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

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

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

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

Understanding the Basics: Performance-Based Marketing Demystified

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

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

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

Kicking Off a Performance Marketing Strategy

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

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

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

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

Channel Mix is Key

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

Measuring Success: Key Metrics for Performance Evaluation

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

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

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

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

Using Multi-Touchpoint Attribution

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

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

Adopting a Performance Marketing Mindset

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

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

Ethan Broder

Hi there! I’m Ethan, a Growth Marketer based in Steamboat Springs, Colorado. I have four years of digital agency experience under my belt creating and executing acquisition strategies for a number of different verticals across multiple channels. When I’m not at my desk, you can find me skiing, mountain biking, or chasing my dog around in the mountains.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is Performance Marketing? 

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

So, why be so detailed about measurement? 

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

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

The 4 Steps of Performance Marketing with an Agency

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

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

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

Paid Strategies for Scaleups in Performance Marketing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is Performance Marketing Right for You?

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

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

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.

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

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

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

Creative Team: 

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

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

CRO Team: 

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

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

Paid Media Team: 

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

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

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

SEO and Content Team: 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion: Let AI Handle the Tedious and Repetitive Tasks

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

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

Ellen Jantsch

Ellen is the founder at Tuff and one of the team’s core growth marketers. She is a versatile marketer with expertise in multiple channels – from ppc to seo to email to others – responsible for the experiments and testing.  She is happiest when she’s on the ski hill or outside pointing her mountain bike downhill.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Moving Forward

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

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

Ellen Jantsch

Ellen is the founder at Tuff and one of the team’s core growth marketers. She is a versatile marketer with expertise in multiple channels – from ppc to seo to email to others – responsible for the experiments and testing.  She is happiest when she’s on the ski hill or outside pointing her mountain bike downhill.

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

Welcome to our AMA with Richard Meyer, our Head of Growth at Tuff. 

Meet Richard, the driving force behind our Growth team. He’s all about teamwork, partnering closely with every team at Tuff and our clients to achieve tangible, long-lasting growth. With his wealth of experience, Richard has pioneered growth strategies and testing for countless startups and scaleups. Whether it’s cutting down on customer acquisition costs, fine-tuning budget allocations, devising media plans, enhancing user experiences, or predicting outcomes for marketing investments, Richard is instrumental in empowering our clients to maximize their strategy and budget.

Ready to dive in? Richard is here to address any questions you have regarding:

Achieving profitability while pursuing high-growth and scalability can be challenging. As a growth expert, how do you navigate this balance, and do you believe it’s achievable in practice? 

When it comes to making a business profitable while expanding, there are a few important things to think about. First off, every business is unique. If we’re always comparing ourselves to others and thinking the grass is greener elsewhere, we’ll never be satisfied. But, we do need to be smart about how we use our resources and stick to our commitments to our team and organization.

So, when we’re considering those resources, responsibility is key. Here’s my approach: I divide my budget into two parts. 80% goes into what I know works – the stuff that keeps the business running smoothly. This is our reliable performance channels. Then, the remaining 20% is set aside for trying new things, experimenting, and testing out fresh ideas.

This way, we have a decent chunk of our budget dedicated to testing without risking everything. It’s not so much that if it fails, we’re in trouble, but it’s enough that we can see if new ideas have potential. Now, depending on the size of your company, this split might vary. A big company might allocate funds differently than a smaller one finding its footing.

The key is to always set aside some resources for growth and testing. That way, we keep learning, growing, and avoid getting stuck in a rut.

Can you distinguish between a growth must-have and a growth nice-to-have in terms of business development strategies?

So, in the world of growth, there’s been a shift in mindset between what’s a must-have for growth and what’s just nice to have. What I mean is, we used to focus on what seemed necessary for a business to succeed, but things have changed.

Before, it was almost like you could buy your way into success if you had a big budget or a compelling story. You could attract attention and opportunities even before your product was fully ready. But now, that’s not the case. More businesses are starting from scratch, with little or no external funding, and they’ve got to prioritize making money from day one.

So, having a huge team and tons of cash isn’t as crucial as it used to be. In fact, it can sometimes lead to inefficiency and wasted resources. What really matters now is how scalable your systems and processes are. If you’ve got streamlined operations for things like marketing and creative work, you’re in a much stronger position.

A small team that’s super efficient can achieve just as much as a big team, if not more. And what sets successful businesses apart is not just their size or budget, but their mindset. They’re always looking for ways to improve and grow, no matter how well things are going already. 

That’s the real must-have for success in today’s world.

From your experience, what channels are the most efficient drivers of growth?

When it comes to finding ways to grow a business, there’s no one-size-fits-all approach. It really depends on what kind of business you have, where you’re at in your journey, and what resources you have available.

What’s most important is finding ways to be genuine and true to your brand in whatever channels you choose. Whether it’s creating content, reaching your target audience, or using creative strategies, it’s all about being yourself.

For B2B businesses, LinkedIn tends to have the quickest payback period for advertising. But it’s important to be smart about it because it can also be easy to waste money if you’re not careful. On the other hand, for B2C businesses, it’s more about finding the right mix of channels based on what you’re selling and who you’re trying to reach. Paid search and social media advertising are usually solid choices, with platforms like Facebook and TikTok being popular options.

Beyond paid advertising, it’s also worth investing in ways to engage your existing customers and keep them coming back for more. Things like SMS messaging can be really effective, sometimes even more so than email. And for B2B businesses, building thought leadership through content and sharing insights on platforms like LinkedIn can be key to building trust and credibility.

So, whether it’s paid advertising or engaging your current customers, there are plenty of ways to drive growth for your business. It’s just a matter of finding what works best for you and your audience.

Looking ahead, what are your predictions for the marketing industry over the next 12 months? How might trends or technologies shape the landscape?

In the next year, there are two cool things I’m eager to watch and see how they shape things. 

First up, we’ve got automation and AI. Basically, this means using tech to make stuff happen automatically, like in marketing where we want to pump out better stuff faster, whether it’s ads or content. This is gonna shake things up and help smart marketers stand out.

