digital product solutions sell in a low-touch way. Examples:

• GSuite
• Dropbox
• An ebook from Amazon

That’s the model for productizing our services. The closer the sale of your services gets to those three experiences, the more of a product it is.

And the lower-touch your product, the better positioned you are, psychologically, for a low-touch delivery thereof.

High-touch vs low-touch delivery. The delivery is everything that happens after a solution is sold and before a transaction is concluded. 

As is the case with sales, delivery can be either high-touch or low-touch for either products or services.

But the goal of productized services delivery is simplicity. Simple for you the provider to give, and simple for your client to get. Here’s where repeatable processes do make a difference. Less total value can be delivered in a product than through custom services – at least to a single client. The high-touch of customized services, custom-tailored to map to client problems, is exactly what makes them so valuable.

Still a good idea to productize services?

Which is a good point to end on – productizing all services may not be ideal for your firm. It’s less profitable for a small tech firm with a niche market to solve fewer problems for one of its clients. And products always solve fewer problems than custom services and therefore create less value. Therefore products command smaller fees.

If you do choose to productize services then, try a hybrid of productized and customized services. Just as many small SaaS firms can emulate the 800 pound gorillas like Salesforce, and sell customized solutions on top of their products. 

Then there’s the content marketing dimension – the lowest end information products act like high-value content. Cheatsheets, guides, checklists, are just a few examples – I want to talk about how to build them, as I have products on the mind!

Until then,
Rowan

 

 

George Bernard Shaw (Pygmalion, Saint Joan, among 60 other theatrical works) once remarked that the only reason he wrote plays was to get people to read the preface.

It was his hack (or so he claimed tongue-in-cheek) for getting people to listen to his opinions, including his subversive leftwing politics.

Confession – I’m kinda doing the same here! The beauty of “How-To” articles is that you can about not just how to do something but why to do so.

Some context for productizing services: services firms and product firms are two sides of the same coin. The coin is solutions to client problems. The “side” is what you show the client.

I have B2B SaaS firm clients who are essentially consulting firms with a branded product. I have B2B tech consulting firm clients (custom development, data science, etc) with highly systematic technical processes, such as agile development, release-cycle deployment and maintenance, and plug-n-play architecture. Kinda like a product. That’s how I organized my prior tech consultancy, in fact.

But here’s the problem with custom consulting: it’s harder to sell. Also, it’s a much less flexible Swiss army knife to your clients’ problems than a product.’

This is counter-intuitive. Shouldn’t custom services be more customizable pricing-wise? If you play with the semantics sure. But we all know the common refrain: if the prospective client can’t pay X, we can’t even get on the phone with them. With X being a pretty damn high number.

Meanwhile, SaaS products can (and usually are) creatively packaged into 3 or 4 pricing tiers, each with its own diverse set of solutions: features, integrations, support & services levels, capacity, etc. And you can take that packaging and make it very easy to read.

That’s why you should productize your tech/creative consultancy services:

1. make yourself more accessible to a broader set of client/needs
2. eliminate lengthy and time-consuming pre-sale negotiations
3. make it easier to sell
4. make it easier to deliver

Starting point. Let’s follow Steve Jobs’s advice on where to begin creating products: start with the customer experience.

Where does the customer experience of productized services starts?

The pricing page on our website. That’s your starting point.

Get out a pen and paper. Or a wireframing tool if you have one, and sketch out the pricing, starting with the problem faced and ending with your special ability to solve it. Think about how your horizontal and vertical specializations can be expressed as things like checklists, manuals, cheat sheets, training videos,  audit reports, architecture diagrams, ebooks, web-based workshops, in-person workshops, and regularized consultation sessions.

Examine the detritus of your client work and marketing work and look for building blocks. Be creative, mix and match.

That’s the experience-first productization of your services.

Go deeper. An alternate, more profound, and equally (if not more) valid method is the problem identification method. What causes your clients’ pain?

