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.

The Internet is constantly evolving with a new platform or a new tactic or a new feature coming out nearly every week. This means that growth marketing is also constantly evolving, and it’s really easy to want to jump onto every shiny new toy as they roll out. Our expertise here at Tuff is in a variety of areas and especially growth and performance marketing. Therefore, we’re always looking for new ways to diversify our partners’ channel mix to utilize their digital ad spend to drive the best, most efficient results possible.

How to choose channels to diversify your digital ad spend

If you’re considering trying out a few new platforms, we recommend asking yourself some key questions before you decide which ones to explore:

• What is the budget I have to work with, and what do I feel comfortable spending on a daily basis in a given channel?
• Who is the audience I’m trying to reach? How can I reach them – by interest, demographic, groups they’re apart of?
• What type of creative do I have access to or what can I create? 
• What kind of time do I have to manage these campaigns and make optimizations? 

Once you’re able to answer some of these questions, you’ll be able to figure out quickly which channels you have the resources and bandwidth for. Now for some ideas…

TikTok

This may seem like a no-brainer at this point, but we have a lot of partners who come to us looking to diversify their channel mix who are not yet running paid ads on TikTok! This is usually the first channel businesses who have just started to scratch the surface of paid social want to explore next, and for a good reason: TikTok reported that they have 150 million monthly active users in the US in March 2023 – up by 50 million in just 2 years. 40% of users have reported that they don’t have a Facebook, so if you’re looking to get in front of an audience that you haven’t tapped into just yet, they are likely here. We’ve tested TikTok for both B2C and B2B businesses and have seen success with both!

TikTok is a great channel to explore if you’re looking for a way to promote your product or service with creative video assets. The best part? They don’t even need to be super-produced or polished. In fact, the audience on TikTok gravitates toward ads that appear more native to the platform, like scrappy UGC testimonials, the green screen feature, and trending sounds. We’ve even seen success with ads made for TikTok on other channels, like Facebook and Instagram, which shows that people are looking to consume this type of content.

You have the ability to target by age range, gender, geographic locations (states, cities, or DMAs), interests, hashtags, behaviors, and more (hint: we have a lot of success with broad targeting, meaning no additional targeting outside of geographic and age targeting 😉) You can even leverage an ad format called Spark Ads, which allows you to run an already-existing TikTok video from your own organic account or influencers’, appearing even more native on the channel.

Pros: possibilities to be more creative with your video assets due to the nature of the platform; large audience in mostly every age range

Cons: limited geographic targeting (no postal codes or radius targeting); strict ad policies; higher daily budget necessary to make a mark than other ad platforms

Perfect For: B2C or B2B advertisers looking to generate awareness and conversions through video creative to a very engaged audience

Reddit

In an age of both community and curiosity, people are very often looking toward platforms where they can ask questions, learn new things, and interact with like-minded individuals, and Reddit is the perfect place to do all of the above. Reddit is a social media channel but also a forum and news site where people can join hundreds of thousands of communities, or “subreddits,” that usually fall within a specific category. 

Reddit users are typically very active and spend time on the channel every day – it’s expected that 55.79 million people will use the channel daily this year. This means the reach you’d have access to is pretty massive. Reddit users are pretty tuned into whatever it is they’re reading or talking about in subreddits, and they also tend to be more skeptical of advertising on the platform. It’s important to really make your creative native to the platform and to target very specifically so that you make sure you’re reaching the right audience. Targeting options include communities (subreddits), interests, custom audiences (like lists, remarketing audiences, and lookalike audiences), and, as of June 2023, keywords. 

The platform also offers a wide range of ad formats, including text ads, image ads, video ads, carousel ads, and even a product called Conversation Placements, which sit within a conversation thread under a post but above the first comment, appearing like a native addition to the conversation. The key to success in optimizing your Reddit ad creative is to make sure you’re producing assets that do not appear too much like an ad but rather a way to make a valuable contribution to the subreddit. 

Pros: exposure to a highly-engaged audience; a variety of targeting options (and you have the ability to do audience research directly on the platform by perusing subreddits); less expensive than other ad platforms

Cons: not every subreddit that exists is available to target as a community; Reddit users may ignore ads more than users on other ad platforms; very simple ad formats

Perfect For: advertisers looking to reach a niche audience where they’re already spending time (like people interested in career development, shopping, fitness and health, personal finance, etc.)

Programmatic

“Programmatic” has been a buzzword for a while and we’ve certainly been hearing more and more partners who are interested in testing it out as of late.

In essence, programmatic advertising allows advertisers to reach very specific audiences outside of Google and Facebook/Instagram.  Notable programmatic platforms include StackAdapt, The Trade Desk, and Criteo, though there are many others.

Ad types include standard display, video, CTV, audio, and native display, making it easy to repurpose assets used on other channels before investing into platform-specific creatives.  Using benchmark data from legacy platforms will help inform early optimizations and the overall effectiveness of the strategy. If you’re looking to tap into a platform that can massively scale your digital ad spend, programmatic may be just the thing for you. Let’s take a quick look at a few of our favorite platforms.

The Trade Desk

The Trade Desk is the biggest player in the programmatic space. This is the home of more traditional Media Buying. You can go here to advertise on all of the big networks you are familiar with. Fox, ABC, ESPN, CBS and everything in between are available for placements. Out of all of the programmatic platforms, Trade Desk has the largest inventory available out of all of the possible programmatic platforms, but also the highest minimum spend thresholds. 

With revenue over $1B annually, they are certainly a giant in the space, but it makes sense as to why they are so large. They are used by agencies, large media companies, and many enterprise level companies. Their open API makes Trade Desk a perfect fit for a team with a large swath of data to analyze and utilize. You can plug directly into the platform and get to work immediately with all of your data at your fingertips. 

Pros: Virtually unlimited inventory, multiple integrations with other platforms, open API.

Cons: High monthly minimum spend not achievable for smaller businesses. 

Perfect For: Media buying agency or enterprise level company.

Criteo

When we think about Criteo, we think about dynamic retargeting. If you are an ecommerce business, Criteo may be just right for you. It makes it incredibly easy to retarget users who have been to a product page, but have yet to convert. They have placements all over the internet that engage users throughout the full buying journey. Criteo is truly a powerful option for nurturing people who are familiar with your brand or product, but need that extra nudge over the finish line.