Then, there’s the algorithm game. Ad platforms are all about those fancy algorithms now, using data to figure out what works best. So, the more they learn, the better ads they’ll serve up.

Another biggie is that money won’t be the only thing that determines success anymore. It’s not just about throwing cash around. Even small, savvy startups can compete if they really understand their audience and deliver something great.

So, yeah, it’s an exciting time, especially for those who can make it happen without a huge budget.

Given your extensive experience and B2B focus, I’d like to delve into ABM. Your recent Tuff blog article on ABM tools caught my eye. Could you share key tactics for successful ABM campaigns, especially in targeting high-value accounts?

So, here’s the deal with Account-Based Marketing (ABM) strategy: It’s not one-size-fits-all. Each account is like its own unique puzzle, needing a different approach to crack it. Why? Well, it depends on where you’re coming from, what your goals are, and how your customers make decisions.

When I dive into ABM, I’m all about the creative and content side of things. Creativity is key. It’s about showing how your product or service can change someone’s life for the better. You gotta paint a clear picture of how things would be different if they used your stuff. Sometimes, people don’t buy because they can’t see how it fits into their lives. But if you can show them, even before they’re ready to buy, it creates buzz and makes them want it.

So, yeah, focusing on being creative and nailing your content is super important in ABM. It’s the secret sauce to making it work!

How do you approach measuring the ROI and effectiveness of ABM initiatives, and what key metrics do you prioritize in evaluating campaign performance and success?

Alright, let’s break down account-based marketing (ABM) in plain terms. The big picture here is that everyone in the company needs to be on the same page about what we’re aiming for before we jump into ABM.

So, what’s the ultimate goal? Making more money, plain and simple. Now, that might mean different things for different companies. It could be snagging new customers, or maybe it’s about making each sale count for more. Whatever the case, it all boils down to boosting revenue.

When it comes to ABM, it’s not just about saying, “Hey, this campaign did this and that.” It’s way more complex than that. We’ve got to see the bigger picture and understand that the real win is when the whole company benefits from more cash flowing in.

Now, that doesn’t mean we skip out on measuring things. Testing is key. For example, let’s say we want to see if our approach speeds up the sales process. We could split our deals into two groups, market to one and leave the other alone, then compare the results. If we see a jump in closed deals and they’re sealing the deal faster, that’s a win.

So, while we’re focused on specific campaigns, the endgame is always about boosting the bottom line for the entire team.

Want to connect with Richard? Shoot him a message on LinkedIn. You can also see some of the cool stuff his team’s been up to on our blog or if you’re looking for a growth marketing agency like Tuff, reach out directly for a 1<>1 strategy session! 

Ellen Jantsch

Ellen is the founder at Tuff and one of the team’s core growth marketers. She is a versatile marketer with expertise in multiple channels – from ppc to seo to email to others – responsible for the experiments and testing.  She is happiest when she’s on the ski hill or outside pointing her mountain bike downhill.

The post AMA on Growth Must-haves and Growth Nice-to-haves with Richard Meyer appeared first on Tuff.

Here’s one of the biggest challenges our startup partners face: Hitting growth goals with limited resources.

Now more than ever, marketers are expected to do more with less. As a marketing agency that works with startups of all stripes, we’ve seen how AI can be a game-changer for these teams, helping them work smarter and get more done.

According to a recent study by LinkedIn and Ipsos, nearly half of B2B marketers are now using AI in their strategies. And guess what? Interest in AI courses is still skyrocketing. People want to learn how to use it, particularly using tactics under the umbrella of “Generative AI.”

Our startup partners, whether they’re in education, fintech, e-commerce, or elsewhere, often wonder how they can tap into AI without sacrificing their brand’s identity. So, we’ve put together a no-nonsense guide full of the latest trends, practical tips, and best practices. It’s all about helping startups stay ahead of the curve and keep their edge in the market. Let’s dive in.

Using AI to Redefine Startup Marketing

AI has quickly become a cornerstone of modern marketing strategies, providing invaluable insights and predictive capabilities. Using machine learning and natural language processing, AI has the ability to sift through data, uncover patterns, and forecast outcomes like never before. Let’s take a closer look at the latest AI trends reshaping digital marketing and discover how you can leverage AI to supercharge your startup marketing efforts.

Personalization and the Customer Experience with AI 

Successful marketing is never one-size-fits-all, and in order to really see growth and results, you’ll need to personalize your messaging to each audience. The good news—AI has completely changed the personalization game in startup marketing.

Example

For instance, if your startup specializes in eco-friendly home products, AI can help you comb through customer data, such as purchase history and website interactions. Through AI analysis, you can discern patterns indicating preferences and behaviors.

Armed with this insight, you can craft marketing messages that resonate with different segments of your audience. For environmentally-conscious consumers, emphasize the environmental benefits of your products, while for budget-conscious buyers, highlight the cost-effectiveness and potential savings.

Understanding all of the ICPs (ideal customer profiles) that fall within your target audience requires extensive research, and tailoring your marketing message to every ICP can be challenging. But AI can help you better understand your ICPs by analyzing individual preferences, behavior, and context. 

For every partner at Tuff, we’ll conduct an audience deep dive when onboarding a new startup or scaleup partner. These deep dives give us an opportunity to work directly with our clients and get an inside look at their target audience. 

During this process, we’ll often use AI to help us gather information about each audience segment. We’ll then use this data to build out customer personas, value propositions, and message testing frameworks. You can learn more about our strategic messaging process here.

AI-Powered Content Creation and Distribution 

Creating captivating content for your startup—from blogs to social posts, emails, and ads—can be made simpler with AI platforms. (Check out our curated list of our preferred AI content production companies.) While our Content and Creative Strategists form the core of Tuff’s content production, they often enhance their efforts with AI for increased efficiency.

Our creative process at Tuff is rooted in data. This means that we always analyze our partner’s ad account data before developing creative. During this process, we’ll take a closer look at which type of content and messaging has historically resonated best with the partner’s target audience. We’ll then use those insights to inform our next round of creative. 

