We’re living in the AI era. From software and healthcare to data and other industries, AI is fueling technological disruption on a level unseen since the arrival of the personal computer. But beyond the business applications of AI, another revolution is unfolding in the realm of consumer behavior—specifically, search behavior. 

In late 2024, Google’s share of the search industry market fell below 90% for the first time in nearly a decade. AI is the culprit. Now, for the first time, users have free access to AI answer engines that not only crawl the open web, but provide custom responses to their queries in real time. Suddenly, the company that invented the modern search engine is now locked in a battle to win eyeballs from LLM tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, X’s Grok, and many others. 

SEO isn’t dead. But search itself — the way we find, vet, and interact with digital information — is being turned on its head. And in the middle of it all? Your brand, which still needs to reach, educate, and persuade potential customers and users in organic-ish ways.

That’s where Generative Engine Optimization comes in — a discipline both similar and unlike SEO in fundamental ways. In this guide, we’ll unpack GEO, explain how it differs from Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) and traditional SEO, and share what smart brands are doing to future-proof their visibility in a post-keyword world.

What is GEO?

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is the practice of improving your brand’s visibility in AI engines. 

Unlike traditional SEO, where the goal is to rank a website highly on search engine results pages, GEO is about ensuring your brand and its content is referenced in the responses generated by tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Bing Copilot, Google’s AI Overviews, and others.

These tools don’t just fetch and display a link to your website. They synthesize and construct responses in real time based on a blend of training data, live web content, and contextual interpretation of your query.

For brand leaders and marketing teams responsible for converting unaware audiences into qualified prospects, the question is no longer just, “Are we ranking?” It’s “Are we a part of the answer?”

An example of GEO (missing) in action

Now, I personally think it’s defensible — albeit misguided — to read all of the above and think, “so what?” After all, marketing is a field dominated by cycles of hype and decompression. We’re obsessive about the latest thing. And Google’s been around for 20+ years, so maybe all that staying power means users will just stick with it.

So to illustrate the point, let’s define GEO by its opposite and share what a lack of LLM visibility actually means for your brand: 

• A user asks ChatGPT, “What’s the best B2B CRM for startups?” The answer includes two competitors and a product roundup, but your brand isn’t mentioned.
• A prospective customer types a question into Perplexity instead of Google. The AI cites three articles — none of which are yours — as the foundation of its recommendation.
• A decision-maker using Google SGE gets an AI-generated answer at the top of the page summarizing key takeaways from five sites. Yours isn’t one of them.
  

In each case the user gets what they need, but your brand is nowhere in sight.

That’s the challenge GEO is designed to solve. It’s not about optimizing for search results but about optimizing for inclusion in AI-generated narratives.

GEO vs. AEO vs. SEO — What’s the Difference?

To understand where GEO fits into the broader picture, it helps to zoom out.

Over the past two decades, SEO has evolved from keyword-stuffing and backlink chases to a more nuanced, intent-driven discipline. But now, AI is accelerating that evolution, splintering search into multiple surfaces: Ranked results, featured answers, and full-blown generated responses.

Let’s break down the distinctions:

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Traditional SEO is about ranking web pages in search engine results to drive organic traffic.

• Goal: Earn clicks from high-ranking links on Google or Bing
• Tactics: Keyword targeting, backlinks, technical site health, content quality
• Success Metric: Organic traffic and page rankings
  

Many brands should still do SEO — but SERPs are increasingly crowded and click-starved as search engines add AIOs, paid results, and more dynamic content. 

Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)

AEO is about structuring your content to be surfaced as the direct answer to a query — whether in a featured snippet, knowledge panel, or voice assistant response.

• Goal: Be the answer, not just a result
• Tactics: Clear formatting (Q&A, bullets, tables), schema markup, concise definitions
• Success Metric: Featured snippet placement, voice response inclusion, zero-click visibility
  

AEO emerged alongside voice search and smart assistants. It’s about incorporating tiny bits of information that engines can extract instantly.

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)

GEO focuses on getting your brand included in AI-generated answers; i.e., the synthesized, conversational outputs produced by tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google SGE.

• Goal: Be referenced, cited, or paraphrased in AI-generated responses
• Tactics: Authoritative content, semantic depth, entity, schema markup, presence in trustworthy sources, systematic content freshness
• Success Metric: LLM visibility, brand citations in AI tools, brand sentiment in AI tools
  

Similar to AEO, GEO is about formatting for extraction. But it’s also about building enough context and credibility that AI tools pull you into the conversation even if the user never visits your site.

We should note that some brands and search thought leaders still use different terminology for the practice of optimizing content for AI visibility; e.g., it’s not unheard of to read “LLM SEO” out in the wild. At Tuff, we prefer GEO. 

Rethinking SEO Strategy in the Age of LLMs

Until recently, SEOs have followed a tried-and-true formula: Publish high-quality content, earn links, rank well, and capture clicks. The idea that every business is a publisher was huge for its time.

But in 2025, that playbook is fraying.

According to SparkToro’s 2024 zero-click search study, nearly 60% of all Google searches now end without a single click — a number that’s been steadily rising year over year. 

Why? Because Google has long invested in keeping searchers on its platform rather than referring them to sites directly. Before the AI boom, they did this by answering more queries directly — through featured snippets, maps, and carousels — often satisfying the user’s intent without requiring them to visit a site. 

Now, that dynamic is expanding both in Google Search and beyond. Generative AI tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Bing Copilot are starting to function as end destinations themselves by delivering synthesized, citation-lite answers to complex questions. Users don’t need to click through to get the gist. And thanks to LLMs’ ability to summarize, contextualize, and personalize, the barrier to finding information is trending toward zero — and so is the barrier to creating content.

Generative content tools are flooding the internet with basic, surface-level explainers. As a result, top-of-funnel, Wikipedia-style content is rapidly becoming commoditized, and brands that keep churning it out are seeing diminishing returns. 

So, where does that leave marketers?

It doesn’t mean you should stop publishing content. But it does mean your content strategy needs to shift from “publish more” to “publish smarter.”

What brands should do instead:

• Double down on differentiation. Move away from generic explainers and lean into content only you can produce: Product deep-dives, original data, founder insights, customer stories, and technical how-tos.
• Refresh content consistently. According to data from AirOps, 95% of all pages cited by ChatGPT were either published or refreshed in the past 10 months.
• Shift down the funnel. Instead of chasing top-of-funnel traffic, use content to nurture evaluation-stage prospects, educate on key pain points, and reinforce product value. SEO is no longer just an awareness channel. It’s a trust-building tool.
• Structure content for AI surfaces. Write content in a way that’s easily extractable and reference-worthy for GEO. That means structuring answers clearly, using schema, and building semantic authority around your niche.

The bottom line? Brands still need to publish. But they need to be strategic about what, where, and why. In an environment where AI answers dominate and clicks are harder to earn, content must do more than fill space. It must anchor your presence across a fragmented, answer-first internet.

Your Next Move: How to Future-Proof Your SEO Strategy

The rules of search are changing, but the goal remains the same — show up where your audience is looking for answers.

In the era of LLMs, that means expanding your SEO strategy beyond ranking pages to earning presence across traditional search, answer engines, and AI-driven interfaces. Here’s how to get started:

1. Conduct a GEO audit and test your visibility  

You can’t be the answer if you’re not formatting for answers.

• Ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Bing Copilot industry-specific questions. Is your brand, product, or POV mentioned?
• Check which sources are being cited, and reverse-engineer what they’re doing right.
• Use platforms like Profound to monitor and benchmark your presence across generative engines — even when you’re not getting the click.
• Add schema markup, internal linking, and modular Q&A formatting to make your content snippet- and voice-ready.

2. Build an Answer-First Content Library

Think beyond blog posts. Create layered content assets built for human and machine consumption.

• Modular formats (e.g. quick definitions, comparisons, data tables) make it easier for AI crawlers to pull and summarize information.
• Product marketing content — e.g., feature breakdowns, use case pages, competitor comparisons — is more defensible and harder to replicate.
• Integrate content with your brand voice, narrative, and hard-to-replicate trust signals. 

