SPEAKERS

Naomi Soman, Christian Klepp

Christian Klepp  00:03

Welcome to B2B Marketers on a Mission, a podcast for changemakers, where we question the conventional, debunk marketing myths, provide actionable tips, think differently, disrupt industries, and take your marketing to a new level, from improving your campaigns to making you a better marketer. These are the inspirational stories that will help us change the way we think and approach B2B marketing, one conversation at a time. This podcast is brought to you by EINBLICK Consulting, helping you to stand out in the market and drive revenue to your B2B business. And now your host, Christian Klepp.

All right, folks, welcome everyone to this episode of B2B Marketers on a Mission. This is the show where we help you to question that conventional, think differently, disrupt your industry and take your marketing to new heights. This is your host Christian Klepp. And today, I’m joined by someone on a mission to help B2B SaaS marketers make every dollar go further with copy that converts. So coming to us from Tel Aviv, Israel, Naomi Soman, welcome to the show.

Naomi Soman  01:11

Thank you. Thank you so much for having me.

Christian Klepp  01:13

Thank you so much for being on the show, Naomi, and I’m really looking forward to diving into this conversation, because it’s a really important one, especially for marketers that have to either contend with copywriting and content marketing. I wouldn’t say anyone listening to the show, I would say that was that would be a nine out of 10. Right? In terms of people that have to deal with that. So um, yeah, without further ado, let’s dive in. So you’ve been a professional SaaS copywriter, or messaging strategist for some time now. And so just for the sake of this conversation, we’re gonna zero in on a topic that I think has become part of your professional mission. And that’s how to build the right personas so that you can adapt your messaging across the funnel. I know that sounds like a handful, and it probably is, but it’s super important. So let’s dive in and start with the following question. Where do you see a lot of B2B SaaS companies fall flat when it comes to both personas, and messaging?

Naomi Soman  02:17

So I think that the reason why SaaS companies usually fall flat is because they’re too zeroed in on features, and not enough on moments. So SaaS company, SaaS products are very complicated, they have a lot of really interesting features. And the initial instinct is for people to say, here are the features that we can offer you, here’s why they’re really cool. Come take a look, come try it. But when it comes to building a persona, you want to think more in terms of moments, you want to think what was going on in their life that led them to search for our solution. So for project management, it’s not that they are having a hard time organizing, it’s that they have a huge email thread, and they can’t find the information they need, or they have a spreadsheet with 17 tabs open. And when you shift the conversation from: here are the features we have to let’s paint a picture of the moments in this person’s life, that as they go through our marketing funnel, then you can really bring that persona to life in a very colorful way that’s not cheesy or over the top or off brand, but is still nuanced, and easy to relate to. So you feel like you know this person, because a persona is person, a person’s life is made up of these very visual, very tangible moments.

Christian Klepp  04:00

Okay, fantastic. Fantastic. So just basically to address the question, you feel that not enough SaaS companies are giving this particular aspect enough airtime, so to speak, they’re not focusing on that enough? Is that what you mean?

Naomi Soman  04:17

Yeah, exactly. Because you sort of have two different camps, you have the sort of traditional campaign marketers, demand gen user acquisition, and they’re more likely to think of a persona as… Okay, we are dealing with men between the ages of 25 and 35, with this income level, and maybe this family situation. And then you have more product marketers who are very, very focused on what are the features that people are using. How are they using them, because they’ll go and talk to customers, and the customers will say, this is how I use this feature. This is how I use that feature. And that’s how they’ll build a persona. And neither of those camps really get at what a persona is in real life. And how do you use it. And more importantly, how do you translate that into copy, because there’s sort of an old adage, no one reads the Wall Street Journal, because they have an Ivy League education, a golden retriever and make six figures, right? Like those are maybe correlated, but there’s no causation there, the reason why somebody might read the Wall Street Journal is related to what they are getting out of it, and maybe what kind of qualities they associate with the Wall Street Journal. And the same is true for SaaS. People, a middle manager doesn’t just buy a project management tool, because he needs a solution, he buys a project management solution, because there are all of these things going on in his life that are driving him to look for that tool. And if you can, if you can pull out all of those examples, then you can actually write copy that stands up off the page and makes people to pay attention. Rather than just getting caught in these buzzwords and getting caught in this jargon. So instead of defaulting to the sort of obvious copywriting examples like improve your ROI, or save time, save money, be more efficient, those are sort of bland, they don’t go beyond the surface level. You can, maybe it’s they want to hear they want to see their publications name across all other… they want to see their company name across all of the top publications. Or maybe they want to hear from their team members. Wow, you are one of the best managers that I’ve ever had. You’re so efficient, and you really help bring the best out of our team. That really helps people see themselves in your solution, as opposed to just this is the feature, this is what it does. This is the benefit that you can get out of it. It makes it more like jumping into a story.

