If you find the marketing tool market overwhelming, let me assure you that you’re not alone.

In a recent Marketing Fix newsletter issue, I wrote about the Era of Subscriptions and how I realised that my annual marketing tools budget is ca $6,000. Ugh!

I figured it might be helpful to share my marketing tool stack with other practitioners, too.

Perhaps, this expert-tested and carefully curated collection will help you find your next virtual helper – and save you many hours.

Below, you can find my go-to tools and software in 5 categories:

1. Marketing tools for ideation, copywriting, and visuals
2. Social media and email marketing tools
3. Web design, optimisation, and SEO software
4. Tools for creating courses, workshops, and videos
5. Productivity and time tracking apps

But first, I’ve included some thoughts on the subscriptions industry, as well as recommendations on how to select the best marketing tools for your project.

If you’re looking for the list of tools, scroll right down.

Welcome to the Era of Subscriptions, A.K.A. order a puppy for 5 hours

Early 2020s. The main subscription-based articles in our lives are SaaS tools and gym memberships.

Year 2025. Most of us are signed up for 20+ subscriptions. 

“No way, the number can’t be that high,” you say?

Now consider your recurring payments to mobile apps, newsletters, video streaming, music, news, magazines, podcasts, groceries, coffee, Amazon Prime, health & beauty products, gym & classes.

The greatest evil must be Apple’s iCloud Storage, designed to grow YoY.

Name one thing that can’t be found in subscription format.

Animals? Wrong!

How did we end up in a world where even toothpaste is subscriptionised?

Over the past 5 years, the subscription economy has been fuelled by many things, among them Covid-induced laziness of the Western urban population and laws allowing marketplaces to elude social taxes of precarious workers.

No small role was also played by the tech investors dreaming of hockey-stick growth charts of ARR.

The best way to procure the ARR as a brand with a physical consumer product? Introduce monthly subscriptions.

Welcome to the Era of Subscriptions.

Annual subscription fee: $7,600+

Having recently adopted many new productivity and marketing tools (free + paid), I was curious to see how much the invoices in my inbox and bank account add up to.

I found a sleek (and free) Subscriptions Tracker template on Notion Marketplace and entered all my expenses under 7 categories.

​

Work & Marketing software:

• Ideation, copywriting, and visuals
• Social media and email marketing
• Web design, optimisation, and SEO
• Courses, workshops, and videos
• Productivity and time tracking

Lifestyle & intellectual interests:

• Productivity & task management
• Lifestyle, health, and arts

Monthly spend: €618

My initial reaction was a big “Ughhh!”

I knew there were a few expensive marketing tools there, but I wasn’t expecting the total sum to be this much.

Alright, it’s not that bad, I thought, when looking at the per-month aggregate.

But then I switched the chart input to calculate the yearly budget…

Annual spend: €7,429

​

​

The resulting sum is, frankly, horrifying

How on earth!?

And I don’t even subscribe to food delivery or streaming services…!

You’ll find the full list of my subscription expenses below.

But first, a bit of life philosophy.

How much is too much to pay for marketing tools?

After overcoming the initial mini-shock, I went deeper and considered what value each tool adds to my work and life:

• Enabling work projects
• Increasing productivity
• Improving daily life

And so on…

If you’re planning to do the same exercise, here are 3 POWs that might be helpful.

1) Pragmatic: cost / value

Am I making more money thanks to a tool than I spend on it?

2) Productive: cost / time

Saving money feels great, but isn’t your saved time even more valuable?

3) Emotional: cost / happiness

Is the subscription making a significant improvement to your quality of life?

Cheap = expensive

These days, ever more distractions compete for our 16 hours of daily waking time.

There also seems to be more worthwhile projects these days, compared to 10 years ago.

In personal life, this means more friends to catch up with, events to socialise at, articles and books to read, recipes to try, cities to (re)visit, exhibitions to see, barre classes to attend, cafes to linger at, and moments to capture and share.

On the work side, I’m a freelance marketing consultant who also maintains a blog, newsletter, and creates marketing courses.

I wince at the thought of all the hours I’ve spent on LinkedIn to build new connections, write and design posts, and keep in touch with colleagues and clients.

Don’t even mention Instagram…

Saving money feels great until you realise your time is even more valuable.

When selecting the tools for my work, I’d rather spend a bit more to get the industry’s best.

Going with a cheaper option might save you €/$/£100 here and there.

But product limitations (fewer features, low-quality design) + the extra time spent are simply not worth it.

As to productivity and lifestyle subscriptions, some save you time while others, in fact, waste it.

Ask yourself whether that Netflix subscription is actually making you happier – or smarter…

Ok, let’s return the focus on marketing software now.

Investing in tools = investing in growth

Over the past 6 months, I’ve spent ca €2,500 on:

• Marketing and productivity software
• Substack newsletters
• Marketing & design templates

The sum seems rather exuberant in retrospect.

And yet, there’s no other way I could have delivered all my projects without this investment.

Perhaps, I could have chosen a cheaper blog theme than Blocksy Pro (€289/lifetime). Or a cheaper course platform than Kajabi (€209/month). Or used Mac’s free screenshot tool instead of Cleanshot ($29/lifetime).

Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps, I would have saved ca €500.

Certainly, I would have paid in tens (if not 100+) of extra hours, lower-quality branding, and the resulting lost opportunities.
​

Do I regret spending a little fortune on software & tools in 6 months?

No, the investment has well paid off.

I’m even considering getting two extra tools: 🐒

• Superhuman to declutter (and de-stress) my inbox experience, flooded with too many newsletters
• Notion Pro for better LinkedIn giveaways & course resource management

In order to make money, you need to spend money

I was reminded of this point of view last weekend, while weeding my garden.

I was listening to a recent Delivering Value podcast episode with Maja Voje.

She said that it took her years to realise: “In order to make money, you need to spend money.”

The logic rings more true than ever.

Over the past 6 months, I have…

• Worked on two long-term marketing consulting projects
• Wrote a 360-degree marketing audit for three companies
• Rebranded my newsletter to a new strategic focus and design
• Switched my blog theme and redesigned most of it
• Created and launched my first-ever marketing course
• Grew my LinkedIn account to 13k+ followers with 2-3 posts/week

​
​The list is not a complaint. Nor is it a boast.

We all have to work, and many of us enjoy the process.

I love learning new skills; I thrive when (self-)challenged.

The list is the key reason why I looked up and tested tens of new marketing tools and began paying for several of them.

I also made several one-off purchases of other marketing experts’ resources (like Maja’s GTM Checklist) to improve my skill set faster. (These are not included in the Notion doc.)

Below, you can see the full list of the paid and free tools that I use in my marketing projects and personal life – my Mary Poppins bag of marketing tools.

My Mary Poppins bag of marketing tools

First, an important clarification…

The Mary Poppins “purse” is a model of the ’60s carpet bag.

Among other paraphernalia, it contained a hat stand, a mirror, a houseplant, and a floor lamp.

Thx God the marketing tools are virtual. The only thing they weigh down is one’s bank account balance.

All the marketing and productivity tools mentioned are ones that I currently use or have used for some client projects.

I hands-down recommend them all.

Without further ado, here they are.

1. Marketing tools for ideation, copywriting, and visuals

​Figma PRO: Design for website, ad creatives, social media posts, newsletter, etc.