According to the company, they serve over 5 billion ads per day. Although retargeting users is one of Criteo’s strongest assets, they offer solutions for demand generation, customer acquisition, and brand awareness. Their platform is as easy to use as any of the top competitors in the programmatic space, making this a viable option for just about any advertiser.

Pros: Quality machine learning, high end placements, detailed remarketing

Cons: If you are not an ecommerce business, this may not be the most effective platform four you

Perfect For: Ecommerce business looking to retarget users with product related ads.

StackAdapt

There’s lots to love about StackAdapt. It’s an easy to use programmatic platform that allows brands to advertise on Display, Video, Native, CTV, and Audio placements all over the web. Their reporting is top notch and can easily integrate with any internal CRMs, pixels, or preferred tracking platforms while also providing an accurate representation of data directly in the platform. 

One of the best selling points of this programmatic platform is that there is no minimum to run campaigns. This can be added easily to any media plan. Many others have minimums of $50,000 or above, but with StackAdapt, you can do powerful testing on a limited budget. Their access to audiences is another key area that Tuff utilizes when advertising for our partners. We have access to over 300,000 audience lists for both B2C and B2B users. Regardless of the business or budget, StackAdapt may be for you when thinking of running any kind of brand campaign. 

Pros: Variety of ad formats, lots of creative options, massive reach of users, effective targeting options, no minimum spend required, self serve platform.

Cons: Easy to get lost in the weeds or overspend on ineffective placements.

Perfect For: Business of any size looking to test programmatic on a large or small scale. 

MNTN CTV

We’ve been hearing for many years now that linear TV advertising is out, especially with the rise of social media and the Internet, where we’ve unlocked other avenues to advertise to an audience. However, when Connected TV advertising about 5 years ago, advertisers quickly saw the value of promoting their content through the channel. As of July 2022, a report from Nielsen reported that streaming platforms accounted for just about 35% of total TV consumption, beating our cable and broadcast TV.

CTV advertising refers to video ads that are delivered to an audience over the Internet as they stream movies and TV shows through their Smart TV or devices like an Amazon Fire Stick or Roku. You’re able to reach people with the impact of traditional TV advertising but with the precision and measurement capabilities you’re used to having access to through digital advertising, like audience-based targeting, IP-based targeting, and multi-touch attribution. You also have access to a self-service advertising platform where you can navigate everything from campaign set-up to adjusting our daily budgets to generating customizable reports.

Pros: ease of use with an intuitive advertising platform; customizable campaign set-ups; finetuned audience targeting; customizable reporting options; accurate, real-time multi-touch attribution 

Cons: you need to work with a CSM to create and set up your account; more expensive than typical digital advertising on social and programmatic platforms

Perfect For: advertisers who have polished, produced video assets they’re looking to get in front of a large audience 

Nextdoor

Nextdoor advertising has become an attractive option for many advertisers, with 1-in–3 of US households being present on the platform.  Data indicates that these users make 90% of their purchases within 15 miles of their work or home, and predominantly from local businesses.  

When Tuff works with partners that have more of a local target audience, Nextdoor is one of the first non-traditional PPC tactics we explore. 

While Nextdoor is a great emerging channel for diversifying your digital ad spend, we do run the disclaimer that it likely won’t be a major part of your media budget. With limited placements and a growing userbase, it’s hard to spend a large amount of money on Nextdoor in any given month – although this could change in the near future as they continue to grow. 

Pros: Hyperlocal targeting, affordable CPMs, engaged local audiences

Cons: Smaller userbase, limited placements

Perfect For: Businesses with local presences

Pinterest

Pinterest can be a great option for advertisers, especially for ones that already possess a strong paid search strategy.  This is because the Pinterest platform allows you to use keyword targeting.  Since Pinterest is used as a search engine, this makes sense and can allow for incredibly targeted advertising.

The platform also has other traditional targeting methods that mirror Facebook, Instagram, and Google audience targeting, such as interest-based targeting.

Pinterest is a largely untapped platform, especially for ecommerce brands and service businesses. Since Pinterest users are planners, we recommend using their larger attribution windows (30 / 30 / 30) and using it as a mid-funnel tactic to increase consideration for your brand, and having it be a smaller part of your digital ad spend. 

Pros: Visually appealing ad formats, very active userbase, lots of targeting options (intent + demographic)

Cons: Low last-click activity, longer attribution windows

Perfect For: Businesses trying to reach users in the consideration stage of the funnel

Spotify

Spotify should definitely be considered when attempting to diversify ad spend and reach new audiences.  As one of the largest podcast and music streaming services in the world, the reach is massive and the audio ad-format adds another method of communicating with your target audience.

However, the targeting on Spotify can seem somewhat limited when compared to other platforms. Though reduced targeting options may cause an advertiser to shy away from the platform, it is still worth testing as a top-of-funnel awareness play due to its tremendous reach. 

Pros: Good ad formats, affordable CPMs

Cons: Limited targeting options, secondary platform

Perfect For: Businesses trying to scale top of funnel reach

Microsoft Ads

Formerly known as Bing Ads, this platform is an obvious choice for businesses or advertisers looking for incremental conversions for their product or service. Microsoft Ads has basically the same offering as Google Ads. You can advertise on Bing with Search and Shopping Ads easily by importing campaigns directly from Google into Microsoft. This import feature makes this platform highly accessible to businesses of all sizes. 

Even though search volume is of course much smaller than Google Ads, Bing has some unique offerings that make it a great option to add to your marketing mix. According to Microsoft, they own 17% of desktop market share, meaning that there are over 600 million PC users available to reach. This equates to over 13 billion monthly searches. Yes, that is 13 billion! Google is obviously the main player when it comes to online searches, but Bing has a significant reach that cannot be forgotten about. 

Users of Bing also tend to be older and have higher incomes than the average user on Google. With 36% of its users in the top 25% of household income, Bing’s audience has more buying power for your product or service. We tend to allocate around 10% of the overall paid search budget to Microsoft Ads at the start. Learn what works for your business on this platform and scale from there!

Pros: Tends to bring in cheaper CPCs than Google Ads, lots of desktop traffic, substantial buying power from user base.

