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. 

Richard Meyer

Richard has spent the last five years working at digital agencies, exploring various industries and company lifecycles. I’ve created and implemented growth campaigns on just about every platform for startups, $20,000,000 a year companies, and everything in-between. When not at work, I can be found cheering on the Penguins or Steelers, spending time with my wife and son, playing disc golf, baking, or walking my dogs.

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

If you’re a B2B org, chances are you could benefit from adopting an account-based marketing approach. 

But hey, we get it, starting out can seem like a mountain of work.  

You may find yourself in this position and ask, what tools do I use? What the hell is RevOps, anyways? Lead generation and demand generation is the same thing, right? How do I get on the same page with my sales and go-to-market teams? If you’re looking to kickstart an ABM program or you’ve launched one but aren’t seeing the results you want, you’re in the right place. 

Let’s dive in together!

Why We Love Account-Based Marketing: 

The B2B buying journey is complex. If you’re not using ABM, you have a contact-level attribution model. That means that the revenue is credited solely to the contact who signs the deal. 

This is inherently flawed. 6sense published a report in 2024 that estimates that the average B2B deal of over $10,000 has 9 people on the buying committee. How on earth do you create a fair attribution model when one contact came in from word of mouth, one from a trade show, one from paid social, and the rest via an email chain? 

ABM recognizes that sales and marketing must work together for the larger overall goal: marketing creates touchpoints along the buying cycle via educating target buyers for sales to close deals. A mature ABM organization doesn’t give a single thought about “whose revenue” it is – because at the end of the day, dollar bills are the same on the P+L sheet no matter where they come from. 

Our Approach to Account-Based Marketing

Our approach to account-based marketing is fairly simple, and it starts with three questions: what is your inbound marketing strategy today, how effective is your current approach, and what’s your level of marketing sophistication?

• What is your inbound strategy today? Often, organizations in the scaleup phase don’t have an inbound strategy, at least not a real one. They may get the occasional inbound lead that is actually a referral, but if you can’t clearly articulate how you’re generating demand, you don’t have an inbound strategy.
• How effective is your current marketing strategy? If they’re talking to an agency, chances are they aren’t happy with their results. However, is that because there is an unrealistic expectation on marketing? Or, rather, is marketing responsible for an OKR that drives little business value? If you don’t know – do some digging before getting to question number three. 
• What’s your organization’s level of marketing sophistication? This is difficult to quantify, but when you start to have discussions about ABM, a few things become clear quickly. Fair warning though, this question can turn into about a dozen followup questions, which is why we save it for last.
  • Is the organization set up to receive inbound leads? How are deals being worked? Who controls budget? Who represents marketing at important organizational meetings? Are you a leads, or a revenue KPI organization? What tools do you currently have in place to measure success? What does success even look like? 

Depending on these answers, we will recommend a varying degree of account-based marketing, in which the level of sophistication and investment increases or decreases based on what needs to take place. 

For each of these, we recommend an account-based measurement approach, not a contact-level measurement approach. It’s far more important for the revenue from the target account to close than who gets credit. 

We’ll tier these into a few organizational personas: 

• Entry-level ABM 
• Roller Coaster ABM
• Legacy ABM

Entry-Level ABM:

If you’re new, or have no existing inbound volume, don’t get started by buying a fancy tool, like Demandbase or 6sense. We’re a huge fan of these platforms (and speak more on them later), but the last thing you need on your P+L before validating your ICP, target accounts, or more is a six-figure software.

Instead, we recommend taking a scrappier approach. Ask yourself these questions: 

• If we could sign 100 new companies tomorrow, who would they be? (Note: it doesn’t have to be 100, but for this example, we’re using it. The actual number you’ll need depends on a lot of things, including organization size at the organizations you’re marketing to.)
• What types of businesses are my best customers? 
• Who at the organizations are the people buying my product or service, and who else at the organization is involved in the buying process? Who is the final decision maker? 
• What materials do I have that speak to my target audience? If I don’t have any – how can I create something that will be valuable and educate my audience as to what I do, and that I know the problems they are dealing with daily? 

These aren’t super hard questions to answer, but it may take some time (and grunt work using ChatGPT, or AI for Work). We recommend starting with a lead generation approach to validate that you are reaching the right personas at target companies, and then once you feel confident in your ad targeting, expanding into a demand generation strategy. Which brings us to 

Roller Coaster ABM:

If you’re a marketer at an organization using an ABM strategy that is currently measured on your ability to bring in MQLs, this one is for you. 

Chances are, you are caught in a roller coaster of lead optimization, and your love of your job depends on what your CPMQL is on any given day. Your biggest challenge? Attribution, and justifying the expense to finance and revenue operations when content downloads don’t turn into sales opportunities. Likely, your organization has a “me” mentality, and not a “we” approach to revenue generation. 

The good news is that there is an answer to your problem, and it’s measurement. The easiest way to get out of Roller Coaster ABM is to: 

• Take a step back, and audit your lead and revenue pipeline. Chances are, your content downloads are converting into opportunities at a sub-5% metric, and that’s not sustainable. 
• Evaluate what other KPIs exist within your revenue pipeline that you and sales both agree are problematic: is it velocity? Is it win rate? Is it deal size? Is it new logo acquisition? 
• Assemble a plan of attack for how you could measure the effects of one of those KPIs with a structured (non-lead) generating test. 

Each one of the KPIs listed above can be tackled with a structured account based marketing test, using control and test variations. If velocity is an issue, you can market to half of your pipeline with content designed to nurture them through the funnel. This content has to be ungated and able to be consumed by prospects at target accounts. Over time, you can begin to measure the uplift in velocity, and start to create internal buy-in for an account-based measurement instead of a contact level attribution model. 

This journey won’t, and can’t be easy. It takes a humble and dedicated marketing leader to turn the conversation from “how can I get more leads” to “how can marketing better support sales and revenue generation?”. This process can take a year, maybe even more to create internal adoption – and even then, can lead to a lot of internal skeptcism, so have the narrative and data ready at all times. 

Legacy ABM:

Legacy ABM organizations are organizations that have a fully bought-in revenue, sales, and marketing team to a “we”, not “me” mentality. In our experience, these are the least common type of organizations, but they do exist! 

A Legacy ABM organization has to have a test-and-learn mindset to continue evolving processes, systems, tools, and teams. If they don’t, they’ll get stagnant, and likely end up back at the Roller Coaster ABM approach. 

There’s a lot to learn from what successful ABM operations do, and the most common traits we’ve found are: 

• They constantly are evolving their approach to fit the needs of their revenue goals – tailoring their strategy based on the various stages of the buying process. 
• Their content, collateral, and messaging speaks authentically to their target audience. No faking it. 
• They invest in the full funnel – from awareness through to retention. 
• They use all three ABM approaches: one-to-many, one to few, and one-to-one across marketing and sales. 
• Marketing, sales, and revenue operations meet and connect frequently about goals, areas of opportunity, and how they can work together. 
• They use intent data from providers such as 6sense to help inform their priorities and share insights across the organization. 

The biggest issue many Legacy ABM organizations face is scalability, and finding a partner or approach that allows them to find the right measurement and paid strategies to unlock more growth. Often, they’ll use a dedicated partner to manage the paid strategies, while they continue to own content production and RevOps themselves. 

When to Buy a Tool While Setting up an Account Based Marketing Approach: 

There are several different types of tools you can leverage in account-based marketing, and depending on their level of sophistication can range between a few thousand, to well over a hundred thousand dollars to invest in. We recommend holding on investing in a true ABM tool until you’re in at least the “Roller Coaster ABM” persona, and perhaps beyond, where you can clearly measure the benefit of having the tools to scale results. 

To run a successful ABM strategy, you’ll need at least the following tools and resources, so also consider the total investment required when deciding whether or not to buy a tool. 

• An account targeting list: this can be generated manually (difficult) or via a tool using filters and intent data. 
• A CRM: Your CRM should be your source of truth for sales and deal activity. 
• A content marketing strategy: regardless of stage in ABM, you’ll need to have content to market that speaks directly to your target audience. 
• Money and time: to market, you’ll have to invest in ads on LinkedIn (most likely) or other ABM channels such as Stackadapt. Results also take time, so having a clear roadmap and timeline is helpful. 

Comparing ABM Tools: 

Our favorite tool: 6sense

6sense was named as a leader in the Magic Quadrant from Gartner in 2024. With dedicated CSMs and onboarding support, 6sense can help take your account targets and help you tier your spend based on actions your accounts are taking right now. If an account is showing high levels of intent? It can automatically move to a new marketing segment to continue to nurture it to a state of conversion. 

Other Intent Data Providers: Demandbase

Demandbase is another category leader in intent and ABM data. However, in our experience, is built a little more to be “out of the box” than 6sense. This can be beneficial to less sophisticated organizations who need less customization, but also can be a limiting factor for RevOps teams who are looking for more robust reporting and modelling. 

Other Intent Providers: ZoomInfo Buying Signals

ZoomInfo is a leading provider of company contacts and now, Buying Signals. No longer just a place to get enriched contact data, you can use ZoomInfo data to measure web activity, technographics, and more. In our experience, if you’re using a provider such as 6sense or DemandBase, you likely are using ZoomInfo already for enriching contact data, but this is another potential area to explore if you are looking for an intent-based solution. 

Other ABM Tools We’re Excited About and Trialling: 

The ABM space is continuing to evolve, and with that, new tools and opportunities continue to present themselves. Currently, we’re using all sorts of new tools and will be reporting back on their use case. 

• R!B2B: Identifies contacts that visit your website, and sends their contact data back to you in Slack
• Apollo.io: Newer to the enriched contact game than ZoomInfo, they are disrupting the go to market process and motion. 
• Terminus: A premium DSP that allows you to market to target accounts and personas on premium ad inventory. 

Ready to Supercharge Your ABM Strategy? 

