#SOFTLAUNCH
HELPING B2B SaaS & TECH BRANDS DISRUPT THEIR CATEGORY VIA
CONVERSION COPY CREATION
BEST FOR
One-person marketing armies who need support with content production.
Marketers in fast-growing startups & SMEs who need experienced copywriters to upgrade the copy to a pro level.
Marketing, project & campaign managers in SMEs & corporates who need outside expertise for complex projects.
WHY? THE TL;DR
Because you're in a saturated category. It's crucial to stand out with your 24/7 salesperson called copy to improve conversion.
The highly targeted copy has to be aimed at the right stages of your ICP's buyer journey and crafted for the proper channels.
(Re)writing entire websites, single landing pages or email campaigns calls for a conversion specialist at the wheel. Starting from €400 per landing page.
TRUSTED BY LEADING B2B BRANDS
THE LONG STORY?
The first content marketing mistake B2B SaaS & tech brands make is to look at competitors to copy their marketing content, benefits included.
They must know something we don't, right?
Wrong.
On the other side sits a team asking the same question and acting from the same presumptions. It reads like the premise of a surreal short story from Franz Kafka himself.
The second mistake B2B SaaS & tech brands make is to create content for internal stakeholders.
Say what? Most marketing & project managers and attached creatives know their ICPs well and regularly meet up with customers. I know because I've worked inside and partnered with quite a few different orgs.
What most people outside a (larger) organization don't realize? The content is commissioned by an internal decision-maker, not by the customer.
So, the project focuses on getting the final approval of said decision-maker. And the latter has to agree on something acceptable for their leaders, direct reports and customers.
Meaning it's about reaching a consensus, specifically in that order of importance.
That consensus is often why the larger the org, the more vanilla the content is. There are more management layers and direct reports to please and loads of egos on the line.
Since this is the corporational order of things and gets emulated by smaller SMEs trying to behave more corporate, it's your perfect secret weapon to disrupt your product category armed with nothing more than tailored, distinct conversion copy.
As none other than Sun Tzu said in The art of war: "The opportunity of defeating the enemy is provided by the enemy themselves."
Another contributor to the overall vanillaness of B2B content? The nature of B2B business software. All benefits can be distilled down to increasing efficiency.
It's hardly going to convert nowadays since decision-makers will tune out when they hear the efficiency mantra repeated for the umpteenth time in a slightly different form.
Face it, stamping 'do more in less time, against fewer costs' on everything from accounting to BI or general ERP software is helping no one push that buy button.
The answer to this copy conundrum?
You'll need to dig up the raw customer pains, take them as a starting point and match them with your product messaging (the how) & positioning (the what/for whom).
Not the other, more traditional way around where you take a few features, turn them into benefits and go to great lengths to invent a partial match with customer pains.
To get this right, you must do old-fashioned qualitative and quantitative research, like 1:1 interviews and representable surveys.
Also important is extracting Voice of Customer (VoC) data from places like social, fora, reviews, communities, support questions & sales calls. It works wonders if you take their words and repeat them back at them. There's a load of pains and emotions in there. You can use for this to communicate you understand them like no other brand.
This is not the place to delve too deeply into the research part. I'll explain more about this on my copy conversion guide product page. That's a foundational and highly recommended starting point for your marketing and sales efforts.
Another cog in the conversion copy wheel is the tone of voice: the personality of your copy and brand. It's powerful because buying is, first and foremost, an emotional process, even for B2B and even for you. Stop shaking your head in denial. We're all humans.
With the research done and the category analyzed, you can create a distinct tone of voice.
If I start talking about this with prospects and unaware customers in B2B, the standard rebuke is that they 'don't want to sound too popular.'
Which is telling.
Apparently, a tone of voice can only be binary. Your copy can only be boring as hell or some over-the-top, infomercial-like shoutfest.
Obviously, this is not the case. A tone of voice is your copy's personality. Now think of the people you know. Their personalities have lots of different traits and go all over the place. Sure, some people can be dull or high drama sometimes, but nobody's like that all the time. My point? The binary division is a complete fantasy.
Example? I recently helped a Dutch HR software company ditch the grey, same-same tone of voice and converted it into a warm, personable and knowledgeable personality. It removed the artificial distance inherent in the old tone of voice.
The result? It upped the open and clickthrough rates of cold email campaigns and brought in more business via their site. They even received congratulatory replies, welcoming the pleasant, different way we approached them. That was coming from cold emails! How many times do you see that from yours? See how standing out works?
The next step is putting everything together for the materials, be it a new or updated site, landing page or email. It's crucial the right message is used for the right channel for something to convert.
To be clear, with conversion I mean a wide range of conversion events. Like a clickthrough on a read-more or buy button, a form sent, a material downloaded or an ad clicked.
