14 lessons from sunsetting a marketing site
Last week we sunsetted the Lessonly.com marketing site. Here are 14 lessons I learned from being one of its many collaborators over the years!
Build together — Every major page was built with a copywriter, designer, and dev in a tight squad from step 1, not in independent stages.
Marry brand + demand — Don’t believe the myth of picking one. Great creative and great conversion can co-exist and feed one another.
Be helpful — The best content actually helped people solve real problems for free—the interactive tools were some of the most effective!
Get rid of forms — Give away content. It took guts for us (especially to Kyle Lacy) to eliminate all but one form on the site. We pruned bad leads out of the funnel and got WAY more effective at converting the good ones to a first meeting.
Minimize friction — We used tools like Drift to start conversations and save SDRs emails & Clearbit to cut down on fields for the one remaining form.
Invest in SEO — Mitchell Causey built an engine EARLY. This was Lessonly’s most consistent lead channel for nearly a decade.
Give voice to the company — In order to ship a piece of content almost every day, we tapped SMEs across the company as contributors, not just in marketing.
Have the courage to break it — When we hit a demand dip, we decided to rebrand and rebuild the site from scratch—all in 6 weeks. It could have flopped, but it was an inflection point for our marketing.
Focus with sprints — When we needed focus, we put aside everything else and bucketed work—whether on a larger scale (those 6 weeks to rebuild everything) or small one (1 day to design tests for a quarter).
Find your CRO squad — Conversion goes up when brand/demand work together. We had a standing conversion rate optimization team of a designer, writer, dev, and demand gen person who ran ~20 tests every quarter to increase conversion.
Find a great dev — With people like Peter, Foxio, Brandon, and the GOAT Ryan in your corner, you avoid constraints and can dream big.
Copy is king — Your brand can be beautiful, but if copy is poor, you’re toast. Study the greats. Find your voice. Hone it and push one another. It’s a win for both brand and demand.
Democratize building — While our highest-fidelity pages were built by devs, we had a robust page builder and trained every marketing teammate how to build so they could ship beautiful pages fast.
Brand experience — Your site is the largest canvas for your brand. Don’t be afraid to use it. Don’t settle for mediocre—build something beautiful, that surprises and delights, that the team is proud of. It’s worth it.
Grateful for the 5 years of learning!
