from conversion to consumption: rethinking landing page optimization

Most B2B marketers optimize landing pages for one thing: conversions. But what if that approach is actually hurting your results? In this episode of Digital Banter, we’re joined by Tas Bober for a fresh take on landing page strategy: optimizing for consumption rather than just conversion.

Podcast Transcript

What’s up everybody? Welcome back to Digital Banter. It’s been a hot minute or months, I guess, since we, uh, last had an episode. That music James, it’s been a while since we heard that one, right? Has new music actually new season, new music. I was kind of thrown off by it a little bit myself. So while we have not recorded an episode in months, we are welcoming back a three time guest task over.

What up task from, I believe the scroll lab as you are now calling it, correct? Correct. Is it official? Is it official yet? It is not fully [00:01:00] official. Uh, waiting on Kevin Wrap. Kevin Rap, you are taking way too long. Um, but. Legally, it’s still gonna be the old name ’cause it’s just too much a pain in the ass.

Uh, but marketing wise, you know, it’s that. So I’ve changed the name everywhere, just not on the stuff that Kevin’s in charge of. So have, have you ordered any swag yet? No, but it is on the list and I want like cool swag and not even the ones that say scroll lab on it. I want stuff that says like dead lead.

Things like that. I want, I want a, a scroll lab snapback that’s maybe I’m gonna start collecting. I want like trucker hat, snapback, swag from all my friends. That’s pretty much it. Oh, someone said there’s no audio. Is that true? I. Uh, it’s just them is my guess. Sorry. That’s, there we go. Nevermind. Nevermind.

Anyway, [00:02:00] anyway, good. Keep your thoughts to yourself

anyway. So task your focal point in the B2B. Ecosystem is around landing pages. And we’ve talked, you know, a couple times on past episodes around that. But I think today’s episode in particular, we’re gonna shift the narrative and focus a little bit more on the, the pain and the challenge of folks that are not seeing the outputs and I.

Uh, impact of their landing pages on leads and rethinking that paradigm and making a shift towards less focus on conversions and more about consumptions. Yeah. But before we get into all of that kind of shakeup and, and different kind of points of view, you know, we are also shaking things up as far as our segments are concerned on digital banter.

And we wanna kick this off with a question. How the hell did you end up in B2B marketing? Let me, lemme actually start with this ’cause I like this question. Okay. First of all, I have this philosophy that everybody just kind of falls into B B2B. They end up in B2B. Nobody like goes. I mean, [00:03:00] I’m sure if you went exit five and ask how many of you dreamt of being a B2B marketer when you grow up?

Zero of them would’ve said Yes, that’s what I want to do. Maybe Dave, ’cause he’s a thought leader. But that’s pretty much it. Um, but I want to know, start out, what did you want to be when you grew up when you were a kid, and then how did you end up falling in B2B? Oh boy. We’re going deep in the archives. Um, wanted to be a vet.

Uh, decided then that blood made me woozy. So rule that one out real quick. Um, and then I was like, okay, maybe I wanna be a writer. And so I kind of stuck with that and I was like, okay, I’m gonna be a journalist. That’s great. Like, I’m gonna write for a living. And, uh, so when I went to college. I was majoring at the time in journalism.

I was bored outta my mind because anyone who has any interaction with the Indian [00:04:00] education system, which is very closely tied to the British education system, it is like insane. And then I went to an American college and it was just. So easy, um, that I was bored. And so I asked my dean, I was like, Hey, can I go do my internship like as a first year?

Would that be weird? And she was like, no, uh, if you want to. And I was like, okay. So I went and found my first, uh, job, which was for this, um, business publication, and my editor was like, listen, you’re really good. Okay? Don’t take this the wrong way, but you are going to absolutely hate writing for other people.

I’m like, okay, is this like a performance review? Like I’m not, is this like an attitude thing? Like I don’t know what’s happening right now. Um, and then, uh, you know, he’s like, but look, if that’s what you wanna do, that’s fine. Just when you go back to college now, just change your major. Broaden it up a little bit.

Which is so weird because I’m very like pro narrow everything down now he’s [00:05:00] like, broaden up a little bit, but back up your backup. So he is like. Go back, make it a communications thing so you can like, do multiple things in communications, including journalism, uh, and then minor in something that’s technical.

Um, I. And so I did a communications major marketing minor with a website front end focus. Um, and lo and behold, marketing and websites are like what my life has become now. Um, and I guess a little bit of writing some journalistic stuff, um, which apparently James thinks my content’s both. Good and bad, so we’ll get to that.

Um, and yeah, so that’s kind of like how it got started, but as far as B2B went, like no one, I, I feel like no one starts off growing. I’m gonna be like a, I’m gonna sell to other businesses. Everyone’s like, I’m gonna work at Google. I I’m gonna work at Apple and I’m gonna, you know, sell at Old Navy or whatever.

And then, and then [00:06:00] something happens and you’re like, oh, there’s actually a whole like, boring side of this, and you just fall into it. Which was weird because the first six years of my career I worked at an NBC TV station, um, in Des Moines, Iowa. Booming. Wow. Exciting times. Very exciting times. Um, yeah, I mean it was so funny ’cause like side tangent, everyone in Iowa that, you know, there’s a thing about Iowa nice.

