Is it just me or do all SaaS sites look the same?

The @FoundationIncCo team wanted to find out.

We took 100 SaaS sites and analyzed their marketing approach to design.

Grab a coffee, bookmark it and enjoy the thread 🧵

Here’s what we learned studying 100+ SaaS sites.
98% Of Brand Logos Are On The Left

The placement of the logo on the top left of a website is a common design best practice.

It’s an approach that most designers use inside of SaaS and outside of SaaS. But sometimes brands will switch things up and go in the middle like this:
Most SaaS Websites Are Mobile Responsive

The world runs on mobile. In April 2021, 56% percent of all web traffic came through mobile phones. 📲

Mobile responsive sites are a great way to ensure you don’t deliver broken experiences for people on a desktop or visiting on mobile.
54% Of SaaS Homepages Don't Use Video

This one surprised me... But it shouldn't have.

Video is ridiculously intimidating for brands. But it can be a great approach to build a more intimate and human relationship with your website visitors.
There’s Always Primary Call To Action Above The Fold

There’s a clear best practice in SaaS that your call to action driving people to do something needs to be above the fold.

More than 90% of SaaS sites that were in this SaaS research had a button or CTA above the fold.
Green Means Go & It's The Most Popular Button Color

The second most popular colour for buttons is orange (see Zoom in the last tweet) followed by Blue.
"Get Started" Is The Most Popular Call To Action

The most common words + phrases within the call to actions tended to be: Free, Demo, Get, Started, Try X and Request…
Using A Light Background Is Best Practice

Most of the sites (92% of them) we reviewed used white or light colors as the primary background for their sites.

One of the sites we found that used a dark background changed it to light 4 months after we found it...

White is crisp:
Half Of The SaaS Brands Use A Live Chat Tool

Our research found that nearly 50% of SaaS sites have a chat box in the corner ready to be engaged with.

Across most of these sites the services being used were Intercom or Drift.
56% Of SaaS Sites Use Real People On The Homepage

The rest of the others are mostly using illustrations. You know the illustrations I'm talking about... The one's that are kinda like people but not really like people..

No shade though. These illustrations can be great.
Leveraging Illustrations In SaaS Is Common (70%)

There's a wide range of use cases but illustrations showing people using tech are VERY common. There are a few brands like Kissflow that have fun with it.

Side note - Check out: @illustrationblk for your site.
So Should You Follow The Standards?

Depends.

Experimenting with design is a great way to uncover something before the rest of the industry. That said, the risk of design experimentation is that users could find the entire experience broken and poorly created.

So be careful.
Experimentation is one of the most important things that SaaS companies. So don't use all of these ideas as a crutch to say WE MUST do this...

Run your own experiments.

It could be testing new images or trying new copy in buttons like I advised here...
When @FoundationIncCo (follow us so you don't miss the next report) put this together we thought we would find more brands doing the same things.

But there's a decent mix!

If you like SaaS & want info like this subscribe to our free newsletter: foundationinc.co/newsletter/
And if you enjoyed this thread; scroll over my face, double click, find that follow button and hit it.

I tweet about SaaS, content, growth & entrepreneurship.

And I'm always looking to connect with new people.

So let's do it.✌🏿

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More from @TheCoolestCool

13 Jul
Unlocking an SEO moat is SaaS marketing goals.

What is it?

It's when a brand has invested so strategically into content & SEO that they captured space in the SERP for the vast majority of search terms associated with their market & ideal customers.

How do you do it? 👇
A brand that has built an SEO moat is a brand that establishes itself as an authority in the eyes of Google and can extract value from the global search behaviours of people around the world.

To get value. You must give value.

That's where it starts.

Creating valuable content.
Salesforce has an SEO moat.

You search “CRM” – Salesforce shows up in the top 3 results. Type “marketing automation” – Salesforce shows up in the top 4. Type “CRM software” or “CRM system” and once again they're in the top 4. And so on, and so on.

This is called an SEO moat.
Read 9 tweets
16 Jun
I’ve had blog posts reach thousands and earn hundreds of thousands.

The key?

Copywriting & content marketing fundamentals.

Grab a coffee, bookmark this one and enjoy the thread 🧵

Here’s some copywriting tips to create blog posts & essays that unlocks ridiculous returns:
Keep The Skim Readers Hooked

Some people will read the text under each paragraph in this thread. Some people will skim right over them and just digest the first line.

Create content for both of these readers to maximize shareability.
Use Bucket Brigades Often

Hear me out:
Here’s the thing:
But that’s not all:
You might be thinking:
You’re probably wondering:

All of these sentences lure people into wanting and reading more.

Why? Because here’s the thing:

See what I did there? 👀

It keeps you scrolling
Read 15 tweets
4 Jun
I’ve helped companies earn millions from content marketing over the last 5 years.

It’s an art & a science.

Grab a coffee, save this thread and dive in 🧵

From up & coming startups to the giants — here’s some underrated thoughts on how SEO & content can drive sales.
DON’T IGNORE THE “BORING” CONTENT

Most marketers go to conferences and hear speakers talk about the campaigns that generated 2M visits. These get all the buzz.

But what’s more interesting is the case study that earned $2M in revenue.
DATA DRIVEN CONTENT DRIVES LINKS AND PRESS

If you can get your hands on interesting data — You can quickly become a journalists best friend.

The key?

Find ways to make the data tell a story that is compelling, shocking, reinforces biases or is triggering.

Media will listen.
Read 22 tweets
2 Jun
Marketing is applied psychology.

Every tweet. Every ad. Every word.

The best marketers are students of psychology and use it regularly.

Grab a coffee, save this thread and dive in 🧵

Here are some of the most interesting applications of psychology in marketing:
The McDonalds Marketing Strategy

🍔 Small: $5
🍔🍟 Medium: $5.75
🍔🍟🥤 Large: $5:90

The medium option is a decoy as it looks overpriced in comparison to a small... But the large looks like a deal.
Fewer Syllables Feel Less Pricey

When you read $47.89 in your head it can feel more expensive than $49.40. This is because we often perceive longer sounding numbers to be more expensive.
Read 15 tweets
31 May
Growth and marketing frameworks are the mental models of marketers.

Remember the right ones and they will give you ridiculous returns.

But not all are created equal.

Grab a coffee, save this thread and dive in 🧵

The most important marketing frameworks:
AIDA: Attention -> Interest -> Desire -> Action
The Hero’s Journey
Read 17 tweets
5 Apr
Backlinks are key to any SEO strategy.

More backlinks = more trust.
More trust = more SERP visibility.

One of the best SEO strategies of all time is what @Glassdoor did early on by creating a content engine that drives backlinks consistently.

How? Weaved a web.

A THREAD🧵👇
In 2018, Glassdoor was acquired for $1.2B.

For context, today Glassdoor has:

> 520 million backlinks from 109,000 domains
> Generates more than 2 billion annual visits
> And n 70% of those come from organic search.

And that's Glassdoor US.

Here's the international numbers:
Glassdoor has built a brand so strong, and an SEO moat so deep that it is effectively unshakable.

The key?

Data driven content.

And that data driven content has been helping Glassdoor establish 'house hold name' level brand recognition within corporate circles for years.
Read 19 tweets

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