Bottom line: Squarespace doesn’t win customers because its templates look nice. It wins because it turns every free customer into a tiny billboard, buys attention in places people already trust, and cross-sells its own existing users harder than it chases new ones. Small business owners keep copying the design and skipping the actual marketing engine underneath it, and that’s the mistake.
The pretty design is not the marketing strategy
I’ve had this conversation with at least a dozen clients over the years. They show me a Squarespace site they love and say something like “I want my business to feel like that, clean, minimal, expensive looking.” Fair enough. But then they assume that if their own website looks that good, customers will just find it. That is not what Squarespace itself believes, and Squarespace should know, because it’s the company that made the template.
Squarespace spends an enormous amount of money on marketing that has nothing to do with design. When it filed to go public in 2021, its own numbers showed sales and marketing spend running at roughly a third of total revenue, well over £150 million a year on paid attention alone, not on making the product prettier. In 2023 it paid a reported $180 million to buy Google Domains outright, taking on around 10 million existing domain customers overnight, purely so it could email every single one of them and try to sell them a website. That’s not a design decision. That’s a shopping list turned into a sales funnel.
The uncomfortable bit that most people writing about Squarespace’s marketing skip over is this: pretty design didn’t build that business. Paid attention did, aimed relentlessly at people who were already close to buying something. The templates are the shop window. The actual shop was built on ad spend, acquisitions, and email.
The free badge that turns customers into billboards
Here’s a tactic I think more small businesses should steal, and it costs nothing. Every website on Squarespace’s cheapest paid tier carries a small “Made on Squarespace” badge in the footer. It’s tiny, it’s grey, most visitors never notice it consciously. But multiply that across roughly 4 million subscribed websites and you have a permanent, unpaid advertising network that Squarespace never has to pay a penny for.
I had a florist client a few years back on that plan who wanted the badge removed for £8 a month more on the next tier up. I told her not to bother yet, she was three months into trading and needed every pound in stock, not branding. But watching that badge sit quietly on her site while orders came through Instagram made something click for me: the badge isn’t there by accident, and it isn’t there because Squarespace forgot to remove it from cheap plans. It’s there because every single customer becomes a walking case study, whether they notice or not.
What you can copy without spending anything: put a small, honest line of proof somewhere visible and repeated. A “built by” credit if you’re a designer. A “as recommended by” line from a client if you’re a consultant. A tiny badge or footer line that quietly does the introducing for you, on every single page, to every single visitor, forever, without you lifting a finger after you set it up once.
Why most business owners skip this
Because it feels too small to matter. One line in a footer, seen by maybe one in fifty visitors, feels pointless compared to a big campaign. But Squarespace didn’t build a $6 billion company on one big campaign. It built it on thousands of small, repeated, nearly invisible nudges stacked on top of each other for over a decade.
They sell you the next product before you’ve finished paying for the first one
Open a Squarespace account today and within the first week you’ll get emails nudging you toward a custom domain, then toward Squarespace Email Campaigns, then toward Acuity Scheduling if you’ve mentioned booking anything, then toward Squarespace Payments. None of this is subtle once you’re looking for it. It’s a deliberate, staged sequence, and it works because it targets people who have already said yes once.
That’s the part small business owners consistently get backwards. Most of the marketing effort in a typical small business goes toward finding brand new people who’ve never heard of you, cold traffic, cold ads, cold outreach. Squarespace spends most of its internal marketing budget on people who are already customers, trying to sell them one more thing. It is far cheaper and far more reliable to sell to someone who already trusts you than to convince a stranger.
A step-by-step version of this any small business can run this month:
- List every product or service you currently sell, then map which existing customers have only bought one of them.
- Pick your two most complementary offers, the way Squarespace pairs “you have a website” with “now book appointments through it.”
- Write one short email, three or four sentences, that goes to that specific group only, not your whole list.
- Send it, then wait ten days and send a second, shorter follow up to anyone who didn’t open the first.
- Track how many of those existing customers buy the second thing within thirty days. That number is your real cross-sell rate, and most businesses have never measured it.
Do that quarterly and you’ll find revenue sitting inside your existing customer base that you were completely ignoring while chasing cold leads.