If you’re new to ABM or if you’re stuck in the Roller Coaster ABM, we’re happy to help. Our team of growth strategists, content marketers, lifecycle strategists, designers, and paid experts are able to plug into your existing sales and marketing functions to help take you to the next level. Let’s talk! 

Richard Meyer

Richard has spent the last five years working at digital agencies, exploring various industries and company lifecycles. I’ve created and implemented growth campaigns on just about every platform for startups, $20,000,000 a year companies, and everything in-between. When not at work, I can be found cheering on the Penguins or Steelers, spending time with my wife and son, playing disc golf, baking, or walking my dogs.

The post Investing in an ABM Tool: Comparing 6Sense, Demandbase, and Other Effective Alternatives appeared first on Tuff.

Chances are you’ve worked at a job where you’ve walked on pins and needles–doing everything you can to avoid failure and not draw too much attention to anything that can be construed as failure. An intolerance of failure is more toxic to company culture than arsenic. Simply put: When people are scared to fail, or scared to explore out of their comfort zone, growth is stunted.

At Tuff, we’ve adopted a growth marketing culture that focuses on data-driven decision-making. It’s helped us develop and attract best-in-class talent internally. It’s helped us drive better results for our business and our partner’s businesses. All thanks to our clear focus on driving revenue and results. 

How we’ve gotten to a place where growth culture and data-driven mindsets intersect is pretty simple: we always strive to test and learn, and do so in a thoughtful manner. Here’s how we do that:  

What’s a Growth Marketing Culture?

A growth marketing culture is an environment in which people feel open and free to try new things and embrace failure. This doesn’t have to be “outside the box” thinking, but can be as simple as learning new skills and tactics, or taking on new challenges that test your expertise. 

How to Create a Growth Marketing Culture

At Tuff, we’ve created a growth marketing culture by:

• Encouraging a “test and learn” mindset
• Acknowledging failures, and learning from them rather than keeping score
• Establishing a career framework
• Setting measurable quarterly OKRs 
• Providing an annual learning stipend
• Implementing HeyTaco Rewards for book or class expenses
• Providing opportunities for employees to be involved in work that falls outside their normal job description (sales, Tuff’s marketing strategy, etc.)

If someone wants to come to work, execute their job description, and nothing else? That’s fine as long as they are willing contributors to the workplace. But, if someone wants to continue to learn new things and grow, there’s a clear path and opportunity to do so. 

What’s a Data-Driven Mindset?

A data-driven mindset is a key component of a growth culture. What it means is you evaluate everything through the lens of numbers, instead of emotion or “gut feeling”. It’s important to note that everything can be measured in some form or fashion, if not directly by data.

When using a data-driven mindset, you follow this process when evaluating a problem: 

• What is the problem I’m trying to solve? Why does it matter? 
• How could I potentially solve it? 
• How can I measure what I use to solve it? 
• What did the results show me? 
• What will I do differently next time? 

Here’s a real-life example: 

1. Problem: There are five employees at Tuff who love F1, and all think they are the fastest go-karter in the company. We’re wasting a lot of time debating who is fastest instead of working.
2. Solution: We go go-karting at a track that measures lap times, and also grid position to establish who is fastest. 
3. Measurement: Whoever finishes first, wins. We’ll also factor in the fastest lap time to see who is the fastest in a single lap. 
4. Results: Raj won the overall race, but Richard set the fastest lap time of the day by nearly 2-tenths of a second. Inconclusive data, but we did confirm that they are the two fastest overall employees in our company. 
5. Our next test: We’ll use a single KPI (grid position or lap time) to declare a winner. There’s too much noise in our current data set. 

Here’s a real-life marketing example: 

While the above is a bit of a ludicrous example, it’s proof that you can apply a data-driven mindset to just about anything if you try hard enough. Here’s a real-life marketing example, though, if you don’t believe me. 

1. Problem: Search CPA is increasing and total signup volume is decreasing on organic and direct channels since I pulled back on top-of-funnel spend because CPA was healthier on Search than Meta. 
2. Solution: Implement a limited flight test on Meta in 5 test states, and evaluate how blended CPA is influenced in the test states vs. the control states. (Note: There are other ways to measure top-of-funnel success. 
3. Measurement: Signup growth – Total signups in the 5 test states vs. control group compared to the previous period. 
4. Results: 22% increase in total signups in the test states, blended CPA was 5% lower in those states because of the growth in organic and direct traffic. 
5. Our next test: Implement this test in an additional 5 states to see if we can replicate the results and scale to the remaining states.

Without putting the data-driven mindset to the test, we could have just thrown Meta back into the mix without a clear strategy to determine if it helped total signup volume and CPA. By creating a test structure and clear definitions for what we were measuring, we were able to identify that top-of-funnel efforts have influence outside of their channel silo. 

How a Growth Marketing and Data-Driven Mindsets Influence Decision Making

When challenges are presented through the lens of a data-first growth marketing culture, it removes all the guesswork. If you want to go out of your comfort zone and try something new, you will know if it worked or not, and what you can do differently next time. Your new status quo is a continual self-reflection of “Did this work?” and “Why or why not?”, and you’re not scared to evaluate why it didn’t. 

It’s important to note that a business leader may be reading this and thinking to themselves, “Having my team continually try new things seems risky, why can’t they just perfect what I hired them to do?” It’s a valid point. 

With our test-and-learn mindset, it’s essential to set appropriate boundaries and goals to ensure that the fallout of failure isn’t so extreme that it kills the excitement of growth in the first place. 

A good rule of thumb is that a growth test needs to be significant enough to make an impact, but small enough that if it is a complete failure, then jobs, partnerships, morale, and our growth mindset is not at stake. 

This is applicable to learning new skills, trying new tactics, or improving existing skills alike. Here are a few examples: 

Trialing New Skills With a Growth Mindset

An employee wants to assist with research and analysis for a sales pitch. Give them a timeline so they have the opportunity to collect feedback and course correct. You wouldn’t want to have them take a first attempt at a new skill without a solid backup plan.

Trialing New Tactics or Improving Existing Skills / Strategies with a Growth Mindset

A growth marketer identifies an opportunity to trial TikTok ads for an existing brand. The brand has only seen success on Meta so far. Dedicate a test budget to get initial benchmarks, evaluate, and test again to see if you can get directional improvement. Make sure the budget isn’t so large that the partnership is at risk if it fails. (But it must be significant enough to gain insights.)

How a Data-Driven Mindset Leads to Better ROI 

Not only does a growth culture lead to better employee engagement, but it also leads to better business results. But how? 

1. It ensures you’re not leaving opportunities on the table (missed revenue).
2. It requires you to know the impact of your efforts and where to focus next (intentional measurement).
3. It implies that you’re prioritizing the most impactful things (improving intentionality).

When adopted, this mindset impacts all areas of your marketing team, not just your acquisition experts (paid social, PPC, etc.). Make sure you include your creative team!

With creative in a data-driven mindset, you don’t create assets because they’re “cute”, or you like the look of them. Instead, you’re leveraging performance creative to get better results. You’re also evaluating why certain aspects worked or didn’t work to further the effectiveness of your output. A recent test with one of our partners with this mindset led to a 66% reduction in Cost per Application in 3 months. Another partner, Soona, experienced a 57% increase in total sales, with a $200 reduction in CPA in three months. That’s ROI, and it came straight from the data-driven mindset, and a willingness to get nitty-gritty with the testing details.

Looking for a Partner Who Really Has a Growth Culture and Data-Driven Mindset? 

We’ve set out to make Tuff a place that fosters growth internally, which drives results for our partners. By using a data-driven mindset, we don’t just say we’ll drive better results, we’ll go do it. If that sounds like something you’re interested in, get in touch. 

Richard Meyer

Richard has spent the last five years working at digital agencies, exploring various industries and company lifecycles. I’ve created and implemented growth campaigns on just about every platform for startups, $20,000,000 a year companies, and everything in-between. When not at work, I can be found cheering on the Penguins or Steelers, spending time with my wife and son, playing disc golf, baking, or walking my dogs.

The post Building a Growth Marketing Culture: Fostering Data-Driven Marketing Decision-Making appeared first on Tuff.

As a growth marketing agency, we are constantly seeking ways to grow revenue for our partners. We often do that by analyzing each marketing channel, and scaling those that have the best ROI. Sounds simple, right?

When you start to think through how user behavior differs across channels, marketing decisions quickly become anything but simple – especially if you operate under a freemium business model with a lead cycle that can take a significant amount of time. Sophisticated data systems can often tell you your exact return on investment, broken down by channel and even campaign. But sometimes, that data story isn’t intuitive.

What happens when we don’t see bottom of funnel conversions on a channel we know works for lead gen, but hasn’t yielded many paying customers? Where should we dive in? Can we better understand our audience? How can we find the cog in our marketing wheel? Intent metrics. 

Intent metrics allow us to assess the layer between qualified lead and paying customer to better understand our audience and ultimately make optimizations to drive more down funnel results upper and mid funnel channels. 

What is an intent metric? 

Intent metrics are a set of measurements used to gauge the level of interest, engagement, and intention displayed by users or potential customers towards a particular brand, product, or service.

These metrics help assess the effectiveness of marketing efforts at various stages of the customer journey, particularly in the upper and mid-funnel stages where the focus is on generating awareness, capturing attention, and nurturing interest.

Intent metrics often go beyond traditional metrics like qualified leads or conversion. They typically aim to capture deeper insights into consumer behavior and intent. They provide qualitative and quantitative data that indicates the likelihood of a user taking a desired action, such as making a purchase, signing up for a newsletter, or requesting more information.

Who is an intent metric best for? 

If your business or product offers a free account or free trail feature, an intent metric could be helpful for you. If your product sees a longer than normal sales cycle, an intent metric may be helpful for you. With the longer sales cycle, you can make faster decisions around campaign optimizations before a user drops off. There is no more

With Teachable, we were able to take insights from our free users to optimize campaigns at the top of the funnel and the middle of the funnel, which ultimately drove more paid users over time. 