Answer the question by drawing a quadrant with High Pain vs Low Pain on the Y-axis and Low Buying Power vs High Buying Power on the X-axis. See it in action on this Google Doc and feel free to make your own copy.

Clients who land in the High Pain and High Buying Power quadrant – they’re the ones who need your custom consulting services. But even they might be candidates for “simpler” (to deliver or justify the cost of) productized services. 

Take action. This is not a simple undertaking, but it’s important to start somewhere. Make at least one digital product that’s very easy to buy and at least somewhat easy to deliver.

I did so by mashing up my tech industry and marketing knowledge with 6 cool products: WordPress, Google/Outlook Calendar, Calendly, Zoom, Temi, and Stripe.

Was it as easy as the customer experience feels simple? Hell no. Building and polishing takes work. 

But the result is a product that reduces the scheduling, contracting, negotiation and payment dysphoria that spans weeks to less than a minute: https://www.rowanprice.com/revenue-growth-strategy-session/. 

My best,
Rowan

 

 

 

I lived in London for a year. In my between my Bayswater apartment and Selfridges department store was a cathedral that had been bombed out during WWII. It had been renovated in a way that visually commemorated a time when the people were drenched in fear. To allay that fear, ‘management’ offered these words:

We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender

These are perfectly crafted words. More than that – they form a strategy. In fact, they perfectly fit the definition of strategy I work with.

1. A set of ideas 
2. that inspire
3. a move to 
4. a position of advantage
5. over a long period of time

Can you find each of these qualities in the Winston Churchill speech above? 

The military maneuverings – the decoy invasion days before D-Day, for example. That was tactics.

The strategy was the threat of never-ending guerilla warfare in London and other British cities. And the threat of Britain’s only military strength – it’s navy and air force. All the British positions of advantage were invoked. 

By the way, the audience of Churchill’s speech wasn’t the enemy – it was his people. Just as Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff’s writings are largely aimed at his own people, to inspire them and also clarify strategy. 

Take action. The next time someone puts a ______ strategy in front of you – a digital strategy, a marketing strategy, a content strategy, a brand strategy. Whatever they call it. The next time you see the word, ask yourself if it meets these 5 requirements.

You might have to do some homework to get your answer.

For example, what is a position of advantage, for your business? If someone offers a content strategy, which usually takes the concrete form of an editorial calendar, ask yourself: what position of advantage does it leverage? 

And another strategy-qualifier – does it inspire you to do the work? By which I mean, does it prick your professional pride, your high standards as entrepreneur, a craftsperson, a consultant, or however you define yourself?

If a strategy doesn’t inspire you and your people to charge ahead, bin it.

 

A scientific study demonstrated that your “Big 5” personality traits (Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism) can be altered within hours by … content. [1]

No wonder content marketing is so effective. 

On that note, I wanted to continue a little on yesterday’s theme of building bridges between yourself and the people who need your solutions.

I made the point that you need to choose several marketing channels. And that they should satisfy both short and long-term lead generation goals.

And crucially, that long-term, content marketing is the most reliable form of lead generation for almost every kind of business that you’d describe as niche, technical, creative, and expertise and/or software-driven.

Possible exception: you are partially owned by Alphabet and have 2 billion in venture capital funding (Verily, née Google Life Sciences). Then maybe leveraging personal relationships is a more reliable form of lead generation. Or just letting Google do your dirty work and silence your competitors. 

But I doubt it.

Content marketing is the most reliable, least risky form of lead generation. 

Not comfortable, maybe. Not pain-free. But safe. Just like having a job is not safe, compared to being self-employed – it’s just more comfortable.

Content marketing is probably the safest thing you can do with your business.

But only if you do it right. Which brings me to the other points I wanted to make today.

1. You need assistants and conspirators to build a bridge

I don’t care if you are a business of 1 to 10 people or even just a solopreneur. You need help to do content marketing properly.

This is one of those cases where two people are a magical number and much greater than the sum of its parts.

Every solopreneur I know of uses multiple people, contractors or consultants, to polish their content marketing. I do this too, but not well. #goals.

