BY JOEL MUSAMBI
Co-Founder of Growth Media
50
Actionable Tips for Growth Marketers
growthmedia.ca
1
Writer’s Note I created this ebook to share some of the best growth marketing tips I’ve learned through research, experimentation and lots of trial and error. I’ve seen success with a lot of these strategies and hope that they will help with your marketing goals as well. If you’d like more ideas on growth marketing, we regularly share our thoughts and strategies on the Growth Media blog. If any one of these 50 tips works for you, I’d love to know about it! Send me an email at jmusambi@gmail.com. This ebook was designed by Rally Stanoeva from eBook Simply. If you’re thinking of creating an ebook for your marketing needs, I highly recommend you chat with her. Thanks to Rally Stanoeva and Martin Staykov for the feedback and editing. Joel Musambi Co-Founder, Growth Media
2
DIFFICULTY: EASY 1. Adding Spacing on Social Posts Use extra spacing when writing posts on social. This makes your content much easier to consume. No more than three sentences is best and that has worked for me. Josh Fecter is a great example of someone who excels at writing on social.
2. Growth Hacker Project Flow I use the growth hacker project flow to rank experiments and determine which campaigns are worth running based on their score. I rate each experiment on a scale of 1-10 for these categories: Thesis: How compelling is the hypothesis? Impact: What kind of results can we expect? Confidence: How confident are we that we can accomplish it? Ease: How easy or difficult will it be? Delivery: How confident are we in delivering on time? These categories make sense for me but feel free to personalize this flow to better suit your decision-making process. 3
DIFFICULTY: EASY 3. Search Operators Search Operators are useful for focusing in on a search. If used properly, you can get lists and other data that would have been difficult to find in a simple search. I’ve created this list of 58 search operators that you can use.
4. Redirect Unsubscribers Create a redirecting page to a converting landing page after someone unsubscribes. You have a hidden chance to win them back - use it wisely! 5. Trade Show Keywords Trade shows are still an important acquisition channel for some companies, but the cost associated with it puts some startups at a disadvantage. Even if your company can’t go to a trade show, you can still have a presence by targeting the keyword associated with the show. If your landing page is relevant, you’ll potentially get some traction without having to physically be there. 4
DIFFICULTY: EASY 6. Content Notifications Add notifications at the top of your website or in-app for freemium accounts to drive people to content pieces. Be strategic with the order. For example, the order could be content pieces that go through the buying process of your product. Ahref is an example of a company who does this well.
7. LinkedIn Ad Campaigns In most cases, I suggest to not use CPC on LinkedIn or your budget might run out before you reach the majority of your audience. Impressions is the best avenue. Also, never select the expanded audience option for campaigns on LinkedIn as it will target a large percentage of unqualified individuals. 8. Premium Free Trial If your application offers a free trial, have those users try the
upgraded version of your application, rather than the freemium version. Depending on how addictive your application is, users may be more inclined to bypass the freemium version if they had a great experience with the upgraded version. 5
DIFFICULTY: EASY 9. Suggested Pages To find out which influencer/company/community Facebook pages are liked by your Facebook followers, click on the profile photo of a business page and copy the ID number. It will usually be after the second period. From there, add it to the url after the “=” in https://www.facebook.com/pages/?frompageid= and you’ll see the suggested pages. Credit to Alex Rangevik for this tip. 10. Social Proof People are more likely to start engaging with a post if it already has amassed likes and comments. Use the lowest CPC countries to get social proof with ads before opening up the targeting to a bigger audience. By spending a few dollars, your ad copy can get the initial traction needed before you change the targeting locations again. Remember that targeting the United States can be up to 5 times more expensive, therefore use low CPC countries for all your experiments. Here are the countries listed on Jerry Banfield’s website. 11. Retarget with Videos I prefer using video to retarget web visitors rather than content. The cost per view is only a few cents per view, whereas retargeting content can cost you a few dollars per click. Videos usually have more people engaging with it. This grows your audience quicker.
6
DIFFICULTY: EASY 12. Facebook Messenger Use Facebook Messenger now for campaigns before it becomes one of the “normal� ad channels on Facebook. Currently, marketers are having success with it, but as it becomes more popular, it’s effectiveness will go down. This is the perfect opportunity to experiment with it. ManyChat is a good tool for Facebook Messenger campaigns. 13. Customer Testimonial Ads Create a Facebook ad of a customer testimonial with a photo of their face. Upload your customer list on Facebook and target them, which will see an increase in engagement. Influitive is really good at using this approach and has even incentivized customers to participate. They wrote about it in this blog post.