Like people are really nice in Iowa. Mm-hmm. And they were so sweet and they were very sweetly. Ask me when they’d meet me. They’re like, Hey, um, you know, so no offense, but what are you doing here? And I’m like, what do you mean? They’re like, well, why are you in Iowa? Like in a, in a nice way. Like, why would you choose to come here?

Like, we were born and raised here. Why are you here? And I’m like, I love Iowa. It’s cool. Um, but I, I. You know, was mainly in B two, B2C, I guess, kind of. ’cause at the TV station we sold advertising to other [00:07:00] businesses to sell to customers or our viewers. Um, we did that. I was an AE there for three years. And then the actual pivot into B2B actually only happened when I moved into SaaS.

So it was B two, B2C. For half of my career and then it just went B2B and I was like, kind of liked like the long sales cycles and arguing about attribution and stuff like that. Just getting, I hate all of that, but, and not working from Thanksgiving to the New Year’s. That is splendid. Let me just tell you, because one thing at the TV station, if the weather was bad.

Oh, you’ll come in into work because that’s our bread and butter. Right? Um, so like, here’s this tropical person who’s never driven in snow, like crying all the way to the TV station, driving my car, but like going two miles per hour. ’cause I was so scared. Um. So, you know, those life, those, those hardships have prepared me for B2B.

I have a hypothesis that the reason that the, like the B2B marketing community [00:08:00] is so strong is because one, a lot of it is BA based in the WI Midwest and there’s a lot of Midwest ice that happens out there. Um, and like I. I feel like everybody started out with like, oh, I want to be, you know, work in e-commerce and sell this and do like the, I don’t know, the fast-paced life I’ll call it.

And then they see a B2B job and then they get it and they’re like, okay, this is gonna be boring. And I do it for a while. And then they realize like the flexibility, it’s relaxed and uh, you know, there’s also not as many people like critiquing your creative ideas in the same way. About that. I don’t know about that, James.

Yeah, but like you like, okay. A pixel to the left please. Yeah. Yeah. If that, that one resonates. Shout out to who gave me that. Okay. First of all, yes, we don’t work holidays, but would I say that it’s not stressful? No way. [00:09:00] Like I worked 50, 60 hours a week and like for B2B, which has like an average what sales cycle of three months.

There’s a lot of shit that they want us to do, like within two days or prove within a week, and we’re like, so we are constantly arguing about things that B2C doesn’t argue about, like B2C knows this campaign’s gonna take X amount of time. We’re probably gonna get a response this time. But I feel like I.

The people who weren’t like maybe raised in B2B and then they come in here and like they’ve kind of tainted the industry because we try to measure B2B the same way we do B2C, and that’s what causes a lot of stress for us. It would be far more relaxed if we just acknowledge like I. Oh, shit’s gonna take three to six months or whatever.

And it’s like, sometimes marketers aren’t even there for six months before they see the fruition of their work. And, and then we also have this, like, the lack of creativity I think shoots us in the foot because like we wanna be Oh yeah, totally. It is much of an [00:10:00] exercise in expectation management. It’s like you’re managing so many stakeholder, ma, like stakeholder opinions.

You’re trying to like tell people. Like, Hey, it’s gonna take some time. And we’re like, oh, how much time? Well, okay, 90 days. Okay, cool. But then in the monthly reporting meeting with the cmo, what are you gonna say? And that’s why we have this like, leads, leads, rah, rah, rah, let’s buy ’em for 17 cents. We talked about that during our last episode, and it’s like.

That’s why content syndication exists. So list buying exists is because of B2B, I feel like B2C doesn’t have this problem. Do you feel like that, like, I mean let’s use that as a jumping off point then into like the core part of our conversation. I mean, is that mentality then also jading? The, I mean, you mentioned it yourself about measurement and attribution and measuring things in a D two C mindset, but that doesn’t work when you have a three month sales cycle, you know?

Does that also translate into, let’s say, in this case, landing page strategy and like [00:11:00] the desire to force somebody down into a conversion, like in that outdated thinking, I. Yeah. Or a different model. Yeah. Because if you, and that’s the gap I found, right? When I like pivoted into the landing page niche, I’m like, okay.

I just regurgitated information that we’ve all been taught for many, many years now, which is if you just look up landing page template or landing page, uh, best practices, you’re gonna get all these like HubSpot articles and Unbounce and all of this stuff, and all of that works great. From a B2C context, when you want direct response or maybe like very top of funnel for us, like someone trying to, you know, sign up for an event or get an ebook or something like that.

It works like that. But then we think we can do the same shit for like product related landing pages or campaigns and it’s like, no, like, you know how much convincing needs to happen. You’re not convincing one person. And it’s funny because I’ll get pushback from people who are more in like the PLG space where they’re like.

Yeah, but we’re not trying to do [00:12:00] like a business case or anything for like our customers don’t care about that. I’m like, okay, I’m the decision maker and I use a bunch of tools. Like my husband’s here, shout out Mr. Bober. But, um, he knows like we will use something and we’ll push it to the limits of free before I ever make a business case to myself to justify the purchase.

don’t care if it’s $20 and I don’t care if it’s like $5,000. It’s gonna be the same thing. Like Chachi pt I gave myself a whole year. I’m like, I need to use this for a year before I’m even paying for this thing. And I only just started paying for it like two months ago. And when I did, my husband’s like, oh, I guess we don’t talk about purchases anymore.