Nor did I do well at engaging co-conspirators when I had 20 employees.

2.  The owner (or her expert employees) needs to create the content

There’s an entire industry, called “content mills”, that exists to let you try to get around this rule. It’s futile.

What do Qwil (lean SaaS startup with 35 employees) and Salesforce (SaaS-behemoth with 35,000 employees) have in common?

Their CEOs do their own content marketing.

Qwil’s CEO Johnny Reinsch writes amusing LinkedIn updates; I’d call him a master of the form.

Salesforce’s CEO Marc Benioff has written on the corporate blog for many years and has published a book. Why doesn’t Benioff spend those precious hours on corporate governance? Partly, because it’s also a way of leading his workforce . Also true for Reinsch. [2]

But also because writing about corporate governance makes him better at it.

That’s the thing about content marketing – it doesn’t just help you get customers, it improves the value of your offer and how much you can charge for it.

A psychotherapist who creates content about her work provides better results than one who doesn’t. (And therefore earns more – more value created, more value earned). And why better results? 

Because when you put something into writing (or video, or audio) in front of people you don’t know, you think it through. To avoid others correcting you in public. To avoid misleading people with bad information.

But also because it makes you think more carefully about what you build/do/sell/teach. Don’t think it’s important to think about what you do? Then you’re just a laborer.

I want to further explore the relationship between ideation and content marketing, but not this time. 

Content marketing is safe in the long term, but it’s not comfortable. It’s not easy – if you’ve had any trouble with it (as I often have), reply to this email and let me know.

My best,
Rowan

 

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FOOTNOTES & ERRATA

[1] Digression on the word content: someone remarked that content is what you put in a box. It just sounds like cardboard. Okay, but it’s useful. I must note though, that the scientific study referenced used writings by accomplished authors such as Henri Bergsen.

By the way, the name of the study is misleading – the study did not use literature per se. It used non-fiction essays, albeit of literary quality, such as you might find published in The New Yorker.

[2] In a sense, it’s also true for businesses of one, which, properly configured, aren’t really so isolationist, per the first point above. The book to read here is Paul Jarvis’s Company of One. 

Programming note: I wrote this yesterday but once again, ran into a logistical snafu with MailChimp, so apologies for not getting this out to you yesterday.

 

 

Recently I wrote that an effective approach for creating messaging is to write a letter.

That’s not just an ideation hack. That’s actually the essence of B2B marketing for niche tech and digital firms – a letter speaks to just one person, naturally, in as little or as much detail as needed.

How pleased I was with the feedback I got from offering that perspective.

This is from reader Brant (thanks Brant!), shared with his permission:

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Then it hit me like a cardboard cutout of a blue elephant, I’m not selling my skill set. I’m not selling a set of tools, or even really a process! What I am selling people is solutions in the form of a bridge between where they are and where their clients are. It doesn’t matter how Business A connects to their client pool if they aren’t getting the conversions they need to keep their doors open. What matters is what Business A can do to harpoon clients and pull them out of the water, in droves. When I’m considering a web project for a client I need to view it more like picking them up by the scruff of the neck and changing them from Frumpy Lumpy with a broken kazoo into the Pied Piper for their industry!

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This really nails it – each of us can aspire to sell, ultimately, that bridge. [yes, insert joke here].

To repeat:

“What I am selling people is solutions in the form of a bridge between where they are and where their clients are”

Maybe your customers are Frumpy Lumpy or Grumpy Stumpy, but if they are not the Pied Piper, then you better help them build a bridge by which their customers can find them.

And you need that bridge by which your own customers can find you, too.

What is that second bridge made out of?

Philip Morgan has remarked that the default state of marketing is failure.

He has also remarked that most B2B lead generation advice is terrible. 

I’d add that most B2B lead cultivation advice is quite bad too, though not as.

Why are all three things true?

Because most marketing advice consists of letting you off the hook. The hook is what you’re on when you commit to content marketing.

Building an excellent content marketing program is just as hard as building an excellent software program. But people don’t buy that.

