CXL - Being a copycat means you're slow

Your host today is Peep Laja, Founder at CXL

Ultimately, everyone's gonna copy each other. They're gonna copy your product, your marketing tactics, your messaging.

I was talking to Jaleh Rezaei about this, and she said:

"Really the only winning strategy is speed, how fast you are innovating and staying ahead of the game. Faster always wins."

You need to be constantly innovating (both product R&D and marketing R&D), and building the next version. The more successful you are, the more people are going to copy what you have put out there.

metadata.io launched a candid sales pitch video ad on LinkedIn - a novel tactic playing on authenticity - now I see a bunch of companies doing the exact same thing.

What those folks don't know though is that this is the Law of Shitty Clickthroughs in action. The more people use a marketing tactic, the less effective it gets.

Folks crave "best practices" and "let's do what works for others". What came before tends to have a lot of momentum.

This is why the majority still run the same old webinar formats they used five years ago, and their whole acquisition machine really hasn't changed for years.

Driving PPC traffic to gated whitepaper landing pages and hoping to generate pipeline… the effectiveness of all that is tanking because of the Law of Shitty Clickthroughs, whatever the opposite of novelty is, and changing times.

The road to a bland vanilla brand is paved with the best intentions.

What stands out, gets picked. While others are deploying predictable, obvious, seen-it-a-thousand-times marketing, you should go for pattern interrupt.

New, innovative marketing ideas that are different have a better chance of getting attention and tend to work better. Obviously, you won't know in advance what will work, so you need to run experiments.

Once you find a thing, double down on it - do more of it, exploit it while it works. At the same time, keep your experimentation engine humming - so by the time your thing gets copied and adopted by others, you're already milking the next thing.

While most still take weeks and months to react and ship, winners do non-stop experimentation and get feedback in days. They iterate and get to things that work so much faster.

Every new idea will eventually get stale. You need to discard your winners, kill your darlings and out-innovate yourself on a regular basis.

So the operating mantra is "always 2 steps ahead."

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2. CXL Live

We're wrapping up preparations for CXL Live. Among other things, this means matching every attendee with the most relevant folks in experimentation, growth and demand gen.

Based on your preferences, role and industry, we'll seat you at the table where you'll learn the most and network with the people that face the same challenges and are tasked with the same goals.

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Is your website traffic dropping? Bounce rate increasing?

This is a normal thing - but imagine how much you could optimize your website if search engines understand the purpose of your landing page.

SEO does exactly that - this playbook teaches you step-by-step how to optimize your landing pages for SEO performance and ranking them higher in search results.

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4. How to navigate & attract new leads in the dark funnel

95% of B2B buyers are not ready to buy your product right now. They’re having conversations with colleagues, researching on social media, and listening to podcasts about the product or industry and learning where your brand fits in.

Demand generation helps you influence buyers where they’re having those conversations and in those unattributable spaces. It’s an inbound model that develops your authority and brand affinity over time—it can be a long game to get results, but it helps you stay in play.

Those places where your buyers are being actively influenced by the marketing activities you cannot track are called: the dark funnel.

In this article, we’ll uncover the dark funnel and show you how to win customers on the channels companies often overlook. 

Read the full article.

5. CXL talent program

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6. Speero's experimentation blueprints page is online

Experimentation Operating System (XOS) Blueprints help visualize organizational processes so you can optimize how your company delivers an experimentation program.

They have two parts:

1. They are decision support tools that are built on top of and customized.
2. They are connected with some program or business metric such as research velocity, or decision quality, speed, etc.

We present them as downloadable 'tools' (Figma, Miro, Decks, Docs, Sheets) for you to take, customize, and optimize your program with.

Get your Experimentation Blueprints.

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Ognjen Bošković
Growth Lead at CXL

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