NV#1 | Guinness. Optimisation. Unicorns.

First edition! Welcome!

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Before we get into the first edition, here’s a little about us - Mark Byrne and Dan Trindade. We’re great friends, business partners, and alike in so many ways, except in height…

We’ve been fortunate to connect with extremely generous and innovative business leaders over the years, and at some point we realised that we were amassing a huge amount of repeatable strategies, tips, tricks, tactics, methods and other synonyms for “bloody good business sense”. So, we decided to package them up in a free newsletter. We hope to create a community and library of knowledge that we wish we’d had back in the beginning.

At the core of the New Vertical newsletter we offer in-depth interviews with business leaders, founders, entrepreneurs and experts. Real people, real stories, and real strategies that made a huge difference to a variety of business types. This is actionable knowledge that virtually any company can implement and realise growth. We publish these interviews between editions of the newsletter, and any featured interviews will be highlighted in the main edition.

Thank you for subscribing and making this journey with us. We hope you make the most of the content!

Stay Vertical!

In This Edition

Table of Contents

• First edition! Welcome!

• In This Edition

• Featured Interview: Mohammad Abdin

• Copy / Content

  • Why you need a CRO expert for your content.

• Lead Generation

  • Using Google Ads to provide value.

• Marketing

  • The Pratfall Effect

• 5 Minute Tactics

  • Strip ads from text-heavy web content

• 5 Minute Tactics

  • Turn any flow chart into steps with ChatGPT.

• Unicorns 🦄

  • Here be unicorns…

• Share Value

• Until Next Time…

Featured Interview: Mohammad Abdin

Copy / Content

Why you need a CRO expert for your content.

It’s great working with a friend who happens to be your CRO. Conversion Rate Optimisation was something that never factored into my copy too heavily until I met Dan. Certainly, getting a CTA (Call To Action) in the right spot was important, and I had my copy looked at by editors or proofed by people, but when Dan gets his CRO hat on, he’s unstoppable (and not for the faint of heart).

When Dan rips apart my sales copy, I can take it in good humour. As a copy and content professional, I have had my fair share of moments where Dan told me something was - for want of a better word - crap. And he was right. The trick is, you don’t actually get precious over your words, because sometimes you are way off the mark or you just get tunnel vision on a certain aspect of the copy.

A CRO’s job is to look at a landing page or commercial intent copy and become the ICP (Ideal Client Persona).

• Did I grab them in the first 8 seconds?

• What would make them click?

• How do they feel?

• Would that button be better further up the page?

All of the answers come back to me as feedback, usually as hastily made screenshots with arrows and red & green lines scrawled on in MS Paint.

Let’s look at an example. This is the before and after of the pricing section of the homepage back in 2022 for Business Awards UK. The pricing section was quickly put together (before my time) and was in need of an overhaul.

The biggest issue with the pricing: visitors not really understanding what they get for their money. That’s a big no-no when you’re trying to improve conversions. People were scrolling to the price and bouncing off the site.

Dan’s notes on this went something like this: -

• Arrange in one line for readability

• Use bullet points for speed and reinforcing decision making

• Highlight most important value propositions (use star icon)

• Use brand colors effectively

This was done over a period of time to allow visitors to interact with new elements. We did this using heat maps and literally comparing every visitor journey on the page.

We saw an immediate uplift in conversions through early 2023. Using data from Microsoft Clarity (a free heatmap and analytics suite) we could literally watch session recordings of people when they got to the pricing, and moving down the page to the CTA much sooner. This meant we’d delivered the information they needed better and faster.

Nowadays, the homepage has much more going for it, and new journeys depending on the visitor, but the principle stays the same: Copy is created, and Dan puts his CRO hat on ⛑️.

So, the advice is pretty simple: if you want to increase conversions, ask an expert. A Conversion Rate Optimization consultant will give you much more bang for your buck, because they are literally trained in how copy works, UI (User Interface) and making every call to action count.

How do I find a CRO expert

When you’re looking for a CRO expert, go with your gut. If you think the CRO expert convinced you to click on their ad… then they are probably pretty good! Agencies tend to add in lots of stuff you don’t need, and it’s probably a good idea to work one-to-one with an expert.

For instance, look at these ads on Google:

Guess which one I’d go with? Yes…. Rich looks like a good bet*. I get all the information I need up front, and no fluff. He may have hired a Google Ad expert to do his ads, but I bet he had a hand in the copy.

*New Vertical is not affiliated with Mr. Rich Page 😊

Lead Generation

Using Google Ads to provide value.

If you use content (or want to use content) to generate any kind of business, I would not hesitate to recommend the “They Ask, You Answer” philosophy. If you’re not familiar with Marcus Sheridan’s “They Ask, You Answer”, then I absolutely recommend it. Here’s a summary for brevity: FourMinuteBooks.

On the topic of the TAYA philosophy, there’s a current trend that I am loving in paid media, where companies are apportioning budget to helpful, educational and valuable content - and not just sending eyes to commercial pages on their website. When I was a content manager in a previous life, the company saw a massive uptick in conversions by sending people to my top performing articles, so I know this works.

Think about it…

Customer is in the market for a new bike. He hits Google in the research stage of his buying journey and searches for “best bike for men over 40 with short legs”. 🙄