​Canva: Design tool for marketers who haven’t yet learned to use Figma

​Adobe Firefly: AI-generated images, e.g the featured images in this blog

​Adobe Express: Editing images, e.g. removing background and changing size

​Grammarly: Checking spelling mistakes in my Google Docs, newsletter, social posts

​CleanShot: Taking high-quality screenshots and adding special edits + recording GIFs

​ChatGPT: Researching ideas and topics, getting copywriting angles (never the full text)

​Miro: Workshops and brainstorming for consulting projects

2. Social media and email marketing tools

​KIT: My go-to newsletter marketing tool for Marketing Fix

​Sparkloop: Newsletter referrals for Marketing Fix

​Taplio: The very best LinkedIn tool for analytics and content generation

​Texts: Mac desktop app that consolidates all your messages, e.g. from LinkedIn and Instagram

​Octopus CRM: My go-to tool for growing LinkedIn follower base with automated invitations and welcome messages

​Instantly: The best sender domain warmup tool to ensure your emails land in the Inbox

3. Web design, optimisation, and SEO software

​Blocksy PRO: Super flexible & high-quality WordPress theme used for this blog

​Wisepops: Hands down the most flexible and good-looking pop-up tool

​Lasso: Website add-on for beautiful product offer layouts

​Wappalyzer: Browser extension that shows all the tools and pixels on any website

​Moz: Top SEO tool, I use their free browser extension for optimisation & research

​SemRush: Top SEO & PPC tool, I use the free version extension for research

​SimilarWeb: Web and SEO analysis tool, I use it for site traffic analysis

4. Tools for creating courses, workshops, videos

​Kajabi: All-in-one course management platform, best in the industry

​Tally: Typeform-style tool for collecting user feedback and doing website surveys

​Senja: The very best tool for collecting and showcasing testimonials

​Typeform: Top website form tool with lots of features and layouts

5. Productivity and time tracking apps

​Calendly: Meeting scheduling

​Teamweek: Now Toggl Plan, I’ve used it for task management for 5+ years

​Toggl: Time tracking for freelance projects and every other work-related task

​Notion PRO: Project management and documentation + content management

​Slack: Better turn your phone notifications off

​Evernote: Desktop app that I use for note-taking and drafting texts

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Et voilà, this was my list of marketing tools and software that I use daily.

The awful – or good – thing is that looking at this list, there’s nothing I’d willingly give up.

And yet, I’m going to play Easter Egg hunt this weekend and hide some of those from my bank account for good.

This time, too much is too much.

Wondering what to do next?

Get bi-weekly marketing and growth advice by joining 15k+ marketers in the Marketing Fix newsletter community.

Recommended articles for further reading:

• The very best marketing newsletters in 2025
• 105+ LinkedIn ad examples from top B2B brands
• My 55+ predictions for 2025 marketing trends

The post The Marketing Tools That I Use Every Single Week appeared first on Marketing Fix blog.

This article is based on a keynote titled 5 Mistakes and Cures for Low-traction Startups that I presented at the Growth Marketing Summit in August 2022.

The room was packed with marketers. The screen was lit up with stupid (or, arguably, lovely) cat and raccoon GIFs. The air was filled with painful truths and aha-moments.

Essentially, everyone had gathered to find the answer to a burning question, albeit simplified: 

Are we making any mistakes in our marketing, brand, or product strategy? And how to fix it? 

Are you spending your marketing $$$ the right way or throwing them straight in flames? 💸🔥🚒

How I imagine the CMOs and CEOs must feel…

Taking a step further, it’s important to realize that marketing, brand, and product are intertwined. You can’t grow if one key aspect of your company is dysfunctional.

So instead of focusing on tiny mistakes like using on the wrong Facebook ad campaign structure or missing out on email marketing automation, I asked everyone to take the macro-level view.

Zoom out of your everyday work and consider your company from the birds-eye level.

Now, you’ll begin to notice the actual problems. And once you see them, you’ll be able to fix them.

But before we jump to the TOP 5 mistakes of low-traction businesses, I suppose I should briefly comment on why I am even the right person to talk about this topic…

20+ Marketing audits later…

For the past 1.5 years I’ve been freelancing as a marketing consultant, working with both B2C and B2B brands.

I’ve had the opportunity to speak to 60+ businesses and work with 20+ of them.

My favorite marketing collabs

Quite often, I begin a new marketing consultation project with a 360-degree marketing audit.

What is a marketing audit?

Read more: 80 Marketing Audit Questions – Free Checklist

The goal of a marketing audit is to understand how the company is doing in all aspects and channels of marketing and growth. 

It might also arise from burning questions like: 

“Marketing isn’t working. What are we doing wrong?”

Or…

“Are we using the full potential of all marketing channels?”

To compile a marketing audit, I request access to the company’s marketing reports, ad accounts, etc. I always set up calls with relevant team members to get their insights.

Once I have all the requested information, I’ll get to work…

Ultra busy checking ad accounts…

It usually takes ca 1.5 weeks to compile a marketing audit…

Typing down the 100th recommendation

In the end, I and my client end up with 60-70 pages’ worth of a Google Doc. It includes an overview of all the marketing channels. 

I also look into the onboarding process and product retention as it’s just as important a contributor to a company’s growth as new user acquisition. 

Below is a quick overview of the marketing audit sections that I generally cover.

Marketing audits cover more than just paid ads

In regards to each of the above topics, I share my advice on: 

🔍 The current state

🔍 Opportunities

🔍 Suggestions

We then meet with the marketing team – often the CEO joins as well – and discuss the key takeaways and, most importantly, how to go forward.

💫 Goals

💫 Action plan

💫 Work

As a result of a marketing audit, the company will have a clear understanding of how each of their marketing teams/channels/actions performs and how to improve it.

Now the real work begins!

Alright, sounds sort of legit… 

But what are the BIGGEST mistakes and priorities?

Let’s get right down to it!

Read more: 55+ Marketing Trends for 2025

🔥 Mistake #1: No clear goals

The first things in a marketing audit that I check are the company’s marketing KPI and growth reports.

I mean… 80% of the time I don’t check them as they do not exist. Rather, what’s been happening is the CEO or CMO saying:

“Let’s run some ads and find out who our customer is.”

 Or…

“We’ll find out the ROI and CPA once we start with marketing.”

Um… No you don’t!

You (the CEO or CMO in this case) should know the company’s growth forecast for the next 6-12 months. 

You should know where that growth is supposed to come from. And at what CPA, ROI, and payback period. How else do you intend to ever make your startup or early-stage business profitable?

Without clear growth goals, there won’t be a clear action plan.

The best a marketing team can do at such poorly-guided companies is to try to get “some” results. Without a long-term vision, this tends to result in wasting time on poor-quality social media posts or blog articles that nobody will actually read. 

Working 9 to 5… 🎵🎵🎵

Doing marketing without a clear understanding of the goals amounts to being busy for the sake of being busy.

If you don’t know where you want to go, you can’t get there.

If this sounds like your company, here’s a not-so-easy (and yet unavoidable) solution. You’ve got to demand clearer input from the top management.

The only fix to Mistake #1 is getting clear input from the CEO

Top management needs to know the goals

When consulting various companies in growth and marketing, I always begin by establishing a detailed Marketing KPI Tracking sheet. Together, we fill in the past 3 months to see if there’s any past data on the LTV and CPA per lead and paying customer.

Up next, I collaborate with the CEO or CMO to understand the next 6 months’ revenue goals and work down to other growth and marketing projections based on revenue expectations, churn, LTV, and expected CPAs. 

All this leads to having…

🗝️ A clear 6-month plan

🗝️ Alignment of marketing & product

🗝️ No gut-feeling-based surprises

… on the high level. And on the marketing team level, you’ll have…

💫 Clear expectations (numbers)

💫 Revenue, ROI, LTV

💫 KPIs and measurement

Ready for the takeoff

Once we know all this, we can proceed to implement the planned marketing activities and campaigns.

Moreover, as you know the expected KPIs, you can compare whether your results match the projections and make quick adjustments (e.g. channel & budget allocation) if needed.

🔥 Mistake #2: Amazing product, bad packaging

Remember that quote used in startup blogs and books around the 2000s? 

“If you build it, they will come.”

Well, as it turned out as I googled it, the words come from a movie titled Field of Dreams.

When talking to various businesses – both B2B and B2C – I’ve realized that many of them have a very strong product and there’s a high potential for finding product-market fit.

However, their website and ads looked like out of an early aughts’ financial scam.

Great products need great packaging

Around 10y ago it was still possible to build a breakthrough product and get people using it via engaging the early adopters and betting on word-of-mouth.

In 2022, this is no longer the case. Almost all business verticals are saturated with tens of businesses building a similar product. 

Even if your product is the best in the industry, you’ve got to earn the user’s trust. And nobody these days trusts a brand that looks low-quality.

People don’t buy from brands they don’t trust

Take this example of a well-known fintech company…

Here’s what their website home page looked like in 2012. (IDK how it didn’t look sketchy already down in 2012, but anyhow…)

Would you trust your money to this company in 2022? Hopefully not.

Of course, they know that design trends as well as website-development opportunities have changed over the past 10 years.