I’m like, like, what? We, I’m like, I did my due diligence with doing it. So, so that’s why I’m like, you still gotta make the business case, you know? And, uh, and we don’t think we need to do that. We’re like, Hey, give us your, give us your information right now, and then you can, you can see if we. You know, if [00:13:00] we’re gonna be worth your time or money.

So now we know why you have all the elongated hyphens in your posts, right? M dash, m dash, dash. I actually do, yeah. M dashes yesterday. Again, my husband’s like, what’s an M dash? Like this thing. That’s him. Find the button on the keyboard. You get a dollar. It’s like, uh, it’s like three buttons right before you can.

If a landing page should not have the objective of driving and conversion, then what should it have the objective of? Drum roll. Where’s, what’s his name? Zen. I don’t have the, Ian, I don’t think we have the button for it, but No, this isn’t like a soundboard. This isn’t like a studio. Yeah. Oh. Need to up your game guys.

It’s been maybe the, alright. We also play with the free version. Um, yeah, no, I think. Specifically in B2B that buyers are [00:14:00] information and research heavy. They’re collecting this information either to put a business case together or. Make a business justification for themselves on whether they should engage with the product or engage with the company.

The other thing that we’ve done and shot ourselves in the foot is like we unleash the SDRs, like pit bulls, right? If somebody’s just like download an ebook, it’s like intent. Intent. Get them, get them, and Right, and we’ve done that. So then that makes buyers a little more. Risk averse where they’re like, I am not going to interact with this brand until absolutely necessary where I feel like I’m 80% there and I just need a little push.

Right. Um, so if that’s the case and that’s what they’re doing, like I had, I. I’ll share it with you guys. Um, I had like a business case justification deck that I’ve had carried with me for three companies now, where anytime I wanted to justify or purchase large or small, even free. Okay? Sometimes, like even getting Hotjar.

I had to like [00:15:00] put a business justification in for a free product and like do this road show internally about like why we need it, what are the goals, how much is it gonna cost, will there be adoption, will there be implementation? Here’s the, you know, timeline, all of those things. And so. When I started working on landing pages, I’m like, the reason why they’re taking so long to convert or we’re finding a lot of bouncers and stuff, we’re not giving them all the information they need for that business justification.

And we need to be upfront with that. Right? If the, like Dave Gerhardt, our thought leader, our B2B thought leader, um, he is like, our job is to make sales, sales job easier. Yes. But then that happens if you make it easy for the buyer to do their job. That comes first. And then by way of that, there’s a domino effect.

So I think we should really focus on how people are consuming information on the page. Are we giving them the relevant information on the page? And then, um, are they coming [00:16:00] back? And most likely they’re not converting on the landing page itself, but converting on the main website. ’cause maybe they can’t find the landing page.

Again. I have a post that’s coming out tomorrow where I’m like, A landing page is not a destination. It’s actually the start of the journey, right? It’s planting the seed, it’s giving them that information. They’re like, huh, okay. And they leave. I can tell you the last time I’ve purchased something directly from a landing page, um, myself, right?

I’m always like, I do my exploration. I see what information they give me. I collect that. I talk to my boss. I do the road show, and then I come back, I talk to them, try to get pricing. ’cause that’s really, you know. That’s another battle. And then, uh, convert on the main website. And then we sit here going, huh, interesting.

Direct traffic was up this month. Wonder, wonder what that is. People must have just been searching for us anyway, how the paid campaigns doing, like, what’s going on there? And you’re like, dude that, like they all rising tide lifts all boats. No, no, no one. Okay, [00:17:00] cool. So how do, I guess the question is like, how do people, what do people expect when they get to a landing page now then, right.

Because I, I totally agree with you that. You know, no, the old like form, fee form on the right and basically chat GBT copy on the left is, uh, should, should, should be dead in the water. I will also stand back like I still see this work to an extent, but I. I do like your philosophy better as far as like where it fits in the customer journey, but then it still question stands like, okay, what’s the difference between that and the homepage that has all of the information, or what are they expecting when they get to a landing page?

I. The nav thing, I promise I wouldn’t discuss. Like you can discuss that. Yeah. But it’s like, it’s another thing, right? So like how much do you expect them to navigate away from the landing page? ’cause I do think that they should be able to navigate away from the landing page. So I don’t know a lot of questions in one, but what should they expect when they [00:18:00] get there?

So what they’re expecting right now is the initial, like the, the standard like landing page template that you can picture with your eyes closed, right? And that’s when we gotta flip the narrative a little bit. And I think when we do that, it’s very like company centric. I mean, here’s the thing. You guys have worked firsthand with me and we did this firsthand with one of your clients, um, where it was like the longest landing page of our fricking lives.

But if it worked, um, weirdly, and it was because of this, like you are making it very bio forward. And I think the biggest thing is like addressing their problems. Like, we like to do this other thing in B2B, which is like, let’s agitate the pain, twist the knife. Make them feel it and then they’ll come to us.

Right. Like twist it blood everywhere. Um, the, the show is R rated. Apologies everybody. Yes. Um, emotion doesn’t always have to be [00:19:00] negative. Yeah. I think there’s, like, I. Just reframing that into, can we show a little empathy? Um, you know, if it’s Calendly and you’re like, here are the problems that you’re likely facing, right?

Uh, you’re sending a dozen emails back and forth just to nail down a time. Then you add in more people who are trying to do that. That’s. Like now a complicated process. Um, and then that’s essentially slowing down, you know, when you can, when you have availability, when you can do stuff, how projects move.