Christian Klepp  07:15

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I’m gonna move us on to the next question. And I’m sure you’ll have no problem answering this one. Talk to us about other pitfalls. Right? That marketers should avoid when they’re developing personas and messaging.

Naomi Soman  07:30

So I would say the main one that I see is not mapping it across the funnel. A lot of times marketers hate these golden rules, like show benefits, not features. And the truth is, sometimes people need to see benefits. And sometimes people need to see features. So when you think about a persona, you have to think about what message are you delivering them right now, if this is very, very top of funnel, maybe it’s an ad, maybe it’s a blog post, maybe it’s a podcast, you really want to focus on the benefits of your solution, because they haven’t really learned all that much more sort of in that solution aware stage, but later on, like, let’s say they’re comparing you versus your competitors, you want to zero in that features, because then they’re already ready to understand the need of the issue understand how you really different from your competitors.

Christian Klepp  08:31

Fantastic, no, that’s absolutely right. That’s absolutely right. They need to take the different stages of the journey, the different stages of the funnel into consideration. That’s absolutely right. Okay, um, we talked about this in the pre interview call. But we all know that research and strategy are important. I mean, some people use those two terms very loosely. But um, talk to us about how marketers should use this type of research and strategies to create personas that are actually useful. So I’m not not naming names, but we don’t want to come up with personas like Marketing Marion, Frustrated Frank, right. I mean, we’re way past that now.

Naomi Soman  09:13

Yeah, so that’s a great question. My favorite way to do this, and I think this is the most efficient way to do this, as opposed to running surveys that might take a long time or trying to find customers that you can interview and hoping that they remember everything. What I do is I go straight to the sales calls. So typically, SaaS companies will have some sort of recording tool, like Gong, for example. If they don’t, it’s super easy these days to just hit record. So if your SaaS company is not recording calls, ask the BDRs, SDRs, AEs if they can just hit record on several of their next sales calls and send them over to you when they’re done. So I say go right into the discovery calls typically at the beginning of the sales process, the salespeople will interview the potential customers and users to see if they’re a good fit. And if they’re worth going on to the demo, that’s where you’re going to find the gold. So listen to those and note down all of their concerns. If you can take the recording and put it into descript, or some sort of transcription tool, then you could even put it through ChatGPT. And get all of the examples of the stories that they tell. And you can just write those down. And I take those examples and put them almost word for word into my ad copy or into my landing pages, especially those really great phrases where you’re like, Wow, what a great way of describing that. I take those, I do copy and paste and use them to build more interesting copy. So in a landing page, for a, for example, that I wrote recently, instead of saying the word foundational, I heard a user use the word phrase, meat and potatoes, and I took that copied it and put it right down there on the landing page. And it’s sort of sparkled as opposed to the very things I suppose to copy that just fades back into the page.

Christian Klepp  11:14

Proprietary award winning technology, and you know, all that kind of like generic stuff, right? I mean like, the objective of the exercise is to get rid of that and make it more customer centric. And I think what you were saying also there, Naomi was using the customer’s language in the copy, like, not necessarily like verbatim, but like almost taking what they said, and then you know, using that as a, as an important component in crafting copy that will ultimately resonate with them as well.