Today, the same company’s home page looks like this:

Looks 100x more legit, doesn’t it? 

It is told that your brand should be good enough not to get in the way of growth.

But how to tell whether your branding is good enough? I usually suggest a simple exercise:

Ensure your brand is at least as good as the competitors’.

But don’t just go with the gut feeling – your own baby will always look sweeter and smarter than those of others.

Ask three types of different audiences to evaluate your website / App Store listing and to grade its quality and trustworthiness.

🍪 Ask a brand/marketing expert

🍪 Ask your friends

🍪 Ask 10 neutral people

And what shall you do once you realize that your brand really isn’t as strong as it should be?

Hire a branding expert or agency to help you out.

Now, let’s get to the next mistake that’s the exact opposite of having a strong product and a low-quality brand.

🔥 Mistake #3: Amazing brand, no product-market fit

You can trick people on a date with your product…

… But they’re free to leave any time.

What this means is that you can spend a lot of money on paid advertising and other venues for customer acquisition.

However, if your product fails to deliver on its promises, the new customers will immediately churn.

I’ve often seen Product and Marketing teams fighting over this conundrum. Is it the fault of the product or marketing that you fail to attract new paying users with a high LTV?

Sometimes, as I ask during a marketing audit what the customers think about the product, I hear that all the users are huge fans and give positive feedback. 

“The feedback from 20 customers tells that the product is great…”

The problem with such easy-way-out customer surveys is that you might send an email asking for feedback to 1,000 users. But only the ones who like your brand will answer. 

The few fans would of course tell you almost anything you want to hear. But is it the information that you actually need?

Yes this is Dog I like the product

Here’s the problem…

People who are disappointed in your product do not bother to reply to your emails. Nor do they fill in the surveys.

So how can you get honest, relevant, unbiased feedback about your product?

By hiring a group of 10-20 random, neutral people who more or less fit your target audience group and getting them into a room or on a 1h call one-by-one. You can then ask them to test the product and to give honest feedback.

The goal here is to uncover the real issue. The most common issues include:

🔥 Solving an inexistent problem

🔥 Not the best way to solve a problem

🔥 Too expensive (time + money)

The solution to a non-existent product-market fit is, well, to find it. And it’s not going to be easy – you’re going to have to make substantial changes to the feature set, pricing model, or another product aspect. Or pivot completely.

P.S. By “improving your product” I do not mean building new cool features that seem like quick wins. This almost never works. A meaningful product change will probably take months, but will also be worth the effort.

Looks like we’re steering away from marketing and spending too much time on the product? Thing is, no marketing can make people use a bad product.

But let’s get back on the marketing track for now…

🔥 Mistake #4: Lack of focus

Most marketing teams are constantly on the lookout for new user acquisition and growth channels.

At one point, this will lead to your team of 1 or 20 – depending on the size of your company – working on many different channels at once.

Most of the time, focusing on so many marketing campaigns at once will lead to a big bold mess.

If this looked like your marketer, keep reading. Salvation is coming.

One of the most common suggestions I write down in marketing audits is this: Stop working on this marketing channel.

❌ There’s no point to post on social media if your posts are not original

❌ There’s no point to create another blog article on a topic that’s been covered 100x

❌ There’s no point to work with influencers if you don’t see measurable results

Consider all the marketing activities that you and your team spend time on and ask: Is this bringing us new customers and revenue? 

If the answer is no, stop working on that marketing channel.

Quite often, I recommend to my clients to focus only on paid advertising and automated emails for a while. 

If you can’t make paid ads work for you, the chances are low that you’ll find substantial growth opportunities in any other channels.

You can drag along for a year or more doing low-impact work. Or you could just spend the time and salary money on running 4 weeks of paid ads.

Instead of 12 months, you’ll find out in 1 month whether there’s a product-market fit / whether your brand is strong enough.

To explain this a little further, I’ll share a quick story from my Bolt years.

As one of Europe’s biggest mobile advertisers, we received a pitch from a new ad platform every week. They promised lower cost-per-install and lower cost-per-purchase prices than we had in Google or Facebook ads.

However, we always turned them down.

Why?

Because their platforms could reach only 1% of the people we could reach with our Facebook and Google ads. 

Why would we spend time on working on tiny marketing channels instead of funneling all our efforts into scaling and improving our top channels? 

Instead of wasting your team’s time on tiny marketing campaigns that promise low-cost results, focus on the activities that bring results on scale.

🥲 Kill your darlings and cute pet projects 

🥲 Focus on 3 high-potential growth channels

🥲 The same applies to product features

As a result, your team’s focus and output will improve. You’ll have to work less, but will yield better results.

To put this in Moomin terms: instead of reaping ten unripe green pumpkins, you’ll get one big juicy pumpkin.

Continuing on the subject of (vegetable) growth, we’re down to the last mistake…

🔥 Mistake #5: No growth loops

Whenever you bring a new user into your product, the first challenge is to keep them there for the first 3-5 minutes.

If you achieve that, you’ve likely got an excited user looking to explore your product further.

While it usually falls on the Product team to increase retention, reduce churn, and keep users happy over a long period of time, there are points in the in-product user journey that fall under the Marketing team’s radar. Such as…

• Post-signup retention newsletters that urge the user to complete their profile or try the product
• Post-onboarding requests to refer a friend
• Automated lifecycle marketing emails that keep bringing people back into the product/store

Know your retention stages – Image source

If you forget to think about user retention, you’ll be filling a water bucket with a hole in the bottom.

You might bring in 10,000 new users… But in 2 months only 20% keep using your product.

My friend where are tho?

Yup, that’s sad.

But there’s more than just retention marketing that you can do.

You can also build growth loops.

A playbook definition goes like this: “Growth Loops are systems designed to make every input to generate an output. That output is then reinvested as an input and, since this is a closed-loop system, the process repeats.

In more practical terms, the best-known growth loops are:

🍯 User-2-user referrals

🍯 User-generated content

🍯 Rewards programs

However, offering people €5 to invite a friend for another €5 promo code doesn’t quite cut it in 2022. You may need to find more attractive incentives.

For example, Revolut has upped their referral offering to €50 for every referred friend. On the other hand, they’ve also made it 5x more difficult to fulfill all the conditions.

Test various referral programs to turn one new customer into multiple new customers. By the time the first one leaves, their invitees are referring their own friends. 

The best time to ask for users to refer friends is while they’re excited about your product – either right after signup or after another successful engagement (e.g. ordering something from your store / unlocking a milestone inside the product).

🍩 Build in the initial surprise moment

🍩 Establish growth and retention loops

🍩 Keep people excited and engaged

Once you’ve figured out the biggest hurdles to your company’s growth, you’ll be able to fix the holes in your marketing and product buckets.

It’s only an uphill ride from there.

🍪 Thx for listening, thx for reading! If you’ve got an article/keynote topic you’d like me to cover next, drop me a line on LinkedIn.

—

A quick note: 

I am back from my writing sabbatical and taking on new marketing consultation projects. 

While my schedule for the upcoming months is already 60% booked with confirmed projects, I am still open to 1-2 extra interesting projects starting from October/November 2022. 

Reach out at marketing@karolakarlson.com and tell me how I could help your marketing/growth team.

The post Top 5 Mistakes & Cures of Slow-growth Companies  appeared first on Marketing Fix blog.

I’d worked with them before, but coming in after a year, it all looked like a big mess to start untangling.

There were some ongoing marketing partnership deals, ad campaigns that had developed over the years, different brand messages used across marketing channels…

Basically, A LOT to grasp, review, fix or build up. 🔥

I mean… That’s how it always feels when joining a team with ongoing processes. And this is fine.

Regular “starting to work with a new brand” situation

However, after 3-4 weeks of an intense period of meetings and documenting the new strategy, things finally seem to be falling in place: we’ve got the fully new Facebook ads strategy live and running, we’re publishing blog articles (again), and the B2B leads’ number is shooting up.

I figured it would be interesting to write about how joining a new company as a CMO looks from the inside and what are the first things to work on.

How does it feel? Where to get started? What to prioritize? What mistakes to avoid?

I hope this will be helpful for all the new (and not new) marketing team leads out there.

Week 1: Understanding the big picture + meeting the team

The first thing I ALWAYS do when taking on a new client or joining a new company is to meet the team and understand how they see things.