And I think that’s very like factual and stating like, Hey, these are the problems you’re experiencing. And the buyer’s going, oh, check, check, check that, that makes sense. Versus like, you know, the, the, it’s like the, I, I always think of like those balding commercials or something like those infomercials.

It’s like. Feeling down, lost all your hair, girl, not checking you out anymore. You know, it’s just like we’re only driving. You’re like, dude, okay. You know, chill out. And [00:20:00] so it’s, I think we try to again, adopt the wrong things from B2B, uh B2C, and try to put that in B2B and we’re like agitated and they’ll come to us and buy our $30,000 product.

So like on the landing page, if we think about all the things that a buyer has to do to justify the cost. To justify the cost. Then we’re thinking, okay, they need us. They need to know that they’re in the right place. So it’s like. What are you, who are you for? Which is the basics. B2B does not get this right.

are the problems that you exist to solve? How do you solve them? So like the other thing we love to do is like feature dump, like as if they’re product specifications, right? Like you go to Old Navy’s page and then they’re like. The seams are like 15 point or whatever, 32 inch seams and blah, blah, blah.

And then we think that works in in B2B, where we’re like, yeah, you know this feature and this integration, and it’s like this AI capability and all of these things, and we just [00:21:00] dump on there and we expect them to just. Figure it out. We’re like, ah, we give them all the information, we’re great. But it’s like we need to talk about those features and context of what they solve.

Right? Like you can talk about seams or you can say high wasted pants, right? Um. That kind of gets the message across in a little more of a layman’s term, in layman’s fashion. So just similar things there. And then obviously the proof and credibility, which is being very relevant. Um, not just the same three testimonials on every page of the website.

And then FAQs, which is the objection handling that they actually hearing on sales calls or actually getting on feedback. Um, and then finally making the ask. So it’s kind of like the sequential story like format where you’re saying. This is who we are. This is who we’re for. If we’re not for you, bounce, cool.

These are the problems that we solve. You’re not having these problems bounce. That’s cool. This is how we solve those problems because we obviously acknowledge and have an understanding of the market. Here are other people like [00:22:00] you. We have helped. Here are some common objections that we found and how we tackle them and.

Hey, if you really wanna know more information, um, reach out to us. This is interesting ’cause this, uh, basically what you said there, essentially, Matt, like one of the things that we focus more on is content strategy and like creative strategy more on the ad side. Before the landing page. And those are like the four things that we focus on as far as like you see product focus ads all the time, right?

 Like this feature, this feature, this feature, buy our stuff, and like we take this whole approach of leading with emotional messaging, pain points, then justifying with. Social proof, common objections, um, and so on. So it’s like, it’s, it’s right in line. And it just shows that like from the customer journey, it’s like, okay, you have to start with that stuff.

The landing page is a step in the journey, the content and whatever the deliverable after that also [00:23:00] has to match that. Uh, it’s not just one, not just one thing. The other thing I’m also like, I see so many posts on LinkedIn that’s like, you know, people. Buy with emotion first and justify with logic later.

And I see a lot of that for B2B. And from a buying perspective, like the only time I ever got emotional about any purchase is when I’d have like my CMO come to me and say, Hey, you need to go. Buy this tool ’cause like I’m on the board or whatever, or like telling me that I need a tool that I really don’t need and I have to like somehow become the champion for and have to like deal with it now in the workflow.

And maybe that’s just me, but I was a very like logical buyer. I think the only thing I was most afraid of was, um. Making a recommendation that wasn’t correct. Uh, but then you’d have like a lot of accountability, like shared accountability in it, and it’s like, it’s kind of frowned [00:24:00] upon. If, if I went in there and I was like, I’m making an emotional decision or whatever, or I reacted emotionally to make a decision, I feel like my bosses and peers would be like.

Okay. That’s not how we make sense. Think about the shiny object syndrome that people deal with though, right? So like, I’ll give an example. Think about every A BM platform out there. I don’t know if you’ve seen this the way that we have, but we have many clients who have six sense demand base. It was purchased and then literally nobody used it.

That like to me, says that this was bought on. Like emotion doesn’t, again, it doesn’t have to be tied back to the pain point. It could be just like shiny object syndrome. Like I want to be on the top of whatever it is. And I think that we see that a lot. Like a lot. A lot. I. Um, and yeah, you’re probably a smarter buyer than most people.

I just don’t like spending money, so maybe that was my thing too. It’s like even in-house, you know, it was just like, I was just not the, not the person that’s like, I feel like I’m gonna drop 50 K ’cause I feel like I’m [00:25:00] missing the 6 cents boat. You know, like that’s just not, well, I think the emotional element is different, right?

A lot of it’s like tied back to whatever the task is that you’re trying to achieve. Like if you’re emotional, like you want to be forward thinking in your job and get a raise and bring new ideas to the table, like your tech buying habits are going to follow that. Mm-hmm. Um, you know, if you are. Stuck in your ways and want to keep things the same and don’t wanna change your process and don’t wanna improve.

They’re like, there’s an emotional element in that too. Mm-hmm. Uh, you know, everybody’s seemed the, was it person who’s been around for forever who has, doesn’t want to change their process? Like that’s a, a whole different emotion to tap into. There’s two things that stuck out to me in kind of what you guys were just talking about, and the first is the outdated mentality of landing page strategy, being structured around like outcome or content rather [00:26:00] than audience.