Creating intent metrics unique to your business

Creating intent metrics for your brand involves a strategic approach to tracking and measuring user behavior and engagement throughout the customer journey. The intent metrics you track should be unique to your audience, your customer journey, and the leading indicators that often precede conversion actions on your site. 

Start by identifying the key actions or behaviors that indicate user intent and align with your marketing objectives. These actions can vary depending on your industry and business model. Examples include clicking on a specific call-to-action, downloading a resource, adding items to a cart, or subscribing to a newsletter.

This takes a lot of research from both marketing and product teams. You first try to find where the conversion rate drops in your user flows. We often analyze this by channel – the point of drop off can be different from a Meta ad compared to a Google search ad because the users intent with your brand is drastically different. 

How we built intent metrics for our partner Teachable

With our partner Teachable, an online course creation platform, intent metrics allowed us to flip our top of funnel and middle of funnel strategy upside down.

A bit of helpful background: In Teachable’s user flow, there are three distinct actions that we track and optimize for:

• Lead (email capture)
• Free Account Created
• Subscriber

Through paid social channels, we had successfully driven a ton of leads (top of funnel) and free account (middle of funnel) users to the Teachable product. Our CPLs and CPAs were incredibly healthy. But we weren’t seeing a ton of those free accounts convert to paying subscribers.

We asked ourselves, “Is this a product issue? Are free users unhappy with what they are getting? Is paid social simply not the channel for us? Is the right audience even on paid social? How do we drive higher intent users to the product from top of funnel channels?” Before we would open the “product versus marketing” can of worms, the intent metric was introduced. 

Historically with Teachable, if a lead or free user did not come back to the product within 5 days after signing up for a free account, they were likely to never convert to a paid account. The Teachable team had done enough research internally to know this to be true. With that information, the team was able to roll out an intent metric to track users who came back to the product after signing up for a free account within: 

• 1 day
• 3 days
• 5 days

With the above information, we were able to assess what was driving the highest intent among users by:

• Channel
• Campaign
• Audience
• Creative asset

We were able to look at everything above and see which was driving the most 1 day, 3 day, and 5 day logins. This allowed us to assess the success of every aspect of a media mix – channel, campaign, audience and creative – to make better campaign optimization decisions. 

How to use intent metrics in your marketing plan

By reporting on intent metrics as well as leads and free accounts, we were able to completely shift our approach to campaign optimizations. Rather than look at hard and dry KPIs, we could look at more holistic metrics to allow us to better understand the behavior of those we were reaching. 

We could finally see who was coming back to the product to log in, and from where they converted onto the free product in the first place. We used this data to adjust campaigns based on where we were seeing the highest intent.

There are a multitude of insights an intent metric can provide, but we lean on them to answer questions that help shape our growth strategy when we aren’t seeing immediate revenue-generating success on certain channels. 

• Can we justify spend on this channel? 
• What should our budget breakdown across channels look like based on ROI? 
• Are we reaching our audience on this platform? 
• Which piece of creative is working? 
• Ultimately, did this drive down funnel results? 

A holistic approach to intent metrics

Not only could we get in the granular details with intent metrics, we could also zoom out more holistically. I often get the question, “How do you back into budgets? How do you decipher where to properly allocate dollars?” We could now assess channel health as a whole, and look at where we wanted to allocate ad budgets. This allowed us to truly see where we should be spending our time and money. 

With Teachable, we learned that although we saw intent from our paid social channels, we saw the highest intent on paid search (naturally). Because of this, we were able to make monthly and quarterly budget recommendations that would provide the most value and return to the business. This didn’t mean we would use the intent metric to shut off channels entirely, but it did allow us to make more strategic budgetary decisions across channels. Because of this, we have been able to drive more down funnel results. 

Re-optimizing campaigns based on intent metrics

You have all of this data now, so what do you do with it? With Teachable, we used this to assess if anything was working within upper and mid funnel channels. Specifically, we looked at: 

• Intent by campaign: Is one campaign driving higher intent than another? Perhaps messaging is stronger on one campaign than the other. 
• Intent by audience: Is one audience driving higher intent than another? Perhaps targeting on this social platform is more spot on for this audience than the other. 
• Intent by creative: Is one piece of creative driving higher intent than another? We can use this information to inform our next round of evergreen production. We can also shift budgets to certain pieces of creative that are driving the highest intent. 

This allowed us to make smarter decisions on our top of funnel channels, justifying to a Board of Directors or a C-Suite the spend on specific channels.

This also allowed us to make more informed decisions on creative and messaging. We could now look at an ad headline and say, “This is bringing users back to the product for 4 days, rather than 1. Let’s lean into this messaging. This is bringing a stronger user to the product.” 

How to evolve your reporting

Intent metrics are tricky metrics to layer in reporting. It’s not an easy item to introduce. 

Today, we use the intent metric as a holistic metric to assess the health of channels, campaigns, audiences, and creative. Right now we keep this out of our daily and weekly reporting. We don’t believe a variation in intent percentages on a Monday versus a Tuesday are good enough reason to remove a creative asset from the mix. Because of that, we report on a monthly and quarterly basis. We dive in and take a look at:

• Highest intent by channel
• Highest intent by campaign
• Highest intent by audience
• Highest intent by creative

And vice versa we will look at:

• Lowest intent by channel
• Lowest intent by campaign
• Lowest intent by audience
• Lowest intent by creative

As we look at this, we make shifts within campaigns based on where we are seeing success. We may realize that a creative asset with a wonderful CPL doesn’t have high intent down funnel, with that we will likely sunset that creative asset. Holistically, we are shifting budgets within campaigns and making monthly and quarterly budget recommendations based on our findings.

That’s not to say we are not frequently sitting with the intent metric on a daily basis. For example, when kicking off a new round of creative production, we will go to the intent metric to glean insights for the next round. When asked questions from leadership such as, “Which audience is performing the best on Facebook right now?” We can quickly lean into the intent metric for an answer.

Validating that intent metrics lead to conversions

The most important thing is to correlate the intent metric with revenue. If you can’t do that, the metric will become obsolete to leadership. 

Once you lean into intent metrics, what changes? Do you see a faster free to paid conversion rate? Do you see an uptick in paid subscriptions from a certain channel? Use this information to not only justify the importance of intent metric usage, but to make strategic decisions across your marketing channels. 

With Teachable, we have seen a direct correlation with intent percentages and Free User to Paid User conversions. It’s actually uncanny. When assessing intent percentages on a graph, and layering the free to paid conversion rate over this, the trend is nearly identical. Intent = Paid Conversions for Teachable. Because of this insight, we can confidently sunset a campaign or creative asset and have a very clear why behind it.

Because of this, we have proven to see a direct ROI by leaning into the intent metric. By finding learnings like this, you will see faster adoption by executive and marketing teams. Lean into these metrics, and they will soon be a leading indicator your team uses for marketing channel, campaign, and creative health. 

Why you should incorporate intent metrics into your planning process

The intent metric has allowed us to learn so much about our audience. As a growth partner, usually we’re assessing key performance indicators, conversion rates, and making strategic decisions from there. The intent metric has allowed us to look a layer deeper after that original conversion event takes place.

Because of this, we know our audience better, we make smarter decisions surrounding advertising spend, and we feel confident we’re moving the needle in the right direction to provide down funnel revenue results.  

Interested in talking to Hannah about intent metrics for your business? Let’s talk! 

Richard Meyer

Richard has spent the last five years working at digital agencies, exploring various industries and company lifecycles. I’ve created and implemented growth campaigns on just about every platform for startups, $20,000,000 a year companies, and everything in-between. When not at work, I can be found cheering on the Penguins or Steelers, spending time with my wife and son, playing disc golf, baking, or walking my dogs.

The post Quantifying Impact: How Intent Metrics Validate Upper and Mid-Funnel Marketing Channels appeared first on Tuff.

We’ve all had to do more with less with something at one point or another – whether it’s time, resources, or budget. Doing more with less is intrinsically part of the growth process. We get more efficient, and that creates a new benchmark that we need to meet or exceed the next go-around. 

If you’re reading this, you’re likely a marketing leader feeling pressure to generate the same or more total results with less total ad spend. Why is that? And more importantly, how the heck do you manage to pull that off? Let’s dig in. 

Why Marketers are Being Asked to Do More With Less

Since April 2022, growth marketing as a concept has been flipped on its head. Growth in pre-2022 terms, as defined by most marketers, would be the practice of scaling results as quickly as possible to maximize total results. 

Often, the scaling was done at break-even CACs, or at a loss with the hope that the LTV of a newly acquired customer would eventually offset the cost of growth and fuel another round of funding. 

In mid-2022, recessionary fears began looming, and skyrocketing interest rates caused inflationary pressures to mount. 

As a result, most scaleups and enterprise brands have since had to adapt their growth strategies and models to do more with fewer paid resources. Performance marketing managers are feeling pressure from their CMOs to optimize for efficiency over volume, and CMOs are feeling pressure from CFOs to reduce spend as much as possible. 

But… why? 

For scaleups, a fear of uncertainty in venture capital markets caused organizations to create as close to a positive cash flow rate as possible to ensure they can keep the lights on for as long as possible. 

For enterprise brands, the choice is often between growth and headcount. CFOs are trying to maximize the total human resources available to the organization (as it makes fiscal sense) while balancing paid growth. As a result, paid media budgets for both enterprise and scaleup brands are under direct scrutiny. 

Cue the scramble to redefine what growth means. 

If I’m a CMO that is being asked to hit growth targets (my job depends on my ability to hit them!), and I’m working with fewer resources, I need to make every dollar count. Growth at all costs is no longer the philosophy: creating sustainable, holistic growth is my new path forward. 