14. Flatten Link Architecture Flatten your link architecture. Too often marketers are interlinking to the most recent content pieces and leaving the old content untouched. Keeping a balanced linking approach will help your old content with its ranking.
7
DIFFICULTY: EASY 15. Dictionar y Integration Integrate your content with a dictionary extension such as Google Dictionary. It will add a small question mark on words that you believe people may have a hard time defining. Once people click on the word, a definition will pop up. This can prevent web visitors from leaving the site when searching for a definition. 16. Comparison Ad Campaign Use your competitor’s company name in a comparison ad. Target your competitor’s brand name and also the keyword their customers use to login to the platform. From there, create a landing page detailing why you’re the preferred vendor.
17. Customized Short Links
Instead of creating a simple shortened link, use a tool like Sniply to add an additional CTA to the linked page. The CTA can appear on any page or news article that you share.
8
DIFFICULTY: EASY 18. Draw Attention to Your CTA Draw attention to your Call-to-Action when a visitor is on your website. A cool tactic you can use is simply changing the colour of the CTA once a visitor hits the halfway point of your website. This will grab the visitor’s attention again and you can use a tool like mixpanel for event tracking. 19. Trade Show Outbound Emails Be strategic about the time that you send outbound emails during a trade show. Once you have the attendee list, send them an email about visiting your booth during the longest speech or panel discussion of the event. The reason for this is that they’ll likely be browsing on their phone during this time. If your message resonates, you’ll get foot traction to your booth once the keynote speech is over. You can even schedule the email ahead of time. Check the show’s schedule and make sure you’re using the right time zone.
9
DIFFICULTY: MEDIUM 20. Email, In-App Message or Push Notification? When choosing how you will send customers your message, think deeply about the person’s environment, state of mind, and potential reaction to your message based on the medium you use. For example, if you want users to download your mobile app, the best medium to use is an in-app message to those on desktop. If you send your message over email, they will likely receive it when they’re not using or thinking of your product. If you send it as a push notification, you will likely interrupt them during a meeting, a conversation with a friend, or while focusing on other work. A good message delivered with the wrong medium won’t be as effective. 21. Conversational Content According to the 2017 Internet Trends Report, 20% of mobile queries were made using Google Voice and that will undoubtedly continue to rise. Therefore optimizing your content for voice search will be critical for the future of SEO. This article by Sherry Bonelli on Search Engine Land explains how to do it. 22. Complete Onboarding
Use retargeting campaigns on social for the users who have started but not completed the onboarding process. Many marketers make the mistake of not reminding those users what your product does. This assumes that the person remembers why they started signing up in the first place. But people quickly forget trials they sign up for- you need to remind them of the value proposition of your product.
10
DIFFICULTY: MEDIUM Common message: “Hey, sign back in to App Name to finish setting up your account.” Better message: “Need help with Value Prop? Sign back in to App Name to finish setting up your account and create your first Feature.” 23. Referral Program Rewards
For referral programs, make all the rewards (and the actions for earning them) directly associated with increasing usage of your product instead of cash rewards or random items like iPads. Here are a couple examples: Wealthsimple is a robo-investment app. To get more of your money invested without fees, they have a tiered awards program that encourages you to invite a friend, download the mobile app, or transfer an existing investment account. Similarly, Dropbox’s incentive is giving you extra storage when you invite a friend. You can also reward them by unlocking paid or premium features for some time, such as a month. This encourages them to upgrade. Also, make referral rewards double sided (reward both your user and their friend with the same reward) so that people feel like they are helping their friend and not just themselves.
11
DIFFICULTY: MEDIUM 24. Webinar Timer Add a timer to your website or blog sidebar that always counts down from 5 or 10 minutes announcing when the next demo/ webinar will begin. If you have an IS team, you can set it up so when they click the link your team is notified and can present the demo right away. Or have a pre-recorded webinar that they can watch. 25. Add Urgency to Email Campaigns Use urgency in your email promotions. For example, in the past, I’ve used MotionMail to create timers within html email marketing campaigns. If you write your emails in html, simply customize the timer and then add the small code wherever you want the timer placed. This works well with ecommerce emails. 26. Diversif y Acquisition Channels Don’t be too attached to one platform or strategy. Dictionary websites lost a tremendous amount of traffic after Google’s definition snippet came into place. Be ahead of the curve with your acquisition efforts.
