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

This week we’re looking at Buffer’s homepage, plus Linkedin ads from ActiveCampaign and Bamboo HR.

Buffer

Full Homepage

Homepage Hero

Steal Buffer's Near-perfect Homepage Social Proof Cards.

Check out the way Buffer puts social proof in their hero.

It has a lot of information that you can take in extremely quickly.

Each little card contains a statistic like "2x more followers" or "115k grew following"

The numbers jump out. The outcomes are very succinct. You can read all of them in under 10 seconds.

They also show the variety of platforms people are using buffer to manage, from linkedin to twitter to instagram.

Testimonials give more detail and allow you to demonstrate a narrative with a problem-capability-solution structure.

But for an effective and eye-catching form of social proof at a glance?

These cards give you outcomes in clear and specific numbers, plus a reason to trust in the form of names/handles of the people who saw these results.

How Big Brands Position Themselves

If Buffer was a small, unknown player, I would be DRAGGING the copy in this hero mercilessly.

But, as we have seen before, messaging for a well known player is much different.

Most people landing on Buffer's site as first-time visitors fall into 1 of 2 categories:

they know full well what buffer is. Maybe they used it at an old job, maybe they have been hearing about it for years.

They haven't actually heard about buffer, but upon any external research (review sites, reddit) they will get the details they need.

So for a company like this, your hero headline and body copy need to help you differentiate, handle objections, and disqualify people you don't want using your tool.

Usually, the following little piece of copy would never make it onto the top of a homepage:

"We're a values driven company..."

But I think it helps them find their ideal customer. They are way beyond the growth stage after all.

My one piece of negative criticism here?

Their attempt to outwardly define their ICP is as follows:

"For ambitious people and teams".

I don't think that helps or provides any value to them or the reader, and I would love to hear an argument that defends it.

ActiveCampaign

Linkedin Ad

Talk How Your Customers Talk

I have worked in marketing & CRM for almost a decade.

For the past 3 years, I have avoided the term "email blasts".

For those of us entrenched in the industry, the term has amateurish connotations.

There is nothing wrong with what most companies are doing when they talk about an "email blast" but a lot of tech and marketing pros just don't call it that.

But ActiveCampaign has a good insight here. Small business owners do call them email blasts, and they also delineate them from targeted email in terms of scale and intent.

So they make it clear that ActiveCampaign is for email blasts.

And that is meaningful to their ideal customer.

Bamboo HR

Linkedin Ad

B2B is Allowed to Be Festive!

Some people might think this Bamboo HR ad is trying too hard.

Some might even call it cringe.

I think that's very pessimistic.

B2B buyers are people. Halloween is not just for B2C.

It might just be a test to see if it moves the needle vs a more evergreen creative in their ad account.

Either way, I think it's a fairly memorable and unique way to demonstrate their capabilities, address pain points, and express part of what makes their platform different from competitors (ease of use, I think).

Marketing teams that take these types of risk are bound to find some hidden creative gems.

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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:

• Adfolio - For their awesome repository of B2B ads, with excellent commentary.

• Founderway.AI - An awesome resource that helped me better figure out how to run this newsletter, and forever friends of TouchPoints.

• Concise Copy - Pavlo is an absolute expert at homepage copy. Check out his value prop canvas for a super useful resource.

• Growth Therapy - Amanda is more B2C than me, but her insights about paid media and growth marketing are always welcome.

I sincerely appreciate these folks for providing great content and inspiration. It's great thinkers like these that allow me to deliver the best of modern SaaS marketing to you, our subscribers, every week in TouchPoints.