Table of Contents

• Creating frameworks for sustainable paid growth
• Getting the most out of non-branded search
• Developing ad creative that forks for all parts of the funnel
• Targeting the same audience with different campaign optimization events
• Optimize the UX for traffic you’re already paying for

Creating Frameworks for Sustainable Paid Growth

If you’re in this situation currently, the good news is that you’re not alone. As a growth marketing agency, the large majority of our partners (90%+) have been tackling this same question over the last year and change. 

We get it, budgets aren’t increasing anytime soon, and you have to make the most of every dollar to continue to grow results. So let’s dive in on how to do that. 

We’ve created several frameworks for creating sustainable paid growth that can be adopted individually or in tandem with other growth strategies to maximize your ad dollars as much as possible. 

• Maximize non-branded search 
• Develop ad creative that works for every part of your funnel
• Utilize content in multiple optimization events
• Optimize the user experience for the traffic you’re already paying for
• Convert more leads with lifecycle marketing
  

Get the Most Out of Non-Branded Search

Paid search presents a huge opportunity for scaling for established brands that have some form of brand recognition and a clearly defined service or product that fits neatly into the search landscape. Search is high-intent because it’s action-oriented. 

When bidding on a term, you know that you’re showing up in a placement where someone is showing some form of intent for seeing a result similar to what you’re targeting. Additionally, non-branded search typically takes up most of your paid search budget, so tweaking your philosophy on non-branded search is an easy way to make significant changes to your bottom line. 

Because paid search is constantly evolving, staying on top of trends is important, but creating a testing framework to validate what works in your strategy should be a part of your evergreen approach. A methodology of “throw a bunch of keywords to the wall, see what works, and go from there” isn’t going to cut it. 

There are two components to getting the most out of non-branded search: 

• On established non-branded terms that drive revenue, maximize impression share
• For non-validated non-branded terms, dedicate a part of your budget to testing and weeding out ineffective terms

Maximizing Impression Share for Validated Non-Branded Search

Say you have 1,500 non-branded keywords that you’re targeting (which isn’t crazy for established brands who are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a month). Within this search structure, it’s unlikely that you are spending enough for each of your keywords to tell if each keyword you’re targeting is effective or not. 

It’s incredibly easy to create wasted spend by simply creating too many keywords to effectively test at a single time. However, most organizations will still keep this approach because they’re getting enough volume and a reasonable enough CPA that it’s fine to keep the status quo. 

That’s not a good enough answer when it comes to making the most of every dollar.

How We Validate Non-Branded Search Terms

If you are trying to make the absolute most of your non-branded budget, you need to create a more robust process around validating non-branded terms in a quick, efficient manner. Here’s how we tackle this for Tuff:

1. We define a target CPA threshold we’re comfortable spending up to. If this is not established, we work with our partner to establish this based on typical ROI metrics in their pipeline. 
2. We look at all the keywords we’re targeting and bucket them on their average CPA:
   👉Validated Search Terms: Keywords that are converting within our target CPA (likely a small portion of your total keywords → 5 – 10%)
   👉Terms in Need of Optimization: Keywords that have spent more than our target CPA but we believe could work.
   👉Unvalidated Search Terms: Keywords that haven’t spent up to our target CPA (likely the majority of your total keywords)
3. We assign budgets and campaign structures to maximize non-branded results by asking these questions:
   👉Validated Search Terms: What’s the max impression share I can hold for these terms and maintain our target CPA? That’s my new target spend.
   👉Terms in Need of Optimization: Why aren’t these keywords working? Is it a poor-quality score? Do I need to adjust the ad copy or the landing page experience? Does another bidding type work? Are there negative keywords I can add to improve their performance?
   👉Unvalidated Search Terms: How can I bucket these keywords to get them to my target spend level and learn if they are validated or need optimization?

For a recent Tuff partner, we applied this framework to their current search efforts and found the following. For context, their target CPA is $165 and they felt confident that they were in the ballpark of their goals.

More importantly, if this brand had capped their “needs optimization” keywords at their target CPA threshold (and turned off keywords after CPA exceeded their target of $165), blended CPA dropped to $171 (an 8% decrease) and saved them over $30,000 in wasted spend that could be utilized towards testing other keywords that hadn’t been tested, or maximizing the reach of their validated terms with more dedicated search impression share. 

Maximizing Volume Within Target CPA Constraints

Our process in this situation is to take the validated non-branded terms and maximize their volume within the constraints of our target CPA. From there, look at the remaining monthly budget, and determine how many unvalidated non-branded terms you can get to your target CPA threshold within a month. Then, pause underperforming keywords when they hit the target CPA spend without a conversion. For keywords that need optimization, we recommended which to keep and re-test and those we were comfortable pausing. 

In this scenario, we’re able to get the most out of non-branded terms we know work, implement a testing budget we’re comfortable with to keep blended CPA at a healthy benchmark and work through our non-validated keywords faster → scaling results while keeping ad spend stable. 

Develop Ad Creative That Works for Every Part of Your Funnel

Did you know that ad creative can be responsible for 80% of the results you get from running paid acquisition strategies? Sure, targeting, tactic, budget, optimization, and copy are all critical components to a successful ad, but creative (asset design and messaging) is the single biggest lever you can pull. 

Utilizing performance-based creative, whose primary function is to drive revenue, is incredibly impactful for brands that are trying to get the most out of their advertising budget. 

Why? Increasing your click-through rate has direct correlations on your ad’s delivery and the number of people that are arriving at your site to perform the action you want them to. 

Why Performance Creative Matters

In Q1, one of Tuff’s partners implemented two rounds of performance creative updates, where we took the learnings from what was working (and what wasn’t), and revised the creative we were running based on these findings.

The results were a 55% increase in CTR in three months. 🤯

If your benchmark was 10,000 sessions in the previous quarter, with a 3% CVR on site (300 signups), that’s the equivalent of driving an additional 5,500 sessions and 165 signups (assuming spend / CPC is level). What could a 55% increase in total results do for you? It truly can be as simple as applying a performance based-lens to your ad creative. 

Developing Performance Creative Tailored to Your Funnel

Your target audience is being approached by hundreds of other brands daily. And you’re competing directly with them for their attention, time, and resources.  

A common mistake made with ad creative is taking a broad brush and assuming that your target audience is going to resonate with your message, regardless of their familiarity with your brand or their previous interactions. This leads to wasted impressions and as a result, wasted dollars. 

Do you know what each part of your advertising funnel requires from a messaging perspective? How about a CTA perspective? 

It’s a mistake to treat people who are in the awareness stage of their journey the same as someone who has had multiple touch points with your brand in the last 30 days, or someone who has taken action on your site already. Little things, such as your call to action for late-stage targeting vs. early-stage targeting, can add up quickly to become big things. Your creative message and desired action of the target audience should vary depending on where they are in the customer journey. 

By mapping out what your creative messaging and CTA is at each stage of the funnel, you’ll end up with something that looks universally friendly to your brand but specific to each person depending on their familiarity with your business. 👇

Your creative messaging needs to work as hard as your ad dollars and targeting/tactic strategy. Don’t let ad creative be an afterthought: use it to make the most of your budget. 

Target the Same Audiences with Different Campaign Optimization Events

For organizations that rely on internal content production for advertising assets, it can be tricky to increase results without increasing the total content output. Suppose you’re a B2B organization that relies on case studies and whitepapers for advertising assets. In this example, it can be tricky to ask your internal team to produce more whitepapers and case studies without costing your organization more in total paid resources.

Traffic Campaigns, Document Downloads, and Message Ads

To circumvent this, we’ve taken a multiple-touch approach with creative concepts. If we’re using a whitepaper, we’ll develop scrappy performance-based assets to promote said whitepaper across multiple optimization events: sponsored content (traffic/engagement), document ads (download), and message ads (speak to sales). Over the course of several weeks, we’ll launch each tactic to the same target audience, meaning that we’re able to quickly pivot messaging and optimize for each part of the target audience’s journey. 

Why start with sponsored content? It’s the cheapest way to get insight into which messages are effective, what creative components resonate with the target audience, and to build top-line engagement with the target audience for that content piece. 

From there, document ads provide a great way for someone to engage with the content and, should they desire, download the content. This provides a measurable KPI as well that is valuable to stakeholders: new leads generated, even if it’s not the primary goal of what we’re trying to accomplish. 

Lastly, message (or conversation ads) allow us to follow up with a program or service-related inquiry related to the content the target audience has been consuming. This creates a natural touch point for sales to step in and take new business meetings with prospects. 

Tailor Creative for Desired Action

The key to all this? Like optimizing creative for different funnel stages, we’re also tweaking the optimization event to deliver the most relevant desired action for each stage in a target audience’s awareness. 

The benefits of taking this approach are that you’re creating measurable engagement at each level of awareness in your audience’s journey and can create additional efficiencies at the lower funnel as well – making a direct impact on your bottom line. 

Optimize the User Experience for the Traffic You’re Already Paying For

There’s often so much thought into the ad targeting, messaging, and creative design that the user experience is left as a “final element.” The landing page experience and associated lead flows can make a significant impact on your ad dollars simply by ensuring that once you acquire users to your site, you’re able to convert them at the best possible rate. 

Two main ways optimizing the user experience can help make the most of your ad dollars: 

• Implementing strategic CRO tests to improve the conversion rate
• Making your landing page experience more relevant to drive down ad costs

What is CRO? 

Conversion rate optimization is so much more than making tweaks to visual design because “you think it makes it better.” It’s the ongoing practice of implementing structured tests to gain insight as to what works and, often more importantly, what doesn’t work on your website as it pertains to the desired action you want your visitors to take. 

Say you have 10,000 site visitors a month. If you’re currently converting at a 2% rate, that means you’re having 200 people take your desired action in a single month. 

