Brand Measurement: Why Positioning ROI Is So Hard to Prove

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Mark Evans: Before we jump into today's podcast, here are a few announcements. First, the second edition of my book, Marketing Spark, has been published. It delivers strategic and tactical advice and tools to craft compelling stories that resonate with customers. It's a book for entrepreneurs rather than marketers. Through practical advice and real world examples, Marketing Spark is a comprehensive guide to the art of storytelling. Of course, you can find it on amazon.com. Second, I'm doing a free virtual workshop on November 24, which coincides with US Thanksgiving, on improving your brand positioning and messaging. It's interactive, and you'll walk away with inspiration and some ideas on attracting and engaging more customers. The link is in the show notes. Speaking of positioning and messaging, today's podcast guest is Pedro Cortez, who helps SaaS companies turn more visitors into customers with better messaging and positioning. That's his tagline. I love talking about brand positioning and messaging and gravitate to people who share my passion for what I see as a crucial business pillar. My conversation with Pedro has a different tone. In some ways, it felt like a mini debate or a respectful discussion. As much as I interviewed Pedro about what he does and how he works, I also challenged his thoughts and approaches, particularly around the impact of his work. Part of the problem with positioning and messaging is it's not easy to measure ROI. You can't point to your work and confidently say, this is the reason for better results. Better positioning and messaging matter, but they're one part of a multilayered marketing mix. Now I enjoyed the conversation with Pedro because it's healthy to challenge other people's views of the world and share different perspectives. I hope you enjoy the conversation. Welcome to Marketing Spark.

Guest: Thanks for having me. I'll just wanna try to make this podcast episode as as valuable as it can be, so let's do it.

Mark Evans: As we talked about before I hit the record button, I spend a lot of time talking about brand positioning. Probably too much time because I think it's so important. It's one of the pillars for SaaS, marketing, sales, HR, raising capital across the board. So I'm excited to talk to someone who's obviously a kindred spirit who spends a lot of time thinking about this and writing about this. Maybe we can start a conversation by having you share your background and how you got started in the world SaaS marketing and brand positioning.

Guest: That sounds good. On my end, it was a little bit of a a different path, I would say. I start actually started off as a designer because I always had this interest. I I would look at big companies. And at the time this was seven years ago, more or less. And at the time, there weren't that many guidelines on how to design apps. There weren't that many design systems in the first place, and there weren't many guidelines on how to design an app in order to make more money. The revenue side of things on how you can keep users longer and so on. People just it was a guessing game. And now it's a little bit different. So if there's proper roles for it and tools and so on, so it's a little bit different. And at the time, I was looking at what big companies were doing and companies with a lot of users. And we've had a process with a lot of users and so on we're doing. And I felt there was a lot of things missing. I'm a big geek for behavioral psychology and why people buy and so on. So I looked at that and say, looks like this breaks every rule ever. So I thought I could, let's say, in the young innocence, just make it better. And I start publishing, like, a few designs around it, how I would redesign this app and that app and so on. And because I used to draw when I was a kid, I used to spend all my hours drawing. I could just look at something and recreate it very easily even though I haven't used the Figma and so on. So I got up to speed really fast. And I started doing a few projects. I've done a few apps with lots of users. I worked with few agencies here in in Portugal and few clients and so on. But then I realized what I actually liked wasn't the design, was the was optimizing for more sales. That was the part that I like geeking out on. And then I eventually moved to landing pages because I just thought it was, like, a medium that was easier to tweak. It would be, like, more, of a b two b aspects because apps are mostly b two c or the most common, the ones with the most users. And then that slowly involve involving to me designing landing pages to just writing the copy and so on. And I just noticed over time as I was geeking out on copywriting that the way I think is just it's like a very natural way for a copywriter to think is if there was a type of person that was born to do it, just felt I was, born to do it, let's say. And even though that kinda, sounds cheesy.