Cons: Less overall search volume than Google Ads, user interface is sometimes hard to navigate

Perfect For: Business with an older target demographic, or one who is looking to find incremental conversions to accompany other paid search and shopping efforts. 

Things to Avoid While Diversifying Digital Ad Spend

While testing new channels and tactics for your digital ad spend, it’s important to remember that channel diversification can take many forms and isn’t a one-size fits all. It’s also not a panacea – testing a new channel and finding a strategy that works for you will take time. You shouldn’t expect to see immediate results on a new channel by copying the strategy you have on one of your primary channels – it will take testing, learning, and refining to find the right tactic for you.

Here are some common mistakes we see in digital ad spend diversification that you should try to mitigate: 

It takes time to optimize

Most tests and experiments on new channels don’t work in the sense that they are a completely new tactic, and take time to master. Don’t try to diversify ad spend and expect to get the same results you’re seeing on other channels in week, or even month one. 

Don’t forget to account for extra management

Adding new channels can increase the complexity of reporting, optimization, and overall management. Instead of checking Google Ads, Facebook Ads, and Google Analytics, for example, now you’ve got to learn how to incorporate new channels’ data and reporting dashboards into your existing systems and processes. 

Don’t over-diversify

While diversification of spend and strategy is a great idea, over-diversification is a thing and can present issues of its own.  If spend is spread too thinly across multiple new channels or platforms (or even multiple campaigns or ad creatives in one platform), it will take longer to gather actionable data and will be much more difficult to gauge the effectiveness of.

Want to Diversify Your Digital Ad Spend?

Tuff has managed ads on just about every platform imaginable, with budgets from partners ranging from a few thousand dollars, to one million-plus a month. Whether you’re in scale-up mode and wanting to try some new tactics or channels, or you want to optimize your advertising efforts on your existing channels, we can help. Let’s talk!

The post 8 Channels to Diversify Your Digital Ad Spend appeared first on Tuff.

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

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

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

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

What is an intent metric? 

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

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

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

Who is an intent metric best for? 

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

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

Creating intent metrics unique to your business

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

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

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

How we built intent metrics for our partner Teachable

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

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

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

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

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

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

• 1 day
• 3 days
• 5 days

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

• Channel
• Campaign
• Audience
• Creative asset

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

How to use intent metrics in your marketing plan

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

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

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

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

A holistic approach to intent metrics

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

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

Re-optimizing campaigns based on intent metrics

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

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

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

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

How to evolve your reporting

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

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

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

And vice versa we will look at:

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

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

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

Validating that intent metrics lead to conversions

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

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

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

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

Why you should incorporate intent metrics into your planning process

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

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

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

Richard Meyer

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

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

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

Why Marketers are Being Asked to Do More With Less

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

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

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

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

But… why? 

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

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

Cue the scramble to redefine what growth means. 

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

Table of Contents

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

Creating Frameworks for Sustainable Paid Growth

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

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

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

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

Get the Most Out of Non-Branded Search

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

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

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

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

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

Maximizing Impression Share for Validated Non-Branded Search

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

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

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

How We Validate Non-Branded Search Terms

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

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

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

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

Maximizing Volume Within Target CPA Constraints

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

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

Develop Ad Creative That Works for Every Part of Your Funnel

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

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

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

Why Performance Creative Matters

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

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

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

Developing Performance Creative Tailored to Your Funnel

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

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

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

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

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

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

Target the Same Audiences with Different Campaign Optimization Events

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

Traffic Campaigns, Document Downloads, and Message Ads

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

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

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

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

Tailor Creative for Desired Action

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is CRO? 

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

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

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

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

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

How Can My Landing Pages Help Drive Down Ad Costs? 

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

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

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

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

Convert More Leads with Lifecycle Marketing 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Unsure of where to start? 

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

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

Richard Meyer

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

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

As marketers know all too well, one of the hardest parts of the job is measuring success in your campaigns. Digital marketing was supposed to be different though. It promised the ability to measure all of the touchpoints that your individual advert had with customers so that you could quickly and definitively tell if your marketing was working.

But it hasn’t played out quite that way. 

As the profession has matured and the placements have expanded, it has become harder than ever to measure the impact of your marketing dollars. Every platform tells an ostensibly different story than the next, and none of them seem to capture the full story. 

That’s because of that dirty little A word, Attribution. Every channel leverages its own attribution models to measure the effectiveness of an ad campaign. Marketers struggle to tell the story as many default to last-touch or first-touch. Some get crafty and leverage more complex attribution models like U-shape or even Time Decay attribution.

This has been exacerbated by Apple and their App Tracking Transparency that was ushered onto us with iOS 14 in 2021. Suddenly, tracking the user journey became more complicated.

Many growth marketing agencies and brands have turned to multi-touch attribution and market mix models to justify their spending at the top of the funnel. They know that investment in awareness is critical, but can they tell that story with data?

Fortunately, there is a framework available that can help shape that story by tying in dark impact. Read on to learn more.

What is a dark impact campaign and why are they important? 

There used to be an old rule of thumb that circulated through marketing textbooks that said a person needs to see or hear your ad 7 times before they’re ready to buy your product. While this number is constantly debated, the underlying logic is that people need time to warm up to you before they trust you enough to make a purchase.

This is increasingly true for B2B marketing. Buying cycles are getting longer, and this is being exaggerated by slowing market conditions. There are more stakeholders and decision influencers than ever before. So there are more people that need to be comfortable with you and your product or service before they’re ready to even schedule a demo or take a call.

But relying only on last-click metrics can be costly. That is where Dark Impact comes in.

Dark Impact, Dark Funnel, and Dark Social are all concepts that describe the activities inside of the buyer’s journey that you can’t measure or account for. Specifically for the context of this blog, we’re describing how viewing an ad on Facebook then turns into a Google Search or a TikTok purchase.

Some examples of Dark Social activities are: 

• An exchange in the comment section of a Facebook post
• Asking your friend or colleague on LinkedIn for their opinion on an agency or analytics tool
• Doing a Google search after seeing an ad 
• Scrolling through TikTok product videos to learn more

These dark funnel activities don’t show up in analytics, yet they influence decisions constantly.