3. Redefine Your KPIs

Rankings and organic traffic still matter. But they’re no longer the whole story.

• Track AI citation mentions and content visibility across AI platforms.
• Monitor your “answer share” across key question categories in your space.
• Consider SEO performance alongside downstream metrics like demo requests, sales velocity, and pipeline quality.
• Think about visibility as the new ranking. 

Build a GEO Strategy in 2025

Search is changing. We’re here to help. Whether you’re looking to expand your content efforts this year, future-proof your existing content library, or figure out a strategy that does a little bit of both, we can help. 

Reach out today to kickoff your free GEO strategy call with one of our content strategy experts.

The post GEO, AEO, and LLM SEO: How AI Is Reshaping Search (And What Brands Should Do About It) appeared first on Tuff.

Are you leading a growth-focused organization eager to boost your marketing outcomes? Whether you’re a high-growth startup, a mid-market business, or an enterprise managing multiple business units, marketing that drives real, measurable results is non-negotiable.

That’s why the phrase you need to keep an ear out for—whether either hiring an agency or building out an in-house team—is performance marketing. 

Performance-based marketing strategies are driven by tangible business results. The channels and tactics associated with performance marketing strategies are flexible. They span across search engines, social media networks, AI chatbots, websites, and more, but the goal is consistent: Generate direct revenue for the business as a result of marketing efforts.

This article explores how performance marketing applies across company stages—from startups to enterprises—what to consider when adopting a performance mindset, and how to measure success at scale.

Understanding the Basics: Performance-Based Marketing Demystified

Simply put, performance marketing measures all marketing efforts with a dollar and cents contribution to the company’s bottom line. Metrics like revenue, CPA (cost per acquisition) and ROAS (return on ad spend) are taken into account for every decision made within the marketing strategy. While the focus of other marketing varieties might end with higher funnel metrics like impressions or video views, performance marketing follows those interactions all the way to revenue-generating activities. 

For early-stage startups, this mindset is essential for survival. But for enterprise organizations, performance marketing helps ensure marketing budgets are accountable, scalable, and optimized across regions, channels, and teams. Performance marketing means adopting a mindset of optimization toward company revenue across the board. This includes content development, performance ad creative, conversion-optimized websites, and more.

Every effort from your marketing team has the potential to generate revenue for your startup, but not everything is optimized for that specific purpose. A video or blog post without supporting data is often wasted effort. That’s why this kind of content isn’t usually part of a performance-based marketing strategy. 

Kicking Off a Performance Marketing Strategy

While there’s no such thing as a one-size-fits-all performance marketing plan, there are basic fundamentals to nail before you’re off to the races. We recommend defining your audiences, identifying your unique value props, and refining your messaging strategy. But before diving into your tactic mix, you need to clearly define the goals of your marketing efforts. 

Defining these higher-level goals is something that happens very early in our partnerships, often during our first call. During these initial conversations, we ask questions like:

1. What are your organization’s revenue goals for this month, quarter, and fiscal year?
2. How does your organization currently measure marketing efforts?
3. What tactics has your organization tested in the past?
4. How does your company currently generate revenue? Are there multiple revenue streams we can promote to users?

After integrating this data with our own research and expertise on growth opportunities and market competition, we develop marketing strategies. These strategies revolve around various channels to acquire new users, spanning from search engines to programmatic display networks.

Channel Mix is Key

To be clear, performance marketing is not only allocating efforts toward what drives “last-click” conversions. We typically recommend a channel mix that covers each part of the acquisition funnel, even if certain channels aren’t driving directly attributable last-click revenue. We have measurement strategies in place to ensure that some of these higher funnel tactics, like organic search acquisition or video marketing, are contributing to larger revenue growth. 

Measuring Success: Key Metrics for Performance Evaluation

You can’t call a marketing strategy performance-focused if there’s no strong measurement framework in place. Measurement is the backbone of performance marketing, and it’s how we evaluate the success of our efforts. It’s also the engine that drives all of our decision making and optimizations.

To build an effective measurement framework, you’ll need to start with identifying the main KPIs of your business.

Regardless of your business or industry, identifying main KPIs is the first step to building your measurement framework.

From here, we break down our KPIs by tactic and channel. It’s worth repeating that not all channels merit the same measurement framework. Some high-funnel channels prioritize metrics such as CPM and video watch rate. Lower funnel channels, however, concentrate on actions directly linked to revenue, like purchases and qualified lead submissions.

Using Multi-Touchpoint Attribution

We acknowledge that each partner requires a unique, tailored approach to measurement frameworks. Multi-touch attribution is an invaluable tool for accurate measurement support. It offers options to comprehensively understand the effects of diverse marketing strategies. Leveraging multi-touch attribution enables us to make informed decisions that drive results.

These tools allow leaders to clearly understand which channels contribute to revenue and where to scale or trim budgets.

Adopting a Performance Marketing Mindset

There are countless ways to approach building and executing a performance marketing strategy. Regardless of the size of your organization,  adapting a performance-forward mindset is essential to survive and scale. 

Performance is at the heart of every marketing strategy that we build for every single one of our partners. We integrate closely with our partners to set, achieve, and exceed growth goals. If you run startup or scaleup that’s interested in how the Tuff team can build a performance marketing strategy for your company, don’t hesitate to reach out!

The post Fueling Growth: Performance-Based Marketing for Growth-Driven Organizations appeared first on Tuff.

In working with hundreds of brands — from startup to enterprise — over the last half decade, we’ve found brand growth strategies can usually be distilled into one of three categories: 

• Growth at all costs (GAAC)
• Brand to demand marketing 
• Performance-based marketing

GAAC, or growth at all costs, was most popular with venture backed startups and scaleups prioritizing new customer acquisition over any other metric (even at a loss). With rising interest rates and inflation, this methodology reduced in popularity in Summer 2022, but still exists in certain subindustries (ecommerce, mostly). 

Brand to demand marketers are a new wave of marketers trying to undo the measurement KPIs of performance marketing. They argue that without brand awareness, performance marketing isn’t a viable play. The connection between brand and demand is often a difficult one and dependent on leading metrics above all other considerations.

Finally, there’s performance-based marketing. This is exactly what it sounds like: Marketing that focuses on specific, measurable, business-relevant KPIs. Performance marketers believe every action levels up to what the brand is trying to achieve — namely, grow revenue.

As data collection and analytic methods become increasingly robust, performance marketing is evolving into the leading methodology for digital marketing efforts. So understanding how to speak performance marketing language — and view marketing tactics through a performance lens — is essential for staying at the forefront of the marketing industry. 

Below, we’ll break down the four vital components of performance marketing for brands of all sizes. 

What is Performance Marketing? 

At Tuff, we define performance marketing as a results-driven approach that focuses on a business outcome. Other marketers will define it more loosely—saying that it’s simply attempting to hit a certain measurable KPI, even if that KPI is something fluffy like CTR or CPC. 

So, why be so detailed about measurement? 

For starters, just about anything is measurable these days. Sure, you might not be able to measure the number of impressions a billboard generates down to the individual consumer. But you can likely do some form of test to measure the impact a billboard has on your sales. (For what it’s worth, we don’t recommend it.) And this is an extreme example by any reasonable standard today. Digital campaigns—across all mediums—offer a level of granular tracking that physical media could never come close to reproducing.

Therein lies the difference: Rather than focusing on any sort of measurable outcome, we’re focusing on measurable growth–most often dolla’, dolla’ bills. 

The 4 Steps of Performance Marketing with an Agency

Performance-based marketing, especially when executed by a performance marketing agency, falls into a four-step process: Goal setting, research, testing, and optimization. These four steps are interdependent and iterative, driving continuous growth. Similar to growth, in order for it to be successful, it requires a growth marketing culture and mindset oriented towards achieving results. 