Naomi Soman  11:47

Exactly. If you use the customer’s language, they’re much more likely to feel that you understand who they are and what they’re going for. And we can measure that actually, the more closely we use the language or the more accurately we use the language of our customers, the better the landing page will perform. And I’ve seen this work at like $20,000 a month differences, that if you pick the exact word that they’re using, and this could be as different as like Task Manager versus task management tool, it can make a huge difference in the performance of the page. This is a concept psychologist called mirroring, sort of reflecting back to customers, the language that they themselves use.

Christian Klepp  12:31

Absolutely, absolutely. And we’re gonna talk about metrics in a second. But before we do, so, we’ve done the research we’ve gone through all the due diligence as such. So once marketers have developed these right personas, how can they use these to develop and adapt their messaging across the marketing funnel? And where you can please provide some examples?

Naomi Soman  12:58

Yeah, for sure. So again, I think of it in terms of, at what stage are they going to see a specific asset. So typically, on an ad, I will focus on the problem. And I’ll sort of hint at the solution. But I’ll really double down on if this is the problem you have, then you need to try us. Then if you think of in that same, in that same funnel, if they click on an ad, they’re gonna land on a landing page, that’s when you can start getting into the solution. And you want to say this is the solution laid out very basically, and then talk about what it provides. And then sort of hint at the product, and how the product works, some of the details, some of the more complex workflows, that it empowers, and, and then you can start to think about, okay, if they’re hesitating, if they’re a little bit concerned, maybe I can give them a little bit of something, to get them over that hurdle, reduce the friction. Now, it’s not going to be all about reducing friction, it’s not gonna be all about their doubts. But you can sprinkle it throughout the page, like under the CTA, if they’re concerned that it’s not going to have a specific integration, then you might put that like, right underneath the CTA. Or if they’re concerned that they’re not going to be able to figure out how the software works. You can advertise your knowledge base, or talk about the customer service. And make sure to put that at the bottom of the page. So if they’re concerned, which you’ll find out if you listen to a lot of these sales calls and these discovery calls, you can include that on the page. And then you can you can bake that into your social posts. A lot of people are getting really into organic social media, social selling. It is a really great tip: Ask the customer service team, ask the sales team, what are people concerned about? Spin each of those into a social post. So you’re advertising this even further up the funnel, so they can get over their concerns. So they can have their questions answered before they even talk to a salesperson. So I would say that, when you’re thinking about creating these personas, first think of it in terms of when are they going to see this in the funnel, the earlier on in the funnel, the more you want to focus on problems, the later on in the funnel, the more you want to focus on solutions. And then even further down, you want to talk about overcoming people’s doubts and concerns. And if you’re doing more organic content, more podcasts, blog posts, social posts, then you can create content around each one of these persona areas. So that you are giving people as much information as possible in the earlier stages of the funnel.

Christian Klepp  16:09

Fantastic, fantastic. Those are some great insights. I have a follow up question for you on the topic of reducing friction across the different stages of the funnel. Naomi, would you say that it would be helpful, I mean, besides the points that you’ve just raised? Would it be helpful also to include an FAQ section, either on the product page or on the solutions page? And, you know, going back to what you mentioned a couple of minutes ago about like listening to sales calls, right? And listening to those recordings and taking down or observing those genuine challenges or questions or even objections, right, that potential customers have, what did that make sense to also, like, incorporate those insights into an FAQ section and that way, you can already address some of these issues or these questions that they have up front. And that will that will also save, perhaps in future, the sales… The trouble of answering these in discovery calls?

Naomi Soman  17:05

Yeah, 100%. I think that on product pages specifically, like on the website FAQ, that’s where you want to put those FAQs. I would say in a landing page. If it’s a Google campaign, LinkedIn campaign, a long FAQ section might bog down the page, it might, you might be giving them too much information right away. They don’t need all of that information and they are not ready to digest it yet. But on a website, where they have the time, they’re really considering what the product is about and whether it’s worth the investment. 100% FAQs are great. And again, pull those from the sales calls, like take them directly from the customer’s mouth.

Christian Klepp  17:44

Okay, great. Um, so that was the first question. The second question is, what are your thoughts on social proof to help reduce friction?