How to get “dark impact” data into your analytics tools

Dark Intent Metrics

When it comes to measuring dark impact, by definition, these metrics are a bit more elusive. They’re not readily available inside of a single analytics tool.

Still, there are a few metrics that you can look at to get an idea of how dark activities are impacting your marketing performance.

Branded Queries in Google Search Console

First, using Google Search Console you can visibly see awareness being created. Looking at the performance report, you can get an idea of what queries your website is showing up for organically. 

To get an idea of the dark impact on your website’s traffic, what you’ll want to do is benchmark how many impressions you were getting on branded queries prior to starting campaigns or making campaign changes.

From there, you can compare the number of impressions that you’ve received since the campaign went live. This will help you to see that more people are turning to Google to learn more about your brand.

Note: This is far from a perfect solution. It shows you the cumulative lift or decline but it doesn’t help you identify which channel or campaign specifically led to the change. There are ways you can isolate variables when using this particular measurement method to prove the effectiveness of top of funnel campaigns. 

When combined with more data though, the picture begins to gain some more fidelity.

GA4 Conversion Path

Another useful way to get an idea of the dark funnel your customers are following is to use the Conversion Path report in GA4. This report is also available in Universal Analytics but since Google is deprecating Universal Analytics in favor of GA4, we’ll focus on that.

Inside GA4, if you click the advertising tab on the left-hand side, you’ll arrive at an advertising snapshot. Underneath Attribution on the left, you can click conversion paths to see all of the touchpoints that are being used on the way to conversions on your website.

To get the “Dark Utility” from this report, you have to read between the lines a bit. This is a starting point for the exploration and not the destination.

I recommend changing your filtering from Default Channel Grouping to Campaign. This will allow you to identify how many campaigns users are touching before they’re ready to convert. Maybe the users visited 3 of your traffic campaigns and 1 Google Display before finally clicking a Google Search ad. 

If most of the converters happen from a single campaign touched, then congratulations you have an all-star. 

If though, most conversions happen from multiple touch points across multiple channels, this is an invitation to dive deeper. This signals that it took more coaxing before they were ready to convert, and there’s no reason to suspect that there wasn’t more influence here.

Meta “Go To Google” Metrics

One of the challenges of reporting with Meta and other DSPs is that each platform uses its own model for attribution. Many of these platforms include view-through conversions that don’t appear inside of Google Analytics. 

The most common attribution view in Meta is “7-day click or 1-day view”. This means that Meta measures conversions that happen within 7 days after a click on an ad or 1 day after you view it. 

This presents a challenge for marketing managers and directors that need to reconcile the data in their primary analytics tool with what their media buyers are reporting within the ad accounts.

Fortunately, the Meta Pixel collects all website traffic, not just traffic coming from Meta ads. This means that we can build custom audiences and filter where the traffic came from using both referring domains or UTMs contained in the individual URLs.

What are Meta “Go To Google” Metrics?

Using custom conversions inside of Facebook’s ads manager, we can build micro conversions that capture the number of people that view your Facebook ad, don’t click, and travel to your site via another channel.

As we’ve covered, tools like Google Analytics are really good at measuring Bottom Funnel campaigns because they are typically more measurable and direct. Where they leave a lot on the table, though, is in evaluating how ad impressions on one channel affect performance on another lower funnel channel.

There may be instances where a campaign doesn’t drive a high volume of clicks or last-click revenue, but that campaign is excellent at generating awareness and getting people to do a  Google search. 

Using more traditional methods of tracking saddles you with this blindspot. Using the “Go To Google” Metrics helps you see things that were previously hidden.

How to Track Facebook Impressions to High-Intent Google Searches

It’s actually pretty simple to build custom conversions in ads manager to measure the impact of dark social campaigns on Meta. It essentially entails two steps:

• Create custom conversions Inside of Facebook to Measure Traffic From other web sources
• Setup Your Facebook Columns so that you can see the results

Watch the video tutorial below to see how you build these custom conversions and bring the data into your Facebook columns to see results.

Translating dark social impact to leadership

What gets measured gets managed. The presumed certainty that derives from being able to see a clear and direct link between ad spend and revenue can be alluring for c-suite executives and board members. 

That’s why it is imperative that you understand the story so that you can paint the picture clearly for important stakeholders. The gift and the curse of performance marketing and demand generation efforts is that we have tidy metrics that make us feel like we can confidently tell a story. The problem is that that story is devoid of context without examining the impact of ad impressions and other hard-to-measure activities.

The ability to not only recognize the dark impact ,but also to be able to explain it, allows you to unlock control of a deeper more meaningful narrative. 

It allows you to justify continued investment in channels and campaigns that might not look as strong in Google Analytics. 

It helps to illustrate how one channel affects another one in your brand’s marketing ecosystem. 

It is for this reason that as you evaluate the effectiveness of your campaigns across stages of the marketing funnel, you spend some time looking at blended metrics like CPAs and CAC. Combining blended metrics, with dark funnel measurement will seat you in a position to make more intentional decisions.

The post How to Measure and Invest in “Dark Social” Campaigns appeared first on Tuff.

Attention, growth minded marketing leaders! As you look for ways to automate processes, increase campaign effectiveness, and scale your business, AI marketing tools should be at the top of your list. 

Why? AI tools supercharge efficiency. 

With AI, tedious and time-intensive tasks are automated or greatly sped up. The result? Teams have room to focus on strategy and big-picture tasks instead of being bogged down. 

Don’t just take our word for it. As Gartner CMO predictions hint, “ By 2025, organizations that use AI across the marketing function will shift 75% of their staff’s operations from production to more strategic activities. 

As a growth marketing agency, There’s a lot to be gained from integrating AI marketing tools into your marketing efforts. So scroll on to get acquainted with some of the top tools CMOs should know about. 

How Marketers Should Evaluate and Select AI Tools

We’ll dive into the helpful (and potentially game-changing) AI tools shortly. But, allow us a moment to discuss proper tool selection. After all, there’s no shortage of AI tools on the market. And with the arrival of ChatGPT and the ensuing buzz among marketers, the tool options are only growing. 

How do you sift through the noise? 

Use these steps to find tools that align with business goals, budget, and team structure. 