Mark Evans: One of the things that fascinates and puzzles me at the same time is how the positioning and messaging for many SaaS companies, including those with great products, is mediocre, if not terrible. You visit their websites, you look at the homepage, it's confusing, incoherent, there's a lot of industry vernacular. They're talking a language that is not designed for customers. And the question I ask, and I'm gonna ask you, is why do so many SaaS companies struggle with positioning and messaging given that it's so important these days to tell a clear and compelling story. Like, how come they don't recognize that their positioning and messaging isn't working or is completely off? And what are the signs that a company has a positioning problem?

Guest: Mhmm. The reason why I think it's like, lot of companies do this don't do this properly is maybe for a couple reasons. Probably one of the biggest reasons is that they look up to bigger companies, and they look at what they're doing. And they probably think copying them is a good idea even though they have their a lot of brand awareness so they can afford to just not be as clear. It's never a good idea to not make your messaging clear, but they can afford to get away with it because people have some awareness of what they do before they even click on the page. So that's one thing. The second thing is regardless if the founder is technical or not, I think most of the most SaaS founders are like product people. So they like geeking out on the products. They like kicking out on the problems they're solving. They like kicking out on the features they're building even though maybe not not that many people want those features. Right? And it's like they speak their own language. It's not something that is gonna be natural to them. It's almost like charisma. Right? You you that is something that you have to learn to be how to be well spoken. You have to learn how to communicate with people. You have to learn how to understand their feelings and so on. That is something they they learn over time, and that is something as a product person is, like, totally the opposite of what you're doing every day. So it's normal that when they try to write something, when they try to explain themselves, they just sound like robots when they try to write something.

Mark Evans: But do you think they run into the emperor has no clothes problem is that they operate with this positioning and messaging, and everyone pats them on the back and says, oh my god. Your marketing and your messaging and your positioning are so clear. It's wonderful. I love what you guys are doing. But meanwhile, what they have is actually cutting them off at the knees because they're operating with positioning and messaging that's not resonating, that doesn't have the impact that reflects the value and the utility of the product. Why don't they get that perspective? Why doesn't someone within the marketing or sales or product development team turn to the the VP marketing or the CEO and go, when I look at the landscape, our positioning, our messaging doesn't work as well. We need to fix it. It needs to be this way. Why doesn't that happen?

Guest: I think the real answer is probably, like, a little bit of a lack of self awareness, just denying the actual problem because it feels like they wanna sound smart with their marketing, or they are looking for the validation of maybe the decision maker or the way that the the team wants the product to be perceived rather how everyone else wants the the product to be perceived. And then those things tend to happen. Right? They write the pages for other people on the team or how they think they wanna do it or making them feel smarter rather than what the customer wants to hear. Because it's it's pretty hard to do that. Kind of that is, like, the easy way out to just figure out what is a a funny way to do this or what is the stereotypical way of creating a website and making it sound, like, very grand and and very, like with a lot of buzzwords and all that stuff. I think they just have the wrong reference of what it's a good or a bad, landing page.

Mark Evans: Given your background in design and landing pages and obviously copy that converts, what's your take on the signs that positioning and messaging aren't working? What are the the signals that a company would get? Maybe they recognize them or not that they need a different story, something that's going to resonate more, something that's gonna drive conversions? Because I think a lot of companies struggle with the the idea they don't know what they don't know. They don't recognize that their their positioning slash messaging isn't working. So from when you're working with clients or even when you're communicating via LinkedIn and the other ways that you do marketing, what are the things that you point to and say, these are the signals that your position in messaging are ineffective?