Naomi Soman  17:53

That’s a great question. I think social proof is great. However, in today’s climate, people are so savvy that they are not trusting social proof the way they were at one point. So I use social proof very strategically, I don’t flood the page with social proof, I pick out the best social proof that I can find, the best testimonial, the best ROI, the best statistics, the best case study, the best logo, customer logos, and I’ll put them on the page, I’ll make sure that they are as trustworthy as possible, include an image include the person’s job title, include the company’s logo, show that you have actually worked with the person, they are a real person. And so that’s number one, make sure they’re very reliable. Pick social proof strategically. Number two, I would say choose social proof that proves the point you’re trying to make. So if you’re trying to prove that the solution can improve ROI, choose social proof that proves that point, not just any social proof because people get excited about social proof. And they just put it all on there. No, be strategic about what it is you are trying to convince your users of. And then third, I would say try to choose a few different kinds of social proof. So company logos is a good example. Maybe G2 badges or stars from… or Capterra badges or Capterra reviews. And maybe a testimonial, maybe you have Forrester reports that they did on you and you have some statistics that you can pull. If you have… people make decisions in different ways. So you want to have a few different kinds of social proof, depending on what they need to take that next step, what what kind of angle is going to convince them.

Christian Klepp  19:55

That was such a fantastic answer. I’m glad you brought that up. It’s… what I’m taking away from this as be strategic, but also be intentional in terms of like, what are you trying to tell people through the testimonials, through this type of social proof beyond trying to like glorify yourself, right? Because how often… often do you go to websites where you see the same testimonial sprinkled throughout the website, even in sections where it might not necessarily make sense? Or okay, it’s the same social proof on the pages of different like products or different services. So is this company like using all of these products? Right? It makes you want to step back and think about that, right? Or my favorite one is like all the clutch badges, right? or whichever review platform you have, right, and then that that also is sprinkled throughout the website. And you’re absolutely right, I think, I think the reality is to be strategic and be intentional about it. But that also requires quite a bit of thinking on the part of whoever is putting together all of this copy, right, and putting together the website, right? For instance, if this person had, you know, gave the company a testimonial about, okay, they have this challenge, and then this is how the company helped them overcome it. And then they put it in the section of the website where that testimonial may not necessarily make sense. That would make you as the potential visitor to this website either have doubts about how genuine this testimonial actually is, or think, okay, well, this company is just singing, you know, its own praises here. So it doesn’t necessarily, so there’s no correlation between the social proof and what’s on the what’s on the page itself, right?

Naomi Soman  20:21

100%. And on top of that, you may actually convince the user that your solution is not intended for their demographic. So I’ve heard users go through pages through sort of user testing. And the company put, like the, the biggest logos that they had, so like Coca Cola, and Mattel, and all of these huge, huge enterprise names. And actually, the page was intended for small businesses. So people were like, you know, maybe this is not for us, maybe this is too expensive. And they didn’t even look at the pricing yet. But they’re like, maybe this is just too robust for us, we need something a little bit smaller. A lot of SaaS companies can cater both to small medium businesses, and to enterprise corporations. So you want to make sure that the social proof that you’re using is speaking to the person you’re talking to. And most of the time, if you’re setting up a campaign, you know who that person is, you know, what size company they work at.

Christian Klepp  22:51

Absolutely, absolutely. Okay, Naomi, we get to the part in the show where we talk about actionable tips. And now look, you’ve been doing this for a while you understand that copywriting, especially copywriting that delivers results. It’s a process, right? This isn’t a button that you push, or an AI tool that you use, and bam, it gives you this like award winning copy. Right. But if somebody were listening to this conversation that you and I are having who is struggling with these challenges that we’ve been talking about. What are some of the things that you’d like them to take away from this discussion? So walk us through that process of what marketers can do to develop the right personas and adapt their messaging?

