Welcome to our 50th issue! It’s been a long road, but I’m glad to have you here.

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

ActiveCampaign

Full Homepage

Homepage Hero

Headline Template: Qualifier + Category

ActiveCampaign is right in that sweet spot between medium-sized and big prestige SAAS.

They are swinging up at CRM's and entrenched email marketing.

They have a lot of features and capabilities, but they have chosen to tactfully display their bread-and-butter capability with a qualifier that sets them apart.

This simple template can be used for almost any product as long as you know your core capability and any of your key differentiator.

You could even load you're capabilities & differentiators into a LLM and let it use them to get a starting point for your next headline.

Constant Contact

Linkedin Ad

Good Fluff vs. Bad Fluff.

This ad features two kinds of fluff. One is worth avoiding, the other can be used fairly liberally.

Bad news first. "Best in Class" is great for a category like cars. There are fairly well defined classes, and a statement like this can be backed up.

For SAAS, it's meant to mean "best for the price", but the pricing and capabilities of your competitors aren't well known and documented as much as they are for the car world.

"Best in Class" ends up sounding braggy and meaningless.

Now the good:

"Checks all the boxes".

By itself, this is vague and could mean multiple things to different readers. The key here is that you can quickly show what you mean, as Constant Contact has done here.

Right next to that phrase, they have literal checkboxes displaying the features they are referring to.

This makes the fluff a useful shorthand. The ad is geared at franchise brands. If you read the caption, you know what boxes they are talking about.

BUT even if you skip the caption, you can look right next to that phrase and see a list of the aforementioned boxes.

Buffer

Linkedin Ad

One Ad, One Capability

I've discussed multiple times just how focused you can get with linkedin ads.

It's great to make them for a specific niche audience or a specific outcome that your potential customers might be after.

Buffer is doing a similar thing here, but arguably, we don't see it as much.

Buffer's product has a lot of capabilities. This is sort of a foot-in-the-door case.

I think they probably did some research about what was missing from social media scheduling tools, and saw enough traction for Linkedin carousel scheduling.

They built it, made it free, and are now pulling in new users to their ecosystem on this one situation.

Here is the bet they are making:

Companies using hootsuite or sprout social will use buffer for this one feature, then see their interface/pricing/user experience is better and choose to consolidate to buffer.

This one feature is serving as a beachhead.

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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.