I started by meeting with both the management team + all marketing team members to ask them a list of questions.

You just can’t review/create a marketing strategy without knowing the company’s high-level goals.

The top-down planning goes like this – Image source

Some of the things I asked the management team:

• What are the top-level KPIs you want to reach in the next 3, 6, 12 months? Why?
• What’s in the product plans for the next 3, 6, 12 months? Why?
• What’s currently the biggest revenue-driver? Where’s the bottleneck? Why?
• What do you think the marketing team can help the most with? Why?

Asking “Why” as a follow-up to each question helps to better understand the logic behind.

E.g. by asking “Why do you want to grow the GMV over expanding the marketplace” I can either understand that the company needs to grow their revenue to land the next investment round, or we discover that revenue doesn’t matter and we need to 10x the size of the marketplace.

Also, it’s surprising how many CEOs can’t answer the question about the company’s high-level KPIs and long-term plans. Not the case with MeetFrank. Anyhow, I really recommend asking the above questions even before accepting a marketing job in a company.

So basically, instead of jumping to the projects right away, start by understanding the mission, objectives, KPIs, etc.

Mission ➟ strategy ➟ objectives ➟➟➟ Projects Image source

By being aware of the top-level KPIs and objectives, I’d be able to come up with the best marketing strategy to help achieve those.

Knowing the management team’s vision, I took a step closer to the action and met up with each marketing team member individually.

Some of the things I asked each of the marketing team members:

• Who’s in the Marketing team and what are their owned projects?
• What are the Marketing team’s KPIs and OKRs?
• How do you document things? How do you track MoM results? What charts and tracking tools do they check?
• Where are the B2C and B2B users coming from right now?
• What user acquisition tactics have you tested before?
• Who’s the typical user? What value do they get from using the product?
• Who’s the typical B2B client? What value do they get from using the product?
• What are the biggest challenges and blockers?
• Where could I help the most?

My personal goal for these meetings was to understand what’s working, whether the team understands what they’re doing, and how are the inter-team relationships.

I also wanted to understand how marketing results are tracked and measured, what are some of the things that were tried but didn’t work, and much much more.

MeetFrank recently did a CVI rebranding

In addition to meeting the team, I also did research on my own, reviewing the website, social media accounts, and ad accounts. 🕵️‍♀️

Most importantly, I user tested the product, both on B2C and B2B side. You can’t do marketing for a product that you haven’t tried out yourself.

As a result, I had many notebook pages’ worth of notes and felt even more overflown with information and ideas what to work on next.

Me telling Kaarel, the CEO, about all the ideas

At least I felt closer to untangling the mess in my head.

After 10 meetings, I had more or less the information I needed to start outlining the macro-level marketing strategy. In the case of MeetFrank, it felt easier to build the strategy from scratch than to adjust the existing one.

Above all, it meant creating a ton of new spreadsheets and guides. 🐿️ 🤓

Week 2: Creating tons of reports & documents

People have different styles of leadership.

I personally love to have a clear structure with spreadsheets and guidelines in place, so that everyone has a quick overview of their priorities, tasks, and results. It just makes me feel more on top of things and less messy. #tidy

Here are some of the spreadsheets and documents we created:

• Marketing team masterplan with KPI tracking
• Marketing team Q1 2020 roadmap
• Content marketing planning sheet
• Social media planning sheet
• Online ads strategy + creatives

On top of that, I wrote some Confluence guides on more specific topics, e.g. how our Facebook ad campaigns should be set up or what types of social media posts we publish.

Basically, I just wanted to get things moving fast, have everyone know their responsibilities + priorities, and create an overview for other teams. The latter is important to keep the entire company aware of what you’re working on and also share the timeline for projects, so they can also better plan their work.

Want to know how the spreadsheets look like? 😉😉 Here’s a sneak peek:

Marketing team roadmap

The goals of this document:

• Outline the projects that the marketing team is working on
• Give a timeline for each project + show how it’s progressing
• Have a weekly/monthly tracking for all marketing-related metrics and KPIs

Here’s how the roadmap part looks like:

Surely, the columns and first rows are completely different for each company.

The roadmap shows what’s planned + what’s done

Marketing team KPI tracking

To have a quick overview of whether our work is bringing any results at all, we created a KPI sheet with all relevant metrics.

Here’s a snapshot of the KPI tracking sheet. It includes close to 200 rows of metrics and formulas.

Currently, as we’re still figuring out our marketing strategy, we monitor the results on a weekly basis to see if there’s an uplift in results thanks to marketing activities we did the past week. Later on, we’ll likely switch to monthly reporting.

The sheet has more than 200 rows with different KPIs

Big thanks to MeetFrank’s performance marketer Olena for helping to fill in this monster sheet. 🙏

Content planning sheets

To help team members working on social media and content marketing to get up to full speed, we also set up new planning sheets for those two areas.

Here’s the social media plan we’re currently using.

The format is too scrappy for long-term but worked for a quick kick-off

The social media plan is not yet complete, and we’ll likely restructure it + add performance tracking metrics for each post (to understand what works best).

We review the social media + blog content plans on a weekly basis and inform the Design team of all the needed creatives.

Want to learn more about marketing strategy? See the list of best books on marketing to dust up your skills.

Online ads strategy

To get the new Facebook ad campaigns live, I took a bit of a shortcut through the brainstorming and planning process.

So we created Confluence guides with ad creatives and campaign setup specs together with MeetFrank’s performance marketer Olena.

That’s how the Confluence guide looks like for each campaign:

We have clear setup rules for all global ad campaign types

Instead of spending (wasting?) a few weeks of time at team meetings, discussing the best ad strategy, I just outlined the one to get started with. The goal was to get ads live fast. And later on, we can optimize and A/B test all we want. We know most of the best practices anyway, so why not implement them right away. 💁

Once all the documents were ready, we reviewed them together with the team, confirmed with the management team, and set to work: hands-on and fast-fast-fast.

MeetFrank marketing team’s spirit animal – Image source

Week 3: Launching the new strategy and checking results

As we built the entire marketing strategy more or less from zero, we also needed tons of new ad copies and visuals.

We wanted to get the ads live fast, but the designer working on ads was on vacation. 🙃

So I created the first designs on my own and then asked another in-house designer to review and improve them. We probably saved around 2 weeks in time.

Ad creatives are a constant work in progress

Our performance marketer Olena set up all the new acquisition, remarketing, and engagement ad campaigns in around one week while our designer Mo worked on all of the new designs.

After that, we could start waiting for the results to come in, optimize the campaigns, and keep working on new ideas to test.

I’m not going to touch upon creating the Facebook ads strategy for too long, as more can be read in some other articles:

• Copywriting hacks and tips for Facebook ads and social media posts
• B2B Facebook ads: building a marketing funnel + best practices

We kept looking at the results in the Facebook Ads Manager, our KPI sheets, and also asked the other teams if they see a positive trend.

The initial picture is looking good, but there is SO much more to do. 🔥

Now that we’ve got the basics covered, we can dive in to analyze each marketing activity’s results and ROI + double down on things we see driving the highest growth.

Key takeaways

By now, the first blog article is out after a month-long pause, we’ve launched a few social media giveaways, and all acquisition, remarketing, and engagement ad campaigns are up and running. 🤜💥🤛 to the team.

Our marketing intern Yelyzaveta is testing new post types on MeetFrank’s Instagram page

Looking back at the first month working with MeetFrank again, I collected a few learnings that might also be helpful for other marketers.

So here they are.

1. Make the company’s business strategy crystal clear to yourself

Do not even start to create a marketing strategy before you don’t fully understand what are the company’s 3-month, 6-month, and 12-month goals and high-level KPIs.

It took me multiple meetings with Kaarel (CEO) to fully grasp what we want to achieve and how the marketing team can best contribute to that goal.

Yes, it took some time, but at least everything we now do is supporting the broad-level company growth. Which is why the marketing teams are for.

2. Prioritize your time + delegate

Joining as a part-time, not full-time CMO created an urgent need to make the most use of my time. On the other hand, I’m quite impatient and want to roll things out asap. #cognitivedissonance

And then there were all the other teams, coming to the marketing team with their ideas and requests… Which is not a bad thing in itself, but can easily derail from the top priorities.

