Welcome to TouchPoints, the newsletter that breaks down marketing collateral from top SAAS brands for inspiration and analysis.

This week we’re looking at a Linkedin ad and two homepages. Let’s dive in!

Hubspot

• CRM & Marketing Automation

• Founded 2006

• 1000-5000 employees

Linkedin Ad

Byword AI

• AI Blog Writing

• Founded 2022

• 2-10 employees

Homepage

Microsoft Clarity

• Website Behavioral Analytics

• Microsoft founded in 1975, Clarity launched in 2020

• Microsoft: 10,000 + employees, Clarity: 11-50 employees

Homepage

Observations

Do You Partner, Bro?

If I started an awards show for TouchPoints, Hubspot would win the partnership award.

They leverage their acquisitions, integrations, and industry partners all of the time to drive adoption and shorten time to value for new users.

They make Gong the hero of this ad, and that really strengthens their overall message, which is that they are the ultimate tool to work with your existing systems.

The Dominance of Social Proof

Does your homepage have social proof? How many forms of social proof are on your website?

Whether it is a testimonial, company logos, or a review aggregator badge, social proof is one of the most commonly seen elements of copy, beaten in frequency by just CTAs, which are truly near-universal.

In particular, homepages almost always have some small form of social proof above the fold.

Capterra and G2 have built huge ecosystems based on this simple fact, to the point that now people often check Reddit, knowing full well that the review aggregators can be gamed.

One notable exception to this trend is in marketing emails. In the several I have analyzed, features and capabilities are more common.

Maybe that’s because the people who are receiving marketing emails have already converted.

Any Questions?

Looking for more explanation about the elements of copy that I highlight? Check out my guide here.

Anything further?

I'm happy to take a break from researching pitch decks & eating chocolate chip cookies to address your questions.

Email me here.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to extend our thanks to the following companies for providing examples and insights that made this edition of Touchpoints possible:

• The Ad Professor Newsletter

• Marketing Examples

• Milled.com - For their marketing intelligence platform identifying trends.

• Peer Signal - For using data to showcase high performance digital growth strategies.

• Crunchbase - For their database of innovative companies to learn from.

• Linkedin - For their great transparency in their ad library, and company information

• Beehiiv - For being an awesome provider of newsletter creation and delivery services.

I sincerely appreciate these companies for providing great tools for research. It's collaborators like them that allow us to deliver the best of modern SaaS marketing to you, our subscribers, every week in TouchPoints.