Establish Clear Goals

Before stepping foot into the vast marketplace of AI marketing tools, define your business goal. Are you hoping to:

• Improve customer engagement?
• Optimize a process?
• Increase content output?
• Automate repetitive tasks?

Once you know exactly what problem you need solved, the range of options shrinks from overwhelming to more manageable. For example, say a head of growth wants to increase content production efficiency and sets a goal of reducing the time it takes to create and publish content by 30%. In light of this, turning to tools that center on: 

• Content editing 
• Content scheduling 
• Content optimization

While knowing the goal is crucial,  there’s still more to consider. 

Research Available  Integrations

AI tools should make your life easier. So it’s crucial to evaluate one based on how it would fit into You deserve an AI tool that plays well with others 🤝. 

If there are certain tools your team uses and relies on heavily,  ensure your potential AI marketing tools can integrate with them. For example, if you already rely on a marketing automation platform like Marketo, you could start your search by looking for tools that have direct integrations with Marekto. Ask things like: 

• Are there costs attached to integrating the tool with our systems? 
• Are there APIs or webhooks available for custom integrations?
• How well does the tool’s API integrate with our current tools?

Ease of integration is another metric you can use when evaluating tools. White some tools are out of the box integrations, others may demand technical work to fully integrate. So determine what resources your team can set aside for integration and decide accordingly. 

Consider The Learning Curve

A lot of AI marketing tools boast ease of use and intuitive platforms. But it’s still essential to determine how steep the learning curve for the tool will be. Look to the tool to see if onboarding materials are provided and whether there is a support system for troubleshooting in case problems arise 🤖. 

Here are a few handy questions to keep in mind when evaluating AI tools: 

• Can this AI tool be used by marketers without extensive technical knowledge? 
• What type of technical support is offered and how quickly can issues be resolved?
• How much time is required to integrate the tool into existing workflows?
  

Evaluate Scalability 

Your business (and your tech stack) will continue to evolve. For this reason, keep an eye on the future 🔮as you evaluate AI marketing tools. Consider the tools in light of long-term plans and decide whether they are built to scale. Ask questions like:

• Is this tool built to handle large amounts of data as our customer base grows?
• Does the tool offer enough flexibility to work with new channels we’re planning to integrate with in the future? 
• Are there customization options and features that can change as our business needs change?

10 AI Marketing Tools For Growth Minded Marketers

What time is it? Tool time!

Whether you want to create hyper-personalized customer experiences, turn tedious tasks into automated ones, help scale content production, or all of the above, the AI tools on this list can help. 

AI Marketing Tools for Personalization

Dynamic Yield 

It’s no secret that data is a marketer’s best friend. Dynamic Yield analyzes it in real-time using machine learning algorithms and then serves up personalized customer experiences. 

What it is: A self-training AI-powered system that determines buyer intent from customer data. It delivers tailored experiences across channels including web, mobile, and mobile apps. So based on their past behavior, preferences, and purchase history, a customer will receive specific content and product recommendations.  

Noteworthy feature: In addition to delivering hyper-personalized content, Dynamic Yield offers ReccomendML. This feature utilizes a deep-learning model to rapidly analyze large amounts of data and recommend ideal products to users. 

Integrations:  Dynamic Yield labels itself as platform agnostic, promising to integrate easily with your existing tech stack. The open API makes for seamless integrations with popular tools including GoogleAds, Klaviyo, Magento, and Mailchimp. 

Nosto

Designed with e-commerce companies in mind, Nosto puts machine learning algorithms to use, drilling into customer behavior to provide personalized digital experiences. The platform makes launching integrated experiences both quick and easy, no drawn out implementation needed.

What it is: An AI tool that optimizes that allows marketing teams to quickly segment audiences, A/B test for optimizations, and curate personalized shopping journeys based on actionable data. Unlike Dynamic Yield, it’s specifically designed for ecommerce and is known for its ease of use. 

Noteworthy feature: Nosto offers omnichannel integration so brands can deliver tailored experiences via email, mobile and even in-store. Users enjoy the platform’s dynamic bundles feature which is designed to make upsell and cross sell actions seamless, increasing AOV. 

Integrations: Integration headaches? Not with Nosto. It integrates well with a large list of e-commerce tools: BigCommerce, Magento, and Shopify to name a few. Plus,  the tool prides itself on  “ easy migration, risk-free deployment and fast time-to-market”. 

Natural Language Processing (NLP) Tools 

Drift

For a chatbot that doesn’t feel like a bot, look to Drift. The custom chatbot software offers engaging messages to site visitors and works to qualify leads, moving them along the pipeline. 

What it is: Drift is a conversational AI chatbot that can understand and interact with customers in real time. It utilizes natural language processing (NLP) to deliver custom responses and understand user intent. The result is more tailored conversations and better user experiences. 

Noteworthy feature: When it comes to this AI chatbot, use cases abound for sales and marketing teams. The ABM campaign capabilities, for instance,  allow marketing teams to target important accounts and decision makers with well-timed and specific content. Generic messages, be damned. The tool also offers granular reporting so CMOs can track key metrics. 

Integrations: There are multiple ways to integrate your tech stack with Drift. The platform’s integration directory involves the usual suspects  like Salesforce, Clearbit, and Salesloft. But Drift 🤝Zapier work hand in hand, allowing users to connect with thousands of apps.

MonkeyLearn

Making sense of unstructured data just got easier. MonkeyLearn can take in large amounts of customer feedback then analyze and classify it to provide insights into customer sentiment, highlight trends, and more. 

What it is: MonkeyLearn is an NLP tool that automates text analysis processes with the help of machine learning models. It offers all in one text analysis of customer reviews, social media comments, and other feedback. You upload the data, MonkeyLearn provides the visualizations and actionable insights.  

Noteworthy feature: Users can view customer feedback in one central location and have access to pre-built machine learning models for fast analysis. Want a more custom approach? MonkeyLearn offers a no code option for building and training custom machine learning models.

Integrations: MonkeyLearn integrates with many tools from customer service tools like Zendesk and HelpScot to survey platforms like Typeform and Qualtrics. If you don’t see your preferred tool in the integration library, don’t worry. MonkeyLearn offers more through Zapier. 