Guest: So if they had, like, really good mental reference of what a good and bad landing page could look like, they could tell right away, but that's not really the case. Otherwise, they wouldn't make the mistake. So I think the sign that every person can tell right away, but maybe they don't understand where it comes from or is, like, the underlying reason why that happens is, let's say, if you sell a product through a demo and you have all these weird questions in the demo. Right? So when they get to the demo, they barely know anything about the products. They don't know any reasons why you're better. Maybe they come up to the demo with the completely wrong expectation. Right? So your product does does this thing, and they think it does something else. Even if they're more or less related, it could be, like, totally something that is, like, different enough to where you couldn't sell them on that. So those are typically signs that they're just not clear on what do you do, but they booked anyway because their problem was so urgent and so big that they had to fix it, so they booked anyway. And those are the that's a very small percentage of the amount of people they couldn't be converting. Right? So let's say out of every 10 people, they're probably converting, like, one or two of their the problem is so big that they book the call anyways regardless if they know what their product does or not. Right? So that's one layer one layer. The other layer is, let's say let's do the demo again because normally, more feedback in their on their reactions and so on. Let's say you're showing them a feature. Right? You're showcasing some sort of feature based on what they ask, and they're, like, blown away. They're like, I didn't know you could do this. This is way better than what we're using and so on. So it's like the moments of why the product is so good only happens either after they see it in a demo or once they try it. If that's the case, then it's like a sure sign that you're losing money on by just not improving your your messaging and your positioning because people should have even if it's a smaller version of that moments, they need to have that. So it needs to be clear right away. The three pillars I usually talk about, what is the result that you provide? Why are you better than what I'm using right now? Otherwise, you'll never overcome that resistance of switching over. And how long would it like, what is the risk? What how long would it take to set up, or how long would it take to train my team and so on? Right? If they don't understand these three things at the same time, then you're never gonna be, like, as optimized as you should be. Right? Because, otherwise, there's just gonna be people that are never gonna convert. Usually, with my clients, they're even if their page is okay and they're converting, there's always, like, this percentage of people that they could never convert because they're more skeptical than everyone else. Is either normally, these are, like, more enterprise leads or at least that they wanna target if they wanna go up markets. People that just they have tried more tools. They're more skeptical to whatever the website claims, and they should they are probably experimenting with several tools all the time, so their mind is clearly comparing all the time at everything you're saying. So they're much harder to convert when they pay you way more.

Mark Evans: I would argue in theory that what you say makes sense. If I'm a salesperson or a BDR and I'm doing a demo or a presentation and I say something that the light bulbs go on immediately, or a lot of what I'm saying isn't resonating and people are they're silence and people are confused and they're asking questions. Those are amazing signals that should relay back to the marketing team and the product team, but often, I don't think that happens. And I don't think there are I'm just curious about the other signals that a company can receive from prospects and customers about their messaging. Because I think, like, my experience, a lot of them operate in ignorance is that they're just doing what they're doing. They're they don't know what they don't know, and that there's just not enough blatant shots across the bow that will say to a company, your positioning, your messaging sucks, and you need to change it. A lot of them operate in ignorant bliss, and they don't know any better. And I just that's one of the challenges that I have is as a somebody who spends a lot of time on on positioning is getting people to recognize that that what they have is a pain, a big pain that needs to be solved ASAP. Any thoughts on that?

Guest: When you say the big pains, are you talking about the people you're helping or, like, the customers looking at the website?

Mark Evans: The people that I'm helping because when companies okay. Let me take a step back here. A lot of companies will look at conversion rates, for example. And if they're way below industry benchmarks, they know they have a problem. If they're not getting inbound, the pipeline isn't being filled, sales aren't happening, then that's the reason for panic in a lot of companies, and they'll do a complete tactical overhaul. Positioning seems to be a different creature because the signals aren't as blatant. They're there, but they're not on a dashboard that says, our position is not working. We need to change it. Maybe questions during a sales call will provide some indications. What I'm asking from your perspective is that what are those blatant signals? What should, the head of marketing or a CEO be looking at that tells them our positioning is not working? Because they could operate without knowing what they need to know for a long time.