1. 1. Goal Setting: Before you put down any plans, ask yourself what you’re trying to achieve. Then–ask how you could measure it. This will influence every step of the process, because it will make clear what you should prioritize and what you should not. 
   2. Research and Strategy: Let’s say you set a goal of running a marathon. Would you ever try to run a marathon without training? It may work for one in a million, but it’s unlikely to work for most.Without adequate preparation (research), you can’t plan an adequate strategy to accomplish your goals. You’ll waste time and burn valuable resources to teach you things you could have discovered before you’ve spent a dollar on ads–the opposite of a performance-based marketing approach.
   3. Testing: When ads go live–start small. A good rule of thumb is to allocate spending to a level where your test is significant enough to fail without major repercussions, but large enough to make a measurable impact. Using the marathon analogy, this is a half-marathon, or a 10k warmup as part of your training. 
   4. Optimization and Ongoing: Once you uncover your initial learnings, continue to optimize toward those and expand upon them. Going back to the marathon analogy–once you get a couple of them under your belt, start to work on setting a new personal best. Continue to find areas to grow, revenue to unlock, and efficiencies to gain. 

Every step along the way is repeatable–if your test fails, go back to research and strategy! If optimization hits a point of diminishing returns, try adjusting your strategy, or testing new things in incremental ways. That’s what the framework of performance-based marketing is all about.

Paid Strategies for Scaleups in Performance Marketing

There are a few obvious choices for what could be considered a performance-based marketing tactic:

• Paid Search / PPC Advertising
• Retargeting on Paid Social
• Search Engine Optimization
• Email Marketing  
• Performance Max (for D2C Brands)

However, there are several lesser-discussed tactics that we believe also qualify as performance-based, (even if others may not), depending on what the ultimate goal is.

Conversion Rate Optimization: Perhaps the most overlooked part of Performance Marketing is tailoring the user journey and experience to a specific conversion action. CRO is the fastest way to unlock exponential growth: A 15% increase in conversion rate via landing page optimizations or personalization can help your media budgets go that much further. Your media dollars are likely heavily scrutinized: it’s time to treat landing pages, web experiences, userflows, and more the same way.

Demand Generation Campaigns: A major reason why the majority of marketers may not immediately define demand generation campaigns as a performance-based approach is the ability to measure results. We disagree. There are several KPIs within a demand generation campaign that can be measured, including content views, content engagement, ICP traffic visits, and most of all—REVENUE.

If someone suggests otherwise, it’s likely because they either haven’t fully explored the capabilities of measurement tools or lack the expertise to effectively implement such campaigns. With the right tools, methodologies, and expertise in place, demand generation campaigns can certainly be executed as performance-driven initiatives, delivering tangible results and driving business growth.

Account-Based Marketing (ABM) Campaigns: Account-based marketing is a B2B-specific strategy in which you target specific accounts (companies) based on varying criteria: industry, revenue, intent, etc. 

The ultimate goal of an ABM approach is to win revenue from specific companies–whether that’s by retaining their business or winning new business from them. ABM campaigns can have all sorts of KPIs–everything from closed/won revenue to specific account coverage goals in order to generate heightened levels of awareness. 

Youtube Advertising: Youtube’s advertising, and video advertising capabilities in general have greatly improved in the last 18-24 months. In particular, we’ve found that treating Youtube as a complementary channel to paid search is highly effective. You can accomplish this by creating custom audiences of users who search the same target keywords you are bidding on, which can lead to massive gains in efficiencies for both paid search and Youtube. 

Youtube can have all sorts of specific goals–everything from conversions, target frequency, etc. that can map back to your business KPIs as a performance-based marketing strategy. 

Paid Social Advertising: In the right usage, paid social channels like Meta, TikTok, and LinkedIn can be highly effective performance-based channels–as long as you’re using them for their appropriate audiences. To be performance-based, it’s most helpful to use a conversion-optimized campaign strategy. But if your main KPI is higher-funnel, such as traffic generated, it can also be a complementary channel with the right measurement system to ensure it affects revenue. 

These are just a few of the many different performance strategies our performance marketing agency deploys. There are several other strategies that could be considered performance-based that are not primary strategies. For example, programmatic display, content marketing, lead generation strategies, affiliate marketing, so on and so forth. At Tuff, we continuously explore and test new tactics to drive measurable results for our partners.

Is Performance Marketing Right for You?

If you’re not in the “growth at all costs” stage of user acquisition, then performance-based marketing is likely a strategy that can work for your brand. The most important part is that you assemble the right team: Evaluate your team’s internal skill sets and determine if they can approach marketing with a vigorous test-and-learn mindset. 

If you’re looking for a performance marketing agency to help you hit your goals–let’s talk. 

The post The 4 Essential Steps of Performance Marketing for Brands appeared first on Tuff.

The potential U.S. ban of TikTok has dominated headlines for years. Most recently, in December 2024, the U.S. Court of Appeals denied TikTok’s challenge, prompting the platform to file an emergency injunction. This decision, pending Supreme Court review, could create significant disruptions for advertisers.

As a platform that’s become a favorite for engaging Gen Z and Millennial audiences with short-form video, its absence could have a considerable impact on paid and organic social media strategies. 

Here’s what this could mean for your brand and how to prepare:

The Immediate Impact: What Advertisers Can Expect

TikTok’s algorithm and short-form video format have been game-changers for performance and storytelling. But if TikTok goes offline in the U.S., here’s what we’re looking at:

• Rising Costs Elsewhere: A surge in advertisers shifting budgets to platforms like Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts will likely increase competition and drive up CPMs.
• Campaign Disruptions: Active campaigns on TikTok may face abrupt stops, impacting ROI. Pivoting budgets quickly to other platforms will be key to minimizing disruption.
• Audience Shifts: TikTok’s young demographic won’t disappear. We anticipate Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts to take the lead, with YouTube Shorts likely absorbing more due to its superior searchability and reach. Instagram Reels will likely attract more people who are focused on sharing highly visual content. 

How We’re Helping Clients Adapt

While the future of the TikTok ban remains uncertain, we are recommending our clients take a proactive, data-driven approach that prioritizes testing different platforms and transferring organic audience engagement.

While we don’t recommend abandoning TikTok early, we do recommend preparing by testing Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts if you’re currently live on TikTok. 

Brands who can get ahead on these two platforms will be well-poised to beat out other brands if TikTok’s actually banned. 

Short-form video isn’t going anywhere. Audiences will naturally shift to other platforms offering similar features, like YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels.

Test TikTok-Style Creative on Alternative Channels

We’re helping clients refine their creative assets to fit these platforms, leveraging what works on TikTok and tweaking it for new environments. Specifically: 

• Instagram’s algorithm prioritizes content that has been shared and has a broad reach – Focus on highly shareable and engaging visuals that blend highly polished brand content with the more scrappy, user-generated content that is organic on the platform.
• YouTube’s algorithm prioritizes fostering an audience with a longer attention span – Focus on audio and visual elements with a lean towards longer-form content.

Migrate Organic Follows to Owned Platforms

For partners with strong organic followings on TikTok, we recommend implementing strategies to move those audiences to email, websites, and other platforms you own. Here are a few specific ideas we’ve recommended:

• Leverage a link-in-bio tool (like Linktree) to create a centralized place that directs followers to email sign ups, your website, and or your other social platforms.
• Run contests or giveaways to encourage your followers to join your email list or visit the website.
• Mention your other social platform handles to showcase where your audience can find you.

Monitor Ban Updates

With the ban still pending, brands have an opportunity to plan proactively rather than reactively. We are strategizing and preparing for shifts in user behavior. We’re confident that audiences will continue engaging with similar content on other platforms. By reinvesting in alternative channels beforehand, we’re positioning ourselves to seamlessly reallocate budgets if the ban becomes a reality.

Need to Future-Proof Your Paid Media Strategy?

Connect with the Tuff team to diversify your channels, optimize creative for new platforms, and keep your campaigns performing—no matter what happens next.

The post Preparing for a TikTok Ban: Strategies to Protect Campaigns and Budgets appeared first on Tuff.

Consumer behavior and ad platform algorithms never stop evolving. What drove engagement and conversions last month might not move the needle today. To keep your campaigns effective and your strategies sharp, you’ll need more than intuition—you’ll also need a repeatable, data-driven approach to testing creative at scale. At Tuff, we specialize in growth marketing, and our proven framework for creative testing is designed to deliver insights that translate directly into revenue.