We also rely on AI to keep us aligned with emerging channel-specific trends, informing our creative tests effectively. Additionally, we leverage AI to conduct thorough analyses of our clients’ competitors’ social ads, gaining valuable insights into effective creative approaches.

This data-driven approach extends to our content creation as well. While our blogs and case studies are always written by Tuff team members, we utilize AI to streamline research and develop content outlines, enhancing our efficiency in delivering impactful content. In short, it allows us to jump right into writing. 

Predictive Analytics for Strategic Decision-Making

When building a growth marketing strategy for a startup, it’s impossible to predict the results and how much your advertising is going to cost without historical data. In this case, marketers often use predictive analytics to help them make those initial strategic decisions.

By using AI to gather data, analyze patterns, and foreshadow future trends, predictive analytics can help you forecast what your campaign costs and ROI will be. This information is super helpful for marketers trying to determine which channels they should activate and how much budget they need to allocate to each channel based on the predicted outcome. 

Chatbots and Conversational Marketing

Many of our startup partners have implemented AI chat bots on their websites to engage with customers and enhance the user experience. These conversational chatbots utilize natural language processing to interact with customers in real time and deliver personalized responses to each user. HubSpot recently shared their top 18 AI chatbot recommendations that integrate directly with existing HubSpot workspaces.  

Navigating Ethical Considerations in AI-Driven Marketing

In the realm of AI-driven marketing, startups face the challenge of balancing efficiency with ethical considerations. As you lean into AI to develop marketing plans and streamline processes, it’s crucial to consider ethical standards to maintain trust with your audience (or partners). Here are four steps startups can take:

• Bias Mitigation: Utilize AI tools to analyze data and uncover biases in marketing strategies. Regularly review and adjust algorithms to ensure fair and unbiased outcomes in targeting and messaging.
• Diversity and Inclusion: Leverage AI to gather diverse perspectives and insights for marketing campaigns. Ensure that AI-driven decisions reflect the diversity of your target audience to avoid exclusionary practices.
• User Autonomy: Implement AI-powered personalization strategies that respect user privacy and autonomy. Provide clear opt-in/opt-out options and transparent data usage policies to empower users in controlling their information.
• Collaborative Approach: Talk with industry peers, follow experts, and collab with stakeholders to navigate ethical concerns in AI-driven marketing. Share best practices, insights, and lessons learned to collectively advance ethical standards in the field.

By considering ethics in your AI-driven marketing strategies, startups can use AI effectively while maintaining trust with their audience, ultimately building stronger connections and moving the industry in a positive direction.

What’s Next?

McKenzie Fowler

Hey there! I’m McKenzie, a Growth Marketer at Tuff who lives in Nashville, TN. After years of experience working at agencies in paid media, I found my way to Tuff in 2021 to work with startups, scaleups, and established brands on full-funnel growth strategies rooted in data. When I’m not working, you can find me taking my dog Burley to the park, traveling with friends and family, or winding down at the local yoga studio. Let’s connect.

The post Startup Marketing in the AI Age: Tactics for 2024 appeared first on Tuff.

The prevailing theme of 2023 has been “Achieve More With Less.” This is especially true right now with uncertainty still at an all-time high and the competition greater than ever as we enter the second half of the year. Marketers find themselves in a tough position, having to compete for budgets, justify top-of-the-funnel initiatives and expenses, and, in the end, address questions from the CFO and board about last-click conversions and why they aren’t simply directing funds to search, given its superior CPA. The key to companies’ success this year, and beyond, has largely hinged on embracing an efficient performance marketing mindset. 

If you find yourself facing a similar challenge of doing more with less, a situation we’re in daily with almost all of our clients at Tuff, I’d like to offer you three specific growth strategies that I’ve found effective at driving MoM growth, unlocking more marketing dollars, and ultimately ensuring alignment among stakeholders. 

The beauty of these strategies lies in their familiarity, as many brands are already employing them in various ways. The challenge is refining how these efforts are communicated. Often, the “why” behind these performance marketing initiatives is not clearly conveyed to non-marketers or company stakeholders. To ensure transparency, accountability, and alignment among all parties involved, it’s crucial to communicate the rationale behind these strategies effectively. Justifying increased marketing investments becomes more feasible when everyone understands the purpose and potential benefits of these tactics and budget allocations. 

In this post, I’ll dive into these strategies, emphasizing their significance and how you can harness support from core stakeholders. We’ll begin by examining how to ensure that no low-hanging fruit is overlooked, and we’ll explore how paid data can be utilized to inform an organic approach, which will ultimately help you minimize your reliance on paid channels. 

Once you’ve successfully implemented those two strategies, I’ll elaborate on measuring top-of-the-funnel spend and the investment in these channels. The initial findings of the Reuters Events: State of Marketing survey revealed that the top brand priorities right now include enhancing brand identity, boosting brand awareness, and focusing on purpose and value-driven marketing. This indicates the necessity of maintaining investments in channels that may not provide immediate last-click conversions but play a crucial role in achieving these priorities. In order to do that, you need to measure the impact and validate the return on investment, even when you can’t see a last-click conversion in GA4 or your CRM. 

Let’s jump in.

Strategy #1: Find your paid search threshold 

Considering paid media and its diverse platforms, each one occupies a distinct stage in the customer journey. Some platforms boast substantial reach and efficiency, yet they reside higher up in the sales funnel and attract users with lower intent, lacking a buyer mindset. Conversely, platforms like search or  retargeting strategies offer access to warmer audiences with stronger intent. While these avenues may not yield as much volume and the traffic tends to be pricier, but this audience is usually primed for purchase, leading to quicker and more efficient conversions.

When managing your media budget, you’re probably dividing funds among paid search, display, and social channels, considering a blended cost per lead (CPL) or customer acquisition cost (CAC). By investing a specific amount each month, you expect a corresponding and somewhat predictable return on investment. To delve deeper into performance analysis, most brands also scrutinize campaign and marketing metrics at the platform level. For instance, they examine the cost per acquisition (CPA) on Google Search, display, and LinkedIn.