A couple years ago I wrote that:

• 95% of your blogs fail
• you have to invest at least 30k a year in your blog – or risk failure
• a simpler alternative is a news feed. But this still requires a 5k/year investment

So pick your metaphor here – bridge, signpost, pan flute – whatever it is, you need it. And it’s a serious investment.

Which is why bridge is the best metaphor. Or bridges, plural.

The bridges we build FROM US to our customers are made of things like email outreach, Upwork, paid advertisements, networking/referrals, and more. And those can all be great things.

But the bridges TO US are made of content marketing.

This takes long-term thinking and patience. So you have to supplement your content marketing with other lead generation approaches.

There are many, many kinds of marketing and business development. There are software products that facilitate methods of marketing which most marketers don’t even know of, just because there are too many of them to know of.

In fact, there are literally 10’s of thousands of sales, marketing, and advertising software products (“martech”). Not one person on this planet who can name them all, although someone aggregates them into this infographic each year:

So there’s a lot of confusion.

Here’s what you do in the face of that confusion – keep two things in mind:

• a structured and strategic approach to creating valuable content is the form of lead generation that you can most rely on in the long term
• thinking of this content creation work as a long-term (years) ideation exercise will give it the best chance of success

Happy bridge-building,

Rowan

 

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FOOTNOTES

[1] The question becomes “what kind of content”, which I talked about in my most recent post. It should also be caveated that content

 

Two claims I recently made on this list:

• SEO research is an ideation tool
• Prospecting-style market research is a way to design a content strategy

And I didn’t back either of those claims up. But I have a case study for you  which does: How Drift’s Blog Helped Them Build a Multi-Million Dollar Brand.

This comes not from me but from the makers of my favorite digital marketing research product, SpyFu, a sneaky competitor research tool. [1]

And a great brand name!!

I’ve been frequently mentioning this case study when chatting with clients about how to design a content strategy. It demonstrates how search engine analytics data can answer the content marketing questions I often get from clients:

1. What to write about? The case study suggests a mix of (6) types of content.
2. How to write/structure content? They suggesting making better versions of what’s already working.

By the way, SpyFu didn’t base this case study on the basis of Drift being their customer either.[2]

So you don’t need to use SpyFu – or any other search engine or paid advertising analytics product – to get some ideas from this case study on how to design your content strategy.

Just as a teaser, I’ll include their piechart answer to “what to write about?”, because I think it instantly spells out a fantastic strategy.

The big blue piece, TOFU, stands for Top of Funnel Content (loosely: “broad/general interest” content), by the way.

The biggest mistake on the web today is basing content strategy entirely on TOFU.

Drift, however, has adopted a much more mixed approach – and with remarkable results as this case study proves with data.

If you’re designing a product marketing-focused content strategy, this is a good place to start.

That case study again: https://www.spyfu.com/blog/drift-case-study/

My best,
Rowan

 

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FOOTNOTES

[1] SpyFu exposes SEMRush  Rube Goldberg chaos that it is. Ahrefs is better, Spyfu is a lot leaner. Recommended product.

[2] If you have a new brand, product, service… here is proof that you don’t need client/customer success stories to produce a case study – you just need relevant data

Friends, how are you…? Welcome back from Thanksgiving break and happy (ugh) Cyber Monday to you. 

My laptop died about a week before Black Friday / Cyber Monday and so it gave me the excuse to spend hours taking in digital, consumer direct marketing over the weekend.

Thus, I got a massive injection of FOMO (fear of missing out).

4 hours, 36 minutes, and 38 seconds left to claim this one-time offer and save $1,400

That kind of rankling thing.

Even if you understand how FOMO works (and employed it in your own marketing) it still agitates you. One of the many reasons people hate direct marketing in their gut.

So I want to talk about the other end of the spectrum, which you could call brand marketing. John Caples called it “corporate-image copy” and Ogilvy called it “image marketing”. Like direct marketing, brand marketing can take many formats:

• slogan
• tagline
• article
• LinkedIn profile
• video
• advertisement
• case study

and more… it doesn’t have to be content.