The Strategic Value of Creative Testing

For growth-minded marketing teams, creative testing isn’t a luxury; it’s a necessity. With millions of dollars at stake, every creative decision must be validated through data. Our method of testing empowers your team to identify what truly works and double down on strategies that yield the best return on investment. In an era where marketing budgets are scrutinized more than ever, creative testing ensures that your spend isn’t just well-allocated—it’s optimized.

By investing in a robust creative testing framework, marketing teams can achieve more efficient ad spend, improved campaign performance, and a deeper understanding of what drives their audience to action.

How to Build a Scalable Creative Testing Framework

We know your marketing ecosystem is complex. Managing diverse campaigns, handling significant budgets, and meeting the expectations of stakeholders demands a sophisticated approach. At Tuff, we’ve developed a streamlined testing framework that delivers clarity and impact. Here’s how you can put it into action.

Step 1: Conduct Research and Develop a Hypothesis 🔬

Your first step isn’t launching ads—it’s analyzing data. Dive deep into historical performance to identify patterns and opportunities. What type of imagery has historically driven the highest click-through rates? Does a specific message style or call-to-action consistently outperform others?

🙇 Example from Tuff: When we reviewed performance data for a B2B SaaS client, we found that ads featuring real employees, particularly the founder, had 35% higher engagement compared to more product-centric visuals. This led us to a hypothesis: “If we feature the founder prominently in our creative, we’ll see an uptick in click-through rates and conversions.” From there, we developed a series of ad variations to put this theory to the test.

The stronger your hypothesis, the more actionable your insights. At Tuff, we never base hypotheses on guesswork—only on concrete data.

Step 2: Define Crystal-Clear Success Metrics

Before you even think about running your test, lock down your metrics. Which KPIs will you use to determine whether a creative variation is a success or failure? For our campaigns, we often look at metrics like CTR, conversion rate, CPA, and return on ad spend (ROAS).

🙇 Example: In the founder-focused campaign, we zeroed in on CTR and volume of conversions as our North Star metrics. We set historical benchmarks to understand whether our creative was an incremental improvement or a game-changer.

Tip: Don’t get lost in the data. Focus on metrics that directly impact your bottom line. This keeps your creative analysis relevant and actionable.

Step 3: Address Critical Questions Before Execution

A well-executed test starts with answering these foundational questions:

1. How Much Budget Should You Allocate? For large-scale testing, dedicate 10-15% of your total monthly ad budget to experimentation. This budget gives you the bandwidth to test multiple creative concepts without sacrificing the performance of your primary campaigns.
2. How Long Should the Test Run? The duration depends on the size of your audience and the budget. Large audiences paired with significant budgets can yield statistically significant data in 7-10 days. Niche audiences may require a full two weeks.
3. Which Audience Should You Target? Choose a top-performing, upper-funnel audience for faster, more reliable data. This approach not only speeds up your learning but ensures you’re testing on an audience segment that matters.

Marketers need to move quickly but thoughtfully. Making informed decisions about budget and audience can make or break the success of your test.

Step 4: Build a Well-Structured Campaign for Reliable Data

At scale, even small inefficiencies can lead to big problems. Here’s how to set up your campaign for maximum clarity:

1. Create a Dedicated Campaign: House all creative variations within one campaign to control variables and simplify your reporting.
2. Configure Ad Sets Thoughtfully: Each ad set should represent one variation. Distribute your budget evenly to ensure a fair test. This prevents any single creative from dominating the budget and skewing results.
3. Leverage Advanced A/B Testing Tools: Meta’s A/B testing feature is a game-changer. It divides your audience evenly and prevents overlap, ensuring each creative variation gets equal exposure. The cleaner your data, the more confident you can be in your conclusions.

Clean, unbiased data leads to clear, actionable insights. Our structured approach ensures that you’re not just gathering data—you’re gathering the right data.

Step 5: Analyze the Results with Precision

Once your test has run its course, it’s time to dig into the metrics. Did your winning creative truly outperform the others? Are the results statistically significant, or could they be due to chance?

🙇 Example Results: In the founder-focused campaign, we observed a 23% lift in CTR and an 18% increase in conversions compared to the next best variation. Compared to our historical benchmarks, this winning creative also delivered a 9% reduction in CPA. The data was clear: Founder-led visuals resonate deeply with our audience and drive more profitable results.
Don’t just celebrate your wins. Document why they worked and consider how to scale these learnings across your entire marketing operation.

Step 6: Document Findings and Make Optimization Ongoing

Your testing doesn’t end once you have a winner. To keep improving, treat each test as a learning opportunity. Document what worked, what didn’t, and why. Share these insights across teams to build a knowledge base that can inform future campaigns.

Make optimization a habit. At Tuff, we regularly revisit our creative strategy, using new data to inform our next round of testing. This cycle of continuous improvement keeps our clients ahead of the curve.

Navigating Challenges in Creative Testing

Even with a solid plan, testing at scale comes with hurdles. Here’s how to address common obstacles:

1. Stakeholder Alignment: Big campaigns often involve multiple stakeholders, so it’s important to align on what we want to learn before testing begins. Are we validating messaging, testing new creative formats, or exploring audience behavior? Clear goals at the start help everyone understand why strategies and briefs are set up a certain way. Use simple reporting tools to keep communication transparent and show how the data connects to those goals.
2. Data Fatigue: Analyzing vast amounts of data can be overwhelming. Simplify your focus to a few key metrics that matter most to your business objectives.
3. Audience Overlap and Fatigue: Avoid overexposing the same audience to multiple variations. Rotate your creative regularly to keep content fresh and engaging.

Tuff’s Approach: We use segmentation strategies and rotate creative frequently to avoid fatigue while keeping messaging aligned with campaign goals.

Scaling Insights Across the Org

Once you’ve nailed down what works, it’s time to scale. Apply successful creative elements to different campaigns, regions, or even departments. Share your wins and learnings broadly to maximize their impact.

🙇 Scaling Example: We worked with a global retail brand to expand a winning social media campaign into email and paid search. By maintaining consistent messaging and visuals, the brand experienced a 15% lift in overall campaign performance.

Elevate Your Creative Testing for Growth

We believe that strategic, data-driven creative testing is the key to unlocking your marketing team’s full potential. Our framework is designed to maximize efficiency, deliver insights that drive growth, and make sure every dollar of your ad budget is working for you. If you’re ready to transform how you approach creative, let’s talk. Tuff is here to help you scale smarter and faster.

Book a call with us!

The post Creative Testing at Scale: A Framework for Marketing Leaders appeared first on Tuff.

Growing a successful brand means balancing long-term trust with short-term results. Brand marketing builds relationships and loyalty, while performance marketing drives quick, measurable revenue.  The best companies know these strategies should work together, not compete.

In this post, we’ll show you how to align brand and performance marketing, optimize your budget, and track the right KPIs to fuel sustainable growth.

The Need for Balance Between Brand and Performance

Brand marketing creates emotional connections and long-term trust, while performance marketing drives immediate sales and signups. Both are critical, but focusing too much on one can hurt the other.

In business models where sales cycles are often lengthy, brand-building content like webinars, case studies, and thought leadership is essential for nurturing leads and building trust over time. For brands with lower AOVs and quicker sales timelines, immediate conversions are often the priority, making bottom-funnel strategies like retargeting critical.

However, investing in brand-building early on can reduce reliance on discounts and promotions, boosting long-term customer loyalty and value. Striking the right balance between brand and performance marketing drives success across both industries.

Aligning Goals and Budget Across the Funnel

Balancing brand and performance marketing requires more than just aligning objectives across the funnel. We recommend careful budgeting at each stage to ensure you’re investing in the right areas for both long-term brand-building and short-term revenue generation. 

Here’s a deeper look at how to align both goals and budgets across the funnel:

Top-of-Funnel (Brand Marketing)

At this stage, your goal is to build brand awareness, trust, and recognition. You’re engaging an audience that might not be familiar with your brand, so your content should be designed to tell your story and demonstrate value. The focus is on creating familiarity and positive associations.