Guest: Yeah. In my case, when I work with clients, they talk to me at a point where they're like, they clearly see all these signs and demo calls and so on where they're like, yes. Once people if I if only I could get more demos, if only I could get more signups, I know that I could close, like, a huge percentage of these people. Right? So they come with me without pain already. That's the kind of the clients that I choose to work with in the first place that kinda fixes the the that problem on my end. But I like to look at it in two different ways, let's say. So let's say if you wanna fix the messaging, it's more like, how do I explain the product that I already have with the same markets in the best way possible? So they look at our offer, and it's, like, the most attractive thing that it could be so we can just get more people to buy it. Usually, a sign for this is if you look at your numbers and look at how many people are getting into the website, how many are sign ups are you getting, how many people are turning to customers, how many are renewing, and so on and so forth. If you look at your numbers and you figure out what is the biggest bottleneck at the moment, and the only way that you could grow your business or the fastest way to grow the business is to just convert more people out of the ones you're already getting onto the website. It's yet another signal that you need to fix it. Because, otherwise, tweaking other numbers before you do that is just not gonna be as effective. So if you have your numbers, like, laid laid out like that, it just becomes more evidence. The second area of this is, like, the positioning parts is usually, like, a little bit broader. The way I like to look at it is if they wanna go for either a different markets or if they wanna go let's say they're in, like, a red ocean. They wanna more they wanna create, like, a new category and so on. That is something that is a little bit more long term, a little bit more complex, and it's almost it's very hard to sell them on that unless they can see it because it's, like, untapped potential. So it's like a market they haven't really experienced much of because they haven't really gone for that market a 100%. So that part is a little bit tricky. I like to look at it as separate problems almost depending on the clients.

Mark Evans: I feel like we're geeking out here and really going deep into the weeds, but that's what this conversation is all about. But I'm gonna counter what you said. Do customers come to you? Do companies come to you knowing that they have a messaging and positioning problem? What happens in my experience is that they have a conversion problem, or they have a MQL problem, or a sales problem. Marketing's not working. The business isn't doing well. So the first reaction is, I think in many cases, even before they look at the strategic focus, is to look at the tactical levers that they're pulling. Oh, we should spend more money on advertising. Maybe we should go to more conferences. Maybe we should publish more content given the rise of AI. Maybe we should improve our SEO. But I would suggest that messaging and positioning are probably pretty low on their radar. It's probably not seen as the cause of their problems when, in fact, it could be one of the missing pillars. My question to you is, why do your customers come to you? Do they come to you because they recognize, oh, Petro, I have a messaging and positioning problem. If you could only fix that, my marketing would be better. Or are they coming to you saying, my web's not my website's not working, conversions are down, bounce rates are up, and I can't figure out what's going on? Why do they come to you?

Guest: Usually, when, clients come to me, they're a lot more aware of what the problem is. And the answer is of, I know that things aren't clear. I'm not sure which angle would work best, but I'm confident that this is one of the biggest opportunities I have.

Mark Evans: Do they know they have a positioning and messaging problem? Is that what they come to you and say, I have a positioning and messaging problem, and you have to help me, or is it something else that they say, but what they're really mean is I have a positioning and messaging problem?

Guest: They say that's but it's be for two reasons. One, because all the content that I create, which is the thing that gets me all the clients, is directly to related to is essentially only problems that the exact clients I want would have. So only them resonate with it with that type of contents, and it kinda filters the it filters some of the people out because I like to work with people that are already aware of what the problem is because I don't wanna sell them on it. So here's what I mean. Someone could come to me and part of my job, depending on how deep you wanna get into this, could be let's say, I wanna make more money. There's like a let's say it's like almost like a timeline because they also take some time to realize this if they're if they're doing it by themselves. Let's say is I wanna make more money. Okay. I wanna make more money. It means I need more leads. And if I need more leads, it means I need to improve my marketing. But how do we improve my market into which area? Okay. It looks like it's probably my website. Okay. Why is my website? It's probably messaging. Right? So you see all these phases they they have to transition through. You could be the medium on the call. Like, if they see you as an expert, you can transition from, if you wanna make more money, this is your opportunity, and you go through all the stages. But they have to be really receptive to it. I usually don't go back more than one or two stages because I like someone to be really sold on what we're doing because it's just, like, the type of client relationship that I wanna have. So in my case, I do it on purpose. I only wanna talk to people that just do that.