12
DIFFICULTY: MEDIUM 27. Integration Landing Pages Create a blog post or landing page that talks about your integration with another software partner so that when someone searches for that integration, your page will show up. Slack has a landing page for each integration and it was one of the tactics brought up in this article by Chris Von Wilpert.
28. Tag Happy Customers Get your customer support team to tag users who have just had a particularly positive experience (such as fixing a big problem for them). Target those people with requests for reviews. To do this effectively, set up a review automation in your email marketing platform, and have your customer support team add users in that automation after a good experience.
13
DIFFICULTY: MEDIUM 29. Integrate Tools with APIs Get comfortable with using APIs. Without including APIs in your marketing technology stack, you won’t be leveraging all the data at your disposal and automating some mundane tasks. This is a good guide from Klipfolio for any marketer that isn’t comfortable with APIs yet. 30. Growth Experiments for Small Wins Run growth experiments for small increases in the channel that you’re testing. In the long-term, these small wins will end up having a big impact. This also creates creative environment, where your team will have the freedom to conduct unique experiments. 31. Automate Your Adwords Campaigns If you’re handling multiple Adwords account, use scripts to automate many of the day-to-day tasks. These scripts will save you a ton of time, which is why I have a document of scripts saved in my notes. Koozai wrote a blog post about 100 scripts to automate your Adwords account. 32. Use Chatbots to Deliver Content Create a chatbot that automates a workflow dependent on someone’s title. For example, have the chatbot ask web visitors what their title is and from there, offer the web visitor unique content that someone with their title would enjoy. You should see an increase in engagement.
14
DIFFICULTY: MEDIUM 33. Gmail Ads for Competitors Gmail ad campaigns can be a another acquisition channel if your company has had success with email. Target the keywords of your competitors and if this is done correctly, you can potentially have the ads placed in the inbox of their customers. 34. Target Social Activity Target people who tweet or write about how they need help with an issue that your software solves or making complaints about your competitors. There are platforms I know that allow you to target individuals based on their social interaction. Many companies are not leveraging this, therefore it’s another avenue to get ahead of your competition. I got this email from an account executive from Marketo after I tweeted about marketing automation. I thought this cold email was well done.
35. Boost Retargeting Campaigns Make a small change to your script to boost your success with a retargeting campaigns. Add a some code to your script in order to only retarget visitors who’ve been on your site for over a minute. This should help retargeting campaigns because quick bounces are likely not part of your audience.
15
DIFFICULTY: MEDIUM 36. Leverage Someone’s Facebook Audience To leverage this properly, you’ll need to have an influencer as a Facebook friend. For example, a friend of mine is friends with thousands of marketers on Facebook. If my product is for marketers, I would use his profile to do this. Go to their Facebook profile, click on view page source, search “initialchat”. You will see the profile ids of people who have looked at that profile. From there, run a script to capture all the ids and then you can add them into a custom audience on Facebook for targeting. Add the id at the end of this url for verification https:// www.facebook.com/insertidhere. See the highlighted id:
37. Use Chat for Email Captures Use the chat application on your website to capture an email for an automated workflow. Create an auto message to begin the conversation, have the bot ask for the organization or title of the web visitor and once that’s done, use a form within the chat application to secure the email. From there, you’ll have valuable data to segment into a personalized workflow. Drift is an awesome tool that allows for a lot of customization using chat.
16
DIFFICULTY: MEDIUM 38. Scrolling Script Use a scrolling script when scraping large LinkedIn groups. Add the script to console and press enter. It has helped me capture all the contacts when scraping. This is needed because contacts will have to be loaded before you can scrape them. Dominick Malzone goes through the whole tutorial in this article.
39. Reddit AMA Campaign Use reddit to begin a conversation about your product. Create a few accounts and start asking questions and talking about an issue that your software solves. Make sure that the conversation feels authentic. Once it gets some traction, have one of your loyal customers join the conversation or take part in an AMA. If this goes well, direct traffic there and it can then be used as a referral for people searching for your product. 40. Video Keywords Find video opportunities to rank on Google if your competitors are ranking for the same keywords with written content. Many howto-guide searches will have YouTube videos as the rich snippet.
17
DIFFICULTY: HARD 41. Viral Referral Program If you can gamify your referral process and have users competing against each other, you’ll have quite a bit of success. Hotjar does this very well. They have a leaderboard and it shows how many referrals are needed to reach the top, similar to what game designers do. My first reaction when seeing the leaderboard on Hotjar was to figure out how many people I needed to refer to reach the top. It’s quite effective.