• Key Metrics: Brand lift, reach, impressions, brand recall
• Strategy: Invest in educational, narrative, or thought leadership content that helps introduce your brand to a broader audience. Owned media like blogs, social posts, and PR are crucial here, as are earned media opportunities through influencer mentions, press, or social shares. By focusing on brand storytelling, you create a narrative that not only informs but also builds an emotional connection with potential customers.
• Budget Allocation: 40%-60% of your total marketing budget should be dedicated to brand-building at the top of the funnel. For example, if your total marketing budget is $1M for the year, consider investing $400K-$600K on top-funnel activities like educational content and brand storytelling. These efforts could include blogs, webinars, or influencer partnerships that build recognition and trust. Focus on owned and earned media, with the majority of spend allocated to content creation and organic engagement.

Mid-Funnel (Transitioning from Brand to Performance)

At this stage, prospects are moving from awareness to consideration. They know your brand exists, and now it’s time to engage them deeper by nurturing their interest and gradually shifting toward performance marketing tactics that drive action.

• Key Metrics: Website visits, time on site, engagement, lead generation
• Strategy: To maximize mid-funnel engagement, the focus is on capturing our audience’s footprint to begin nurturing them on our owned properties as well as paid. Using tools like HubSpot or Klaviyo, brands should set up personalized drip campaigns based on lead behavior. We often find that building new funnel entry points—like interactive content or educational resources—enables consumers to engage deeper with a brand without necessarily buying. For example, in our work with Rewiring America, we created early paid campaigns designed to educate and engage audiences on clean energy benefits, positioning the brand as a trusted resource while nurturing prospects further down the funnel. 

Leverage dynamic content to tailor email sequences based on user interactions—whether they’ve viewed a demo, downloaded content, or abandoned a cart. Segmentation and automation ensure that each lead is receiving highly relevant, personalized content, driving deeper engagement and conversions.

• Budget Allocation: 20%-30% of your total budget should focus on this mid-funnel area. Allocate funds to both paid (retargeting ads, sponsored webinars) and organic channels (email drip campaigns, lead nurturing content) to move prospects further down the funnel. Split your resources equally between brand reinforcement and performance marketing efforts to drive leads.

Bottom-of-Funnel (Performance Marketing)

At the bottom of the funnel, the priority is driving conversions—whether that’s closing a sale, capturing a lead, or securing a demo. This is where performance marketing is most effective, delivering measurable results through direct actions.

• Key Metrics: Revenue, Incrementality, Conversion rates, Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC), Return on Ad Spend (ROAS).
• Strategy: Focus on paid performance campaigns with strong calls-to-action (CTAs), like PPC ads, retargeting, and email remarketing. Offer product demos, free trials, or limited-time offers to nudge prospects over the conversion line. Paid media should dominate at this stage, with tightly targeted campaigns to ensure you’re reaching an audience primed for action.
• Budget Allocation: 30%-40% of your budget should go towards bottom-funnel activities. These funds should be invested heavily in performance-focused channels, such as paid search, retargeting, and high-conversion media types (e.g., display or social ads) designed to capture direct responses. Here, you’re prioritizing immediate returns on investment and optimizing for the lowest CAC.

Key Takeaway: Budget allocation should evolve as prospects move down the funnel, with higher investments in brand-building at the top, transitioning to heavier performance spends at the bottom. By aligning both objectives and budgets, you ensure your marketing strategy supports both long-term brand growth and short-term conversions.

Creating a Unified Brand and Performance Strategy

To successfully align brand and performance strategies across your teams, ensure clear communication of shared goals. Marketing leaders must ensure that creative, brand, and performance teams are aligned, even when faced with conflicting priorities. Establishing cross-functional KPIs is crucial, especially in times of economic uncertainty when budgets might tighten. By ensuring both brand and performance teams are jointly responsible for metrics like Engagement-to-Conversion Rate or Customer Lifetime Value (CLV), marketing leaders can foster collaboration and ensure a balanced focus on both long-term brand growth and short-term revenue. 

One way to do this is by implementing cross-functional KPIs, where brand and performance teams are jointly responsible for metrics like Engagement-to-Conversion Rate or Brand-Performance Crossover. This fosters alignment and shared accountability, making it easier to balance long-term brand-building and short-term revenue goals.

Consistent Messaging Across All Channels

Consistency in messaging is crucial. Whether a customer interacts with your brand via social media, email, or paid ads, they should have a unified experience that reflects the same core values, tone, and messaging. This helps build trust and reinforces your brand identity across every touchpoint.

• Unified Brand Voice: Your brand voice should remain consistent across all platforms, whether you’re engaging through organic content, paid ads, or email campaigns. A clear and unified voice helps customers feel like they are interacting with the same brand, regardless of the channel. This is critical in ensuring that your performance marketing campaigns don’t feel disconnected from your overall brand narrative.
• Visual Consistency: Beyond messaging, maintaining consistent visual elements such as colors, fonts, logos, and imagery reinforces brand recognition. Whether a customer encounters your brand through a display ad or a blog post, the experience should feel cohesive.

When both brand and performance messaging are aligned, it strengthens the overall perception of your business and keeps customers engaged at every stage of the funnel.

How Brand Marketing Enhances Performance

A well-established brand can elevate your performance marketing efforts. When your audience is already familiar with your brand, it’s easier to drive conversions because you’ve already built trust and credibility. Without a strong brand or differentiated value propositions, many companies rely heavily on discounts and promotional offers to drive conversions, which can eat into margins. Here’s how brand-building improves performance marketing outcomes and reduces dependency on discounting:

• Improved Conversion Rates: When your audience recognizes and trusts your brand, they’re more likely to engage with your performance ads and take action. Strong brand recognition means performance campaigns have a higher chance of success, as customers already feel connected to your business—without the need for promos.
• Lower Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC): A strong brand presence reduces the effort needed to persuade prospects. This results in a lower cost per acquisition, as your audience already knows and trusts you, making them more likely to convert. Building brand equity also allows you to achieve conversions without relying on margin-eroding discounts.
• Storytelling for Engagement: Performance ads that incorporate brand storytelling drive deeper emotional engagement, which can lead to higher click-through rates (CTR) and conversions. Use your brand’s narrative to create performance ads that resonate on a personal level with your audience.

How Performance Marketing Fuels Brand Growth

On the flip side, performance marketing doesn’t just drive immediate results; it also generates data and insights that can be used to refine your brand strategy. By analyzing performance data, you can continuously improve how you communicate your brand’s message.

• Data-Driven Brand Refinement: Performance marketing provides measurable results that show which messages, channels, and audiences resonate best. This data can inform your overall brand strategy, helping you fine-tune your messaging and reach the right audience with the right content.
• Audience Insights: Performance marketing campaigns give you valuable insights into customer behavior, demographics, and preferences. Use this information to sharpen your brand positioning and make sure your branding reflects the needs and desires of your target market.
• Testing for Consistency: By testing different messages, creative assets, and CTAs in performance campaigns, you can ensure that your brand’s core values and identity remain consistent while optimizing for better engagement and conversions.

Key Takeaway: Consistent messaging across channels is vital for creating a seamless customer experience, but when combined with performance marketing, it also drives measurable results. A unified brand strategy boosts the effectiveness of performance campaigns by enhancing trust and recognition, while performance data provides valuable insights to continuously refine your brand messaging.

By aligning brand and performance efforts, you create a marketing strategy that works together to achieve both short-term wins and long-term brand loyalty. When done correctly, your brand becomes a powerful tool to elevate performance marketing, and performance marketing, in turn, fuels your brand’s ongoing evolution.

Measuring KPIs for Brand and Performance Integration

Balancing brand and performance marketing requires tracking the right KPIs to measure both long-term brand value and short-term conversion goals. This ensures you’re not just focusing on immediate wins but also building a brand that resonates and sticks with your audience.