Mark Evans: I agree. And I I think that correlating the symptom with the problem is a great way to educate companies on what's really happening. So if your message if your website's not converting, for example, you and I should be doing marketing. Say, your website's not converting. Probably one of the reasons is your messaging's not working, and you probably don't have good positioning. Okay. Great. Okay. Your advertisements aren't converting because your landing pages don't work. You've probably got messaging and positioning problem. Is that the the formula that you're using to communicate to your ICPs?

Guest: It's similar to that. Usually, on the LinkedIn side of things, like, when I actually post stuff. So I always like, the one thing that tends to work really well is if I frame it almost like a sales call, because then everyone understands this. Because if you think of your website as a salesperson, it's pretty obvious that if that salesperson doesn't explain the product properly or most importantly doesn't answer the objections, he he closes like zero deals. Right? So if I was a salesperson selling software products, I even if I show the product perfectly, and at the ends, you ask me a bunch of questions and I can answer them, they'll they get defensive. They assume things. If I don't talk about the setup, they assume I'm not gonna help them or it's gonna take a long time. So you can kill the deal with they can be turned off really easily. Right? Same thing with your website. If you look at it as a bunch of questions that you're not really answering, then people start realizing, yeah, people have this question about my website. My setup time, people assume all the time that the setup is long, but it's not. That is a question that is preventing them from buying. So my content, what it does is it builds the bridge that I don't wanna build on. I I want more leads all the way up to I have a messaging problem. That my content does that. I go from messaging problem to which part of the website are we gonna tweak and so on because I don't wanna bother with the rest when I'm talking with someone. Because that's how you make the sale, like, all really long, or you just talk with people that are not serious.

Mark Evans: So we spent a lot of time looking at the signals of bad positioning and messaging. Why don't we attack this from a a different angle and look at one of the biggest challenges when it comes to positioning messaging is quantifying the success of the work that you and I do and being able to measure and and assess the impact. Because if you look at the deliverables of a position in a messaging exercise, you get your value propositions and your brand positioning statement, and you identify, like, the key benefits, the biggest value that you deliver. We identify what makes a company different. We'll update the messaging, the website, that kind of stuff. But a client will turn and say, like, what are the how's that gonna impact my business right now? Because we live in a very show me instant gratification world. So when you're working with your clients and they're talking to you about the work that you do and its effectiveness, how do you demonstrate ROI? How do you say to them, okay. Here's how I quantify. Here's how I'm how I'm quantifying the success of the work we've done together. What are those KPIs if we can actually use KPIs for positioning and messaging?