The question becomes then, how to create brand marketing content? Brand marketing sells, in an abstract sense, the value of your business. Its allure. 

This is trickier than pure direct marketing, where your goal is just to sell; that’s a create constraint-framework for ideating marketing materials.

So what’s the ideation technique for creating “image marketing” content?

Write a letter (to one person)

And when I say a letter, I mean an email. Literally: open your email editor, put the name of a friend or acquaintance who understands your business in the To: line and tell them what’s on your mind.

This is how you write, for example, an opinion piece.

Well, not entirely. But it’s how you get ideas for one. Same for anything else.

It could be a very short letter too – emails don’t have to last more than one line. I’ve actually advocated “pitching” the length to match the email you are replying to – or if you’re not replying, the length of the last email you got from the person you are writing.

But whatever your length, here are the good things that happen when you write an email letter:

• You address a very specific market  (By the way, have you ever noticed that the quality of an email quickly decreases in proportion to the number of recipients?)
• You sound like your genuine self
• You are not trying to sell anything (usually, at least, in personal emails)
• You clarify your thinking [1]

And that is an excellent formula for “image” (brand) marketing. The other pieces still have to be integrated – namely, the focus on your recipient’s painful problem, and the solution you have for it.

But talking about that stuff in a natural way is essential.

I’ll circle back tomorrow – thanks for having me back in your inbox,

Rowan

PS If you ever got a great idea for your business by writing about it in an email to a friend, let me know

 

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FOOTNOTES

[1] Sometimes at least. It takes practice for writing to be a more effective tool for clarity than speaking, and some combination of both is what works for most people. But here’s the thing: it’s almost impossible to describe your complex business in conversation if you have not previously described it in marketing-ready copy

Just as you cannot see if you do not draw, you cannot think if you do not write

 

Did you read Animal Farm? Or the true story action-adventure epic it’s based on, Homage to Catalunya? If you read either, it perhaps affected you, even if you were “forced” to read it in school.

If so, that’s likely because the author carefully studied how language impacts us.

In part, his motivations were political. Or anti-political, in that they were a reaction to government propaganda, especially from the Soviet Union. But from anywhere. And later he’d extrapolate from government propaganda to news; newspeak (eg “collateral damage” for “killing of civilians”).

But the other reason his books and writings leave a lasting dent in readers’ minds is that Orwell considered how language impacts the author.

Not the reader, the author.

He believed that it was not possible to think clearly about anything complex without being able to write about it clearly. 

You hear people say things like, “I know exactly what I think about this, I just don’t have the words to get it down on paper”. That’s the kind of premise he disagreed with.

See, there’s a distinction between clear writing and artful writing – verse, lyrics. The latter is art.

Like news and politics, marketing is not art; it makes you more money when it’s clear. Or more impact, depending on your goals.

This distinction is important to your marketing and to your products and services themselves.

Show me one SaaS app that doesn’t have words. Or one website. Or, let’s go far afield, one consumer packaged goods. You can’t.

We have woven words into almost everything – and certainly into the digital products we create. If we aren’t clear on how we describe those products, we aren’t clear on what we think about them.

How to take action

So let’s say you agree with the premise – what to do? How to improve your own messaging? How to judge the copywriting skill of someone you may work with?

Judge by Orwell’s rules below:

1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

These were originally published in Orwell’s essay Politics and the English Language [1]. And numerous marketing consultants before me have turned to them for guidance and expounded on them. Drayton Bird, for example. They don’t need my color-commentary.

My primary observation is, “Wow, I break these rules a lot!”.

But in tech and in marketing we are almost all guilty doing so, especially rule #5. To be fair, think of rule #6 when evaluating tech jargon; sometimes jargon is useful because of brevity. For example, SEO for Search Engine Optimization.

But here’s an interesting thought experiment – try applying these rules to the sales and marketing collateral you most love: your proposal template, your website’s homepage, your best blog post, etc. Imagine Orwell

Then ask yourself, do you think about your business any differently? Or as Orwell puts it in the essay, do they “demand a deep change of attitude”?