Because to your point, ask like your logical buyer. So okay. If that’s the case, then. A landing page and the content structure and the narrative that goes into that has to appeal to you as the decision maker versus let’s say if James is on your team and he’s the one that has to champion through this deal.

: It’s a completely different set of outcomes, completely different set of content. And instead, you know, we’re still stuck in this model of, oh, we’ve got a white paper going live, or we’ve got a PLG model and we need to, you know, get that freemium version out there and here’s the only CTA we want on here.

It’s like, okay, but. In the world that we play in where we are crafting paid strategies and we’re controlling the audience, we have a much greater control over what we’re saying, how we’re saying it. Mm-hmm. Um, and the other thing that stuck out to me was your comment about like flipping the narrative task.

How I see that too is like all of our clients, most of them anyway, have a competitive market that they’re operating in. Yes. They might have [00:27:00] different value props, they might have different competitive advantages. They might have imagery, but. The other thing that they can stand out amongst in that crowded nature is the buyer journey and how you are appealing to them, rather than just directing them to another landing page that fits the narrative that they might be expecting.

And if you can catch them by surprise, you’re gonna delight them. You’re gonna create that emotional response without having to say it, and you’re gonna get a logic based outcome, in my opinion. Yeah. The couching by surprise, because like if you. Any survey or just talking to any marketer or talking to any buyer, they, I think I interviewed my husband once on buying, because he’s in a totally different space, right?

Like he’s in data analytics and business intelligence. And so I just interviewed him, not as husband and wife, but as like marketer to like someone who’s very marketing averse. Like he constantly is like, I don’t even know how, like you make. A living as a marketer, like how a marketer’s in business. [00:28:00] I’m like, okay, cool.

Thanks. Catch you at dinner. See you later. Yeah. Okay. But you know, just even asking him and like, yeah, he’s gonna do borderline illegal things before he has to contact a company and, and then just like what works and what doesn’t work there. So it’s almost like he’s expecting everybody to be biased. Um, and so like one of the landing pages that I do this comparison framework and we’ve.

Actually implemented this. Mm-hmm. Collectively, which is, you know, the comparison one, which is what are my options in the market? And just being so agnostic about that. Even in the top, not even the whole page, but even just the top part of the page and just saying, okay, you have these problems, here are some alternatives in the market.

Here are some risks that you need to look out for if you, you know, go with one of these alternatives. And, you know, here are some things that we’ve solved for sure, but like telling them like, Hey, I’m gonna help you make this decision, [00:29:00] um, whether you choose me or not. And I think ultimately that makes them choose you.

Because you were the only one that didn’t just like shove their product down your throat. They were like the only ones that were honest with you about what your options are. And you may not like, that may not be the option for them right now, but they’re like, they’re gonna remember that. Like, I will never forget when I saw the loom and video landing pages.

I still, I talk about that like constantly years later, even though looms completely changed it now that they’ve been bought. But yeah. You know, it’s that kind of stuff where it’s like, oh snap. I was not expecting them to say something nice about their competitors. Like what? And that immediately builds trust and no one ever thinks about that, you know?

I’ve got a question that actually is gonna go down like the exact opposite of trust, in my opinion. Have you done anything with a BM landing pages where you are essentially created a landing page to [00:30:00] target? A specific company and personalize the messaging for that company to the point where it’s almost too personal for that company.

maybe not. Have you done it, but have you seen it and what’s your opinion on it? Like, Hey Joe, I see that you bought those $7 eggs. Exactly. Um, yeah. Uh. No, I have not done a BM landing pages. I’ve had a couple of companies talk to me about them and want to do them. And it’s hard, right? Because like it’s probably not cost effective for someone to come to me and be like, I need, ’cause the way, again, back to the way we do it in B2B is like, oh, you want an A BM strategy?

Yeah, let’s hit up these 100 accounts. Like, okay, it’s not a BM that’s just. That’s just marketing. Okay. That’s just like, um, and so, so I always tell ’em, I’m like, yeah, I could probably give you a template, but like at [00:31:00] the end of the day, a template’s a template. It’s the copy and the substance that you’re gonna put into it.

Um, who’s gonna tell them how to balance that information out, right? Like, what are you gonna use, uh, that’s gonna make Microsoft wanna purchase? Like, what are you gonna say on there when you have like an account that’s visiting, but then you have like. 20 or 30 people in the buying committee who are on that, how, how personalized can you actually get without being creepy, um, or that you have information about them that they never provided you or don’t remember providing you.

Um, so like, I get it with the a BM, like you want that personalized stuff, but I’ve never, like, again, as an in-house buyer, I’ve seen a BM pages where it’s like. Hey, Telium. And I’m like, okay, yeah, you used a freaking token in a variable. Like I’m not dumb, you know? Um, but, but then also then if you think of someone who’s like an InfoSec or like cybersecurity space or IT [00:32:00] space, like that’s a red flag to them, I feel like.

’cause they’re like, WTF, I never gave you my info. Yeah. Also, how safe is this? Uh, how securely are you using my information? Um, so there’s a lot of questions there. So I feel like personalization needs to be more like, uh, behavioral or journey based rather than like. Than like personal characteristic based.

I don’t, I don’t know, like, hey, I love dogs too. Wanna wanna get a demo? Like, I don’t know, just be like, yeah. It’s almost like it should fall in like what they do, one-to-one, one to few, one to many where you’re grouping the few in like, okay, these are similar industries that have similar problems that have, you know, so it’s, you can do the personalization at that scale, but I feel like once you go to like.