Given the high intent of users on Google Search, the CPA for this platform not only results in last-click conversions in your CRM, but also ensures highly efficient CPLs, making it a favorable choice for conversions. There isn’t a single client I’ve ever worked with who didn’t want more from their search budget if possible. 

Due to the exceptional efficiency, yet finite volume of search marketing and the difficulty in explaining last-click attribution and demand creation to a CFO, a common scenario unfolds:

Many brands have already maximized their efforts on branded search, leaving them with non-branded search as the next viable option. The CPA on Google for branded search looks impressive (while top-of-the-funnel channels show less favorable results), leading people to question the CMO’s decision to allocate substantial budgets to top-of-the-funnel channels instead of prioritizing search.

As branded search reaches its limit, brands are compelled to turn to non-branded search and increase spending on non-branded terms, as it presents the most potential for growth. However, this shift leads to a spike in the non-branded search CPA, rendering the strategy highly inefficient, causing panic among stakeholders who then quickly withdraw their spend from these channels.

This is 100% avoidable. 

In the realm of paid search, it’s essential to determine your paid search threshold. This threshold represents the fixed monthly budget you can allocate to paid search, ensuring a consistent stream of leads based on search volume and conversion rates, all while aiming to achieve a targeted CPA cost.

Here’s an example: 

At Tuff, we’re the performance marketing agency for a fintech client with a product designed for accredited investors, offering them opportunities to invest in farmland. We’ve compiled a list of 127 carefully selected and conversion-driven keywords, such as “agricultural land investment,” which collectively amass around 47,700 monthly searches.

Based on our data analysis, we’ve determined that the average click-through rate (CTR) on these keywords is 7%, with an average cost-per-click (CPC) of $18 and an average CPA of $200. Armed with this data, we can confidently allocate a monthly budget of $60,000 to these keywords. By doing so, we expect to generate approximately 3,290 clicks and 296 conversions on a monthly basis. Our efficient paid search threshold is $60,000. 

Calculate your paid search spend threshhold

Once you’ve established your paid search threshold, several crucial possibilities emerge:

• Modeling Scaling Scenarios: Utilizing the data provided earlier, we can explore scaling scenarios. For instance, with the current $60,000 budget, we maintain a $200 CPA. However, if we consider a slightly higher CPA of $215 for the next 30 days, we can introduce additional non-branded keywords with lower conversion rates and higher CPAs. This immediate increase in volume comes at a marginally elevated cost. The question is: Are we willing to embrace these parameters to attain greater reach?
• Explaining Limitations in Search Spending: Despite having a better last-click CPA compared to other channels, investing more money into search isn’t always feasible. The reason lies in the fact that we have already captured all the existing demand. Search relies on people actively seeking a solution, and there is a finite pool of relevant searches related to our product or service. By quantifying this volume with data, we gain a clear understanding of how much we can allocate to the platform and the potential conversion volume. To achieve further conversions, we might need to loosen our CPA constraints to experiment with additional keywords or allocate budgets to other platforms with limitless volume.

Strategy #2: Solidify your position in SERPs 

Once you have determined your paid search limit and verified a set of keywords that consistently generate conversions and revenue, your aim should be to dominate not only the paid search results, but also organic search outcomes.

This strategy happens to be one of my all-time favorites because it expedites your organic acquisition endeavors. For those who have overseen an SEO strategy, terms like “quick,” “fast,” or “accelerate” rarely describe the results. SEO is a long-term endeavor that can take months or longer to yield tangible results, making the right strategy all the more crucial. 

Unlike paid advertising, where you can activate a paid keyword for a short period, assess its performance, and then decide its profitability, organic ranking may take up to 6 months. You cannot afford to “test and learn” with such a substantial time investment. Instead, use paid advertising to inform your search keyword priorities and quantify its impact.

Let me give you a very specific example. 

At Tuff, we have a client who provides an AI art generator app to users and small businesses. To kickstart our SEO strategy, we began by reviewing and compiling a list of keywords that we had already validated through paid search. These keywords exhibited high search volume, strong intent, and consistently resulted in profitable conversions at a significant scale.

Although we were actively bidding on more than 100 keywords, it became apparent that there were 15 specific keywords that stood out as top performers. These 15 keywords were responsible for the majority of conversions, as well as achieving the highest conversion rates.

With this refined list of 15 validated paid keywords in hand, we started to ask: “How well are we currently ranking for these 15 keywords in organic search? And if we were to enhance our organic rankings for these keywords, how would it impact our conversions?”

As it turns out, out of the top 15 keywords (spending the most money, having the highest volume, driving the most paid conversions), the average organic ranking was 27. As a result, monthly organic clicks from these 15 keywords was roughly 34,111 clicks.

If we can start by increasing the average ranking on these keywords to 19 at a minimum (page 2 instead of page 3), we’ll gain 28,871 monthly organic visits, as well as an estimated 1,871 organic conversions.  From there, we can improve rankings further, see even greater gains, and extend efforts to other keyword priorities.  

With these quantified results, we can now engage in a data-driven discussion about organic investment, considering the allocation of resources, time, and expected returns. Knowing that elevating rankings from 27 to 19 within three months will generate an additional 1,871 organic conversions for the brand allows us to identify organic search as a priority. This increase would signify a 30% lift in total conversions, making it a worthwhile pursuit. 

However, it’s essential to acknowledge that not every scenario will yield such significant impacts. In some cases, we may decide that the projected gains aren’t substantial enough to warrant investing time in that particular area. Nevertheless, this exercise still represents a win. 

Embracing a growth mindset means prioritizing activities that have the most substantial impact on the business and bottom line. Without the right data or framework to make these decisions, it’s challenging to feel confident about the efficacy of our strategies.

Strategy #3: Validate mid- and  upper-funnel investment

At this point, you’ve put every dollar you can into paid search and you’re also starting to dominate rankings organically for similar or related keywords. You feel confident that you’re capturing the highest intent audience and capitalizing on all possible existing demand. 