Because you’re not able to increase total traffic to your site (because your ad budgets are frozen at their current levels), you take the opportunity to dig into your lead flows and start making structured tests that increase the conversion rate by 5% each month. If you were to do this for 6 months – you’d be making a significant impact on your bottom line – a 34% increase in total monthly conversions without increasing total traffic. 

Think that a 5% monthly increase isn’t realistic? In a recent test on our website, we were able to generate a 210% lift in conversions just by testing the hero copy on our homepage. 

You don’t have to hit a home run on your first attempt at CRO: just get better each time, and you’ll build compounding (and ad dollar saving) growth soon enough. 

How Can My Landing Pages Help Drive Down Ad Costs? 

Are you utilizing the same landing pages for paid search that you’re using for paid social? Are you utilizing the same landing page for all your paid search campaigns? Are you driving paid traffic in each stage of the funnel to the same lead flow? 

If you answered “yes” to any of the above questions, you have room to improve your landing page experience. Landing page experience is how relevant your site content is to the user that is arriving at it. Google rewards users with a strong landing page experience with improved quality scores, meaning they have higher expected click-through rates and lower overall costs. That means if you have a validated keyword (see above!), it may be worth creating a paid landing page for that keyword or ad group on its own so you can maximize your quality score and decrease your ad costs. 

Same for paid social. If your landing page isn’t as relevant as it could be or is speaking too broadly, your audience won’t resonate with it. Tailoring the landing page for the different stages in your funnel ensures you’re driving the most relevant action to improve conversion rates. 

If your landing page is as relevant as it can be, you’ll make the most of your ad dollars – and cut down on wasted spend on higher CPCs, or low converting traffic. 

Convert More Leads with Lifecycle Marketing 

Moreover, when ad budgets remain flat, it’s time to put non-paid resources TO WORK. If we’re doing everything that we can in the acquisition funnels to ensure that we’re not wasting spend, then your non-paid formats need to be working just as hard to make sure they aren’t leaking potential revenue. 

Lifecycle marketing is a lot more than the prototypical email campaign structure of “We have a promotion for Labor Day.” Instead, it’s creating clearly defined segments of users and working them through a series of tailored messages and experiences to maximize revenue from them. 

If you have a group of highly engaged customers? Let’s turn them into brand evangelists and super users.

If you have a group of unengaged prospects who submitted their lead details but haven’t become paying customers? Let’s warm them back up. 

Have someone that has been stuck in the sales cycle? Let’s get that conversation started back up. 

Lifecycle is the way you ensure that every potential customer has the best opportunity to maximize their total revenue for your organization. It’s about empowering leads and turning them into won customers, stuck deals into revenue, and brand loyalists into referral machines (and so much more!). Getting someone to convert and become a lead is one thing, but we have to make sure we’re getting revenue out of them as well. 

Lifecycle marketing has a direct impact on CAC. In some instances, we’ve seen customer win-back campaigns help turn cold prospects into paying customers at a 27% rate. The great part about this? It’s not just about providing an offer to incentivize an action. Sometimes even discussing your brand vision, value propositions, and how it all works is educational enough to move the needle to the conversion point. 

If you’re not utilizing automation in lifecycle marketing to tailor userflows specific to different customer segments, you’re missing a major revenue opportunity. And you probably aren’t maximizing your paid resources. 

Unsure of where to start? 

It takes a village to make the integrated parts of paid media, creative strategy, CRO, and lifecycle marketing hum. Sometimes, it may be more cost-efficient to utilize an experienced team than to increase head count. Our team of seasoned growth experts combines the vision of growth strategy with robust channel and tactical knowledge. 

If you’re looking for a partner to help you make the most of every ad dollar, let’s talk.

Richard Meyer

Richard has spent the last five years working at digital agencies, exploring various industries and company lifecycles. I’ve created and implemented growth campaigns on just about every platform for startups, $20,000,000 a year companies, and everything in-between. When not at work, I can be found cheering on the Penguins or Steelers, spending time with my wife and son, playing disc golf, baking, or walking my dogs.

The post A New Way to Scale Results Without Increasing Ad Spend appeared first on Tuff.

You may be wondering, “why is someone from a growth marketing agency is creating content about account-based marketing spend on LinkedIn”? It’s a fair point. While account-based marketing (ABM) has historically been executed by internal teams across marketing and sales, or boutique agencies that only focus on ABM, more and more organizations are utilizing holistic growth tactics to maximize their account-based marketing efforts. Today, we’ll focus on a growth approach to account-based marketing spend on LinkedIn. 

Is growth marketing relevant to account-based marketing? 

ABM requires a nuanced, holistic approach. An account-based strategy requires experts in paid acquisition, performance creative development, conversion rate optimization, lead flows, content marketing, and SO MUCH more. For organizations to truly maximize account-based efforts, you need to work with a diverse team of generalists and specialists to develop an efficient and effective ABM program. 

Growth marketing in particular fits this well – because growth is less about single tactical performance and more about the “big picture results” and integrated strategies. 

What is Tuff’s experience with account-based Marketing? 

Roughly 20% of our partners currently utilize an Account-Based Marketing approach. While this may not seem like a lot, Tuff works with all sorts of organizations: everything from B2B, D2C, Ecommerce, PaaS, SaaS, and more. Over the last 12 months, more and more of our partner base are adopting an account-based approach, and we expect this trend to continue. 

In this article, we’ll focus on a single enterprise partner of Tuff’s. Since October 2022, we’ve managed over $400k ($410k and counting) on LinkedIn in an account-based approach. With a fast-moving strategy (a lot of testing, optimization, and learning), we’ve managed over 76 different campaigns on LinkedIn, and have reduced the cost per marketing qualified lead by 62% in the last 90 days. 

Here’s what we’ve learned. 

Five Lessons from $400k in account-based Marketing Spend on LinkedIn

1. Content is king
2. Creative helps, but not as much as you think
3. Measurement alignment is critical
4. Segment size matters
5. Test your optimization events regularly

Content is king

The single biggest lever you can pull in the ABM machine is content. Accounts typically fall into one of three stages of the buyer’s journey: awareness, consideration, and decision. Chances are, accounts that fall into the awareness category need softer calls to action and more introductory content than later-stage accounts, which are already likely familiar with your product and service offerings. 

Mapping out the full funnel so that you can understand what messaging resonates best with each audience is the single most impactful exercise you can do. We found via this exercise that by identifying winning content by account stage and prioritizing spend towards winning content by segment, we were able to drive down the cost per marketing qualified lead by 67% in four months. Here’s the creative exercise we went on when originally mapping out the funnel – we lead with questions as to which CTAs, messages, and problems were most impactful for decision-makers at each stage. 

If the content itself is the right fit, regardless of optimization (website conversions, lead generation, document ads, message ads), it should appeal highly to your target audience.

There are a few ways you can map your content by user-stage, so start with these frameworks to map your content plans for ABM, go to market, and revisit often: 

• What stage are the accounts in this segment? 
• Do they need more “introductory” content or more advanced content? 
• What type of activity do the accounts in this segment display? 
• Are there any industries heavily featured in this segment?
• What problems are my target audience in this segment actively trying to solve? 

Creative helps, but not as much as you think

Creative optimization in ABM can be the equivalent of chasing a red herring. The standard metrics for optimizing creative (CTR, CPC, etc.) can be incredibly misleading for trying to reach your overall account-based marketing goals. 

Our typical philosophy for performance creative optimization is to identify bottom-performing assets, remediate (or replace) them, and test against the previous winners. When doing this process, we were able to increase our CTR by 96% in 90 days. 

These strategic creative decisions and optimizations dramatically increased engagement with our ads. However, a recent audit revealed that often, our highest improvers in terms of CTR drove the same or less marketing-qualified leads than before their optimizations. What gives?!

The audit revealed that you can optimize bottom-performing creative, implement strategic tests to improve engagement with your ads, and more, but bottom performers are often tied to the overall message and content they are associated with. Don’t get caught optimizing to the wrong thing – whatever your core result is, optimize towards that first and foremost. 

Being aligned on measurement is crucial

Speaking of optimizing toward your core result, it’s crucial to be aligned with stakeholders on what your measurement of success is. Steve Watt defines three types of measurement in account-based marketing strategies as coverage, engagement, and impact. 

• Coverage: Measurement focused on ensuring you’re advertising to the accounts you want to be appearing in front of. Example metrics include account reach percentage, spend by account, etc. 
• Engagement: Measurement focused on the actions of stakeholders at the accounts we’re targeting. Example metrics include website visits, leads, interactions with sales, etc. 
• Impact: Measurement focused on the business-level data for your organization. Example metrics include speed to close, deal size, close rate, etc. 

You can see right away that being misaligned on an objective can lead to catastrophic results. For example, if you are trying to help your sales team close late-stage accounts by advertising to people who have active proposals, you better be prepared to show the data that you are helping speed up the close cycle, or improve the close rate of these deals. If you’re measuring in a different metric, say MQL, for example, you’ll get laughed out of the room because it’s irrelevant if a stakeholder filled out a lead form when they are actively in the proposal stage. 

Before you spend a dollar – work on an initial reporting overview and align on objectives. Here’s a list of sample objectives that could be your “north star”, and base your reporting on this. 

• New client acquisition
• Improving close rate
• Increasing velocity of the existing pipeline (moving stages)
• Increasing deal size
• Expanding business with existing customers
• Improving retention 
• Stimulating referrals 

If you are focused on close rate, then it makes zero sense to measure or judge performance based on in-platform ad data. If you’re focused on account coverage, then perhaps judging an account-based campaign on LinkedIn’s reach and frequency metrics may make sense with layering in data from your ABM tool. 

Depending on what your “north star” is from a key business objective, you may need to utilize ad platform data, lead and deal data from your CRM, intent data from your ABM tool, or a combination of all of the above. 

Without measurement alignment, you will be in a sea of confusion as to what the data truly means. Save yourself time and effort, and start here. 