We actually get along very nicely with the sales team ❤️

How to handle the load of ideas and requests as a new CMO? Should you try to tackle the small things first and then focus on the big picture? – Definitely not.

It is easy to get caught up in small daily tasks and in 2 months’ time look back and understand you didn’t get to the high-ROI activities.

As a team lead, you’re hired to work on things nobody else in the team can.

So I did my best to set my focus on developing the strategy rather than helping with daily tasks.

Looks familiar? – Image source

Here’s the approach I used to prioritize my time, more or less:

• Make a list of the 100+ things you’d like to do / that people are asking you to do in the first month
• Prioritize the tasks based on the potential ROI, urgency, and their “delegateability”
• Choose 5 most impactful things and plan to finalize these on the 1st month
• Choose 10 next most impactful things and plan to finalize these on the 2nd month
• Avoid being a blocker for your team: if you can’t give them input fast enough for a task, delegate the full responsibility to them

Here are some of the things I wanted to work on, but postponed as they were low ROI (compared to writing documentation and guidelines + creating an online ad strategy): reviewing email and push notification copy, writing social media posts’ copy, writing blog articles. They’re still important, but can be handled by someone else and later.

3. Keep everyone informed about the progress

Even if you can’t do everything that all teams expect you to, show them the progress. ⏳

On top of keeping the marketing team roadmap updated, I like to post weekly updates on the entire team’s progress for the entire company to read.

Keep the entire company informed

The CEO knows we’re moving things forward.

The other teams know we probably have higher priorities than some tasks they asked help with.

Everyone knows what’s been done and what will happen next.

Perfect.

4. Roll out the MVP, then start optimizing

I am not 100% sure whether this is always the best approach.

But at least that’s how I personally like to work: Get the first campaigns out fast and leave the optimization for later stages.

We managed to create 20+ different new ad creatives and launch 10+ Facebook ad campaigns in less than 2 weeks. Now, we can focus on focus on testing new creatives, targeting, and optimization methods.

One of the new ads we created

I don’t see a big point of working on a strategy and running brainstorming meetings for 1-2 weeks, then launching a campaign, and still having a high chance of it not succeeding.

It’s much better to test things fast, fail/win fast, and then pivot or scale the marketing activities.

5. Find a good balance between micro-management and getting things moving fast

When joining a new team, I do my best to give everyone my immediate trust and assume they know what they’re doing.

At the very beginning to get things running fast + share my past experience with the team, I write more specific guidelines (like how much to spend on social media boosts, whom to target, how to write blog/ads copy, etc. to get things to top-quality faster.) In the long run, I really like the idea that my team could also get everything done without me.

It’s always better to explain the macro-level plans, the right logic of thinking, and share the best practices than to say to people “here’s exactly what to do.” Even if I don’t 100% agree with the output all the time, it’s better to have an independently working team.

As a new CMO, you’re allowed to change the rules of how things should be done quite a bit. But remember that you also need to earn the team’s respect by sharing guidance that’s relevant + then also acting by it yourself.

6. Bonus tip: Get social credit by bringing plants to the office

If you’re the creative CMO type, one thing you can do that affects the entire team’s work results is to make the office look nicer. Yes, it’s quite low-ROI to just make the office feel better to work at. But then again… Is it?

It feels so much better 🌿🐒🌿

What’s next?

O.M.G. there is still so much to do.

Currently, the highest priority is to measure results, roll out the next test projects in our global marketing strategy and scale up the acquisition on both sides of the marketplace.

We’re also hiring a full-stack marketer to work on our blog content, email marketing funnel, and many other projects. Download the MeetFrank app to see the job offer and apply.

The post 1st Month as a New CMO – Where to Get Started? MeetFrank Case Study appeared first on Marketing Fix blog.

Which is exactly how writing this post feels.

Thoughts flashing through want to tell out loud the big announcement. Speak about all the once-in-a-lifetime-cool stuff that happened throughout the past 2.5 years. And also, share the reasons for leaving the Head of Marketing role in Bolt to go back to freelance consulting.

—

I joined Bolt 2.5 years ago, my months-long reluctance to getting hired for a full-time position having softened up after meeting the core management team at a startup conference. These guys were having tons of fun while growing the company, opening one new market after another. I wanted in. 

I spent my first year in Bolt as a full-stack marketer, focusing on scaling the paid acquisition strategy and helping out wherever I could. In the early days, we only had one designer in the company, so I ended up designing my first Facebook ad campaign creatives on my own. Talk about scrappy and hands-on…

In the past 1.5 years, Bolt expanded to hundreds of new cities, launched e-scooters and Bolt Food, and closed new investment rounds. As the company grew from a startup into a unicorn tech company, we needed the Marketing team to keep up. Keeping up with such a rapid growth meant that we had 3-4 new job openings to the global Marketing team open at all times, with 5+ interviews per week.

Also, there were many new projects that nobody in the company owned yet. Being the scrappy growth marketer that I am, I particularly enjoyed the ad hoc projects that at first glance seemed challengingly impossible. Like designing, printing, and delivering 400 waterproof e-scooter stickers to Paris for a launch just one week ahead. Or making the rebranding from Taxify to Bolt happen in just a few months once we had settled on the name. Or getting the @bolt Facebook and Instagram handles that were owned by Facebook itself. I bet everyone in the company has a similar story of their own.

It’s been the most challenging, fascinating, and eye-opening two and a half years of my life. And I couldn’t be more grateful for having been part of this journey, growing together with people who’ve become close friends and have shared unmeasurable know-how.

So, naturally, giving up the global Head of Marketing position in one of the most successful European tech companies isn’t a decision I made overnight. Throughout the past three months, I’ve had (almost too many) moments of doubt.

But I know it’s time for me to move on. 

In my heart, I am still the scrappy marketer who enjoys working on hands-on projects and growing startups. Managing a team of 30 people, my role in Bolt has shifted to that of a team lead, with most of my time spent on meetings, analyzing the reports, and working on budgeting. At some point, I realized that this is not what I like to do: 9 to 5 schedule, not enough time for creative projects, and no days to type away on blog articles.

I know there are many great marketers who enjoy leading a big team, it’s just not for me. At least not yet.

I have grown very close with the team, and feel that in the past 6 months, we’ve finally grown into a mature marketing team with a strong tracking and reporting structure. In a way, we’ve only now reached the point to really start doing world-class marketing at full speed. On one hand, thinking about this makes it even harder to leave. On the other hand, I know the team can handle all the upcoming challenges on their own, and keep growing results without my input. Whomever the torch of leading Bolt’s global marketing team will pass to, will be lucky to join. 

[Getting sentimental]

—

What’s next?

From January 2020, I am switching back to freelance consulting + working on my blog and a book on growth marketing.

I am both thrilled and cheerless thinking about it.

I know I am going to miss the Bolt team and working on such a high-impact global project. Yet I am also excited about soon being able to work on personal creative projects, this blog, and consulting new soon-to-be-unicorn (:p) brands.

And, as Markus, the CEO of Bolt told me, the company is here to stay, it’s just getting started. So who knows… Maybe I’ll get a chance to re-join full-time in the future. As for now, I will stay working on some Bolt projects on a freelance basis. Seriously, thanks for bearing with me. 💚

K.

The post Back to Freelancing appeared first on Marketing Fix blog.

As there were so many great questions and a surprising variety of topics, it felt like a good idea to also document ‘em in this blog. I also reviewed the answers and added bits and pieces to give more context + suggest further reading.

Up next, you’ll find a mix of marketing advice, career confessions, and opinions on a range of marketing-related subjects, from how to get published in TOP marketing blogs to the “agencies vs in-house team” debate.

The Q&A is categorized under a few headlines, so feel free to navigate to the sections that interest you the most.

• Growth hacking
• Learning as a marketer
• Online advertising
• Reporting and measurement
• Rebranding (from Taxify) to Bolt
• Content marketing
• Career and work-life

P.S. if you have any additional questions, you can still submit these on the GrowthHackers AMA page.

One last thing… I’ve had a few people reach out to me and ask how did I get picked out by GrowthHackers for the AMA. I just wrote to them saying I’d like to do one. They said yes.