But I digress. Let's get back to the right message at the right channel. After all, you don't push a demo in a cold email. And it's a waste of attention to pitch your free newsletter on a pricing page where it competes with a buy button. The Rule-of-one principle (use a single primary CTA) works for a reason.
Another crucial step is being realistic about your intentions. All this I sketched out above, including better conversions, will not work for you if you treat copy as a cost. Done well, copy should be viewed as the worthwhile investment it is.
Why? If a sales org needs to scale, they hire new salespeople. The latter usually work 32-40 hours a week, take breaks, go on holiday, get sick, aren't always productive, have to be trained and will ask for a raise.
They'd do a lot for someone who works 24/7/365 without pause.
Yet, the most scalable salesperson out there, who works 24/7/365, is always productive AND doesn't need to take breaks, holidays or sick leave, is already employed.
It's your site copy.
And that poor copy tends to get treated like an unlucky stray dog. It certainly doesn't get the minimum 40K+ per year investment the average salesperson gets in most of the Western world and beyond.
Abandoned by its owners, it may be lucky if it gets thrown a few budget bones out of pity or because there were leftovers from other departments.
As a result, its fur doesn't look too healthy, its demeanor is cautious and passersby don't know what to make of it. Is it dangerous? Does it bite, carry diseases? Better avoid going near it.
No wonder the site doesn't convert as you'd expect.
It's a different story if you take it in, feed it well, play with it and be the owner it deserves. You'll see it turn into a different animal altogether. A shiny fur, joy in its eyes and fiercely loyal. AKA, it's the furry friend you can rely on 24/7/365.
Lastly, you have to hire a copywriter who knows your neck of the woods. For this to work like a lean, mean conversion machine, you need a specialist at the wheel.
Someone who has worked in SaaS & tech for years, knows all the copy frameworks & techniques, has sales experience and is one of those rare-ish T-shaped marketers.
That's where I come in.
SO WHAT DOES KNVRTED PROVIDE?
KNVRTED helps you with professional conversion copy creation. This can be for a new site, landing page or email sequence. Do you 'only' want to upgrade or repurpose these materials with better converting copy? I'm game too.
As you can tell, I've been around for some time and covered just about every aspect of IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS for ICPs in manufacturing, wholesale, retail and professional & financial services. From the data center level to the UX one and sideways into the telco and hardware product world.
That means you get a few subject matter experts, a T-shaped marketer, salesman, business owner, B2B software user and bilingual EN/NL conversion copywriter in one. You won't find this experience elsewhere.
KNVRTED uses item or project prices paid upfront. It includes project admin, research, copywriting, 2 copyediting rounds and a handover.
Know that I'll want to do enough research to make the project a success. I have pre-made briefs, frameworks and systems in place to conduct surveys, 1:1 interviews or analyze VoC data.
Another must-know is that conversion copy done right is a continuous work in progress. To be a top dog means it needs regular care.
It's not a set-it-and-forget-it exercise you do once every few years. I recommend an annual refresh rate of your site as the bare minimum.
KNVRTED'S CREATION SOP
#1 You contact me with a Q. I'll check whether I can help you and follow up accordingly.
#2 If I can, I'll send you a scheduling link for a 15-min intro call. Here you can select your preferred time/date & software.
#3 Does a collab work for the both of us? If yes, we'll start with a pilot project and I'll guide you through the last 3 steps of the onboarding.
WHAT KNVRTED DOESN'T PROVIDE
~ I can't help you if you're contacting me a few days before launch without research, clear goals or briefs and with nothing to work with but a vague-ish idea that I must have all the answers. I'm afraid conversion copy takes time. How much depends entirely on the project.
If you're serious about conversion goals, you also have to be serious about the prep. There's no shortcut to a high-converting site. For example, a 25,000-word site takes about a month to execute, including the brief, design, copywriting, commenting and placement phases. This is your online store front and the online home of your brand. Your reputation and sales are on the line. A lot depends on it.
~ I can't give you 3, 5, or 10x copy guarantees like some of those too-good-to-be-true 'gurus' out there. Well-researched content always leads to better results. How much better depends on the products, audiences and a host of other variables.
~ On top of a big research element, conversion copywriting has a large testing element. My experience is that most orgs don't test or only do limited experiments. This is partly because B2B tends to generate less traffic than B2C.
The real issue? It's not high on the prio list. Most smaller B2B orgs can't afford to employ CROs. And in bigger orgs they tend to be the first specialists that are let go during a reorg. I've seen this happen IRL. While I can help you with copy variations, I don't provide CRO services.
~ While I write emails, I'm NOT sending them out on your behalf. Handling sensitive lists from and for other companies is too much of a privacy hassle.
DON'T JUST
TAKE IT FROM ME
TRUSTED BY LEADING B2B BRANDS