Guest: I think those are probably two questions. It's more like how do I measure results and which things am I gonna measure? The first thing that I always like to say to any clients or any people that I'm speak speaking with on a call is that tracking is, like, very far from actually being perfect. There are a lot of things that we can attribute. The buyer's journey is pretty complex. They might see an ad. They come back to the home page where they convert from the pricing, whatever it is. They convert from a new computer, or someone else in the team refers it because there are multiple people involved in the decision before they even book a demo, all the stuff. So I say that it's never really perfect to every prospect. So what I like to do is I like to look at what is the information that we can use in order to try to make the best assessments of whether this is working or not depending on what the client has. So it depends on how much traffic they get, where does the traffic come from. So for example, if you get a ton of traffic, but all of it comes from the blog and very few traffic actually goes to the marketing pages and makes it a little a little bit messy, or if you get all the traffic from referrals and so on, that makes it a little bit tricky. But the main ways that I track it is either a baseline test, meaning that you would have to know more or less how many trials or demos are you getting per month and what is the average revenue you get per customer. And it's it has been consistent for the last few months. The reason why this works for me is because people only reach out to me once they really feel that they're screwed, that only I can fix the messaging because they tried it before and they don't know how to how to do it. So it means that their results have been pretty consistent. So, therefore, if I make a change, we can see the results. So we do that if they don't have enough traffic for an AB test. Otherwise, we just do an AB test. That would be ideal. Some sometimes with clients, we have some pages where we can do a straight AB test, and other ones, we have to do a baseline. And in terms of the KPIs that I'm looking for is I'm very biased towards revenue. Right? So all I want the clients all I want for the clients for them to get an a recently good ROI. So let's say you have 10,000 visitors and you have 500 sign ups or whatever it is. If I make the sign ups go down, but it'll make more revenue, I don't care. I'll do it anyway. Because I could explain it in a cheesy way that I could get more sign ups, and it would be like a a worse quality, and it would be even harder to score them and so on. So I would just gonna be right biased towards revenue and probably even increasing the revenue per customer. So I'll give you a random example. Let's say I think the most common results is to get to get more or less an equal increase per page. So let's say I redo this landing page. Right? You get a 50% increase in conversion. Revenue per customer is about the same, a little bit higher. Right? Because they came with more context before they actually try the products, so, therefore, they were more like a little bit more likely to buy. Right? So let's say that is the average result. But I've had plenty of clients where we got a 10% increase in sign ups, which is it's weak even if it was just from one page given the traffic that client had, But they got a 40% increase in revenue from all the sign ups that they got because it was an audience that they couldn't sell to before because they were too skeptical. Right? So I'm always biased towards revenue if we have the higher bounce rates or if they spend less time on the page or if they don't scroll until the ends, I don't really care as long as we make more money.

Mark Evans: Yeah. I mean, I like revenue as a north star. I guess the question I would ask is whether you can directly correlate better messaging and positioning with revenue because, obviously, what your work is one part of the mix. It's it at the same time, the company, based on the position and messaging they have, could spend more time on social media. They could spend more time or more money on advertising. They could be doing more cold outreach. So there's lots of different things that they could be doing that are different that support the work that you've done, but it's but it but if they didn't do all that stuff, maybe your work would just wouldn't wouldn't be noticed because they wouldn't be putting the spotlight on it. So it's a tricky thing to say, I created better positioning in messaging, and as a result and revenue went up, it's all because of my work. You're taking credit for all of that. And that's that's I I think that's I feel that it feels like a reach. It really feels like because I I just don't think one thing moves the needle these days, even if it's much better positioning in messaging.

Guest: The short answer is directly, you can you can't really correlate. It's pretty hard. But when I work with clients and that's why the I don't have, like, case studies for all the clients is because it's not, like, insanely clear that those results came from me. That's why you and, also, because not all of them let you make it public because competitors will look at it and so on. But it's very hard to make it, like, a direct correlation unless everything is dialed in except for the messaging, which sometimes when they talk to me is because they get desperate because it's the sales process is dialed in. Churn is pretty low. At this point, it's hard to get more traffic because all the keywords they're ranking for is already good, or it's hard to increase the marketing budgets before increasing the conversions because otherwise, it's not gonna be profitable. So, therefore, there's only one thing that they can tweak in order to make revenue go up. Nothing else there's nothing else they can do. So in those cases, it's very easy to correlate because they have a baseline. They're having converting about the same. There's very little seasonality, so it's very easy to correlate. But I would say in more than 50% of the cases, it's hard to correlate. That is just the the honest truth. But at the same time, a good entrepreneur knows that it takes time, and most of good things get indirect results. So in your case, you're creating content on LinkedIn. You could be doing call outreach. You could be going to events. You could be doing all this stuff where you're doing podcasting, which maybe took you months and months to see the actual results. You just had to trust that it that way it would work. And you're still not exactly sure how many clients you got from podcasting because you might have gotten a referral that then watch your podcast and convert six months later, and they never told you about this. Even if you ask, they just forget. So a good entrepreneur also knows that, and that's why I'm very picky with the clients that I work with because I want them to feel successful, and it's also part of it, them being