Segment Size Matters 

There are two things to consider when targeting a segment and creating a list of targeted accounts: 

• What accounts am I trying to reach? 
• Who at those accounts am I trying to reach?

Like most LinkedIn advertising efforts, audience size affects ad delivery. Audiences with fewer accounts will be smaller, and thus most likely have a higher CPM and CPC since you’re paying a premium to deliver your ads to select people instead of a broader audience where your bids may be lower. 

Like measurement, the segment size is important to align on. Because you’ve already aligned on what your end goal is (logo acquisition, speeding up deals, etc.), you can create a list of prioritized accounts onto base your initial segments. Depending on your objective, you may opt for a larger sized segment of broader accounts to focus on increasing your account reach as much as possible. 

You could take an approach where you are targeting only a select few accounts, to advertise to your closest to closing accounts. Maybe you’re somewhere in the middle and trying to increase engagement across a medium-sized segment. Regardless, know that audience size, ad delivery, and account segmentation go hand in hand. 

Once you have your segment wrapped up, it’s important to monitor who at these accounts is engaging with your content, converting, or interacting with your site. Using ABM tools, such as 6sense, or CRM tools, such as Hubspot’s ABM software, you can measure and see who at accounts are engaged with your ABM strategy.

Reaching the wrong people at an account is like scheduling a date and showing up at the wrong movie theater (not that I’ve ever done that). You need to be aligned that you are reaching the right people – decision-makers if you’re already in the sales process, the right stakeholders if you’re trying to get new business meetings, et cetera. 

A nice way to do this is by utilizing LinkedIn’s job function targeting in addition to the account segment you’ve created. This will narrow your audience by role or function to appear to the people at the accounts you’re targeting who matter the most. This can help you, and your sales team save a lot of time, energy, and money in the long run by focusing on who matters the most in the accounts you’re targeting. 

Test Placement Optimizations Often

LinkedIn is a fun platform for account-based marketing spend because there are so many tactics to experiment with. However, across all your different campaigns, and segments, it’s easy to get lost and start to lose control over what your spend looks like. You don’t want it to look like this at the end of the month 👇

account-based marketing is a highly-nuanced, quick-moving strategy, and without the right safeguards in place, you could be chasing the wrong optimization event or make a tactical decision that sets you back. 

You should regularly be looking at tables like this to make strategic decisions about where you may be over or underspending, or what may be underperforming. At Tuff, we break this down by content piece, tactic, and key objective (in this instance, leads). 

It’s important to make sure you are confident in how you are defining success (in this instance, it’s leads, but it could be account reach, etc.) to establish how you will measure optimization events and the impact it will have on your end goals. 

A non-lead-generating example could be measuring engagement at key accounts. By utilizing a “document ad” format, you can deliver completely ungated, long-form content to key decision makers at target accounts, and see in the segment breakdown if it’s being engaged with. 

In our experience, sponsored content (whether it’s optimized for engagement, conversions, or traffic) has performed at a less efficient overall rate than in-platform optimization events on LinkedIn. It could be the opposite for your ABM strategy, depending on your end goals. Experiment, measure, optimize, rinse, repeat. 

Ready for more? 

The world of account-based marketing is continually changing, growing, and evolving. The emergence of a “growth” approach to ABM is new, but it’s just the latest in a shifting landscape. Key questions on our radar for the next $400k in spend are, “what happens if we change our measurement objective”, “how can we further enable sales by keeping them updated to marketing messages by funnel stage”, “what happens if I try to expand to other platforms, such as Facebook”, and more. 

Here’s to constantly growing and learning, cheers.  

Richard Meyer

Richard has spent the last five years working at digital agencies, exploring various industries and company lifecycles. I’ve created and implemented growth campaigns on just about every platform for startups, $20,000,000 a year companies, and everything in-between. When not at work, I can be found cheering on the Penguins or Steelers, spending time with my wife and son, playing disc golf, baking, or walking my dogs.

The post 5 Lessons From Over $400k In Account-Based Marketing Spend On LinkedIn appeared first on Tuff.

Author’s note: This post was originally published in 2021. It has since been updated for 2022.

2020 and 2021 brought a whole new challenge to ecommerce growth agencies and their partners. As the world shut down in 2020, companies unprepared to sell virtually rushed to bring their products and services into digital spaces. As a result, Shopify, like many other ecommerce CMS (content management systems), saw massive growth, increasing revenue by an unbelievable 89%. This translated to a mind-boggling $2.9 BILLION dollars.

If you recognize your own ecommerce business as part of the above trend, it’s probably time to re-evaluate your online store to see if it’s adhering to best practices and staying up to date as we move further away from 2020 (cheers to that). We put together this guide to help identify areas of growth for your ecommerce sales in 2022. 

eCommerce Trends

1. Efficiencies will be rewarded over massive growth.

With the boom of the pandemic, ecommerce companies saw massive increases in sales as users prioritized online shopping versus a retail or pick-up-in-store option. A large amount of ecommerce companies built entirely new business models based on a pandemic economy. Venture capitalists and investment firms saw this as an opportunity to get in at the ground floor and invest significant cash into the ecommerce space.

Flash forward to 2022, with concerns over inflation and some economic rebalancing due to a myriad of factors (including the housing market, the situation in Ukraine, etc.) ecommerce sales remained steady or stagnant for the first time in over two years. This has lead to a lot of investor and venture capitalist panic, and cash in investment rounds (such as your Series A, Series B, etc.) not as readily available.

Companies that have been on a high cash-burn rate trajectory over the last two years are now scrambling to remain as cash flow positive as possible, and find sustainable ways to grow during this climate. We’ve seen it hit scaleups in the tech world the hardest – but ecommerce has certainly been affected as well.

As you continue to advertise your ecommerce brand over the course of 2022, factor in the value of a sustainable growth plan over the most possible growth in terms of volume. Efficiencies in CAC, cost per sale, and more will be crucial for remaining steady over the rest of the year.

2. Mobile: where shoppers are spending. 

79% of smartphone users have made a purchase on their phone in the last six months. That says it all, doesn’t it? It’d be nice to tidy up this section with two sentences, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. 

Online shopping continues to move more to a mobile-dependent space. In 2016, mobile commerce sales totaled at $0.97 billion globally. That figure reached $3.56 billion in 2021 – over 3x growth in five years. In addition, it’s estimated that up to 73% of eCommerce sales will take place on a mobile device in 2021. Why such a large increase in such a short time frame? 

Mobile commerce has skyrocketed for three main reasons: convenience, accessibility, and increased screen time. 

In the US, mobile device users are spending 24% more time on their smartphones daily than they were in 2016. Social platforms and ad networks have adapted, prioritizing ads so that they’re served on mobile-friendly websites and incentivizing advertisers to have a mobile-friendly experience. 

Mobile shopping isn’t only about purchases online though. With the rise of BOPIS (buy online, pickup in store), users are spending more time reviewing products online to make informed purchasing decisions. Also, over 80% of shoppers said they have used a mobile phone inside a physical store to look up product reviews, or compare prices. Mobile commerce is more than a trend. It’s a movement. If your eCommerce site isn’t designed mobile-first, you may want to re-evaluate. 

So, the question is: does your site have a beautiful mobile experience? If not, get your booty to UpWork and find yourself a UX designer yesterday.

3. Subscriptions: not just for binge-watchers. 

The subscription movement may have started with Netflix, but it sure didn’t stop there. Subscriptions themselves have transformed from a service or product subscription in niche categories to a more practical auto-renewal subscribe-and-save program. By locking in users for auto-recurring orders, brands often reward users with a discount.

This helps eCommerce businesses tremendously; they can pay more to acquire customers because the LTV (lifetime value) of a customer increases tremendously when their purchase auto-renews. This practice largely started because of Chewy.com’s Autoship program, but CMS such as Shopify and Woocommerce are adapting to allow apps and plugins to do the same thing for smaller online stores.

Is your service or product rife for subscription? Have you found success?

4. TikTok has changed the game.

While Instagram still remains a great place to showcase products and create great content, the real disruptor in 2022 is TikTok. TikTok was the most visited site in 2021, beating out the likes of Google, Facebook,  Amazon, Reddit, and more. In 2022, that trend has only continued.

TikTok is a great place to showcase your product in a fun, approachable, and informative way. Since it’s a video storytelling platform, it allows e-commerce brands to try new ways to reach their target audiences. Whether it’s advertising user generated content, informational and educational videos, or using the new Spark Ads format, TikTok ads have something for you.

5. Headless commerce: leaving Shopify out of it. 

For large-scale brands, headless commerce promises to be an early disrupter. This API-driven approach uncouples the front end of your site from a back-end eCommerce platform. Instead, systems communicate via APIs. 

Why do this? For starters, it allows for customization far beyond standard eCommerce CMS. As great as Shopify, Woocommerce, and Magento are, for large scale companies like Nike, Overstock, and more, their needs far outweigh what most CMS provides. 

Additionally, the usage of APIs allows for content management beyond the eCommerce site. Headless commerce can allow for the easy distribution of mass data between the data source and marketplaces like Amazon, Ebay, and Walmart. For large-scale companies distributing their products across multiple platforms, this is a transition that provides scale.  

Even if you’re not an Overstock or a Walmart, understanding the future of eCommerce can help you plan for your business’ future: what are you doing to adapt?

6. Pay options: dollar bills are a thing of the past.

Have you noticed that a lot of eCommerce sites have banners promoting buy now, pay later options through third-party services like Affirm, Klarna, or Paypal Pay in 4? Payment flexibility within eCommerce platforms has introduced a new wave of users who finance larger purchases that they wouldn’t normally make. Breaking a large purchase up into four monthly payments, while still allowing for the vendor to be paid immediately, sounds too good to be true – but it isn’t! 

It doesn’t stop with financing options – digital wallets allow for quick and easy payments on eCommerce platforms. Online shopping becomes even easier with one click payments such as Apple Pay, or PayPal checkout. Ease of use, coupled with additional payment options allows users to pay however is convenient for them, and opens up a new market of potential customers.