Naomi Soman  23:37

Yeah, 100%. I think I alluded to this before, but I’ll say it again, because I have found this so so, so helpful. Get your sales team to record their calls. Then listen to those discovery calls. They’re usually not more than 20 minutes. And you can even take the transcription and/or you can take the recording, turn it into a transcript and use ChatGPT to do this. But find three pieces of information and write them down, find all of the examples of the times where they were struggling with a problem. Find how they described their ideal situation, what they were looking to get to, and what their concerns were, and copy it down word for word. Then when you’re writing something, go back to that. I create like a dashboard or a spreadsheet for myself with all of these examples, go back to that, copy and paste it into whatever copy you’re writing. If you’re writing ad copy, if you’re writing a headline, if you’re writing the title for a blog, if you are writing landing page copy, web page copy, whatever it is, it’s always relevant. Take the customers words, copy and paste them onto the page. And then right around it to round it out. And if you can do that over and over again, you’ll start to think and sound like your customer, it’s super easy. It doesn’t take long. And if you spend an hour or two, just listening to these calls and copying and pasting what they say, then you can use that over and over and over again, for at least as long as your product is, and your market is functioning the same way.

Christian Klepp  25:21

Fantastic, fantastic. You know what? I don’t know what your experience has been. But it blows my mind how many marketers don’t do that. How many marketers don’t actually listen to the sales calls or get recordings from sales. And there may or may not be friction between those two departments. And I suppose that’s a topic for another podcast interview. But, but it’s so important, right? It’s so important to listen to those conversations between the sales and the potential customer or the prospect and to listen to, I think one part of the spectrum is listening to the questions and the objections and the concerns. But the other one is also listening to how the sales address each of them.

Naomi Soman  26:05

100%. And if you want like an extra golden nugget, go to the customer success team. Everyone always goes to the sales team, sometimes Customer Success gets forgotten. Because they work with these clients on an ongoing basis. So they know all of the good stuff. And they know what success looks like and what success doesn’t look like, so you can get some gold. If you go over to the customer success team and they love talking to you. People don’t ask for their opinion nearly as much as they should. But ask them what their opinions are, what clients want, what clients don’t want. That’s a goldmine of information.

Christian Klepp  26:44

Absolutely. Absolutely. Okay. Moving us on to the Love it or hate it question around metrics, right? So I mean, at some point, and this probably happens to you more times than you care to remember. But like, at some point, you’re gonna have to prove that what you’re doing is working, or you have to show some kind of indication of progress, as I always like to say. So what are some metrics and just give us some top level ones that marketers should be paying attention to? Especially when they’re creating the right personas and developing that respective messaging across the funnel?

Naomi Soman  27:18

Yeah, 100% focus on the basics: Conversion rate, do people click? Do people sign up? Click through rate and conversion rate. Do people click on the ad that you’re promoting? Or the podcast you’re promoting? Or the white paper you’re promoting? Do they convert? Do they read the white paper? Do they read the blog? Do they click on to the landing page? And did they sign up for a demo? Start with that, those are the basics. If people are clicking, and they like what they see, if people are signing up, then you’re giving them the information that they need to get there. There’s a lot of others that we could talk about. But I would say that we’re just starting out, that’s a really good place to start. And I think once you have the basics in place, and you have traffic coming in, then you can start to think more seriously about quality, like what quality leads are these. And people measure that in different ways. Sometimes you measure in CAC, sometimes cost per lead, sometimes whether it’s an MQL versus an SQL versus an opportunity. And I would say that those are all good things to focus on. Once you have a lot of people coming in through the funnel, say what quality are these leads? But just to start with, are people clicking? Are people signing up? And if you’re testing a lot of different forms of copy, and you’re seeing where the clicks are, you’ll learn very quickly whether the persona that you’ve created is accurate or not.

Christian Klepp  28:46

Absolutely, absolutely. You know, metrics is one of those topics where people tend to go down this really deep the rabbit hole. But especially if you’re starting out, you’re absolutely right. Like, start with keeping it simple is one thing, but like find the most important components or metrics, you know, as attributes that you want to measure, I think that’s your point, right? Start with those and then build from there. Right? Because if you start out with like, Okay, we’ve got 40 things to measure… So overwhelming.

Naomi Soman  29:20

Yeah, 100%. Don’t, don’t drown in a sea of of numbers. Don’t go down a rabbit hole in Tableau. Are people clicking? Are they signing up? That’ll give you at least 65% of the story. And if you’re focusing on copy, that’s mostly that’s enough to get you.