Marketing Automation

Gong

What if you could glean more value from customer communications while reducing manual tasks? Gong automates the process of capturing and analyzing sales conversations. It then offers up valuable insights to improve the sales process. 

What it is: Gong is a self-proclaimed “revenue intelligence platform” that takes in communication data (phone calls, emails, CRM information, etc) and produces actionable insights for sales and marketing teams. This close up visibility into the sales process allows for targeted message creation and enhances cross functional communication between sales and marketing teams.

Noteworthy feature: Gong’s competitive intelligence feature delivers a look into how your brand is performing against industry benchmarks. Armed with actionable insights and a deeper understanding of the competitive landscape, marketers can optimize strategies with confidence, 

Integrations: For workflow automation, Gong integrates with Momentum, Zapier, Workato, and more. The NLP AI tool also integrates with more common tech stack staples like Hubspot Office 365.

Optimove

On the lookout for AI-powered email marketing assistance? Optimove can lend a (machine-learning informed) hand. From email data segmentation to campaign management, this tool automates a range of tasks and provides helpful insights to boot. 

What it is: A customer-retention focused email personalization tool that uses machine learning and predictive analytics to anticipate customer intent. It then tailors messages, offers optimization recommendations, and can send automatic, tailored emails to customers at the ideal time. 

Noteworthy feature: Optimove users enjoy the increased email relevance that has led to results like lower acquisition costs and increased revenue. With this AI email marketing tool, marketers have the ability to set up automatic trigger-based campaigns that are tied to specific customer actions like site visits or email opens. 

Integrations: Optimove’s partner directory includes a range of well-known marketing tools like Salesforce, Magento, and Domo. The robust integration options make it simple for teams to sync data across multiple channels. 

Customer Segmentation

CustomerLabs

If your AI marketing tool box is lacking a customer profiling tool, take a look at CustomerLabs. The tool promises to “collect, unify, segment and activate customer data across different marketing tools” , all on a no-code platform designed with SMBs in mind. 

What it is: CustomerLabs is a customer data platform that offers segmentation and personalization capabilities for more targeted messaging. It allows marketers to segment audiences based on various parameters such as demographics, behavior, interests, and preferences. The tool offers solutions for e-commerce, SaaS, B2B and B2C firms, allowing marketers to access and combine data into unified customer profiles

Noteworthy feature: CustomerLabs places a large focus on unifying data for a single source of truth. The CDP can consolidate customer data from multiple sources and then craft niche segments for optimized targeting.

Integrations: Because CustomerLabs emphasizes syncing data from multiple marketing tools, they offer a healthy array of integrations. These include Salesforce, Pipedrive, Google Analytics, and Intercom, among others. 

Blueshift

To create targeted messaging that resonates with your audience, accurate segmentation is a must. Blueshift is a cross-channel customer data platform that creates easily accessible customer segments. Marketing teams can reap the benefits of this AI-powered platform  in the form of increased CTRs and conversion rates.  

What it is: Blueshift is a powerhouse of an AI marketing tool that analyzes customer behavior and segments users accordingly. Then, the platform offers data around the needs and preferences of unique segments. Marketers can utilize this data to create well-tailored campaigns for specific segments. 

Noteworthy feature: Accuracy and speed combine in Blueshift’s segmentation capabilities. That’s due to the fact that segments automatically update based on new inflows of data. The tool then “indexes the data about your customer to enable complex segments to run really fast”. In short, predictive segmentation is engrained in the tool so marketing teams can leverage it continuously. 

Integrations: There’s no shortage of integrations in Blueshift’s partner directory. The directory splits available integrations into categories based on functions like advertising, audience management, and analytics. GoogleAds, Magento, Shopify, Slack and a myriad of other tools are available.

Content Production 

If having a streamlined content workflow all in one place sounds like a dream come true, check out Narratto. This speed-enhancing AI marketing tool is built to enhance quality as well as improve efficiency.  That way,  teams can scale content without sacrificing quality.  

Anyword 

Creating high-performing copy for blogs, landing pages, and emails is no easy feat. And doing it at scale adds another challenge. Anyword is an AI marketing tool that content teams can use to quickly compose content that aligns with goals, no guesswork needed,

What it is: A data-driven AI writing assistant that both generates and optimizes content. How? By utilizing data from customer interactions and past marketing campaigns, Anyword can create copy that resonates with the intended audience. The end result is content that converts. 

Noteworthy feature: Anyword levels up content creation along the ideation, writing, and editing phases. In the writing process, the tool offers real-time assistance focused on meeting content goals specified by the team. For optimization, it analyzes past content performance to make data-informed recommendations for improving new pieces of content. 

Integrations: Unlike many AI marketing tools that include integration directories, Anyword doesn’t offer much in the way of information on this front. If you’re looking into the platform, be sure to research specific integration options for tools that matter most to your team. 

Naratto 

What it is: There are a lot of moving parts when it comes to quality content creation. Naratto is an AI-powered platform that brings all the steps together in one place to optimize content production for teams big and small. The built in AI content assistant generates ideas and outlines while the 

Noteworthy feature: Seamless project management and collaboration are helpful facets of this AI tool. The overall draw is the comprehensive nature of the platform. From content strategy to brief creation to publishing, users can leverage Naratto every step of the way.

Integrations: Unlike many AI tools, Naratto doesn’t showcase integration capabilities on its site. However, Zapier does showcase Naratto integrations featuring an array of common tech stack tools. 

Level Up Your Marketing Efforts with AI

There you have it! Ten AI-powered platforms built with marketers in mind. Now that you’ve got the low-down on some stellar AI marketing tools, it’s time to harness their power. Use them to supercharge efficiency and free up your team to focus on meaningful moves that push your business forward.

The post 10 Data-Driven AI Tools to Streamline Your Marketing Efforts appeared first on Tuff.

While we all love the powerful returns that we get from retention and bottom-funnel initiatives, best-in-class brands are well aware that attracting new customers is crucial to a business’ long-term growth and success. To do that, you need effective top of funnel paid media campaigns. But how do you properly gauge the success of these campaigns? How do you stomach allocating budget to these lower ROAS campaigns when others are printing money for you? In this blog post, we’ll explore how as a growth marketing agency we approach effectively measuring top of funnel campaigns for our partners, giving you the insights you need to optimize your marketing efforts and drive growth for your business. 