Don’t have a payment plan installed on your site? You’re missing out on beaucoup revenue!

7. AR/VR: more than just for gamers. 

Augmented and virtual reality is becoming a powerful tool in the customer experience. One of the major complaints about ecommerce is that users don’t have the ability to test or visualize how products will be in person. Augmented reality changes that and allows users to see 3D models of products for a much better idea of what they’re actually buying. 

Virtual reality goes even further and allows users to place items in the world virtually so you can see how a vase looks on your counter, or a photo on your wall. 35% of users say they are more likely to purchase a product online if they could virtually “try-on” a product before purchasing. This also helps cut down on return cost and potential customer dissatisfaction, building brand loyalty. 

Plus, it’s pretty damn cool. Where does AR or VR fit into your customer experience?

8. Personalization: making your customer feel like you only have eyes for them. 

When advocates or politicians talk about the need to have privacy online, rarely is it ever discussed how data creates a personalized web experience. Certainly there is a need for increased privacy for users, as well as better data collection practices, but this should not come at the expense of a personalized web experience. It’d be bad for advertisers, it’d be bad for users both to have a non-personalized ad experience on social platforms, display networks, and more. In short: there’s a more nuanced way to approach this. 

Even more so, personalization is incredibly important for eCommerce businesses. Personalization for eCommerce can be as simple as having recommended products based on the user’s browsing history within your site. It can be as complicated as dynamic content based on acquisition source and A/B testing user flows for a multi-touch personalized experience. 

Personalization is such a fascinating concept because it’s an easy way to increase conversion rate, average order value, and engage recurring customers on your site. AI powered personalization has produced many fascinating results, showing that revenue lift can be directly tied to a personalized user experience within your eCommerce site. 

Let’s get personal with your customers. What does this look like for them?

9. eCommerce content marketing: welcome to Tuff’s world.

Many eCommerce growth agencies are using paid acquisition channels like Facebook, TikTok, Google Shopping, Instagram, and more to generate revenue and acquire new customers. The problem with paid acquisition, however, is that it can be difficult to acquire users at a ROI that makes sense for your business. 

Tuff has seen success with organic eCommerce content marketing for multiple brands. Ranking for non-branded keywords pertinent to your product can help reach users organically in a much more cost effective way for the long term. We recommend balancing paid acquisition with content marketing so there’s a healthy approach to short-term wins, and long-term gains that can drastically increase the number of online shoppers coming to your eCommerce site. 

Know you need juicy content but don’t know where to start? Let’s talk! 

Conclusion

It’s too soon to tell whether or not all of these trends will be here to stay. That said, it’s likely that many of these eCommerce trends in 2022 will persist long after this year is over. When eCommerce trends stay they turn into best practices for a holistic eCommerce business to implement. Three years ago, Instagram was criticized for its implementation of IG-story advertising, and now it continues to be one of the hottest ways to market to users on social media. 

eCommerce marketing is not as scary as it may seem, but it’s nice to have help. As a growth marketing agency, we’ve partnered with over 50+ brands in the last 4 years to couple eCommerce trends and growth marketing techniques for scaling eCommerce businesses.  Want to learn more? Download a sample growth proposal today! 

Richard Meyer

Richard has spent the last five years working at digital agencies, exploring various industries and company lifecycles. I’ve created and implemented growth campaigns on just about every platform for startups, $20,000,000 a year companies, and everything in-between. When not at work, I can be found cheering on the Penguins or Steelers, spending time with my wife and son, playing disc golf, baking, or walking my dogs.

The post 9 eCommerce Trends Driving Online Growth in 2022 appeared first on Tuff.

The way the majority of marketers use Google Analytics’ attribution models to make strategic decisions is broken. I’m talking, “holy cow, this has major implications on our bottom line”, broken.

If you’re making major decisions regarding the allocation of ad spend, or trying to measure the success of a campaign and are using Google Analytics’ default reporting, you’re going to want to read this. 

What is Google Analytics’ Default Attribution Model? 

Google Analytics defaults to a Last Click attribution model for most of its reports (and the key word here is most). Last click attribution gives 100% of the credit to the last source, or campaign a user came from prior to converting. 

Some reports, such as Google Ads breakdown under the “Acquisition” report defaults to a Last Non-Direct Click attribution model. What this means is that Google Analytics will ignore all direct traffic and give 100% of the credit to the last channel a customer clicked through prior to returning via direct traffic. Last Non-Direct click is a preferred attribution model over Last Click for many marketers because most direct traffic has had some sort of interaction with your brand prior to coming to your site. 

What are the problems with using Last Click attribution modeling? Don’t I want to know what made my target audience convert?

It’s true, Last Click, or Last Non-Direct Click can be insightful for measuring the final tactic that caused a user to convert. However, this is an incomplete measurement of the full aspect of the marketing funnel. Chances are, your target audience didn’t convert out of the blue. 

Here are some of the limitations of using Last Click or Last-Non Direct Click attribution modelling: 

• Can give a distorted view of what is actually driving your target audience to your brand in the first place
• Doesn’t account for multiple touchpoints in an advertising funnel
• Silos data and gives 100% of credit to one channel or tactic
• Doesn’t show how multiple channels and tactics interact with one another
• Shows an incomplete customer journey

Take this real-client example: if you see that email marketing is accounting for 30% of your e-commerce purchases, and paid social is driving very few last-click purchases (but a lot of email signups!), you wouldn’t want to stop running the social ads that are leading to email signups. In doing so, you’d be shutting down two acquisition channels at once. 

The last-click attribution model is flawed, and doesn’t take into consideration that a customer today has to nurtured to make a conversion. 

Alternatives to Last Click Attribution Modelling

Luckily, Google Analytics offers several attribution models that marketers can use to get a more complete picture of their conversion efforts. There are several ways to do this. 

Want to watch, instead of read? Check out this video! 👇

First, under the Multi-Channel Funnels report, you can select “Assisted Conversions” report and view how many of your conversions were multi-touch. Selecting the “Source / Medium” breakdown allows you to view how different channels function: either as more of an assisted tactic, or a direct tactic. 

A value closer to 0 in the final column means it’s a primarily final conversion tactic. If the value is close to 1, the channel operated equally as a direct and assist tactic.  If the value is over 1, it means the platform assisted in more of an “assist” role. 

Another favorite tool to compare Google Analytics’ Attribution Models is the Model Comparison Tool. At Tuff, we often use the “Last Interaction” vs, “First Interaction” report to identify demand generating campaigns and platforms. 

In this report, we see that Facebook and Google ads have a 20% and 47% increase in attributed conversions when using the first-click attribution model. Google Analytics’ first interaction attribution model gives 100% of the credit to the first source a user interacts with before converting. 

A savvy marketer can also apply a secondary dimension to view campaign filters applied to dig into which ad campaigns on specific platforms are driving the majority of the initial interest in their brand and product. 

Using Google Analytics’ Attribution Models to Make Strategic Decisions

As you’ve probably guessed by now: the answer for how to use Google Analytics’ many different Attribution Models (we haven’t even touched on Time Decay, Linear, or Position Based models, or how to measure via Zero Party data) is not a “one size fits all” solution. 

Instead, we recommend comparing the different models, identifying what campaigns and channels are generating demand and interest for your products, and leveraging different optimization tactics to drive revenue for your brand. It takes more time to compare models, but the savings can be immense. Ready to see how Google Analytics’ first-click attribution modeling can unlock major demand generation wins at the top of funnel for your brand? Drop us a note.

Richard Meyer

Richard has spent the last five years working at digital agencies, exploring various industries and company lifecycles. I’ve created and implemented growth campaigns on just about every platform for startups, $20,000,000 a year companies, and everything in-between. When not at work, I can be found cheering on the Penguins or Steelers, spending time with my wife and son, playing disc golf, baking, or walking my dogs.

The post How to Drive Better Strategic Decisions Using Google Analytics’ Attribution Models appeared first on Tuff.

Alternative analytic programs to Google Analytics are becoming a dime a dozen. Especially since the rollout of iOS 14, advertisers are flocking to more third-party sources for attribution modeling and customer insights. As an e-commerce growth agency, we’ve worked with several of these third-party platforms: Mixpanel, Amplitude, and Daasity for starters.

Each of these platforms has their own pros and cons – but Mixpanel in particular has helped unlock e-commerce metrics that are crucial for long-term growth far beyond what comes with Google Analytics. 

What e-commerce metrics matter, and why? 

A lot of growth marketing metrics that are crucial for growth can be found in Google Analytics: acquisition channel-specific conversion rates, product sales by acquisition channel, individual sku performance, multi-channel funnels, and more. However, customer-level insights are harder to identify in Google Analytics. 

Some of the customer level insights that e-commerce growth agencies identify using Mixpanel:

• Customer retention by product 
• Conversion rate effect by specific events (specific URL views, landing page, etc.)
• Cohort analysis by specific groupings (product purchased, acquisition channel, etc.)
• Event identification for high-converting customers 

Identifying What Customer Insights are Important to Measure

Because Mixpanel measures each event for each of their identified users, you can get super lost in the weeds looking for insights. Before you start scouring individual customer profiles looking for commonality, take a high-level approach at the data. Ask yourself the following questions: 

• What actions on my website do I consider to be important in the purchasing decision? 
• What existing user flows am I using to generate sales? 
• What does my ideal customer look like? 
• What products do I sell that my customers actually care about? 
• Have I made any updates or changes to my e-commerce site that could affect performance? 

These questions identify a plethora of interesting analysis opportunities, and a skilled e-Commerce growth agency can help you take the findings and turn them into actionable takeaways. 

Data Analysis With Customer Insights in Mixpanel

Mixpanel’s reports allow for the data curious to create custom dashboards where KPIs can be monitored on an ongoing basis.

