Hunter, an email outreach tool, discovered it had lost 9% (74 links) of the backlinks it acquired in the last three years. Website owners had simply removed links or there were technical issues like 404s. To fix this, the team built a script to identify lost backlinks, found the contact information of the website owners, segmented the recipients based on why the links were missing, and then scheduled an email outreach campaign to request the links be re-added. Hunter sent 166 emails in its 30-day campaign and consequently reclaimed 31 backlinks.
ChatGPT can help identify and analyze direct and indirect competitors, including those you’re not aware of. This article includes several prompts to identify competitors of your brand, as well as their unique features, target audiences, and weaknesses. ChatGPT can also recommend ways to reposition your brand’s website based on this analysis.
This report looked at over 2,000 creators to identify trends among 6-figure earners. It emphasizes the move towards diversifying revenue streams and asserting control over businesses. Successful creators focus on digital product sales and audience engagement on their own platforms. They don’t rely on brand deals and social media algorithms. The report also covers challenges in the creator economy, such as the need for creator unions and the growing reliance on AI to streamline content creation.
Before launching your startup, ensure you’re working with a handful of customers via a beta or private launch. This will help refine your product or service offering with preliminary feedback. In finding your first 10-1,000 customers, reach out to targeted strangers or friends, enlist influencers, contact the press, and create viral content. Also, note that not every early customer will be a perfect fit. Use their various personas to further guide and define who your ICP truly is.
When scaling your sales team, focus on hiring individuals who align with your target audience, product, pricing, and GTM strategies. There’s no perfect salesperson, but they do need to understand buyer personas, product complexity, pricing dynamics, and GTM motions. This guide shares insights into hiring considerations for different aspects of the sales process.
The Super Bowl is a high-stakes platform for advertisers where brands navigate the balance between leveraging star power and humor while ensuring their brand remains the focal point. Overshadowing the brand with celebrities or delaying brand reveal risks undermining the effectiveness of the ad. Meanwhile, being too 'vanilla' can make ads unremarkable or easily overseen in the crowd.
Despite its age and evolving landscape, Facebook continues to grow, reaching over 3 billion monthly active users.
IAB released a consumer privacy study that contains users' opinions over the open ad-supported Internet. Findings include the overwhelming preference for ads over paid content and services and the lack of trust in data and privacy practices.
Meta’s Threads is the perfect case study on how top-of-funnel numbers don’t always reflect trends in sustained revenue.
Google Bard will be rebranded as “Gemini”. This will be accompanied with the release of an Android app and the introduction of the “Advanced” tier powered by “Gemini Ultra”. The change aims to align Bard with Google’s best AI models and will offer enhanced features such as expanded multi-modal capabilities and improved coding support. The launch is scheduled for February 7 and will be available on select devices, with plans for expansion later.
X is expanding access to its new vertical video ads, which are displayed within its dedicated video feed. The platform claims that 100 million users now engage with vertical video in the app every day. Based on its testing, X users are 7 times more likely to engage with an ad in vertical video compared to the same ad on the Home Timeline, while early adopters have seen 14% lower CPMs on average compared to ads in the Home Timeline.
A Johnson Box is a highlighted section of text at the top of a direct mail letter, email, or web page. It’s designed to grab attention and keep the reader on a path that leads them through the content. For example, “I amazed even myself” was used to promote a book about financial habits in the 1990s. This opener was effective because it laid the foundation for the whole promotion — a journey of personal and financial growth. The Johnson Box technique can be used in emails, landing pages, social media posts, videos, and product pages.
This article discusses the benefits of using the "chicken game", where urging the audience not to do something paradoxically prompts them to do it. The tactic sparks curiosity and a sense of challenge driven by psychological factors like reactance theory and fear of missing out. There needs to be a fine balance, but using it properly can yield positive results in ad performance.
It's impractical to expect anyone to go through thousands of reviews and be able to come up with actionable insights consistently. With a custom GPT, teams can find insights on bugs, comparisons with competitors, pricing challenges, support issues, brand perception, and more. This post contains a template for creating a custom GPT that you can use to process mass amounts of customer reviews or survey responses. It also provides several example prompts to use for additional insights.