🚀 On growth hacking

Q1: Can you talk about an experiment that was a really big win or led to some breakthrough insights at Bolt? – Taavi Kalvi

When I joined Bolt in 2017, one of my first tasks was to come up with better creatives for our Facebook ad campaigns. So I figured what people care about most when ordering a ride… Duh, the cost of the ride, of course!

I created a new type of Facebook carousel ad that no other app in the industry was using yet. The carousel ad included 5 cards with popular routes in a city and showed the average cost of the specific ride (which was much lower than with regular taxis).

These ads picked up super well and are still one of our top performers. We even see some competitors using the same ad format now. 😄

Q2: What has been your number one learning/lesson from your entire marketing career? – Liis Laisaar

One of the things I learned early on is that you should always try to go a bit wild and test things that others haven’t tried yet. A lot of the best-performing marketing hacks/projects are not shared in marketing blogs.

So, you should make up your own.

For example, when working on content marketing and SEO in the project management software startup Scoro, I had an idea to compile a list of 50+ project management tools, include Scoro as #3, and thereby be listed as the first Google search result for the “best project management tools” keyword.

First, my manager was strongly against the idea: why would we promote our competitors?

However, I kept pushing to test out the idea and it worked: our listicle soon ranked as #1 result on Google and we got thousands of website visits and tens of new leads from there every month.

Today, Scoro has published more than ten similar list articles and these make up a huge part of their website’s organic traffic.

A good starting point for coming up with original ideas is to first define the goal you want to achieve. As you know the outcome, it’s much easier to figure out how to get there.

I also like browsing Facebook ad examples or graphic design galleries such as Behance, thinking how I would use some ideas I see on the brand I’m working for.

Q3: If you were giving a lecture at university to a group of MSc. students in a marketing/entrepreneurial class, what philosophies, tools or books would you share with them? – Taavi Kalvi

I recently wrote a blog article on how to learn marketing where I shared all the advice I wish someone had given me when finishing high school.

I’d say that the most crucial skills for every marketer are creative problem-solving and critical thinking, as well as writing skills and understanding the basic foundation on how human psychology works.

You can find the list of my all-time favorite marketing and branding books here: 49 Best Marketing Books – New and Classics

Q4: Have you ever a situation where you had been skeptical about some idea, but as a result, it proved a great move? What was that? – Maksymilian Plociennik

My manager at Bolt who taught me to be a lot more critical and always question the ROI of different projects. Whenever my team proposes something that I don’t think is a good idea, we talk it through and see if we can run a small-scale test to check the ROI.

For example, we tested animated Facebook ads some time ago and they performed worse than static ads. So we paused the ads and didn’t waste any more time scaling the video ads to additional Facebook campaigns.

Fast forward 6 months, we tried different a type of video ads (longer ones, another design) and they performed much better. So it’s always worth to test all ideas you think may bring results and even revisit some tests multiple times.

On the other hand, there have also been many cases where I’m skeptical about an idea but still agree with the team to run a test. Even if the test fails, it’s still a success in the sense that we’ll know it in the future and won’t do the same mistake twice.

NB, make sure to document your tests!

Read more: Facebook Ads A/B Testing – Why, What and How to Split Test

Q5: What do you recommend for someone getting started from scratch on building their personal brand? – Saura Johnston

Based on my experience, a good way to get started is by creating a blog and writing about the topic you want to be known for. This can also be some other channel, e.g. Instagram. Also, guest blogging and interacting with people on LinkedIn or closed Facebook groups doesn’t hurt.

For the past few years, I’ve received all my job offers via this blog or LinkedIn as people have read my blog or know me via a network of mutual marketer friends.

I recently started an Instagram account project about our houseplant hobby with a friend.

The key takeaway from this Instagram project is that it’s HARD to grow followership.

It takes a lot of persistence and continuity to build up an extensive following on the platform. To push through, you must be truly passionate about the topic you’re building your personal brand around.

Another good starting point is to look at the websites or social media profiles of people who have already made it. Scroll down to their very first posts and see how they got started and which parts of their content gained traction.

 ⭐ On building a marketing team

Q6: What has proven to be the key deciding factor when recruiting new people to your team? (Which qualities make the best team members and employees in marketing (e.g. experience, willingness to learn <– how to validate this, etc.?) – Liis Laisaar

Having interviewed tens and tens of people while growing the team in Bolt, I realized at some point that you will get the right feeling during the interview if a person is a good match to the team. There’s a kind of special connection and understanding that you get when meeting the right candidate to a position. Things like speaking at the same terms, understanding each others’ questions, having similar opinions on specific topics…

I always look for the proactive “let’s get things done” attitude and evaluate the candidate’s home task and previous work experience. I never look at a marketing candidate’s educational profile as this is not what matters (at least not in Bolt and most other successful tech companies).

I also like to hire people with good copywriting skills and a creative problem-solving-oriented mindset.

Additionally, I follow the rule of “If it’s not a YES!! it’s a no” when hiring. If a candidate doesn’t seem to be the perfect fit for the role, we’ll just keep looking rather than making the wrong hire.

Once you’ve hired someone, you’ll spend tens of hours onboarding and training that person. So you should only hire people if you think they are the very best person to fill the role.

Q7: How do you set up your team KPIs? Do you work with some framework, e.g. OKR? – Karolina Krolicka

The global marketing team at Bolt is currently using a quarterly OKRs approach. We make sure that all OKRs are measurable and directly linked to the projects that a particular team member is working on.

Which leads me to a book that everyone in a high-level management position I know recommends (so do I): High Output Management by A. Grove.

Q8: What is the ideal marketing team structure? – Vasyl Sergienko

There isn’t one single ideal marketing team structure that would fit all companies. But all marketing teams benefit from having clear ownership of projects, clear reporting structure, and team leads not having more than 8 direct reports.

Example team structure by CoSchedule– Image source

I personally like to keep the global marketing team functions centralized in the HQ rather than, for example, having a separate Facebook marketing function in every market.

Also, I would rather build a central marketing team with clear ownership for every function. And only then start to split their resources per region as the company expands to more markets. Instead of building a fully functional marketing team for every different region.

Q9: I saw on Bolt’s website that you are currently hiring for marketing roles in 4 different countries. I’d love to hear more about your experience leading an internationally distributed team. What are some challenges you have faced? How do you handle communication and deliverables among many locations? – Hale Schneider

I’d say that the main challenge is always finding the best people, no matter where they’re located. Also, as our HQ marketing team is based in Tallinn, Estonia, it’s a bit harder to find people with international experience than, say, in London.

However, note my answer to the previous question: We still prefer to hire to the centralized team over building out regional marketing teams with all functions.

The good thing is that Bolt is a very international company and we have teams in 30+ countries around the world. So we have built up a strong information-sharing system that involves internal wikis, Slack channels, and regular all-hands meetings where the information is shared between everyone globally.

Markets where Bolt operates

I’ve gotten used to discussing things with people on Slack or via a call that having a team that’s based across multiple locations is a natural way of working.

We always set quarterly OKRs and focus for each team and give them relatively much freedom on achieving those results.

Q10: How to balance between creativity and data-driven culture? – Vasyl Sergienko

First of all, you can also be creative around the ways of interpreting the data.

Different people can look at the same data and come up with different takeaways. Also, you need to be creative to come up with new ideas to improve the results reflected through data. So I’d say that the data-driven and creative approaches go very much hand in hand in today’s marketing.

Q11: Agency or in-house? Why? – Liis Laisaar

I always prefer in-house marketing teams to agencies as the people’s motivation to grow the business, test new things and get results is times higher.

In-house people genuinely care about the company and go the extra mile to make things work. Having worked in and with agencies, I have seen projects often handed over to interns which can lead to low-quality work and poor results. It also takes a ton of time to onboard agency people and to keep communicating with them on a daily basis to approve ideas and changes.

In Bolt, we’re growing so fast and changing things up all the time, so we need to be able to get new campaigns live in less than 1-2h sometimes. This would never be possible when working with an advertising agency.

I do see a benefit to using local agencies if there’s a need for local contacts to execute a one-time marketing/PR campaign.

Agree with the PROs in this chart – Image source

💸 On online advertising

Q12: What’s the number one mistake people make when trying to improve the performance of their PPC campaigns? – Taavi Kalvi

This really depends on the campaign… But that’s not the answer you were hoping for. 😀

Usually, the biggest PPC mistake is looking at the wrong metrics and KPIs in the first place.