Brand Marketing KPIs

Brand marketing metrics are harder to measure because the effects are long-term and qualitative. However, key indicators include:

• Brand Awareness: Measure brand recall, brand lift, reach and impressions across social media, search, and display networks.
• Brand Sentiment: Use surveys, social listening tools, and review platforms to measure how people feel about your brand.
• Social Engagement: Track likes, shares, and comments on organic posts to understand how your audience interacts with your brand.

Performance Marketing KPIs

Performance marketing metrics are more straightforward and measurable in the short term. These KPIs focus on driving action and conversions:

• Conversions: Track sales, sign-ups, or other desired actions.
• Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): Calculate how much it costs to acquire a new customer.
• Return on Ad Spend (ROAS): Measure how much revenue you’re generating for every dollar spent on ads.
• Incremental Revenue Growth: Measure additional revenue directly attributed to performance marketing efforts.

Integrating Brand and Performance Metrics

While brand and performance marketing can seem separate, they are most effective when working together. For example:

• Brand-Performance Crossover: Track how brand-building campaigns influence performance marketing results.
• Engagement-to-Conversion Rate: Measure how brand engagement leads to conversions.

Key Takeaway: Measuring the right KPIs for both brand and performance marketing ensures you’re tracking long-term brand value alongside short-term conversion goals. By integrating data from both strategies, you can continuously refine your approach, maximizing immediate results while strengthening your brand’s long-term growth and recognition.

Conclusion: Balancing Patience and Agility for Long-Term Success

To wrap things up, let’s ask the critical question: How do you build a brand that lasts while still hitting those short-term revenue goals? The answer is balancing patience and agility—investing in brand-building for the long haul while using performance marketing to drive immediate results.

• Brand-building is a long-term investment—it takes time to build trust, loyalty, and emotional connections with your audience. While the payoff isn’t immediate, it delivers benefits like customer retention and higher lifetime value (LTV).
• Performance marketing, on the other hand, offers the agility needed to test and optimize quickly, delivering immediate, measurable results like higher conversions and faster revenue growth.

Focusing too much on one side can be risky:

• Over-reliance on performance marketing: You may see quick wins, but without building lasting brand recognition, long-term growth will be difficult.
• Over-reliance on brand-building: Great awareness might result, but without immediate performance, your business may struggle to see conversions.

The ideal strategy is a balance that integrates both:

Brand-building lays the foundation for trust and recognition, making performance campaigns more effective. During times of budget tightening, marketing leaders should prioritize high-impact brand-building activities that lay the groundwork for future growth, while continuing to invest in performance marketing for immediate returns.

Key Takeaway: Combining patience in brand-building with agility in performance marketing is the winning formula for long-term success. By continually refining your strategies, you’ll build a brand that thrives in the short term and stands strong for years to come.

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Hey Growth Noters, It’s officially Labor Day Friday. And in the spirit of holiday weekends, we’re keeping this one light and breezy. But first! In celebration of five months of The Growth Note (please clap), we’re sharing five of this year’s greatest hits from Tuff World — some of our best growth tips and tricks from pre-newsletter times. Read ‘em on your way OOO. Better yet, mark this whole thing unread and check it out Tuesday morning. We’re all pros here. You know what’s best. As always, thanks for reading. See you out there! Spencer at Tuff P.S.: If you’re enjoying the newsletter, don’t forget to forward (and share the sign-up link) with a friend. Better yet, reach out to us. We’d love to hear from you!  Five Growth Quick Hits for Your Labor Day Weekend 🛥️ ☀️ 1. Performance Creative: What is the Ideal Timeline and Cadence of Testing and Iterating? ⏱️ Testing and iterating performance creative? We’ve got the cadence down to a science — and the timing depends on your specific use case and goals. A sneak peek of our testing timeline for performance creative. For the full breakdown, check out the blog.  2. How to Speak to Multiple Audiences with One Website 💃🕺 Balancing diverse audiences on a single site? It’s simpler than you think. Streamline your messaging and structure to engage all users effectively — no need for multiple websites, just smarter navigation and clear communication. 3. YouTube vs. TikTok Ads: A Decisive Guide for Your Brand 📱 Choosing between YouTube and TikTok ads? Get the lowdown on targeting strategies and creative approaches for both platforms to maximize your campaign’s impact. 4. Advanced Technical SEO Techniques to Propel Your Startup’s Organic Rankings ⚙️ Often overlooked, frequently misunderstood. But solid technical SEO is the foundation propping up all organic gains. Read this guide, and go deep on the technical tweaks that can give your startup a serious edge in search. 5. Cold Email Subject Lines That Get High Open Rates ❄️ If you’re struggling to get opens on your cold emails, this one’s for you. Learn how to write subject lines that grab attention, understand your audience’s psychology, and use power words that resonate. Growth marketing news to watch 📰 The captain has activated the fasten-seatbelt sign 📈 📉 Last month, Google confirmed that the first core algorithm update since March was dropping in the coming weeks. It began rolling out on August 15th — and now, we’re fully buckled up for SERP turbulence. Some things to look out for: organic rebounds for sites impacted by the September 2023 Helpful Content update, as well as a ton more AI overviews. If that were little, an unrelated ranking bug impacted search results around the same time of the core update rollout. Tl;DR: SEO in 2024 remains an adventure. We laughed: Data viz edition It’s a time-honored tradition. Someone (this time,a professor) asks for examples of the worst graphs, charts, etc. out there. Hilarity ensues. Yeah, don’t steal this one for your brand’s data viz efforts. Credit: @slothropsmap on X Looking for more growth content? Check out case studies, guides, and more resources for all things growth on our site. Cheers, Spencer Cappelli, Senior Content Strategist Tuff Growth © 2024 Tuff | We’re a division of Goodway Group!