Mark Evans: Great answer. And I don't mean to push you and be antagonistic here, but I think it it's really interesting to look at what we do and to talk to people about the impact that it makes. And maybe, it's just a thesis, that the ultimate KPI for positioning and messaging is confidence. If a company, the CEO, the head of marketing, the head of sales, the head of product, the employees feel like what you've given them, what we've given them is a much more powerful, impactful story that makes it abundantly clear why this company is the obvious choice, that puts the spotlight on the company's strengths and starts to amplify those strengths of the world and starts to position this company as something special, tells a story that reflects the quality of the product. Like, the whole company moves forward in a more confident way knowing that they're all reading off the same page. They believe it. Mhmm. They can see themselves as being differentiated, and that just It's very subjective. It's a very hard to quantify feeling, but ultimately, that could be, in the short term, that could be how you and I say to a client, yeah, we've done a great job together, now it's time to move forward. What do you think of that?

Guest: Yeah. I'm totally happy to answer these questions because even today, I'm working with someone in my team to see if we can figure out, is there a better way that we can test things? Is there a better way that we can quantify results? Because it's not like the obviously, the clients are super happy with the story they have and the results they get, and they see they they do see the results, they are aware of them. But the more aware they are of the results they're getting on and how far they've come, if there's a way to make them constantly aware, that would mean that the clients would just come back more often. Right? Because you get it's it's like the idiotic trim treadmill. Right? You get used to having that sort of success, and then you forget about it. Right? You forgot what kinda got you there. That was the website. And then they might assume you have to tweak the website, like, once a year, or they or it's like the amount of times that they think about tweaking the website just makes them way more likely to come back to me or to refer me to other people. So the better that I can track this, the more aware they are of the results, and the more they'll come back and so on and so forth. So it's more beneficial for everyone. It's just at this point, it's very hard to track. It's like a puzzle. It's a big puzzle.

Mark Evans: You're picking up on people coming back to you. One of the things that I talk about a lot when it comes to positioning and messaging, it's not a it's not a set it and forget it proposition. You can't, okay. We've done our positioning. Now we're good to go. It constantly evolves and changes. What are the signs that a company needs to refresh its mess its positioning? It needs to tweak it a little bit. Are there things that they can look at, and what are the the processes that you would suggest that a company go through to make sure that their message, their positioning is still relevant and still resonates?

Guest: That is the timing for that changes depending on the marketer you're in. So the way I usually look at it is, let's say you you've redone your messaging, and now the website is really clear and people understand the offer and so on. But over time, it's not like the message is gonna become unclear. It's more like, how do people see you compared to other solutions in the markets? And that could be sometimes other solutions in their head could be not doing anything at all, hiring someone to do whatever your software does, or just other software that they have available in the market. So when the market evolves and the functionality of other products or other solutions they have also evolve, the way that they look at your product versus every other solution starts to changes start to change because other profit other products are becoming better or they're becoming their messaging is better or their pricing is different and so on. As they add more variables, you need to just do a slight reach at retouch in your messaging or or your positioning so you can always feel like the best solution in the markets. So it's like a comparative thing. Right? You always wanna win their the comparison they make in their head of whether or not this is the best solution out there. So it just event it depends on how fast other solutions evolve.

Mark Evans: Basically, what you're doing is you're monitoring your product and how it's evolving. You're looking at how customers are using it, and you're constantly looking at the competition and seeing how they're positioning themselves in the market to make sure that you've got all the right signals so that you can make any moves if necessary.

Guest: Yeah. Exactly. Because you have to figure out what's gonna be your next move. Are you gonna double down? Are we gonna double down on just one ICP? Are we going up markets? Are we going to just try to get some more lower ends accounts? Like, million things that could be done.