The Role Of Top of Funnel Campaigns

First, let’s talk about what we can and cannot expect from top-of-funnel (TOFU) campaigns. 

We CAN expect:

• Reach
• Users’ first touchpoints with your brand
• Brand lift
• Low engagement, low CTR

We CANNOT expect:

• High ROAS
• High CTR
• Low cost-per-conversion

While we can’t expect a great return from TOFU campaigns, the fact is, your more profitable campaigns (branded, retargeting, etc.) are never going to grow if you’re not nurturing a larger audience for them. 

Typically bottom-funnel campaigns are meant to capture demand, instead of generating it. 

That’s where TOFU campaigns come in, but they come at a price. That price is a shift in thinking. Where you ditch the channel-specific attribution methodologies we all know and (sometimes) love, and commit to leaning on channel agnostic marketing metrics like total revenue, total lead volume, and blended CPL and blended CAC. If you measure the success of brand awareness campaigns based on ROI, the results will say the campaigns are tanking. But in reality, you’re building newly generated demand so you can scale your most profitable campaigns. 

All this is to say, measuring your ROAS for TOFU campaigns isn’t gauging the success of what those campaigns are really designed to do. Your TOFU campaigns are there to give your more profitable campaigns a larger user base to work with. Let’s talk about how we can successfully measure your top of funnel campaigns next. 

Three Methods Of Measuring TOFU Success

Brand Lift

We’re marketers, which means we have approximately 1,846 ways to say the same thing. TOFU is often synonymous with “brand awareness” and reach campaigns when you’re actually building them out in ad channels. While ROAS shouldn’t be your top concern with an awareness campaign, there are important campaign metrics to monitor to prevent wasting ad spend on meaningless impressions. 

There are two ways to measure brand lift: conducting a brand lift study or analyzing trends in branded search and direct traffic that correlate with when you ran a brand awareness campaign. We’re going to dig into the latter.

To monitor your brand lift, take note of when your TOFU campaign launched, and look at how branded search traffic (both paid and organic) fluctuated in the time your TOFU campaign has been running compared to the previous time period. 

It should be noted that in order to attribute brand lift to your TOFU campaign, there needs to be minimal other variables that might be influencing your brand traffic. Try to maintain your TOFU campaign as an independent variable when using this tactic. 

Geo-Testing

While brand awareness is great, the real reason you run a TOFU campaign is for those new impressions to actually turn into customers. However, the amount of touchpoints involved in a transaction or even lead submission make it difficult to discern just how much of an impact your TOFU campaign is having on your bottom line. 

To truly identify the potency of your campaign in a vacuum, consider running a geo-test. This method involves only running your TOFU campaign in a select market over a given period of time. Ideally all other elements of your marketing are equal, and your TOFU campaign is the one independent variable that is different about this particular market. From there, simply look at sales and lead fluctuations in that one market versus everywhere else. 

Let’s say you typically market to all of North America. But you’re eager to see how your TOFU Meta Ads campaign is doing, so you run a geo-test in Arizona for one month. It’s business as usual everywhere, except in Arizona, where you’re flooding Facebook & Instagram with prospecting ads to users who have never heard of your brand. At the end of that month, let’s say revenue is pretty flat month-over-month across all of North America, but in Arizona you saw a 20% increase in revenue month-over-month. If you’ve truly isolated your TOFU campaign as your independent variable, you can feel pretty confident that your TOFU campaigns are able to push revenue by around 20%. 

This method isn’t perfect, as you may see swings in conversion rates across different markets. Even so, it gives you a great sense of top-to-bottom just how effective your TOFU campaign is at generating new customers.

Attribution Models/Conversion Paths in GA4

Don’t be afraid to leverage GA4 in your efforts to understand your TOFU campaign. Within the “Advertising” section, you’ll find the “Attribution” drop down which produces two very valuable reports for making sense of your TOFU efforts: the “model comparison” and “conversion paths” reports.

Let’s start with “model comparison” and chat quickly about conversion attribution models. “Last click” used to rule the reporting world, but with more and more touch points showing up in customer journeys, it’s vital that marketers adapt how campaigns are analyzed. Within GA4, there are many more options than just “last click”. You now can easily toggle between first click, linear, position-based, and time decay. 

Your TOFU campaigns are most likely going to be the first touchpoint a user has with your brand. If you want to cut through the clutter and just see how many sales/leads derived from your TOFU campaign acting as the first touchpoint, simply reference this report and toggle your attribution model to “first click” and look for your campaign.

While you’re at it, you might as well look at the other attribution models too and get a sense of how the metrics change between models. 

The other valuable report here is the “top conversion paths” report which shows you the precise touchpoints of a given user’s customer journey:

Not only can you get a sense of the numerical value of your TOFU campaigns, but you also get a real look at what sequences are the most successful with all your given touchpoints. “Top conversion paths” is a vital tool to understand where users are going after they interact with your TOFU campaign. It allows you to calibrate your messaging and prime them for future engagement with other ads, pieces of content, emails, etc. 

GA4 has a lot to offer in terms of putting your TOFU campaigns under a microscope. However, you need to make sure you’ve set up your account properly in order to get these reports to work. 

Get Started Measuring Top of Funnel Campaigns

You now have three methods to give you a better understanding of how well your TOFU campaigns are supporting your business. While these campaigns aren’t meant to produce a clean ROAS directly, they still need to be supporting your bottom line. Don’t let the extra steps stop you from getting to the bottom of your performance. Knowing how to harness your top-of-funnel campaigns is what separates the best-in-class brands from the rest of the pack!

The post Proven Methods for Measuring the Success of Top of Funnel Campaigns appeared first on Tuff.

Marketing teams are constantly searching for innovative ways to streamline processes, optimize campaigns, and drive business growth.

Well, what if I told you there was a way to do all of that?

Please welcome, 🥁ChatGPT and the AI Revolution! 💥

As a growth marketer, ChatGPT is an incredibly powerful tool that you can use to help drive engagement and conversions. By crafting the right prompts, you can create personalized experiences that speak directly to your target audience. 