As you solidify your position in the market, successfully capturing existing demand for your product or service, it’s time to explore a new frontier: creating demand. While you’ve been attracting and converting customers who are actively seeking your offering, the potential for growth lies in stimulating interest and desire where little or no demand previously existed. 

By taking a proactive approach in educating the market about the unique benefits of your offering and crafting engaging storytelling, you can inspire potential customers to recognize needs they may not have been aware of. Let’s look at the the art of creating demand and uncover its potential for fueling further growth and market expansion:

• Capturing Demand: This strategy focuses on meeting existing customer demand for a product or service. The market already has a certain level of interest and demand for a particular product, and the goal of the marketer is to attract and convert those customers who are actively seeking the offering. This often involves tactics like SEO and paid search like we’ve talked about above. The main objective is to ensure that the brand is visible to potential customers when they are already looking for a solution.
• Creating Demand: This approach revolves around stimulating interest and desire for a product or service where little or no demand previously existed. Marketers take a proactive role in educating the market about the benefits of their offering and persuading potential customers to recognize a need they may not have been aware of. Creating demand often requires more effort in terms of marketing campaigns, content creation, and engaging storytelling to showcase the value of the product or service. This strategy is commonly employed for innovative products or when a brand wants to position itself uniquely in the market.

Relying solely on existing demand is often insufficient to achieve month-over-month growth targets. To achieve sustainable progress, it becomes crucial to construct a comprehensive media mix that encompasses non-search channels such as YouTube, TikTok, LinkedIn, display, Meta, and others. By incorporating these channels, you can enhance website visibility, expand brand awareness, and generate long-term traffic.

It’s essential to note that these channels possess vast potential but exhibit lower intent compared to search, and they might not yield last-click conversions. Setting this expectation early on with stakeholders is crucial. Evaluating the success of these efforts cannot be solely reliant on traditional metrics like CPA, CAC, or ROI, as they do not capture the full impact of these channels. However, this doesn’t diminish their value, and it doesn’t mean you won’t have data to validate the investment.

Investing in the mid and upper funnel is no longer merely a “nice to have.” Instead, it directly contributes to driving measurable business value. In fact, investing in these stages has proven to be a direct response (DR) best practice, substantiated by testing and successful outcomes. Let me give you an example. 

We have a client that offers a free digital storefront for creators who want to monetize their social media channels. During a two-week period at the beginning of Q2, our Paid Media team successfully implemented efficient, CPM-optimized reach campaigns on YouTube to generate demand, driving over 22,000 new users to the site. Within two weeks, these efforts resulted in an 81% increase in organic sign-ups vs. the previous 20-week rolling average. In addition, we saw: 

• 70% increase in total users 
• 52% increase in total sessions 
• 81% increase in organic conversions 

In the grand scheme of things, eliminating upper-funnel spending or neglecting to invest in awareness will hamper your long-term success. The crucial factor is to adopt an incremental approach to channel testing, which will enable you to validate the effectiveness of upper funnel expenditures and swiftly and efficiently boost user demand.

Embracing an efficient growth mindset is crucial for marketing leaders navigating budget conversations and seeking to justify top-of-the-funnel marketing investments. By taking this approach, you gain the valuable data needed to grasp the appropriate proportion of your budget that should be allocated to non-search channels. Furthermore, it empowers you to articulate these results effectively to a broader audience and key stakeholders, enabling you to unlock additional funds when required. This way, you can make informed decisions and ensure that your marketing efforts are optimized for optimal long-term success. At Tuff, we specialize in driving these tangible results and unlocking brands’ full potential. If you’re in need of a partner in growth, look no further than Tuff. 

Ellen Jantsch

Ellen is the founder at Tuff and one of the team’s core growth marketers. She is a versatile marketer with expertise in multiple channels – from ppc to seo to email to others – responsible for the experiments and testing.  She is happiest when she’s on the ski hill or outside pointing her mountain bike downhill.

The post Mastering the Efficient Performance Marketing Mindset: Unraveling the Justification for Marketing Investments in 2024 appeared first on Tuff.

From ancient myths passed down through generations to the latest viral TikTok trend, quality storytelling is what captures the attention of…everyone. But beyond entertainment value, stories hold a special place in marketing–they’re catalysts for action. They are the key to building trust, achieving better ROI, and fostering unwavering brand loyalty. When working in tandem with great campaigns, storytelling is an important lever in driving substantial growth.

Importance of Storytelling in Marketing

Before getting into the impact of storytelling specifically, we have to acknowledge the significance of messaging in marketing. Messages are what brands use to communicate their value, products, and ethos to their audiences. The effectiveness of these messages often determines the success of a marketing campaign. You can have an optimized campaign with an unlimited budget, but if your messaging doesn’t stick with the audience, your efforts will be stifled. No trust built = no action taken.

The Psychology Behind Storytelling

Why do stories resonate so deeply with us? It all boils down to psychology. Our brains are wired to seek out and remember stories. We can more easily recall and relate to the beginning, middle, and end of a story. We easily understand that problems need solutions. From childhood bedtime tales to best-selling novels, stories activate areas of the brain responsible for processing emotions and creating connections. 

Marketers are missing out if they’re not making use of juicy storytelling. By weaving narratives into messaging, brands can tap into emotional triggers, fostering a deeper connection with their audience.

Influence of Storytelling on Trust, Loyalty, and ROI

The reason storytelling is powerful is because it’s based on trust. Brand trust is the foundation of customer loyalty and business growth. Storytelling goes beyond conventional marketing by humanizing brands, making them relatable, and establishing a personal connection with customers. When people interact with real stories, they tend to see the brand as truthful, dependable, and deserving of their loyalty.

Building Connections, Nurturing Loyalty, and Driving Growth

Through storytelling, brands can actually create narratives that mean something to their audience. And guess what? This emotional link doesn’t just stop there–it’s what keeps customers coming back and spreading the word, driving and multiplying growth. Here’s how:

1. Copywriting vs. Storytelling in Marketing

We start by understanding the distinction between “storytelling” and “copy”. Sales copy is an important type of messaging that uses persuasive tactics to drive action (namely, purchases). It’s concise and direct, highlights the benefits of a product or service, and asks the viewer to take the next step. While copy certainly has its place in marketing, it’s missing some key characteristics of effective storytelling.