Let’s say your goal is to get new B2B clients for a SaaS tool. So you optimize your campaign on getting new leads. When trying to improve your campaign results, you want to increase the number of leads or lower the CPA (cost per acquisition) of leads. While optimizing on this, you may forget to look at the quality of the leads, so you may end up with more leads with lower quality. So always try to optimize your PPC campaign performance towards more revenue, not mid-funnel or vanity metrics.

Another mistake is always optimizing your PPC campaigns around the same thing.

For example, you want to optimize your Google Search PPC campaigns, so you add new keywords + negative keywords. Maybe, instead of working on this, you should test another channel (like Facebook/Instagram) or another campaign type instead. Or another target audience.

As I’m already ranting on the topic, I also often see Facebook marketers A/B testing small changes. It’s generally more efficient to run tests with variations that are clearly different (e.g. not the color of a CTA button but an entirely different creative vs the current one).

A/B test with visible changes in variations

Q13: Which do you prefer when entering a new market: a) start wide and get maximum exposure OR b) start with as specific targeting as possible and expand later based on already collected data? Why? – Liis Laisaar

It depends on the product and your marketing budget.

In Bolt, we’re marketing a consumer product relevant to most people, so we can use wide targeting in our online ads and let Facebook and Google algorithms to optimize our campaigns based on results.

If you’re marketing a niche product, I’d recommend starting narrower. If you already have a user base, I recommend using Facebook Lookalike audiences.

Q14: What is your approach to influencer marketing? How do you measure its success? – Ane Voje

We have a very data-driven approach to all marketing activities and influencer marketing is no different. We measure the CPA of new users acquired through our influencer marketing activities by counting the referrals made with each influencer’s unique referral code. We also check the reach and CPM of the influencers’ posts and compare it to our other online channels’ metrics.

Q15: What needs to be done to perfectly grow your business throughout the social channels? – Soner Alemdar

A: I’d say that the key thing to succeed in social channels is to constantly create value to your audience. This can mean sharing useful advice, giving away free stuff, informing people about special offers – whatever people can benefit from.

For example, Bolt shares relevant blog articles for drivers

Also, as the organic reach on Facebook is very low (as low as 2% of your page likes), you should always put some boosting budget behind each post.

You can find more social media marketing best practices here: 28 Facebook Ad Hacks for Social Media Growth

Q16: What would you do, if you have to lead a business in the grey market? You know, in a situation, where you can’t promote your brand on Facebook, Reddit, etc. – Maksymilian Plociennik

Tricky… And truth be told, I haven’t marketed such a product before. My first approach would be to find industry influencers and try working with them. Also, building virality to the product so it will pass from person to person. And testing out affiliate marketing.

Q17: Should a new company first focus on client acquisition only or should branding also start from the get-go? – Andreas Velling

You need to understand your brand’s mission and key value proposition from the get-go. But especially with new brands, earning some revenue and getting to the first 1000 paying users should be the priority, so I’d focus on acquisition campaigns first.

You don’t necessarily need to run brand-only marketing campaigns, but can integrate the branded message in acquisition ads.

🤓 On reporting and measurement

Q18: What do you think about marketing automation and who is responsible for that in the team? – Vasyl Sergienko

Marketing automation is a highly relevant project when working with a large scale of users. In Bolt, we have multiple teams working on automation, for example, our Lifecycle marketing team.

Q19: This is a very open-ended and more of a process question and how you go about things but with Bolt being in different markets, how are you able to work and adjust as best you can in creating and executing marketing plans for the different product offerings in each market? I can imagine what “success” or “failure” in one market can be totally different for another. You may have already covered a little bit of this with Mr. Hale Schneider’s question. – Kian Paras

We’re able to use quite a global approach when it comes to marketing in specific countries. Our product offering is not that different from market to market and we focus on promoting our main service above others.

However, we work with local teams to understand each market’s specifics. If you compare Bolt’s social media or blog to some of our competitors, we’re still much more local in our approach.

Q20: How do you approach branding/awareness? Is this just a “side-product” of having the right messages or do you have separate branding campaigns? – Andreas Velling

We do not run a lot of branding-only marketing campaigns as we’re a highly performance-driven company and like to work on things that we can measure.

However, we’ve set the key brand messages and all our performance marketing campaigns and most social media posts also revolve around those messages.

Recently, we launched a green initiative to make all Bolt rides in Europe carbon neutral. It’s a good combination of branding mixed with digital communication channels.

Social media post on the Green Plan

There’s another reason we don’t focus on branding campaigns: as our main brand asset is our product. As long as we’re providing the best ride-hailing experience in a city, we’ll get new users through word-of-mouth and keep the existing ones happy as well.

⚡ On rebranding (from Taxify) to Bolt

Q21: What was your approach for the launch campaign – which channels and assets did you find most valuable and why? – Kati Kuustik

As I set out to work on the first rebranding campaign I’d ever done, I was surprised by how little information about rebranding you can find online. There were literally no articles sharing usable know-how on how to rebrand a company. Only stuff on “how to pick your brand’s name” = useless.

During rebranding, our most valuable channels were those that helped us reach the highest number of our app users: PR, in-app messages, and emails.

We also used other marketing channels like online ads to communicate about the brand name change from Taxify to Bolt. Also, Google Search ads were very helpful in making sure that people will find our website and app store listing with both the old and new brand name.

I’ve found that there are quite many articles on how to do the rebranding / decide if you should rebrand, but very little information mostly on how to approach the launch of the new rebrand.

Q22: What goals did you set for the rebranding launch? – Kati Kuustik

Our main goal was not to lose users and the volume of rides not to drop. There were, of course, a set of lower-level goals that every involved team monitored.

Q23: If you had to do it again, what would you do differently? Or what were your biggest learnings? – Kati Kuustik

The thing with rebranding is that you probably (and hopefully) only get to do it once. 😅

If I had to help a company go through a rebranding again, I would focus on planning early on, having clear timelines, and making sure that all teams follow it. Which is what exactly happened in Bolt and why our rebranding went (almost) smoothly. Although there are always some last-minute surprises…

I’d also start preparing the new brand’s marketing assets and CVI (in case you want to change it) earlier and upload all new ad campaigns in advance. It took our 2-person advertising team weeks to replace all of our 5000+ online ad creatives.

🎡 On content marketing

Q24: What’s the biggest challenge for a B2C company related to content marketing strategy? – Eduarda Lemos

In my opinion, the biggest challenge for all brand blogs is understanding how to create extra value for your users that they can’t find elsewhere.

For example, at Bolt we focus on blog articles that share useful information to our drivers. This information is much harder to find compared to lifestyle-related advice for riders (as there are so many blogs and magazines already creating this type of content).

Q25: How do you manage the content production process understanding that each country has different personas/language, etc.? – Eduarda Lemos

We try to keep our blog content as evergreen and universal as possible and localize it to many languages. Sometimes, our local teams also write additional blog content targeted at their market specifically.

At some point I started to write English copy while thinking how it would sound in Estonian or French, to make sure everything is easy to localize to our 20+ languages.

Q26: Aside from your blog, I’ve read a lot of your guest posts in different blogs and platforms. I am a little biased towards the Copy Hackers one and KlientBoost as my favorites among your written guest posts but the Adespresso ones and Entrepreneur piece are up there too. What was your mindset like early on in figuring out which blog/publication/platform to pitch and how did you pitch to guest post or wrote for them? – Kian Paras

I started out pitching to 10+ marketing blogs, and it was very hard to get in initially. Once you already have a few strong articles in good blogs (in my case, HubSpot and AdEspresso) you can pitch to the next ones and will have proof of your writing quality to present.

You can read more about my guest blogging journey here: After Guest Blogging 50+ Articles, Here’s What I Learned

However, note that you won’t get much extra traffic to your blog from guest posting. For example, when I published an article in Entrepreneur, only nine readers looked up my profile and website.

The main value you’ll get from guest publishing is:

• additional blogging and podcast invitations
• job offers and help requests
• high-quality backlinks

🎢 On career and work-life

Q27: What’s an average workday look like for you? – Mary Green

My regular workday is always full of surprises, project managing some marketing campaigns, attending meetings & job interviews, discussing ideas with the team, and sharing information between teams.