They bought attention where attention already lived
Long before “podcast ads” were a normal line item in anyone’s marketing budget, Squarespace was one of the biggest advertisers on the medium. It was one of the main sponsors of Serial back in 2014, at a point when most companies had never heard the word podcast, let alone bought ad space in one. It then went on to run a Super Bowl commercial almost every single year since, including a 2023 spot starring Adam Driver as a taxi driver called Dermot Corrigan discovering his creative side, in a slot that cost roughly $7 million for thirty seconds of airtime.
No small business is buying a Super Bowl slot, obviously. But the principle behind both moves is the same one, and it’s the one worth stealing: go where attention is concentrated and already trusted, before everyone else works out it’s valuable, rather than spreading yourself thinly across every channel at once.
For a small business that might mean becoming the one sponsor of a very specific local newsletter with 2,000 engaged subscribers, rather than running a Facebook ad that reaches 20,000 people who scroll past it in half a second. It might mean being the guest on three podcasts your exact customer listens to, rather than posting daily on five platforms where your customer barely shows up. Depth in one place people already trust beats thin coverage everywhere.
Their own homepage does the selling for them
I once spent a full afternoon trying to talk a client out of Squarespace, and I lost the argument, fairly. She wanted an e-commerce site with fairly involved subscription logic, and I thought a different platform would handle it better. But when she pulled up Squarespace’s own marketing site during the call, built entirely in Squarespace itself, animated, fast, clean, working flawlessly on her phone, she said something I couldn’t argue with: “if their own thing looks and works like that, I trust it’ll do that for me too.”
That’s dogfooding, using your own product to prove it publicly, and it’s one of the most effective forms of marketing there is because it can’t be faked. If you’re an AI consultant, your own systems should be visibly efficient. If you sell productivity coaching, your own scheduling and follow up should be flawless. If you sell copywriting, your own website copy had better be excellent, because people will judge the whole business off that one page whether that’s fair or not.
This is also, honestly, where a lot of small business owners trying to bring AI tools into their operations get stuck, because they buy the software and never fix the process sitting underneath it, so the finished result still looks and feels amateur even though the tool was expensive. If that’s where you are, working through it with an AI implementation coach tends to close that gap far faster than trying to work it out through YouTube tutorials at 11pm, because someone else can see the process problems you’ve stopped noticing.
What to copy, in order
Pulling this together into something usable rather than just admiring Squarespace’s marketing from a distance:
- Add a small, repeated piece of proof to every page you own, a badge, a credit line, a client name, something that works quietly on autopilot.
- Build one short email sequence that sells your second product to people who already bought your first, before you spend another penny finding new customers.
- Pick one channel where your exact customer already pays attention, and go deep there instead of thin everywhere.
- Make sure your own website, or your own process, is the best possible advert for what you sell, because people will judge the whole business off it.
- Accept that pretty design and clever positioning still need paid attention or repeated proof behind them. Nothing sells itself purely because it looks good, not even the company that sells looking good.
None of this needs a marketing degree or a Super Bowl budget. It needs the same discipline Squarespace applies at scale: repeat the small, proven things relentlessly, and put your money where the attention already is rather than where you wish it was.
Frequently asked questions
Does the “Made on Squarespace” badge bring Squarespace new customers?
There’s no public figure that separates it out from Squarespace’s other marketing, but the logic holds up on its own: with roughly 4 million subscribed websites carrying it, even a tiny fraction of visitors clicking through or asking who built the site adds up to a meaningful, entirely free acquisition channel that costs Squarespace nothing to run.
How much does Squarespace spend on marketing compared to other website builders?
According to its own 2021 IPO filing, Squarespace’s sales and marketing spend ran at roughly a third of total revenue, well above what most small SaaS companies spend. That figure covers everything from Super Bowl ads to podcast sponsorships to the cross-sell emails existing customers get after signing up.
Can a small business realistically copy Squarespace’s cross-selling approach?
Yes, and it’s the part with the lowest cost to test. Map which existing customers have only bought one thing from you, write one short email offering the natural second purchase, and measure how many convert within thirty days. Most small businesses have never even measured this number, let alone tried to improve it.
Related reading: Ritual Marketing Strategy: How They Built a Brand That Wins and Home Virtual Assistant Jobs: The Complete Guide to Getting Hired, Getting Paid, and Staying In It.
For the bigger picture, see my full guide to digital marketing.