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Happy last day of July, you made it! Welcome back to The Growth Note — the growth marketing newsletter from your friends at Tuff. This time, we’re looking at some of the top AI tools for growth marketers (according to us). We’re also sharing high-level results from our recent startup founder sentiment survey and what we know about the timing of the next Google core algorithm update. It’s hump day, folks — let’s dive in. –  Spencer at Tuff P.S.: If you’re enjoying the newsletter, don’t forget to forward (and share the sign-up link) to a friend. As always, if growth insights aren’t your jam, you can opt out here.   Insights from the blog ✏️ AI for Growth Teams — Tools to Reduce Tedious Tasks (While Leaving Space for Human Creativity) 💡 Since the release of ChatGPT in November 2022, marketers and professionals in pretty much every industry have been exploring how generative AI tools can make them better at their jobs. Along the way, we’ve been treated to a barrage of enthusiastic AI posting on X and LinkedIn (you know the sort: “99% of people use ChatGPT wrong. Do this instead … (1/99) ⬇️👀🧵”) and unsettling news headlines speculating on the future of work. Our take? AI is great for automating some of the most repetitive and menial tasks in our day-to-day work. Frankly, it’s hard to imagine going back. Not using AI for those things would feel as weird as manually rewriting text instead of copying and pasting. One of the many fitting tributes from 2020 for Larry Tesler, inventor of the copy and paste command. Source But for other tasks, there’s no substitute for human insight and creativity. The happy medium we should all be striving for is one in which AI accelerates human creative work, not replaces it. So, what processes make sense to automate in a growth marketing context, and what are some of the best tools for the job? To find out, we asked members of the Tuff team in functions ranging from paid media and CRO, to design creative and SEO. Here are some of the highlights: ChatGPT: No surprises here. It’s used by pretty much all of our teams to help with brief outlining, idea generation, and rewriting short snippets of text. CapcutCaptions.ai Submagic: Used by our motion design team to add captions to videos— turning a process that previously took hours in Adobe Premiere or After Effects into one done with a few minutes of review. Turboscribe: Used by numerous teams to generate transcriptions of video content or meetings. We’re always testing new tools. Our AI stance, at least for now? Use AI for the boring tasks that don’t add much value, but need to get done anyway. You can check out the full list of processes and tools broken down by channels here. Taking the Pulse on Startup Founder Sentiment 📈 📉 It’s a message we’ve heard time and time again — in 2024, marketing teams are being asked to do more with less. Over the past 18 months, we’ve seen how significant market shifts have impacted life at many of the early-stage startups we tend to work with. Things like Google’s declining market share, restricted VC funding, and the rise of AI have all made a mark. But on the agency side, these changes have also given us a chance to observe, learn, and understand how startups are adapting — and what these changes mean for growth now and in the future. To get a sense of how the founders at such companies are thinking about growth and marketing heading into the second half of the year, we sent out a survey asking about budgets, growth plans, and top priorities. Here were some of the top findings: Most founders we asked reported significant difficulties managing growth while fundraising.  Many founders are emphasizing organic strategies like SEO while outsourcing more work to part-time consultants. Despite this, founders are moderately confident in their abilities to balance growth with profitability in this climate. On a scale from 1-10 (with 10 being the most confident), most founders selected a six. Most founders believe their company’s culture and values contribute to its ability to navigate financial uncertainty (average degree of confidence, out of 10: 8.5) The responses also featured insights into which parts of founder businesses have been most impacted by the current economic climate. Perhaps unsurprisingly, marketing and growth teams were feeling the pressure: Our founder, Ellen, packaged up these insights into a full report you can read here — including four practical steps for startups, founders, and marketers feeling the pressure to make the most of the current climate. Growth marketing news to watch 📰 Here we go again: Core update version 🚨 Google search liaison Danny Sullivan said in a comment on an SEO Round Table post that he anticipates the launch of a new Google core algorithm update “in the coming weeks.” The expected core update comes amid reports of increased SERP volatility as measured by a variety of third-party SEO tools — which is usually a warning sign of an impending update. The update would be the first from Google since the far-reaching March 2024 core algorithm update, which many experts deemed one of the most impactful to hit publishers in the last decade. Cookie-ful future 🍪 In a reversal, Google announced that it wouldn’t be deprecating third-party cookies after all. As reported by Search Engine Land, the move “suggests Google is trying to balance privacy concerns with the needs of the ad industry and its own business model.” The oft-delayed deprecation of Google third-party tracking cookies became a topic of debate in recent years between regulating bodies concerned with privacy and advertisers fretting over the potential loss of visibility into user data. For now, marketers can relax — cookies are still very much on the menu. This is just nuts 🇺🇲 How we act when they tell us to stay in our lane. Credit: @bradwhipple on X Looking for more growth content? Check out case studies, playlists, and more resources for all things growth on our site. Cheers, Spencer Cappelli, Senior Content Strategist Tuff Growth PS: Tuff on our team summit in DC last week. We’re real, we promise — feel free to say hi! © 2024 Tuff | We’re a division of Goodway Group! Want to opt out of future newsletters? Unsubscribe here Designed with Beefree

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While new tech and tools can sometimes seem like shiny new toys or passing trends, it’s evident that AI has created significant opportunities in growth and marketing, enhancing workflow, output, and results. 

Over the past year, we’ve been experimenting with various AI tools to enhance the quality of our work for clients. In doing so, we’re constantly gaining insight into what AI can’t currently replace, where we need to focus our internal resources, and ultimately how to strike the right balance between strategy and execution. Our goal is to deliver the best work while passing on as many benefits and cost savings as possible to our clients.

Here’s an overview of how each team at Tuff is currently working and leveraging various AI tools: 

Creative Team: 

If creative production were a restaurant, we wouldn’t use AI to say, “Make a pizza,” because you’d get some sort of inedible round-ish shape that sorta resembles what we only can assume is supposed to be a pizza. We’d certainly not be able to serve it to a customer. We can’t even say, “Here’s the ingredients and a recipe… now make the pizza.” But with the right supervision and coaching, we can use it to prep the ingredients, making the process of creating a delicious pizza easier and usually less of a hassle. TLDR: It’s a great resource for sourcing sources.

Day-to-day, it’s an amazing tool for jumpstarting or reviving your creativity when you’re feeling stuck. It can improve average source files and assets, within reason. Plus, it’s fantastic at blending reality with fantasy (think of a DALL-E image of your product in space, underwater, or in Switzerland) to grab attention. It also helps us stay organized and cuts down on admin tasks, so we can spend more time on the fun stuff. Here’s how our performance creative team is using AI to speed up production while maintaining top-notch quality:

CRO Team: 

Our CRO team is all about helping our clients grow using a range of tactics like: landing-page optimization, customer-journey mapping, A/B testing and multivariate testing. They are also experts when it comes to email marketing, website design, and information architecture, bolstered by analytics covering tracking, and traffic analysis. 

This team comprises a diverse set of experts, including web designers, UX copywriters, and developers. They leverage AI tools like ChatGPT, TurboScribe, Natural Readers, DALL-E, Figma AI, Jasper, and Asana AI. While they haven’t fully automated everything with AI, they’ve significantly accelerated and enhanced tasks such as content drafting and refinement, transcription, background removal from photos, image resizing, and more. This has freed up time to focus on strategic and creative initiatives. 

Paid Media Team: 

Our paid media team sees AI tools like ChatGPT as great for enhancing your work rather than replacing you. They’ve had the most success using AI to:

• Perform research, like coming up with initial keyword ideas for search campaigns
• Uncover insights in large data sets to inform media budgets and campaign optimizations
• Generate inspiration for ad campaign copy

Using AI for these tasks saves time, allowing them to focus more on our accounts, make efficient optimizations, and dive deeper into overall media strategies. The paid team mainly uses ChatGPT for these tasks:

SEO and Content Team: 

Here’s our SEO and Content team’s take on using generative AI for content and SEO:

We strongly believe that unedited AI-generated content shouldn’t be used for customer-facing material, especially not for long-form pieces or in B2B settings. People can easily spot AI content, and we don’t want our brand to come off as lazy. So, that’s a firm no from us.

However, there are a few tasks where AI tools like ChatGPT have been really helpful:

1. Meta Description Writing: It’s tedious, boring, and short. Plus, Google often rewrites them anyway. Let the machines handle it!
2. Content Excerpts/Executive Summaries: Perfect for summarizing existing content for blog previews or for giving a quick overview of a brief/outline to clients.
3. Suggesting Alternate Content Titles: While we still tweak these a bit, it’s now much quicker and easier to brainstorm ideas.

AI is a big help for our SEO and Content team by taking care of the most tedious and repetitive tasks that don’t show up in the final copy. It’s great for things like writing meta descriptions, summarizing content or topic ideas, and rewriting small portions of text.

AI is also fantastic for brainstorming. It can suggest keywords when you’re out of ideas, and then you can check those suggestions with tools like Semrush or Ahrefs.

Conclusion: Let AI Handle the Tedious and Repetitive Tasks

We’re always testing new tools, and here’s our takeaway as a growth agency right now: use AI for the boring tasks that don’t add much value but need to get done. This way, we can improve the quality and speed of our work, deliver better results to clients, and free up our time for running more and better experiments.

By freeing up time, we can continue to repurpose that to deeply understanding our clients’ products, audiences, and business models, which enables us to create and implement strategies for sustainable growth. And ultimately, the more tasks we can streamline, improve, or outsource to AI, the better we can adapt our operating model to meet our clients’ evolving needs.

The post AI-Powered Growth Team: How We’re Leveraging Generative AI Opportunities and Passing All the Benefits Directly to Our Clients appeared first on Tuff.

I’ve had the privilege of working with hundreds of early-stage startups, coaching and partnering with many founders to help them create, execute, measure, and refine their growth strategies.

Over the past 18 months, we’ve seen significant market shifts like Google’s declining market share, restricted VC funding, and the rise of AI. These changes have given us a chance to observe, learn, and understand how startups are adapting and what these changes mean for growth now and in the future.

To get a clearer picture of the challenges founders are facing and how we can support them as they adjust their growth marketing strategies, we sent out a survey. We asked about their budgets, growth plans, and top priorities for the second half of 2024. We used Google Survey (linked here) to collect responses from the end of March to the beginning of July. 80% of the respondents are founders running companies with 1-10 employees, while the other 20% have teams of 11-50 people. Most of the respondents (90%) are from B2B startups, with only 10% in retail and DTC. Among the B2B startups, the majority are in the Healthcare/Medical industry. All respondents identified their startups as being in the pre-seed or seed stage.