One to one a BM landing pages, one that’s not scalable at all. You made that point and yeah. Uh, [00:33:00] also kind of creepy. Yeah, and like also, I mean the, you know, you always hear like the best marketing isn’t really scalable, so like that’s less the problem. It’s like you’re kind of dancing around with ethics a little bit, and I think that’s where you kind of gotta ask yourself ultimately what is the information they’re collecting.

Why do I need to make it so personalized for this one account? Is it something that’s really different? Like if you take two healthcare companies and you wanna target them, um, wouldn’t their issues be the same? Like they still under the same regulations? Maybe they have a few things that are different, but is that.

So important to call out. Like I don’t, you know what I mean? So I feel like, uh, a digital sales room is great because you’ve had a conversation with them and then you can customize based on that conversation, which isn’t so creepy. It’s more like consensual. But then you have this like, I would be, I always like take it back to, I take us out of like where we are and put us in an analogy where if [00:34:00] I was on a dating app and someone swiped and they were like, Hey TAs, like who the.

Like, loved what you were wearing today. I like, what? What going on? Fill out my form. Yeah. Like, you know what I mean? Like that would be so freaking weird. Like, Hey, how’s your mom, you know, visited today? You know, and you’re like, how do you know this about me? So then you’re gonna have them focus on the wrong things.

I feel like. So, I mean, we’re talking about personalization in this context, but. I also feel like a BM landing pages, if we wanna call it. Such are a perfect example of focusing on consumption over conversion though, and anybody that says differently of like, oh, well what’s the, the lead capture here? You know, in every situation that has come up to me, it’s like, why do we need that?

You know, their information. What the hell are you grabbing this information from For, right? Yeah. Like that is in a nutshell why shifting from conversion consumption is important and if you have need a testing ground for this, why not test it [00:35:00] there? Yes. Yeah, because that is, that’s exactly right. Like we’re not, there’s no forms typically on a BM pages ’cause you know who you’re talking to and what you’re doing and you’re trying to get them to engage with the content.

And then the way Six Sense and Role works and all those companies report back is like penetration, engagement, all of those things. And um, again, this isn’t the post tomorrow, but, um, I asked like, hockey stacks, Odin. Uh, about the downstream effects of basically engagement or consumption on conversions. And it gave me this whole writeup and I was like, I’m like cheering and singing on the thing because like it’s nice to talk about it and it makes sense, but to validate it with information and data is like great from a different party.

Um, so watch out for that one tomorrow. But it is that because like. Ultimately they have a business justification to put it through, whether they’re feeling it [00:36:00] deeply, whether they’re hurting, whether they’re logical, whatever the it is that the buyer’s doing, ultimately they need to justify the purchase.

what are the things that you would need to justify a purchase? Anything from a pair of pants all the way to 30, 40, 50, a hundred thousand dollars SaaS you need to justify the purchase. Um, and what are the components and core components and tenets of that? Okay. And then making sure you’re giving them the right information.

So if we’re not measuring a landing page’s success on the amount of leads that it’s driving your revenue, it’s generating through e-commerce motion, how are we measuring its success? Aha. The roundabout where, which is like Prav, um, at Paramount talks about this all the time, which is causation and correlation.

And I’m very on board with that type of measurement where I feel like, again, what B2B loves to do is like. Let’s go down to like, is this creative influencing pipeline? And [00:37:00] it’s like, bro, do you know how much shit they’ve seen from us? If you’re doing more than two channels, they’ve seen a ton of stuff from you.

Um, to try to deduce it down to like a single piece of creative or whatever. I mean, there’s some leading indications like, oh, this creative had a little more engagement or whatever. But I’ll ask you guys this, because I saw this in-house, our state of. Whatever report that we had 10,000 downloads on. So obviously there was interest there, but then just our bottom of funnel like demo campaign that had far less engagement.

But then the downstream impact, obviously they were high intent, they were demo requests, um, and those converted and had higher, like faster deal velocity than, you know, the state of whatever report. Because they’re not ready. Right? It’s just as simple. It’s, yeah, it’s such a duh thing, but if you just looked at the numbers and you’re like, oh, the demo [00:38:00] one didn’t get as many views, people weren’t that interested, like Kill it.

Let’s just keep going with the state of CDP. And that’s, so we are gonna do like this volume versus, you know, like the volume of engagement, like with this top of funnel asset versus a high intent demo. You’re not gonna kill a demo campaign just because the numbers aren’t as high converting. ’cause you got 30 here instead of 10,000.

So that’s kind of where I’m going, which is like. There are other indications of whether something’s a success. So I believe in the, what you were talking about before about correlation, causation. The thing that I don’t like in that use case specifically is media mix modeling is like pretty much never gonna work for B2B.

’cause nobody in B2B spends enough. You maybe like a Calendly or a HubSpot or a Salesforce, like you need to be spending in. $500,000 a month or more in media to even like go and be on [00:39:00] multiple channels to have that be relevant. I like a lot more what like hockey stack is doing where they’re tracking the different touch points along the customer journey.

Mm-hmm. And you can find the commonalities. In that customer journey, uh, you know, was it they say 86 different touch points? It is a little bit crazy’s. Okay. You can also see why any sort of modeling also becomes very difficult when you have 86 touch points, but you’re only spending, I. 30 to 50 KA month on media spend and all your other stuff.