Mark Evans: Right. So I've asked you a lot of hard questions, a lot of tough questions. I've challenged you, which is the whole point of this podcast. I mean, I like a a bit of a softball question. What advice would you give us to a SaaS company looking to improve their messaging and positioning, but they're not sure where to start?

Guest: I think usually the best way I'm not sure. I think that has a few different pillars in order for for them to execute it properly. So it's first is identifying which opportunity to go after, and then is how to actually tweak it. So the first problem, it's more about usually, the best way to figure out the the best opportunity is looking at the pages looking at your buyer's journey. Right? So let's say where the people come from, what sort of expectation they have, what pages did they go through before they they made a decision to buy. And based on the amount of traffic that each one gets at the same time compared to the level of intent it has. So for example, if your blog gets a lot of traffic, doesn't mean you have to tweak it because that's that's the whole point of it. But your homepage might get a lot of traffic as well, but doesn't that doesn't mean that you don't have to switch tweak the pricing, for example, which is one of the most important ones. Might get less traffic, but it's one of the first things and last things people check before they're ready to buy. So you just have to balance out the amount of volume or the amount of people looking at that page versus the intent that it has in the relation to people actually buying. So that's how you find your opportunities. In my case, what I like to do is I like to do, like, short projects, three to five pages, validate it really fast. If you do, like, less than that, it's not really worth it because of the research process that has to be done. And then just get, like, the best results you can get with the minimum least amount of efforts, and then it repeats the process, like, several sprint sprints a year. That would be the first way of looking at it in order to identify the the opportunity. The other way of doing it is of actually executing is just thinking about is changing how you think about the pages themselves. Right? So, again, think about it as a sales call. Right? So list out all the concerns that people would have before they they buy. List out all the moments that people get once they jump on a demo and they see it and they get blown away by it. Think about all the reasons why people switched over from one product to another because it's like one of the hardest things that you can do is have ones have someone go through the pain of switching from one product to another. So it just means they saw something in your products that just made them overcome that resistance. So you need to pay really good attention to that. So list everything out, all the reasons. You list all the ways you would answer them, and then you start thinking about the layouts of the page. Right? So what should each section say? Right? Outline it first. You think about what do you wanna say before you think about how you wanna say it. Right? So first, define really what are the things that have to be on that page versus the things that have to be somewhere else. What is going to go on each section? And only after that, only after you define all of that is when you start thinking about headlines and images and so on. Typically, people do that the other way around, so they think about images and design and the and the headlines and so on, and it's very hard. You almost get, like, writer's block because the reason you get writer's block is because you're trying to think and filter at the same time. So first, you just do a do, like, a big ass brain dump in a Google Doc, and then you filter everything else. And then, essentially, you break it down into one step at a time. First, the structure. What am I gonna say? What are the headlines? What is gonna be supporting these headlines? What is the order's gonna be? Like, one thing at a time, then it's much smoother.

Mark Evans: Great. Thanks for all the the great insight, and thanks for the conversation. We covered a lot of ground in a short period of time. Where can people learn more about you and what you do?

Guest: So people can find my website at, cortez.design. They can find a little bit more information about the services, some of the case I I have as well. I also have a a cheat sheet, which is the landing page formula I use for all the clients. And they also has a tutorial and so on that is available for free, so that's something that they can download if they want. Essentially, walks them through all the process of actually redoing the like, a homepage or a landing page. And then they can also find me on LinkedIn, which is where I share most of the tips. So stuff that companies do wrong, tear downs of of landing pages, good or bad, overall tips, client results if they wanna geek out on what results they got and why they got those results and so on. Those are the two best places.

Mark Evans: Thanks again, and thanks to everyone for listening to another episode of Marketing Spark. If you enjoyed the conversation, leave a review. Subscribe via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app, and share via social media. If you'd like to learn more about how I help b to b and SaaS companies as a fractional CMO and my recently launched ninety day marketing sprint service. Send an email to mark@markEvans.ca or visit marketing spark dot co. I'll talk to you next time.