Christian Klepp  29:41

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Okay, Naomi, please get up on your soapbox. What is a status quo in your area of expertise that you passionately disagree with? And why?

Naomi Soman  29:56

So I think there’s a common belief among a lot of Marketers, especially more brand marketers, that copywriting is super creative. It’s a business form of poetry. It’s a form of self-expression. And I really, really passionately disagree with that. I’m a very creative person. And I love bringing creativity into my work. But I think ultimately, copywriting is about figuring out exactly what the customers need, and putting in on the page in a way that they can easily digest. And a lot of that information comes from the customer’s mouths. And the other half of that information comes from understanding the data and knowing what message people need to hear at what point. Are they at the top of the funnel? Are they at the bottom of the funnel? Are you targeting small leads? Are you targeting large leads? Are you focusing on quantity? Are you focusing on quality, because copywriting is really, really simple and really strategic, and can be very scientific and reliable if you can follow this path. And I think that creativity has its place. But a lot of times, it’s just not a super reliable way of building a marketing engine. And if you’re spending $30, $40 $50,000 a month, you can’t just rely on creativity, you have to have a proven process.

Christian Klepp  31:25

That’s a fair point. But um, let me ask you this, would you agree that you would need a certain level of creativity to have that differentiation as well? I mean, surely you can get that also from analyzing the data and addressing the problems of the customers. But would you would you agree that you need a little bit of creativity there as well.

Naomi Soman  31:46

I think that there’s definitely room for creativity, especially in some of the words that you use to express things or the scenarios maybe that you choose. But I think that it’s overstated in the industry, that people believe it’s the be all end all. And I think that it takes a smaller role than people think.

Christian Klepp  32:11

Okay, that’s a fair point. That’s a fair point. Okay, Naomi, here comes the bonus question. All right. Get ready for it. Rumor has up, you’re quite a salsa dancer. I don’t know. Somebody whispered that in my ear. So I’m just passing the message on, right. So if you had the opportunity to dance salsa anywhere in the world, where would it be and why?

Naomi Soman  32:36

I’ve always wanted to go to Cuba, and dance salsa in Havana, because there are two different kinds… There are a couple of different kinds of salsa. And my favorite kind is Cuban salsa. I don’t know how popular it is there today. But in my imagination, they’re just dancing in the streets all the time. So I would love to go there and verify that.

Christian Klepp  32:59

Like in the Havana Club commercial? (laugh) I’m curious because now that you brought it up, what’s the difference between Cuban salsa and the rest.

Naomi Soman  33:10

So Cuban salsa is… it has more of an African flavor to it. And it has a… it has more of an African beat to it. It’s also the for example, LA style salsa goes in a straight line, you keep the same line, where Cuban salsa often goes in a circle. And there’s also a counterpart to Cuban salsa called Rueda, which is done in a group. So everyone, there’s like a series of couples and a circle and they all dance together. And there’s somebody who calls out the moves. And everyone does it at the same time. Which is also very cool.

Christian Klepp  33:13

Interesting, interesting. You know, if this wasn’t a video call, I would have asked you for an actual demonstration. But you know, in the interest of time. (laugh) I’ll just have to take your word for it. I mean, like you’ve gone to great lengths not to describe it in great detail. So I’ve just have to use my imagination to like figure out okay, but that’s the difference between a and b. But yeah, Naomi, thank you so much. This was a fantastic conversation. And I really do hope the listeners walk away with from this conversation with some actionable tips. So thanks again for your time. quick introduction to yourself and how folks out there can get in touch with you.

Naomi Soman  34:37

Yeah, so again, my name is Naomi Soman. You can find me on LinkedIn or via my website is storylogic.com. That’s storylogick.com. Yeah, feel free to get in touch. I’d love to hear from you.

Christian Klepp  34:56

Okay, fantastic. Naomi. Once again, thanks so much for your time today. Take care, stay safe, and talk to you soon.

Naomi Soman  35:02

Thank you.

Christian Klepp  35:03

Bye for now.