It just becomes super hard. But if you can see like, okay, this person saw these LinkedIn ads, went through these landing pages, read this content, attended this event, like you can see the. The correlation there more visually of anybody who has ended up being closed one. I feel like that’s better reporting.

doesn’t give you the nice pretty, you know, how much did I spend, how much did we make? And I think that that’s what everybody in B2B wants and is kind of, I. Unrealistic. [00:40:00] But I think that that’s like the right way to measure the effectiveness of stuff. Yeah. But if, if sales cycles are three months long, right?

You’re gonna let a landing page that sucks, sit around for three months. Like what are we tangibly measuring to say whether it’s working or not? Like you can’t wait to say, yeah, it influence this amount of revenue if it takes three months to get that damn revenue. Task. You could go or I could go on this one.

You go, let me hear, let me hear your opinion. I have, I have, it’s the, it’s the same thing where you have lead, like any measurement technique has to have like leading indicators and. Whatever the end desired result is, right? Like yes, it’s always good to look back at close one and work back of all those deals and see kind of what happened.

So you have an idea, but with anything, there’s leading indicators. Like with ungated content on LinkedIn ads. You can see whether or not people liked the content whether’s based on their click through rates, social interactions, the percentage of videos that they watch, like. You do have to compare those against some sort of benchmark, I’m not gonna say industry benchmarks, [00:41:00] but like your own benchmarks mm-hmm.

To decide whether or not that content was good. Like was this piece of content better than this other piece? If so. Push more in that direction. And I think that’s like the other part where there’s like the set of landing pages that are a little more short term and things like that. And then the ones that I typically help work with are the ones that are more like forever.

Mm-hmm. So we wouldn’t have the question of like, should we turn it off or not? It’s going to be more of a, uh, how do we evolve it or what’s the next thing that the data’s telling us? So. Can I, can I talk about the example, James, that you and I talked about it last week? Go for, yeah, go for it. Okay. The, our collective landing page experience, right.

So for anybody who doesn’t know, um, I worked with Dragon on, you know, snat campaign, which we talked about the wild success, whatever on LinkedIn when it happened, but, um, we created a landing page that was very much on the [00:42:00] consumption based philosophy to test it out. And, um, I think it’s still live. I don’t know if there’s still any tr anyone sending any traffic there or not, but, um.

was looking at all of the other landing pages, and I told James this, I was like, every other landing page had like a three point something conversion rate. Um, the ones that we did were like 1.6 something around that. Right. But what the client ended up telling us was like, they saw 265% increase in purchases.

Not even like the, whatever the conversion is. That’s the, the statistic that we shared. Um. Because of this like long form page that was very, very specific for technical writers and where we talked about their specific problems, how we solved it specifically for them, the same objections, all of those things.

And then the biggest example with the consumption piece is when we were running the test for it, after been running for a few weeks, we saw like 15% of the [00:43:00] clicks out of 2000 clicks, 15% was on the fourth FAQ about like if I bought this lifetime license. But I moved devices. Do I still gonna keep my license?

Like what the hell is going on here? But to see like a hundred and something clicks just on that. Like anyone who’s just looking at these are the people who visited and these are the people who converted would have missed. I. That insight entirely, right? So to see how people are consuming information and are we prioritizing the right information on the page.

So I think at that point we would look at that fourth F FAQ and be like, holy shit, this is a big thing that they’re concerned about. Can we make that its own block? Um, or move it up higher in the page, have it be part of the solutions block or whatever to talk about. How that, like we could address this kind of earlier on and handle that objection before that happens.

Conversion data is not gonna give you that information. [00:44:00] Right. Only consumption data would, and if you’re in a role that has to manage against, we’ll say old school B2B, thinking of, oh, this planning page isn’t working because I’m not seeing the leads that are gonna hang off to sales, what advice do you have?

Somebody that’s in the position that’s trying to manage against that? Well, hopefully. We eliminate the, the whole question of like, should I even turn these off? We are gonna say like, that’s why I call them the foundational pages. ’cause it’s like, guys, these are like always on, always running. These are not part of our like little offshoot campaigns.

I. So that’s something. So I would say like, satisfy their request with like the one-offs and like, yeah, we’re gonna test a couple of things here. Here’s your stupid product launch, landing page, whatever. Have these running, but it takes maybe, you know, 10 minutes out of your day every couple of weeks, right?

Where you can go in, look at the heat map data, look at the session recording, see how people are consuming that, and add it to your monthly reporting of like. Hey, [00:45:00] you know, our evergreen pages. Here are some additional insights. And then use that as kind of like the hub to inform other landing pages in the future for your short term stuff.

Like, Hey, we should definitely like snag it now, can use that objection, which is not specific to technical writers. They can put it on every landing page going forward for any campaign, because obviously it was a big. Objection point. Mm-hmm. And a learning that they got from that, right? Um, so there’s a balance.

Satisfy their request, but also keep this little playground that you got going for yourself, for the data, the good stuff that you actually wanna do, marketing wise, tech stack recommendations. To accomplish that. Oh, that’s a good one. Um, I try to keep it super easy for clients. So if they have an AB testing tool, fine, we’ll do it.