Businesses can enhance their marketing and sales efforts by creating detailed B2B buyer personas. These personas can help businesses understand their customers' goals, objections, and challenges. A clear and detailed persona helps deliver more personalized and effective messaging and content throughout the buyer journey. This guide shares a template for creating personas that cover key aspects like roles, demographics, psychographics, business goals, and objections.
Investing in branding from day one for your cash-strapped startup will pay off in the long run. This guide covers early learnings from the founders of Studs, a 4-year-old startup in the ear-piercing space. The founders also share tactics in optimizing TikTok content, selecting suitable influencers for partnerships, and executing creative events. Incorporating branding into pre-launch strategies and nailing product-market fit before scaling and ramping up brand marketing is crucial for success.
A physical mail strategy may seem outdated in a digital-centric world, but there are unique advantages that make it worth considering. For instance, physical mail offers more personalized engagement, is perceived as less intrusive, and has great synergy with digital efforts for cross-channel effectiveness. There are potential drawbacks to keep in mind, including slower response times, higher costs, and difficulties in tracking results.
The Rule of One means sticking to one idea, one benefit, one solution, one message, and one target audience in a piece of writing.
Google Search is discontinuing the cached webpages, which were initially designed to help users access pages when they couldn't load.
Snapchat’s new campaign positions itself as the antidote to the divisive popularity contest that social media has become. The campaign highlights unique features to distance Snapchat from traditional social media platforms.
Google Search is adapting to TikTok's influence and vast content library by integrating TikTok videos into Featured Snippets and its AI-powered 'SGE'. The move is most likely targeted at younger demographics, who heavily engage with TikTok.
Engaged-view is Meta’s new attribution setting for advertisers to measure conversions within 1 day of a video ad play. It caters to the trend of viewers delaying actions to avoid disrupting their experience. The feature can be used along with other attribution settings to better analyze and optimize video ad campaigns. Benefits include more results for the same budget, better insights into a customer’s journey, and a deeper understanding of the value of video ads.
Personalized emails leverage data to tailor relevant content to individual subscribers. Countdown timers are a powerful visual tool for encouraging subscribers to take action while building anticipation for what’s to come. Adding products based on weather forecasts is a good way of including relevant product selections for a subscriber. Social signals show how many times subscribers have interacted with something, making it clear to them how popular each product is. This in turn motivates them to click on the products more.
Elverys Sports couldn’t gather useful data about its Facebook ad performance because of Safari ITP and browser blockers, resulting in poor ROAS and minimal insights to improve the ads. The team implemented server-side tagging using Facebook’s Conversion API, which provided more data while staying compliant. This resulted in a ROAS boost of 52% and enabled the brand to optimize its ads based on performance.
Testers for user testing tools are often looking to take as many tests as possible to maximize their earnings. When users guess the answers that get them accepted to take the user test, it means your test pool isn’t really your target audience. To prevent this, avoid using simple 'yes' or 'no' screener questions. Instead, use multiple-choice questions with a few dummy responses to reject guessers. You can also include follow-up screener questions to ensure they haven't just guessed correctly. This post includes an example of a poorly-written screener and a recommended version to use instead.
Benchmarks can provide a useful reference point when evaluating your own product’s performance. This post discusses week-over-week user growth, activation rate, and retention for both B2C and B2B SaaS. It also provides AAR growth, net retention, and churn rates for SaaS overall. Be sure to consider the unique circumstances of your company, product, and market when comparing these metrics to yours.
SmartMarketing.me was created by Dan White, a marketer with 30 years of experience. White uses imaginative visuals to bring marketing concepts to life. The “Illustrations” section of the site contains a library of drawings that cover strategies like brand development, positioning, and pricing. It also includes case examples from brands like Tropicana, Dove, and Nintendo.
Social Media Community Management Guardrails documents are designed to help your team consistently respond to questions, comments, and customer support or care-centric needs. These guides should include elements such as brand persona, sample responses for both positive and negative comments, and what not to respond to. It’s critical to train your social teams on these guardrails and make regular updates as needed. This article describes how to build a guide and example social moderation scenarios to be prepared for.
“Friendly fraud”, also known as first-party fraud, occurs when customers file a fraud claim or charge-back despite being satisfied with a purchase. Any business that accepts digital payments is a target. Research revealed that 42% of Gen Z admit to engaging in first-party fraud. The majority of them don’t realize what they’re doing is fraud and are unaware that it’s the merchant who absorbs the cost of the chargeback. This article highlights tips for brands to protect themselves including prioritizing clear customer communications, offering quick refunds, and collecting detailed records of customer transactions.