A compelling story gives the audience something to care about from the start. Think of the last great movie you watched. Chances are, you were introduced to a likable character, you saw their problem, and you understood the implications if they failed to address it.

Marketing works in a similar way. If you aren’t able to establish a reason why customers should care about your product or service, why should they care about all the amazing features? 

Storytelling in Marketing Example

Think about promoting a project management software, almost like telling an interesting story. Imagine meeting a character in this “story”—a stressed-out project manager juggling dozens of tasks and struggling to keep everything on track. The obstacles they face, like missed deadlines and communication hiccups, might remind you of your own work experiences. You can clearly see what could go wrong if these issues aren’t resolved—projects slipping through the cracks, missed deadlines, and a burnt-out team.

Now, consider marketing the software. If you can make potential customers feel a connection with the real challenges of managing projects, they’ll be much more interested in the software’s impressive features. By sharing relatable stories that highlight the struggles of modern project management, you give them a reason to care. This emotional link not only grabs their attention, but it also creates a sense of understanding and appreciation. Suddenly, the software isn’t just a bunch of tools—it’s a solution to their problems and a key component to their success.

Through character development, relatability, and emotional connection, we earn the right to speak to our audience in a persuasive manner. While copy conveys information directly, authentic narratives resonate deeply with audiences, fostering a sense of shared values and experiences. This emotional connection transcends transactional relationships, nurturing lasting brand loyalty.

2. Fostering Brand Loyalty and Advocacy

Loyalty isn’t built overnight; it’s a result of consistent positive experiences and a genuine bond. Storytelling helps brands cultivate loyalty by weaving a narrative thread that customers can relate to and become emotionally invested in. They can see themselves using a product or service before they even hit “Add to Cart”.

Starbucks, for instance, doesn’t just sell coffee–it sells a consistent experience. Through their storytelling, they’ve created a global community of coffee enthusiasts who see Starbucks storefronts as more than just places to grab a drink; they’re spaces that provide comfort, community, and connection (even when they spell your name wrong). This brand loyalty leads to repeat business and enthusiastic brand advocacy as loyal customers willingly share their Starbucks experiences with others.

3. Improving ROI through Storytelling

Let’s address the elephant in the room: “How does storytelling affect my bottom line?” The beauty of storytelling lies in its ability to convert engagement into tangible results. When customers feel emotionally connected to a brand, they’re more likely to become repeat buyers and brand advocates. All because their connection goes beyond the product itself.

Consider the case of Apple. They’ve mastered the art of storytelling to create a brand that elicits a sense of wonder, innovation, and elegance. Their product launches aren’t just presentations, they’re stories that captivate the world’s attention. This storytelling prowess has directly translated into impressive ROI figures, with Apple consistently breaking sales records and commanding a premium price for their products, regardless of how their technology stacks up to worthy competitors.

The influence of storytelling on ROI is undeniable. By eliciting emotional connections, brands can create loyalty, advocacy, and ultimately, increased business success. Now let’s explore how to craft your own narrative and use strategic storytelling to your advantage.

Crafting Your Authentic Narrative

So, how can brands effectively harness the power of storytelling to build trust, achieve better ROI, and foster loyalty? Here are some steps to get you started:

1. Know Your Audience: Understanding your audience’s needs, aspirations, and pain points is necessary. Your story should resonate with them on a personal level.
2. Embrace Authenticity: Be genuine in your storytelling. Highlight your brand’s values, mission, and the people behind it. Authenticity is magnetic.
3. Evoke Emotion: Create narratives that trigger emotions. Whether it’s joy, pain, or inspiration, emotions create connections that lead to action.
4. Consistency is Key: Your story should be consistent across all touchpoints. From your website to your social media, the narrative should remain cohesive.
5. Test and Analyze: By constantly testing and analyzing how messages are received and how your audience engages, new insights can help shape and reshape your narrative.
6. Evolve and Adapt: Your story can evolve as your brand grows. Embrace changes and let your audience be a part of the journey.

Storytelling at the Center of Marketing

As we’re inundated with new information every day, storytelling has become a useful tool to help people organize complex thoughts and connect with brands in meaningful ways. By seamlessly blending narrative with design and consistently delivering authentic messages, brands can actually create deep connections that withstand the test of time.

As marketing continues to change and evolve, one thing remains clear: the power of storytelling is here to stay. It’s not just about selling products; it’s about building relationships, shaping perceptions, and driving growth. So, if you’re looking to elevate your marketing strategy, remember that behind every successful brand, there’s a captivating story waiting to be told.

Need help crafting your narrative? Talk to our growth experts today.

The post The Role of Storytelling in Marketing: Connecting with Your Target Audience appeared first on Tuff.

What was your most recent significant purchase? Did you click Purchase immediately after learning it existed? If not, it’s probably because you needed more information before fully committing.

Maybe your shopping experience looked like this:

You saw a TikTok featuring the product, found it interesting, and visited the website to learn more.

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A few days later, a Facebook ad reminded you of the product. You clicked on it and provided your email to receive a discount code.

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Several weeks later, you received an email from the company, notifying you that your discount code was expiring.

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Later that day, you recalled the email, launched a Google search to find the brand associated again, and went to the website to make your purchase.

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Most customer journeys aren’t linear and require time. That time is why multi-touch attribution is crucial for measuring marketing effectiveness. In this example, using last-click attribution for reporting would credit Google as the sole source of your purchase, disregarding all the other touchpoints that kept you interested (TikTok, Facebook, and email).

But what if you hadn’t seen the TikTok or the Facebook ad that led you to the discount offer? What if the reminder email never came? This particular combination of touchpoints highlights the importance of considering every step in the customer journey, not just the first or last.