But you can do it ratchet, pre and post tests, um, which is kind of also how we did it. I think we did a variation with ours because we used Unbounce. But if you are building landing pages just in your CMS, you only need two things. One, [00:46:00] whatever website analytics, if you’re using GA four or something else.

and then two, uh, some kind of heat mapping tool. Most have about 2000 sessions that are free. Um, so if you can get it past your IT department or whatever to approve, like just putting a free, uh, trial, a free account, free scripts. I know I always ran into that issue, like, free, that means it’s not secure or whatever.

like, okay, great. Um, but try to get one heat mapping tool and then just whatever website analytics you’re using, that’s all you need to get started. Have you tried feeding any of this into an AI tool that aggregates it and then synthesizes it yet? Uh, like what part, what am I feeding it? I don’t know.

I’m just asking. Tell us your AI automation workflow for landing page. I’m just thinking like if you’ve got, if you have heat maps right over here, you’ve got scroll maps and all that data, right? Yeah. And then you’ve got the session recordings. Those two typically are not talking to each other. No. Yeah.

You can get overlays, but the recordings, you have to watch each one [00:47:00] individually. Yeah. They don’t roll up. Like, is there a way that it, have you tried finding a way to synthesize that and feeding it all into something that aggregates? Not the session recordings, because that one’s like hard, right? There’s no transcripts, there’s nothing, right.

it’s like, eh. Um, but if you look at like. Helping, having it do the analysis for you based on very like, set guardrails that I would put into place. I have a lot of like custom things built for like research, um, audits, things like that. Uh, but not for the reporting part yet, just because I’m still gonna have to collect like, part of the data qualitatively.

And because I’m so focused on the behavioral side of things with landing pages, sometimes it’s like, it’s not gonna see the things I’m gonna see, you know? Okay. All right. So as we kind of come to a close here, I wanna ask a question just to kind of go back through everything we just talked about in a snapshot.

What does it mean to somebody that’s listening to move from conversion to [00:48:00] consumption? I. I always tell people this, which is, I’m not telling you to forego conversions, right. I’m not saying it’s consumption like measure for consumption and not conversions at all. Fuck conversions. I mean, kind of, oh, we just kept our, our rating there, but go ahead.

that was, that was my, that was the name of my talk at Hugo Conference last year, which was like. I said, forget conversions, because my first slide was, marketers are fucked. And my coach was like, yeah, let’s not try to start with like, fuck conversions. Marketers are fucked. Everything’s just send it.

Like keep going, keep going. Um, it’s not, it’s not one or the other. It’s saying like, guys, we’re like skipping a whole level and going conversions, sales outcomes, like immediately. Right. There’s a whole stage that happens before that, and it’s how people are consuming the information and are you giving them the right information for them to eventually convert, whether it is on your landing page or [00:49:00] directly on the website, that is kind of like the reframe that we need to do, and so don’t kill your landing pages too soon.

how people are interacting with it. And this is like not to throw shade against like any surveying tool or like winter or something like that, right? Because people are like, oh, why don’t we just run it through winter and see what they say? And I’m like, totally do that, but also run it with this actual experiment.

Because I always talk about it as like. Kind of like what people do behind closed doors and what they say they do are like two different things, right? I’ve taken a lot of those surveys and I, and I wanna sound smart, so I’m like, yeah, that looks wrong. Um, no, I would probably go down here, whatever. Then you watch a recording of tasks on a page and I’m like, rage clicking ’cause I can’t get this button to work and I’m pissed off.

Right? Like, you’ll learn so much from watching how people behave versus just listening to what they’re saying. Because they wanna sound smart. Um, so consumption [00:50:00] will give you the path to like, what is the information they care about? What is the information that they are not finding on the page? Where is the next logical step that they’re looking for?

they missing something? Are they getting stuck somewhere on the page? Is there a technical issue? You’ll never know these things based on just conversion data, and therefore don’t just dismiss your landing pages as unsuccessful because of that. All right, before we let you go. One piece of advice for somebody to improve what we just talked about and their landing page performance in 2025.

One, not 3 1 1. Your best tool is going to be specificity, so if you wanna just fix your landing page right now, and I’m not talking about like. Performance and loading. We’re just assuming that the fricking page loads. Okay. Um, co take all that copy, plug it into chat, GPT or there’s like Hemingway and like all these other [00:51:00] things and just ask it like.

Remove all the buzzwords, speak an active voice and like would I say this one-to-one with somebody? Right. Not above an eighth grade level. And just clean up that copy that already will get you so much further than anything else that you could possibly do on the page. And a fourth rule, no M dashes, no, listen, I use them sometimes, but like Sure you do.

How? I feel like it’s tainted, right? Like I, I mean, I don’t. It’s very rare. I’m, I’m a small dash person ’cause that’s easier to hit on the keyboard, but like, that’s just me. All right. Task. Thank you so much for joining us today. Before we close it out, how can people find you? Where do you hang out and how can they connect with you and reach out?

I. I’m on LinkedIn. If it was a physical place, they would say I was, I would be a squatter. Um, yeah. And so my husband says I spend way too much time there. Uh, so find me there. Come for the landing page insights. [00:52:00] Stay for the ratchet comments. Um, that’s kind of like my little fun thing on Instagram.

Instagram on LinkedIn. I’m, no not on Instagram. Uh, follow me on Instagram for lots of, uh, meme content, uh, if you’d like, that kind of stuff. But, uh, yeah, LinkedIn, find me task over task like SaaS. Awesome. Well thanks again TAs for joining us. Hopefully we’ll see you back for a fourth time. Until next time, everybody, we’ll catch you later.