There are legal implications and ethical concerns surrounding the use of celebrity likeness in brand social content.
A curated list of marketing courses offered by Google Skillshop, Acadium, and HubSpot Academy that covers personal branding, marketing analytics, and influencer marketing.
Effective communication is crucial for business leaders to persuade stakeholders. To better connect with the audience, it is better to tailor messages, adopt structured improvisation in presentations, balance data with stories, and focus on educating rather than trying to impress.
The Pew Research Center’s latest report rounds up social media usage trends among U.S. users over the last 2 years. TikTok experienced the most growth in adult usage over the past 2 years, rising from 21% to 33%. Instagram and X also saw increases. YouTube and Facebook remain dominant, with 83% and 68% of respondents respectively indicating continued usage.
This opinion piece draws parallels between the social media industry and Big Tobacco. It highlights the harmful impact of addiction and toxicity on youth. It also stresses the importance of accountability on social media platforms, proposing the use of AI for improving youth online safety and wellbeing. The CEO of Pinterest advocates for proactive measures and industry collaboration to create a safer online environment for young users.
A good quick win has a high success rate, requires low effort and budget, provides demonstrable results, and has a short time to value. Show your customers’ logos on your pricing page to improve credibility, spark interest, and clarify which plan suits potential customers. Place your sign-up form over a blurred or dimmed version of your product to increase form completion. Upload existing branded GIFs to GIPHY to get free brand exposure on a massive scale. More tactics are included in the article.
Consumer companies are prioritizing product and packaging design in response to evolving consumer behavior and sustainability concerns. The strategy has yielded triple wins by increasing sales and sustainability while reducing costs. This podcast (with transcript) discusses how iterative testing combined with data analytics and gen AI can enable companies to optimize their product and meet evolving customer needs.
Google's Gemini model is helping make campaign asset selection more efficient through a conversational AI experience. Marketers can input a landing page URL and the AI will analyze its content and generate relevant ad elements including keywords, headlines, and descriptions. It accelerates the campaign creation and provides insights on optimization based on the performance. The integration of watermarked images ensures authenticity and transparency in AI-generated content.
n8n is a low-code platform that creates custom AI apps and automated workflows. Default streamlines the conversion flow process and directs you in taking the right actions on leads. Toolflow.ai provides a library of pre-made AI tools and GTM workflows, plus it has a Slack community for upskilling GTM leaders on AI.
Your chances of finding big growth levers are dependent on the pace and quality of your learning. Growth sprints are a simple 5-step mix of agile and the scientific method that involves the whole company. Unlike product sprints, most growth experiments fail, so your primary outcome is rapid learning. The steps to run a growth sprint include inputs from data, ideation and scoring, selection, experimentation, and documenting learnings. The post explains each step in depth.
Incentivized customers tend to be of lower quality compared to organic ones. They generally have considerably lower lifetime value and engagement. Referral programs, free trials, coupons, and gamification can cause negative selection, increase fraud, and promote cannibalization. A successful acquisition program must prioritize quality and avoid relying solely on incentives to hit its short-term targets.
In 1958, LEGO finalized its signature brick design and secured the patent – today it’s a $11.8 billion brand and remains a household name. The company benefits from “the IKEA effect,” which is that people value things more when they build them. LEGO also invested in strategic partnerships to create a sense of unity with new audiences. The brand is supported by the mere exposure effect of a consistent block design advertised with familiar colors and uses. Brands can apply the same principles of single-product focus to stand out and use partnerships to reach new customers.
A breakdown of the responsibilities and duties of a Product Marketing Manager, ranging from an associate to VP level. Save the chart visual as an image for better legibility.
With the recent focus on AI integration, which introduced several new features and increased traffic, LinkedIn reached the milestone of 1B members.
Tech giants like Google and Microsoft often acquire innovation rather than originate it. Startups are the true drivers of groundbreaking technology.
Threads tripled its downloads month-over-month in December. It placed in the top 10 most downloaded apps for the month across both the App Store and Google Play. The growth was likely due to the push Meta had given the app by displaying ads on Facebook that featured Threads’ viral posts. The app could also be benefiting from its move into the fediverse - the social network comprised of interconnected servers that communicate via the ActivityPub protocol.