In this blog, we’ll uncover what makes multi-touch attribution so essential to accurate and actionable marketing reporting. From tools to user experience and optimizing for growth, we’ll explore the full spectrum of tracking marketing touchpoints and building better strategies. 

Understanding full-funnel tracking in marketing

So, what is multi-touch attribution? It’s a marketing measurement that evaluates each interaction a user has with a brand. This allows marketers to assign value to every channel in the customer journey and weigh the significance of each.

Multi-touch attribution is essential for any growth marketing strategy. It provides access to full-funnel tracking, enabling analysis of which channels drive customer engagement and revenue–and to what degree. The real power lies in precision–figuring out what’s effective and what’s not. As you uncover those channels and campaigns that bring in the biggest returns on investment, you’re in control of smartly distributing your budget, making the most impact, and steering your growth strategy toward success.

Tools and techniques for effective full-funnel attribution

At Tuff, we use a variety of tools for full-funnel tracking depending on our partner and their industry. Notable multi-touch attribution tools include: 

• Google Analytics
• Amplitude
• Mixpanel
• Segment

With multi-touch attribution tools like these, you can create and customize your own dashboard to gather and analyze data across all channels throughout the entire user journey.

Real-Life Example

For example, we have an Amplitude dashboard set up for our partner Pathstream, a career mobility platform. In their dashboard, we track every interaction from ad click > website visit > sign-up > program purchase.

When we dig into the dashboard data, we’re checking out a few key data points. First, we’re eyeing the click-through rate (CTR) of the ad. Then, we’re looking at how many people go from clicking to showing interest (that’s the lead conversion rate). Last stop? We’re watching the rate of people who actually enroll or make a purchase. All this info helps us see where to fine-tune the ad, the landing page, or the emails–all to pump up those conversion rates.

Examining conversions by source like the visualization above shows the impact of paid and organic channels across various stages of the customer journey. In the early touchpoints, paid channels amplify brand recognition and ignite initial interactions. Activating retargeting initiatives across social caused that spike in mid-journey touchpoints on Facebook. The huge jump in conversions during late touchpoints shows that further down the funnel, people are more likely to convert on Google, Facebook, AND direct. Altogether, we see that different platforms have power at various stages of the user journey, and using this data helps marketers decide how to spend resources wisely for growth.

Fine Tune Your Performance Creative

With Pathstream, we utilize performance creative to analyze what type of ad archetype and messaging perform best on each channel. Our goal is to drive more revenue and decrease the customer acquisition cost (CAC). With multi-touch attribution, we could see that the Facebook ad below drove the most clicks, sign-ups, and enrollments compared to any other ad we tested. Without multi-touch attribution, we would have only been able to see the clicks and sign-ups from the ad and not the CVR from sign-up to enrollment. 

The power of customer journey insights

When you can thoroughly analyze every step of your conversion funnel and track the origins of your conversions, you’re empowered to make smarter marketing decisions that result in sustainable growth. For example, if TikTok has a higher CVR throughout the entire funnel in comparison to display advertising, we can reallocate the display budget and direct more funds towards TikTok to lower CAC and increase revenue.

When you have insights into the customer journey, you can also tailor your messaging across various channels based on where the user is in their journey. For instance, your Facebook ads might generate a strong CTR yet fail to convert on the website due to users needing additional product information. 

With this data and insight, you can create a plan on how you’ll provide more product information to the user. One solution might be to update your landing page to include more social proof or create a blog on your website that answers commonly asked questions. 

Another solution might be to add more touchpoints to the user journey so you can communicate your products’ unique value propositions. This is where retargeting strategies can prove effective. By personalizing your retargeting messages across channels, you can guide users from awareness to consideration.

Fueling growth with data-driven optimization

In a recent Pathstream campaign, we leveraged multi-touch attribution data to create a full-funnel growth marketing strategy encompassing diverse channels. These included programmatic ads, social ads, paid and organic search, conversion rate optimizations on the website, and nurture flow email campaigns. 

While not every channel led to last-click conversions, we effectively gauged the impact from each channel by assessing both view-through and click-through conversions using multi-touch attribution. Beyond validating marketing channels, this approach enabled us to precisely identify optimal messaging strategies for each channel. As a result, we increased the CVR at every stage of the funnel. 

By increasing the CVR, we increased the number of leads quarter over quarter by 86% and increased the enrollments quarter over quarter by 100%.  

Embracing multi-touch attribution for growth

Without multi-touch attribution, it’s impossible to know the effectiveness of your marketing strategies. When you make decisions based on just part of the story, you leave out crucial bits of information that unlock truths about your customers’ experience. But with multi-touch attribution, you get access to full-funnel tracking and data-driven customer insights. This will ultimately help you build a sustainable, validated growth marketing strategy optimized to scale. 

Interested in learning more about how you can create a growth marketing strategy using multi-touch attribution? Give us a shout!

McKenzie Fowler

Hey there! I’m McKenzie, a Growth Marketer at Tuff who lives in Nashville, TN. After years of experience working at agencies in paid media, I found my way to Tuff in 2021 to work with startups, scaleups, and established brands on full-funnel growth strategies rooted in data. When I’m not working, you can find me taking my dog Burley to the park, traveling with friends and family, or winding down at the local yoga studio. Let’s connect.

The post Full-Funnel Tracking Through Multi-Touchpoint Attribution appeared first on Tuff.

As a growth agency, we have to get a deep understanding of our partner’s revenue models quickly. Once we do, we build a tactical growth model based on what we see. When building growth models, we have to get a few things straight:

• Who is the target audience?
• How do they typically interact with the brand?
• What is the cost to acquire a new user/customer?
• What is the average customer lifetime value (LTV) of that user/customer?

Understanding the answer to that final LTV question is so vitally important, but it’s something that a surprising number of businesses ignore. The only way to really know if your acquisition efforts are profitable is to understand how much revenue your customers generate over the course of the relationship.

Whether you’re an e-commerce brand selling direct to consumer, a SaaS company looking to find more enterprise users, or a mobile app just launching your product, retaining customers and increasing the average lifetime value of those customers is imperative to growing your business.