I’m going to take a break from publishing this newsletter for Thanksgiving – and I hope you have a great one, whether this finds you in the US or not.

Grateful to have you as my subscriber!

Rowan

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FOOTNOTES

[1] The Orwell Foundation, which manages his estate, provides this essay for free here https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/politics-and-the-english-language/.

Funny side story – I copied and pasted this essay into Grammarly, removing the examples of writing “a little below the average” (not written by Orwell). Grammarly qualified the writing as follows:

Clarity: “Unclear”
Engagement: “a bit bland”
Delivery: “Slightly off”

So take Grammarly’s advice with a grain of AI-is-still-stupid salt 🙂

Course creator Danny Margulies asks: What are some good copywriting guidelines for homepages?

I have some strong opinions on this. I wrote about them last year but my take has evolved a little bit since then.

You would think this would be a simple answer, but it’s not… even if the homepage feels simple, the approach that creates it can have a lot of parts to it.

Caveat: these guidelines apply to niche B2B tech/creative firms (which are sort of the same thing nowadays) selling complex services or products to professionals and other businesses.

That said, maybe they are of value for other positioning use cases.

Some basic premises about the purpose of a homepage:

• The homepage is a lead capture landing page first and an informational page (lead nurturing/client retention) second
• For the purposes of your copywriting approach, mentally divide your homepage into two visual parts: (1) above-the-fold, what you see when you land on the homepage, and (2) below-the-fold, what you have to scroll to see. Above-the-fold should be about the same for mobile/desktop.
• The above-the-fold part is for lead capture (book a product demo, schedule a strategy call, subscribe to a newsletter, etc)
• The below-the-fold area actually has three purposes: (1) nurture returning leads/visitors (2) retain existing clients (3) lead capture

Above-the-fold checklist

Based on the premises laid out above, here are guidelines for above-the-fold homepage copywriting. You can think of these as a checklist by which to evaluate your own site.

• A homepage above-the-fold is a de facto landing page – does yours feel like one, even if it retains some degree of navigational UX?
• As you would on a landing page, remove distractions from the homepage above-the-fold with a strictly minimalist header
• To be specific, there should be no more than 5 total things to click on above-the-fold. 3 is ideal.
• Don’t ever use a home link in your main menu; that’s what the logo is for so it’s a waste of space
• The logo should be accompanied by a straightforward tagline that supports lead capture. Assume people don’t know who you are; write a straightforward tagline that informs them what you do and for whom you do it (ie. them)
• The most prominent thing to click on by far should be the lead capture call-to-action (CTA)
• Always include this CTA twice – in the (sitewide) header on the far right and in the main above-the-fold area 
• Do not ever have more than one CTA above-the-fold; the header’s CTA and the main CTA should be identical – use the exact same words for both
• If you use a hero image, it should visually evoke a future state – the state of the prospect after a call with you, after buying your product, after benefitting from your newsletter.
• For a consulting firm, even one selling productized services, the hero image can be a photo of the firm’s principal(s), since that can evoke the future state of working with that person
• You can also use an abstract graphic but again, it should evoke a future state somehow
• If your hero image or abstract graphic doesn’t contain people, be sure to include people another way – a thumbnail photo of either the company principal(s) or of customer(s) is ideal. There should be a human face.
• Next to your CTA, write a headline that does three things – evoke a painful problem, offer a solution, and make it clear who specifically the solution is for. Sean D’Souza calls this “the trigger”, as I have written about before
• As mentioned above, the tagline can help your headline do the work of describing who the solution is for; they work together
• Offer bullets or a mini-FAQ that resolves objections to purchasing that solution
• Let at least one testimonial be at least partially visible above the fold
• Testimonials are better than logo bars but include both if you can
• Transcribe testimonials word-for-word from live-recorded interviews and let them include pre-purchase doubts or objections

That’s a long list – can you do it all above the fold? Yes, it just takes work.