Let’s start with this question: “What products do I sell that my customers actually care about?” from our earlier section. The 80-20 (Pareto) rule suggests that 80% of what we do stems from 20% of our input, or in e-commerce land: 80% of our sales typically come from 20% of our catalog or efforts. Here’s how you can make a dashboard that allows you to monitor product performance in a way that develops insights. 

• Product Combinations: Taking the “Order Success” event, add a filter of product handles, with a breakdown of the ordered products. This provides a list of frequently purchased product combinations. This can help identify product bundles and upsell opportunities to create higher average order value. 
• Trending Products with Your Purchasers: Using the insights report, add “Product Viewed”, add a filter of a cohort of users who have purchased a product, and add a breakdown of product handle to ID trends in product interest with your high intent users. This can help identify trends in seasonality, what products your purchasers are most interested in, and areas to amplify marketing efforts.
• Retention by Product: Using the funnel report you can identify repeat purchasers by using the order success event with an inline filter by product handle, and then a second order success within a certain time frame (90, 180 days, etc.), and breakdown by product handle to evaluate retention by product. Make sure you’re familiar with your platform’s retention parameters when setting up this report! 

These three reports can provide lots of actionable insights on an ongoing basis. Take, for example, the trending products report. You can use this report to compare sales and product page views – and determine which of your products are resonating with your purchasers. Monitoring this on a compared time basis (rolling 7-day, 14-day, and 28-day windows) also allows you to identify seasonal trends, underperforming products, and opportunities to cross-sell. With this dashboard, you can begin to answer the question, “what products of mine do my customers actually care about?”, and focus efforts on what will move the needle for your e-commerce business.

How an E-commerce Growth Agency Can Capitalize on Data Insights with Mixpanel

Growth agencies can use data insights from Mixpanel to make a variety of improvements to their e-commerce growth strategy. At Tuff, we use data from Mixpanel, and other alternative customer insight platforms to implement improvements to our marketing funnels and make strategic decisions surrounding user experience. 

We commonly look at cohorts of users broken into categories such as initial source, and evaluate their on-site activity, their conversion percentages, and their retention to determine an accurate LTV. Segmenting our cohorts and evaluating their long-term performance allows us to optimize our paid efforts and determine the effectiveness of individual campaigns, platforms, and even userflows.

Speaking of user flows, an e-commerce growth agency that specializes in CRO, such as Tuff, can identify common trends using Mixpanel to make UX recommendations. We’ve used product combinations, low conversion rates with specific cohorts (such as purchasers, serial product viewers, etc.), and conversion rates by specific events (such as specific collection page views, etc.) to prioritize and deprioritize elements with our user experience. Whether it’s making a navigation update, or changing the prioritization of collections within the collection page, you can measure the effectiveness of these updates using the Impact tool in Mixpanel as well. 

The Future of Customer Insights

As Apple, Google, Facebook, and other major internet players continue to fight over privacy, using a third party tool such as Mixpanel, Daasity, or Amplitude provides a significant advantage to e-commerce companies. Their data can help in all facets of product marketing: identifying trends, helping match with better lookalike audiences, and optimizing their funnel. If you want to talk to an e-commerce growth agency about how you can leverage your customer insights better, book a free growth marketing session with Tuff today! 

Richard Meyer

Richard has spent the last five years working at digital agencies, exploring various industries and company lifecycles. I’ve created and implemented growth campaigns on just about every platform for startups, $20,000,000 a year companies, and everything in-between. When not at work, I can be found cheering on the Penguins or Steelers, spending time with my wife and son, playing disc golf, baking, or walking my dogs.

The post Using Customer Insights to Unlock eCommerce Growth appeared first on Tuff.

Fintech is an exploding market, accounting for over 650 VC-backed deals in Q2 2021 alone, with $30.8 billion in funding. Market Data Forecast anticipates that Fintech will grow by over 23% annually through 2026, reaching a market value of over $320 billion in that time period.  As the fintech market fills with startups and scaleups, standing out above the noise will be a critical challenge for any fintech organization that desires to be successful. Fintech organizations that have a growth marketing strategy to acquire and convert inbound leads will have a leg up on the competition. 

Before we dive into growth marketing strategies, let’s chat about inbound marketing for a moment. 

Inbound vs. Outbound Marketing for Fintech

A lot of B2B organizations rely on outbound marketing for lead generation and driving sales. Traditional outbound marketing efforts, like trade shows, seminars, cold calling, are slowly fading out of favor with B2B organizations because of the manpower and cost required to manage these efforts. Inbound marketing, however, relies on capturing demand and meeting users that need you: not the other way around. 

Think of it this way: it costs significantly less for organizations to convert a lead who is coming to them, than it is to generate a prospect and convert them via cold calling. Fintech marketing teams that may have previously generated customers via outbound marketing are now shifting to an inbound marketing strategy. 

Know Your Target Audience

It seems obvious enough, right? Every growth marketing strategy should start with identifying the target audience and the value propositions for the organization. If this sounds fundamental, it’s because it is. 

Knowing your target audience rules out potential strategies that were on the table, and unlocks opportunities you may not have previously considered.

For example: if you are a B2C fintech organization – you probably aren’t going to put the majority of your ad spend on LinkedIn. 

Alternatively: if you are a B2B fintech organization that provides solutions to SMB owners, you may discover subreddits or Youtube channels that are large gathering places for your target audience that you can add in your targeting. 

Knowing your target audience also helps you figure out how to communicate with them. Since there are SO MANY fintech startups and scaleups, being able to speak directly to the needs of your target audience clearly will help you stand out above the noise. If you are developing a fintech marketing strategy, grab the Value Props Exercise spreadsheet from the Tuff blog and start identifying your target audience’s needs. 

Know Your Funnel 

The marketing funnel has three main components, top, middle, and bottom of the funnel. Matching your messaging and strategy for each stage in the funnel is incredibly important. 

Many channels, such as Facebook, can serve as multiple stages of the funnel for fintech marketing efforts. Here are some examples of an effective funnel for a fintech organization that Tuff currently partners with: 

• Top of Funnel: Prospecting ads on Facebook centered around value propositions, Youtube Ads with a brand-focused video that directly addresses value propositions
• Mid Funnel: Non-branded PPC Search Campaign, Retargeting campaign on Youtube, remarketing display ads
• Bottom Funnel: Branded Search Campaign, Retargeting campaign on Facebook with an introductory offer

Some additional funnel strategies that could be a good fit for your organization: 

• Lead capture in middle of funnel combined with a bottom funnel email marketing drip campaign aimed at converting leads 
• Prospecting on Reddit, LinkedIn, or other demographic-based acquisition channels
• Partnering with influencers to reach your target audience

Focus Efforts on Demand Generation 

In order for inbound marketing efforts to be successful, people need to know about your organization and how exactly it helps them. One of the most common issues fintech organizations run into is that users don’t know that they need their services or product to be successful. 

Chris Walker at Refine Labs says the following: 

“Most marketing teams only focus on capturing existing market demand. They wait for people to look for them. Then try to capture it with SEO, SEM… They spend all their time and effort and money fighting over the 0.1% of the market that is actively buying…All of the upside is in marketing to the 99% of the market that isn’t actively buying.”

A common example I use in explaining demand generation is Uber. Before Uber, people had taxis, or they relied on friends or daily for rides when they needed it. People didn’t know they needed Uber, until Uber came along and showed everyone why ridesharing was a better alternative to the status quo. 

Explaining your organization’s solution to a problem can be tricky. This is why it is important to spend time with value propositions and identifying how to best drum up demand. 

One disclaimer on-demand generation: using tools such as Google Analytics to determine attribution is only as accurate as the data it is being fed. Not all engagement, consideration, and offsite activity can be measured in Google Analytics, and can possibly make your demand generation efforts look less effective than they truly are. This leads us to…

Rely on Your Zero Party Data

Once you’re up and running with your campaigns, generating leads, and possibly sales – it’s time to figure out how you are capturing your target audience’s attention. With demand generation efforts, analytic tools can be inaccurate as to true attribution. This applies to both inbound and outbound marketing efforts. 

For inbound marketing efforts, if a user hears about you via a Facebook campaign, but does not click the ad, and later finds you via organic search, Google Analytics will tell you that the user found you organically – and make you feel great about your SEO efforts. For outbound marketing efforts, replace Facebook with a trade show, direct mail, or even a cold call, and you could run into the same issue.  

The way to solve this is easy: generate zero party data. Zero party data is data that customers share with brands. Intentionally collecting zero party data can be as simple as asking users how they first heard about you when they sign up. Zero party data is only as accurate as the information is being shared with you, so instead of relying solely on analytics tools or zero party data, look at both often, and develop insights from there. 

Spend Time with CRO 

CRO, or conversion rate optimization, is the ongoing effort of refining your site’s user experience to improve your lead capturing abilities. Getting traffic is one thing – converting them is another. Fintech organizations that spend time continually evaluating their site, implementing tests, and smoothing the path to conversion can see higher returns on their acquisition efforts. 

Some ways that CRO can be included in a fintech marketing strategy are: 

• Testing different value propositions in the hero section of your landing page
• A/B test call-to-actions or sign-up perks
• Incorporating gamification, or other engagement tools on your site

The great thing about CRO is that it is a continual process – as your learnings grow, so do the possibilities.

If you are unsure about how CRO, zero-party data, or demand generation can be incorporated into your fintech marketing strategy — let’s talk.

Richard Meyer

Richard has spent the last five years working at digital agencies, exploring various industries and company lifecycles. I’ve created and implemented growth campaigns on just about every platform for startups, $20,000,000 a year companies, and everything in-between. When not at work, I can be found cheering on the Penguins or Steelers, spending time with my wife and son, playing disc golf, baking, or walking my dogs.

The post Developing a Successful Fintech Marketing Strategy appeared first on Tuff.