While Tuff is largely focused on acquisition, we keep a very close eye on customer churn and repeat purchase rates. These often overlooked metrics can help multiply revenue growth if assigned equal importance to acquisition tactics. LTV can be the metric that unlocks the next level of growth for your company.

This blog post will answer the following questions: 

• What is LTV?
• How can a company increase customer retention and LTV?
• What are the long-term benefits of increased LTV?
  

Come along as we explore these strategies and plot out a path of continuous growth. All powered by maximizing lifetime value. 

Customer Lifetime Value Formula

As mentioned earlier, LTV can be the key to unlocking the next level of growth for your company because it provides a framework for multiplying profitability. You may be thinking, “That’s great, but how do you actually calculate it?” Thankfully, this part is fairly straightforward:

Average Order Value * Average Orders per Year * Average Customer Lifespan = LTV

Understanding this metric is the critical first step in knowing how much you should be paying to acquire a new customer, and how profitable your current acquisition efforts are. The implications of your customer LTV are about as simple as the equation. A higher average LTV means more revenue per customer, and you can tolerate a higher CAC while keeping new customers profitable. 

At this point, we can all agree that increasing our average LTV is a huge lever we can pull for growth. It can increase our total revenue at the end of the day and allow us to scale our acquisition efforts more aggressively. That’s all nice in theory, but how do we actually isolate and increase our LTV? 🤔

Retention Strategies for Boosting Lifetime Value

Building customer loyalty is the name of the game. The more you can engage with current customers and keep them satisfied, the more they’ll want to come back and reengage with your business. Here are four effective strategies to keep your customers coming back to increase LTV:

1. Use content to keep your customers engaged

Content marketing is a great tool for introducing new customers to your brand, but using it to engage with existing customers is one of the best ways to build brand loyalty and authority. Regularly distributing high-quality content to your customer base through email and social channels is a great way to reduce churn and increase repeat purchases. Regular, valuable content means engaged, happy customers.

2. Personalize your communication based on customer behavior

Email marketing platforms allow you to create all sorts of segmentations based on user behavior. Do you have two products that complement each other well? Does your software subscription require a renewal every 12 months? You can maximize your email strategy with customized messaging to target users right at the critical junctions of when they’ll either establish their brand loyalty or start reassessing their options. Get in touch with the right message at the right time and you’ll see loyalty jump.

3. Build out a referral program

Referral programs are the ultimate two-birds-with-one-stone tools for marketers looking to boost their retention and new customer acquisition efforts. 

Here’s how they typically work: After a new customer makes a purchase, offer them a discount if they can get a friend to make a (discounted) purchase. Usually, your customer acquisition cost is higher than the combined value of the discounts, and you’re getting your users to spread the word of your brand for you. Increased LTV and new customers from one tactic, what more can you ask for? 🔥

4. Provide best-in-class customer service

While positive experiences can keep customers engaged, negative experiences can destroy that loyalty just as fast. One mistake early-stage brands make is not properly investing in a customer service infrastructure to support their customer base. Before scaling up your business, make sure that you’ve properly invested in your customer service. It could be the difference between creating a user base of one-time customers and creating customers who you’ll retain for years.

Sustained Growth through Lifetime Value Optimization

If implementing tactics to improve your LTV isn’t part of your current growth strategy, it’s probably time to rethink that roadmap. Increasing your LTV is such a powerful multiplier that can unlock new revenue and the next level of growth for your business. Let’s look at an example:

Imagine you run a company that sells high-end bagels through an online store. These are the best bagels out there and people can’t stop submitting orders. You’re generating 250 new customers each month and they’re buying a one-year subscription to your bagel service. Here’s what your numbers look like at the moment:

An AOV of $45 * 6 orders per year * an average customer lifespan of 1.49 years gives us an average LTV of $402.3. At your current rate, each one-month cohort will generate $100,305 in revenue

Not bad! That means that if you can acquire customers for less than $402.30, you’re making a profit. (We’re ignoring ALL overhead in this example.) You’ve got some room for improvement here though. Of those 250 new customers each month, only 25% of them are renewing their subscriptions, with a whopping 95% of those customers renewing for year three.

Based on that data, you know that retaining past year one is a great opportunity to generate additional revenue through increased average LTV. You work with your team on ideas to get more users to re-up their subscription after that first year and decide to send out a 10% off coupon to customers prompting them to renew 2 weeks out from their subscription expiration. 

You see that renewal number jump from 25% all the way up to 40%! Let’s rerun those numbers for a one-month cohort: 

With that 10% off offer in place, you’re getting an average additional 37.5 subscription renewals in month two. This leads to an additional 36 customers renewing for year three. This leaves you with a total of $114,885 in lifetime revenue from that cohort. 

That’s a difference of $14,580. Apply that to a year’s worth of sales, and you can expect an additional $174,960 in lifetime revenue.   This is just an example and you don’t always see these types of results, but putting efforts into place around increasing LTV can yield the kind of revenue increases that we see above. 

LTV Efforts Go a Long Way 🚀

Just like customer acquisition, maximizing lifetime value is a matter of testing and learning. It’s all about trying things out and seeing what works.

Here’s the thing: Every company, no matter what you do, should be focusing on LTV right now. If you’re not holding onto your current customers and making them happy, you’re essentially sending them to your competitors. And who wants that?!

At Tuff, we’re a growth marketing culture that’s all about finding the correct levers to pull. It’s like discovering secret ingredients that make your favorite dish taste even better. Curious about how Tuff can combine your growth and customer retention efforts into one seamless system? Give us a holler!

Ethan Broder

Hi there! I’m Ethan, a Growth Marketer based in Steamboat Springs, Colorado. I have four years of digital agency experience under my belt creating and executing acquisition strategies for a number of different verticals across multiple channels. When I’m not at my desk, you can find me skiing, mountain biking, or chasing my dog around in the mountains.

The post Maximizing Customer Lifetime Value: Retention Strategies for Sustained Growth appeared first on Tuff.