Below the fold

So what does that strict focus on lead acquisition above-the-fold leave you with?

This is less a checklist than the above-the-fold part above, probably because I haven’t thought or written about it as much. Still, I have some very definite views on this part of your homepage:

• The footer is the new header. Let it take up as much space as it needs to, even the entire viewport
• The things that used to go in the header – like the full navigation menu, social/share links, privacy, support, etc, – should go in the footer.
• The footer serves the purpose of client retention (gives them the information/support they need) and lead nurturing.
• That said, the footer should also repeat the primary CTA
• If you have a secondary call-to-action, repeat it in the footer, but do the work of supporting it with a headline, testimonial, human face, etc., as described for the above-the-fold CTA. 
• What goes below the above-the-fold area and the footer? This could probably be its own section. Here’s where you put the rest of your entire website in a microcosm: content, product information, company bio, etc., with an emphasis on positioning your business as being relevant to a specific audience – or at least to a narrow group of audiences.

Counterpoint – do not put your whole site into one, long scrolling homepage.

For one thing, that approach cuts the page load time – you want a lightning-fast homepage. For another thing, it cannibalizes other shareable URLs that should have their own independent identities, particularly your product and pricing pages. Lastly, it’s passé in 2020. It makes it look like you don’t believe enough in your business to give it the complete, professional website it deserves.

If may have bullet-pointed you to death here, my apologies! 

My best,

Rowan

Does SEO matter to your business? Maybe.

Is SEO a great ideation tool? Definitely. It is without question an indispensable market research tool; keyword research is a method of understanding your buyer that complements surveys, interviews and other forms of research. What a great ideation tool for a content strategy.

SEO research, however, is not the same thing as investing in optimizing your content for search, which ultimately involves attempting to reverse engineer the world’s most valuable trade secret – the Google search algorithm. Which is now partially created dynamically through AI (Google RankBrain).

But I’m going to save that for another email.

Today I’m going to focus on why maybe SEO makes sense for your firm.

And reemphasize here that I’m addressing smaller, niche firms that creative impact with software and/or creative and technical expertise. Because that hugely impact the answer to the question of whether SEO matters.

When I co-ran my own niche tech consultancy, my clients were large nonprofits, agencies, and universities. SEO mattered immensely. To this day, online learning startups like Coursera and Udemy and are dramatically outperforming universities on the SEO side of course promotion. (Looking for an SEO specialization? Become an expert in course marketing for traditional higher ed – I’ll help you land your first client just for fun.) 

And SEO matters to any nonprofit which uses content marketing to attract new supporters. 

That’s partly because a structured content marketing is a given.

About that… content marketing. Because this is where it starts to matter whether for niche B2B expertise firms. And this is where the maybe comes in.

Here are the questions to answer that will get you from maybe to a yes or a no.

• Do you have a content creation practice? Not do you sometimes create content, but do you have a practice? Something with structure to it that sees you regularly publish content.
• Do you the owner – or one of your key, permanent staff members – create your content? It is remarkable to me that business owners still try to game Google buy hiring people without expertise and authorty in the business to produce content. It has been lightyears in SEO land since that work, yet go on the freelance platforms like Upwork and Fiverr and you’ll find thousands of business owners of small B2B forms throwing their money into the trash by hiring content producers. That only works if you *really* know what you’re doing – and you have a mass audience. 
• Do you create content about as narrow an area of subject matter as possible? Because that’s what your audience values and Google or its AI know this.
• Does your content always have enough value to be shared by some of your readers some of the time?

And one last trick question – do you publish content frequently? Because don’t worry about that. It doesn’t matter whether you publish frequently. 

If you answered yes to the non-trick questions, then you should invest in SEO. To call it an accelerant is an understatement.

You could make the case for investing pre-emptively – you think you’re going to launch a content creation practice, so you invest in the SEO research that partially informs set your content strategy. 

But that’s cart before the horse. Think of it this way – getting to play with SEO is your reward for doing the work of designing and executing your own content publishing practice.

My best,

Rowan