In this post, we’ll explore the art of crafting effective prompts and walk you through tips and best practices for writing prompts that will help you take your growth marketing strategy to the next level.

Importance of crafting thoughtful prompts

In the age of AI-powered marketing, crafting thoughtful and precise prompts is critical to unlocking the full potential of generative AI tools. 🤖As growth marketers, it’s important to remember that AI is the doer, not the thinker. 💡Our role is to be the strategic masterminds, guiding the AI with well-constructed prompts to help us streamline processes, optimize strategies, and achieve growth goals.

AI is the doer, not the thinker.

The importance of prompt writing has become so apparent that companies are now hiring dedicated ‘AI prompt engineers’ and offering up to $335,000 a year. 💰💻

To write an expert prompt, start by being clear and specific about your intentions. Remember that AI will do what you want it to do, as long as you explain it thoroughly and accurately. Avoid using ambiguous language or overloading the prompt with unnecessary details, which can lead to confusion and subpar results. 😕 Instead, focus on providing concise and direct instructions to maximize the AI’s ability to understand and execute the task.

Ultimately, the success of AI-driven growth marketing strategies hinges on the collaboration between humans and machines 💻🤝 – sounds like we’re in a Sci-Fi movie, right? We’re certainly getting closer… 

Let’s dig into certain types of prompts and how you can interact with generative AI.

Open-ended vs close-ended prompts

Open-ended prompts encourage more creative and extensive responses, while closed-ended prompts typically yield brief, specific answers. Choose the type of prompt based on your desired output.

Example:

Open-ended prompt

“Can you suggest some ways to improve our marketing strategy?”

Assuming you’ve provided detailed specifics on your marketing strategy prior to asking this question. 

This prompt encourages ChatGPT to generate its own thoughts and ideas on how to improve the marketing strategy without limiting it to a specific set of options or ideas. The response may be more varied and generate broad suggestions that may or may not be what you’re looking for.

Closed-ended prompt

“Which social media platform is the most effective for reaching a younger audience?”

This prompt provides a specific set of options for ChatGPT to choose from and limits the response to one choice. This type of prompt is useful when seeking specific information or opinions, but may not provide as much insight or variety in responses compared to open-ended prompts.

Role-based Priming

Define a specific role for ChatGPT to adopt during the conversation.

If you leave this up to chance, the AI will make too many assumptions.

e.g. “You are a world-class software developer.”

By tailoring prompts to my specific role, ChatGPT can provide more relevant and accurate responses. This approach helps to ensure that the conversation stays focused on my needs and interests, ultimately leading to more productive and effective interactions.

Knowledge & Task-based Priming

Specify the knowledge level or expertise you expect from ChatGPT. As you can see in the example prompt above, I specifically asked for beginner-friendly, step-by-step instructions. I combined knowledge and task-based priming by asking for specific tasks – the names of the files, which files to paste which code into, and how to export and upload the code into WordPress.

I’ve defined AI as the world-class expert and me as the beginner. The roles and tasks are very clear and as things progress and I start to ask more questions, the AI will remember its role as well as mine. 

Utilizing personas in prompts

Defining a Persona. Provide a specific persona to ChatGPT to enhance the conversation’s depth and consistency.

Persona: 🙋Jennifer, a 35-year-old marketing manager at a B2B SaaS company.

Prompt: As a marketing manager for a B2B SaaS company, Jennifer needs to generate high-quality leads for the sales team. Can you suggest some strategies that are effective for reaching decision-makers in the tech industry, particularly those who are actively researching solutions in our market?

In this prompt, the persona “Jennifer” is clearly defined by her role, company, and target audience. The prompt is specific to the challenges she faces and the desired outcome, which is to generate high-quality leads. By utilizing this persona and providing specific context, ChatGPT can generate more relevant and effective strategies for Jennifer’s specific situation, leading to a more productive and valuable conversation.

Segment your asks

Most requests in ChatGPT fall into 1 of 3 buckets:

• Research
• Creation
• Improvement

Research prompts can have less context.

Creation prompts need the most context.

Improvement prompts require the most back and forth.

Break your request into smaller parts

If you ask for a whole blog post at once, it won’t be as good.

If you break the request into parts, you can get great content.

A good rule of thumb?

Ask for a max of 150 words at a time.

Make AI ask you the questions

Maybe the most underrated tip here.

If you’re stuck or want to look at a problem from different angles…

Make AI think of all the angles for you.

Working from a list of questions helps you generate more ideas yourself.

Reference books or well-known marketing frameworks and tell it what to avoid

Priming ChatGPT with references to reputable sources or well-known marketing frameworks can significantly enhance the quality and relevance of its output because you’re guiding it to generate insights that align with established theories and strategies.

Fun fact. When one of our SEO strategists thought that the invoice from their CPA was unreasonably expensive, they asked ChatGPT to write an email using principles from “How to Win Friends & Influence People” and they were able to get a reduced fee! 🫰

Go heavy on context

Bad prompt, bad result.

Simple as that.

The more context you give, the better your responses will be.

Trying giving basic context like:

• Tone
• Length
• Target audience
• Desired outcome
• Where the content will go

Build this all into a repeatable template

The last step is to bring it all together and build a repeatable template that you can use time and time again. 🔁

Creating a repeatable template with these suggestions streamlines the interaction process, ensures consistent, high-quality results, and saves you time on future tasks.

Key Takeaways

Leveraging ChatGPT’s full potential requires thoughtful and strategic interactions. 

Use effective prompts that are explicit, concise, and specify the desired output format. Priming AI with context, such as “You are a world-class content marketer,” can guide responses toward a desired expertise. 

Employing personas can further refine AI-generated content by instructing it to emulate a specific tone or style, for example, “You are an enthusiastic fitness coach.” 

By mastering these techniques and continuously refining your approach, you can significantly streamline marketing processes, optimize campaigns, and drive business growth. 

Derek Coleman

Derek is a digital marketer based in Boston, Massachusetts with almost a decade of hands-on SEO experience. He finds it meaningful, challenging, and exciting to develop, test, and implement new SEO strategies. When he’s not auditing websites and optimizing content he’s usually backpacking and exploring new cultures.

The post Level up your growth marketing strategies with ChatGPT: how to write AI prompts to get the best results appeared first on Tuff.