42. SEO Email Experiment If you have a subscriber list of over 50k, you can leverage them for an SEO boost. Create an email campaign where the goal is to get your subscribers to google the landing page you want to boost. Make google.com your CTA and the message can be “use this keyword to find our new landing page”. If you gamify it, you’ll potentially have large amount of subscribers searching for your landing page. 18
DIFFICULTY: HARD 43. Leverage a Website’s Network Leverage a target website’s network and console. This tactic is rarely used. I’ve been able to find valuable information like contact lists or common threads for campaigns by digging deep into the infrastructure of a website. I was able to find the contact information for all the leads we were looking for and then used a script export them onto a spreadsheet. From there, I used a custom audience campaign to target them. Use this Introduction to HTTP ebook to familiarize yourself with this.
44. Understanding the Local Culture Create content tailored to your local audience through testing. I’ll quote Gustaf Alstromer from a YC interview as he laid it out perfectly: “Facebook saw low growth in Japan, and went and talked to people in the local market and found that people felt it was rude to “invite” friends to Facebook. They found through a growth experiment that changing the wording to “announce to your friends you’re on Facebook” (instead of “invite”, they immediately began to see growth there.”
19
DIFFICULTY: HARD 45. Outreach Email Getting comfortable with navigating within has allowed me to automate certain tasks. I’ve been able to scrape large lists from websites and more by finding a common thread and then using a script to pull the data. It’s a valuable skill to have. Ryan Kulp wrote a great blog post on how to use this to your advantage. He used a script from the network data he scraped of a forum to automate an outbound email process to those users. 46. Customer Master Profile Use a service like Hull to segment your customers out of an automated outbound approach. It syncs all your data together from all your platform and creates a “master profile” for your customer. This will prevent your customers from being included in any automated outbound campaign that you’re running. 47. Use Hidden Feilds on Forms Use hidden fields to capture more information about your subscribers or leads from demo requests. By adding a script on your form, your IS team will have more valuable data that they can act upon when contacting the lead. You can do a lot more with this added data. This extra information will improve your segmentation and also, your sales team won’t need to scour the web for the profile of a lead. For this to work properly, you can query multiple APIs or
integrate tools like Clearbit and Madkudu. Here’s an example of the data that Clearbit obtains with their hidden field after someone fills out a basic form. (See photo on next page).
20
DIFFICULTY: HARD
48. Leverage Partners with Retargeting Create landing pages for your partners with the goal of retargeting their audience. This works well if you have the same target market as your partner, and channel marketing is an important acquisition channel for your company. Encourage their marketing team to direct some traffic to the landing pages you’ve built and have the sales team to use that link in the footer of their emails. By adding the retargeting pixel on the landing page, you’ll have a new audience that you can market to.
21
DIFFICULTY: HARD 49. Personalize Chat Messages with Data Personalize your chat messages. We use Intercom at my company and when I went on Drift’s website, got an interesting chat popup (see photo). It was clear that they were using our IP address, while integrating other tools like Clearbit, for tailored messages to specific companies. I started chatting with them and they confirmed it. This is a unique way of increasing chat engagement.
50. Email Validation API If you’re web scraping and automating the outbound cold outreach with those emails that are collected, use an email validation API to lessen the blow for your domain. It will take out “bad emails” and spam traps. This Data Validation tool gives the emails a score and you can take them out from there. 22
DIFFICULTY: HARD BONUS: Become a T-Shaped Marketer The “T-Shaped Marketer” has been a trending theme in the last few years. Companies are seeing the value in employing marketers with these skill sets. For anyone looking to go this route, I would first recommend having a deep understanding in a few of those skills before teaching yourself the remaining skills of that profile. This is to ensure that you do not become a generalist, which won’t be as valuable in the long term. Brian Balfour wrote this article on the steps needed to become a “T-Shaped Marketer” a few years ago, but the overall message is still relevant today.
23
Conclusion I consider experimenting and testing two of the most important components of marketing. It’s up to you to determine which acquisition channels to pursue for your company. I say this because some of these growth marketing tips may not apply to your business. This is where your creativity will stand out. Be open to learning new methods and create an experimental environment to maximize the potential of your team. I also wanted to give thanks to Rally Stanoeva for editing and for designing these growth marketing tips into this ebook and Martin Staykov for his help with editing. Tomas, my co-founder at Growth Media, and I started blogging about growth marketing a few months ago and since then our subscriber list has grown to 7500. If growth marketing is something that interests you, feel free to subscribe for more tips and to join our growing community! Joel Musambi jmusambi@gmail.com
24