Here’s a summary of the responses, key takeaways, future predictions, and actionable steps for the rest of the year. 

On a scale of 1 to 10, how challenging has it been for your company to manage growth amidst financial uncertainty and tight budgets while maintaining a strong emphasis on profitability?

Balancing budgets and knowing what to prioritize is always a challenge, regardless of economic conditions. Founders reported significant difficulties managing growth while fundraising. On a scale from 1 to 10, with 10 being the most difficult, not a single response was below 7.

The downside is that some startups might never get off the ground because they lack the budget to keep investing in their product or business model. From my 10 years of experience working with startups, I’ve seen that some ideas require larger budgets to validate traction. Without the time or budget (including the ability for the founder to pay themselves a salary), it’s hard to convince people that the startup is worth the investment.

Although I’m biased, since I started a growth marketing agency in a different economic climate and it’s a service-based business, I believe this situation forces founders to do their own marketing work rather than outsourcing it, which can be more beneficial in the beginning. It also requires founders to do things that don’t scale, like sending out emails, attending events, or holding one-on-one demos, instead of spending heavily on ads in the early stages. This approach helps them learn much faster.

No matter the industry, in the early stages, you’re putting something out there, getting reactions, and making small pivots based on feedback. There’s no better way to understand your audience and market than by having your feet on the ground.

What primary strategies or approaches has your company used to sustain growth in the face of financial uncertainty and tight budgets while prioritizing profitability?

Two common themes emerged from the responses. The first, unsurprisingly, was founders focusing on SEO and organic strategies, along with grassroots efforts. This approach works well if you’re in an industry with existing demand and have a focused SEO strategy with a mix of high-intent and high-volume keywords you can rank for. However, this won’t yield immediate results. It’s a worthwhile investment, but you need to consistently focus on it and understand that you likely won’t see results for 6+ months. This delay is due to your low domain authority and thin website content, which affects your credibility with Google and other search engines. Building this up takes time.

The second major theme was about team structures. Many founders mentioned relying less on full-time employees and instead paying hourly rates or reducing people costs. For example, one respondent said, “We utilize part-time staff when possible, don’t support benefits for most of our staff, and work remotely to cut down on office space costs.”

These strategies highlight the need for patience and flexibility. Investing in SEO and organic growth can build a strong foundation, but startups need to complement these long-term efforts with quick wins to keep momentum. Similarly, using part-time and remote teams can save costs and add agility, but it’s important to have effective management systems in place. By combining these approaches, startups can navigate financial uncertainties while setting up for sustainable growth.

How confident are you in your ability to balance the need for growth with the imperative of maintaining profitability in the current economic climate?

The most common response to this question, rated on a scale of 1 to 10 (where 10 signifies the highest confidence), was a 6. While this may seem only slightly above average, when you consider findings from other studies like the Techstars Innovation Survey, which reports that 74% of founders remain optimistic about the future, it suggests that entrepreneurs are determined to pursue their dreams and make a difference in the world, regardless of the challenges they face in their environment. And to that, we say a big hell yeah!  

To what extent do you believe your company’s culture and values contribute to its ability to navigate financial uncertainty and tight budgets while emphasizing profitability?

The average response, rated on a scale of 1 to 10, where 10 indicates significant contribution, was 8.5. In theory, this aligns well. According to this HBR article, company culture has grown in importance due to recent high-profile culture crises at companies like Uber and Wells Fargo, the increased focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), and the ongoing competition for talent. Culture is now a strategic priority that directly impacts the bottom line. It can no longer be delegated or compartmentalized.

However, this seems conflicting with earlier responses where many startups mentioned outsourcing talent, cutting personnel costs, and relying on contractors or part-time workers. Here’s an interesting question, posed with genuine curiosity: What does company culture look like without traditional full-time employees?

Which areas of your business have been most susceptible to the impact of financial uncertainty and tight budgets, and what steps have you taken to mitigate them while still pursuing growth with profitability in mind?

Again, this seems to boil down to two things: reducing the team size and reallocating all budget from marketing and sales to product and development. Here are some direct responses we received:

• “Marketing. We’ve eliminated our marketing budget to allocate all funds to product and development. This of course hinders our growth, so we are doing as much as we can to speak at conferences, appear on podcasts, etc. to spread awareness about our product.” 
• “Growth. You often need to spend more money (on resources, marketing, capacity building) to grow, but it can be challenging if you don’t know what ROI to expect. That’s why it’s important to invest in small, short term tests and if the results are positive, then you invest more. Also, we generally hire internationally to reduce the cost of support.”
• “Growth and people have been the most susceptible. We are having to lean in on mission and commitment of the team and our investors while getting creative about the business model.” 

How To Adapt: Practical Steps For Startups, Founders, and Marketers

Pay for strategy—execute yourself. With capital hard to find and budgets tight, you can’t outsource everything. You’ll need to handle the growth work yourself. While it may seem daunting since you’re already juggling many roles, this means you’ll need to get incredibly good at prioritizing what matters most across all business functions, and growth is one of the most important areas. There are many ways to grow, so my advice is to pay for strategy support and consulting. Find someone who can take the time to understand your business and help you create a testing roadmap based on your goals. Once you have a plan, you, the founder, need to execute it. Though it will take time to implement various tactics, this approach ensures you are focusing on the right things, making it the best setup if your budget is tight.

Get proof to build credibility – forget about traffic. When asked how they’re rethinking budgets with fundraising so difficult, founders mentioned shifting from paid ads to grassroots efforts and SEO. The challenge with SEO is that it takes a long time to show results. My guess is that founders are looking for ways to drive traffic to their website, product, or app without spending money on ads, so they turn to organic efforts.

I’d suggest taking it a step further. While you’re bulking up your website content, focus on building credibility rather than just driving traffic. Instead of tracking traffic volume, look at metrics like time on site. I’d rather have 100 visits a month from visitors who explore multiple pages, book a demo, reach out, come back, and find value, than 10,000 visitors who leave after 3 seconds. No one will be impressed by high traffic volume if it doesn’t lead to any results or revenue.

Don’t just hire a freelancer to churn out low-value content daily. Quality beats quantity. If you can win a few customers or clients, double down on that. Turn their stories into social proof, case studies, and video testimonials to give new visitors more confidence in what you’re selling.

Sustainable growth is better than explosive growth. While I’d argue that balancing growth and profitability should always be a priority for businesses, it’s even more crucial now than it was a few years ago, which isn’t surprising.

If you can consistently show month-over-month revenue growth and have a reliable process for doing so efficiently, you’ll attract the funding you need. Why? Because you’ve proven that you understand what works and what doesn’t, and you have a systematic approach to sustain that growth.

Instead of focusing on reaching 500 customers by the end of the year (which can feel overwhelming and uncertain), concentrate on improving your Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) each month or acquiring one or two new customers monthly. Aim to get better each month and ignore the rest.

Focus on developing processes and systems tailored for part-time workers and contractors. If you’re working with contractors, freelancers, or offshore talent, your ability to communicate your vision and needs to the team becomes ten times more critical. It’s essential to establish clear communication frameworks and use project management tools to ensure efficiency and foster autonomous working relationships with those who contribute to your company’s growth. Setting up communication systems detailing when, where, and how you interact with part-time contractors, freelancers, and offshore talent is arguably as crucial as any other growth or product initiative.

Moving Forward

Navigating growth during tough financial times isn’t easy for early-stage startups. Our survey highlights the smart, resourceful ways founders are adapting, from focusing on SEO and organic growth to rethinking team structures. These strategies require patience and creativity, but they lay the groundwork for long-term growth and success.

At Tuff, we get the challenges you’re up against. Whether you need a solid growth plan or just some expert advice, we’re here to help you focus on what really matters and keep moving forward. Let’s tackle these hurdles together—reach out to Tuff and let’s get your growth on track.

The post [Report] Founders Survey Insights: Navigating Shifts and Challenges with Early-Stage Startups appeared first on Tuff.