But my favorite days are the ones where I disconnect from Slack and email for 4h or longer and focus on macro-level planning and improving the current team/reporting structure.

Q28: What is your biggest struggle currently? – Karolina Krolicka

When growing as fast as Bolt, you run into a lot of struggles.

I’d say the biggest challenge is understanding the business impact and ROI of all the different online and offline marketing activities that we’re doing.

We’re testing and learning something new every month, adding layers of data analytics to our campaign reporting and improving the attribution between different marketing channels.

Q29: How much of your life is dedicated to learning your craft and improvement? I love hearing how others invest in their craft. – Rob Fulton

I feel that I can learn the fastest through my work. Also, running a blog around Facebook advertising helps me stay aware of all the best practices and latest hacks.

I like to research what other top brands are doing and do a monthly review of their social media channels and blogs. Another great way to learn about new best practices is to talk to other marketers. You can even reach out on LinkedIn and propose to have a call and share your key learnings.

Also, whenever I’ve got time, I follow some industry newsletters and listen to podcasts.

I shared a long list of blogs, books, podcasts, and newsletters I like in this article, might be helpful: https://karolakarlson.com/2018-key-learnings-facebook-ads-marketing/

Q30: I remember reading your work and learning a little bit about your career profile while I was doing college internships and I only graduated in 2017. From the outside, it makes it seem like you “Bolt(ed)” upwards so quickly (jk, bad pun) or rose up relatively quickly but you may see it differently.

What is your work-life balance/integration prioritization or however you call it like, especially when you were just getting started!? Because you have Bolt, the blog, possibly other side hustles, and clients although you did mention you do not have the capacity at the moment, and possibly other hobbies and personal pursuits. You may have alluded to it with Ma’am Mary Green’s question but gosh it makes it look like you worked 24/7 to get where you are at. I personally think it’s super cool with all you’ve done so far and I can imagine some of your best work is yet to come. 🙂 – Kian Paras

About the work-life balance… I guess that early in my career I was so into marketing, looking at it as my job, hobby, relationship… (kidding about the last one :p)… But seriously, I think I easily worked at least 60h per week, also spending the Sundays working on either planning for Botl or writing to my blog.

By now, I’ve taken a step back and try to limit my workweek to 50h max. It’s become more about managing my time and focusing on the high-impact items only, removing meetings from my schedule, and learning to say “no” to more low-efficiency projects.

However, I believe that if you find a career you’re really passionate about, working the extra 20h per week doesn’t feel like a burden. Instead, you’ll be thrilled to learn by doing.

I would also say that I was very lucky to have the right opportunities to enter my life at the right time. E.g. I got an email from the CEO of Klientboost inviting me to freelance for their blog and Bolt reached out to me just as I was about to leave my past company. So it’s all about doing good work and noticing the good opportunities as they arise. You’ll be offered cool jobs only if you put yourself out there.

The post AMA with GrowthHackers – 30 Questions and Answers appeared first on Marketing Fix blog.

Just come up with an idea, set up a WordPress site in a couple of hours, and type away.

Well… That was the easy part.

There’s no guarantee that people will read your articles and keep coming back for more. In fact, many successful bloggers have started out with no readers and felt like giving up.

So how can you start a blog that will succeed, get thousands of people reading your articles, and turn your writing into profit?

We reached out to some of the best marketing experts and asked for their opinion.

Also, it’s almost one year since Aggregate blog went live. Looking back, there are many things I’d do differently. I also learned a lot on the journey.

In one year, Aggregate blog has grown close to 30k monthly readers, most of who come to the blog via Google or are return visitors.

As I’m not a big fan of the marketing expert roundup posts that just list everyone’s answers, I decided to test a different format that is, hopefully, more beneficial to someone looking to start a blog.

All the best practices and hacks shared by the marketing experts are edited into a logical order. I also added some of my personal key learnings based on building Aggregate blog.

Look at this article as a guide to starting a new blog or improving your existing website.

Also, big thanks to all the marketing experts who contributed to this article. (This list follows a random order)

Lukasz Zelezny, @LukaszZelezny | Ross Simmonds, @thecoolestcool |
Dubie Bacino, @opajdara | Daniel Wallock, @danielwallock | Cameron Conaway, @CameronConaway | Joanna Wiebe, @copyhackers | Jacob Varghese, @jacobvar | Chuck Bankoff, @KreativeWebwrks | Mark Traphagen , @marktraphagen| Raul Tiru, @raultiru | Sam Hurley, @Sam___Hurley | Samantha Kelly, @SJKellyWrites | Madalyn Sklar,  @MadalynSklar| Amy Purdie, @amypurdie | Peter Trapasso, @petertrapasso |  Adam Connell, @adamjayc | Dan Knowlton, @dknowlton1 | Adel de Meyer, @adeldmeyer | Keri Jaehnig, @kerijaehnig | Shelly Kramer, @shellykramer | Chelsea Krost, @ChelseaKrost | Eric Peters, @EricPeters0 | Dan Marks, @wdanmarks| Nirav Dave, @nirav_dave | Peter Banerjea, @successiswhat | Erik Emanuelli, @ErikEmanuelli | Sarah Dudley, @sarahdudley3 | Jason Acidre, @jasonacidre | Johnathan Dane, @johnathandane | Ashley Faulkes, @madlemmingz | Mike Schiemer | Phil Pallen, @philpallen

Part 1: Things to do before launching a blog

1. Define Your Blog’s Goal

According to Shelly Kramer, CEO + Founder of V3 Broadsuite, it’s important to understand that you’re competing against hundreds of thousands of other corporate blogs, all vying for attention and eyeballs.

Far too many companies launch blogs that are nothing more than thinly-disguised, or not disguised at all sales pitches that are all pieces of brand-centric content.

“If your answer [to why you’re starting a blog] isn’t that you want a way to be able to serve your customers and prospective customers and provide information, resources, solutions, ideas, report on industry trends, and overall help them by giving them information that will help them grow their businesses and solve the problems they might have, stop right there.”

– Shelly Kramer

Social media marketer Adel de Meyer also added that:

“Starting a successful blog starts with a clear goal, message and target audience in mind. You need to plan out your content path and you need to understand exactly what you want your blog to do for you. Every business including personal brands has different goals, missions and stories.”

– Adel de Meyer

When starting out this blog, I had a goal of building myself an online portfolio. As time went by, I started to grasp the importance of a long-term goal and focused more efforts on high-quality articles and SEO.

Blogging is a more strategic endeavour than you might expect.

You should ask yourself:

• What are my expectations for this blog?
• What profit/outcome do I want to get out of it?
• What are my 1-year and 5-year goals regarding this blog?

Once you know what it is you want to achieve, you can adjust the type of blog content to contribute to your objectives in the long term.

2. Position your blog on the market

According to content marketing expert Adam Connell, one of the most important things that most people forget is positioning.

Positioning is what differentiates your blog from the rest.

“Look at what your competitors are doing right now. Identify the good and the bad. And use that to position your brand in a way that allows you to cut through the noise. But what’s critical here is that you re-evaluate your positioning every so often.“

– Adam Connell

Adam noted that if you take your eye off the ball, you may find yourself surrounded by new competitors that are doing exactly what you’re doing because they see how well it’s working for you.

This is why you’ve got to be agile and be prepared to adapt – your competitors won’t stand still so you shouldn’t either.

Nirav Dave from Capsicum Mediaworks also emphasized the importance of choosing your niche market carefully: Once that’s done, you’ll be able to create relevant content that’ll resonate with your audience and drive in more traffic to your site.

3. Select your blog’s name smartly

When starting my blog, I had no idea how to name it. So I went with Aggregate to signify my plan to aggregate many marketing hacks to this one blog.

That was not the best of my decisions.

Let’s face it; the name is kind of random. 😃

UPDATE: In June 2018, I finally changed this blog’s domain to karolakarlson.com and renamed the blog to Advertise. Grow.

So now, I’ve been thinking about a slight rebranding and change of my blog’s name.

The problem with changing your blog’s name is the need for domain name change. And this can potentially mess up your organic blog traffic and backlinks.

So here’s the key takeaway: Consider your blog’s name carefully!

Dubie Bacino from FriendFiler made another great point:

“Before you launch a blog, check if your blog’s domain name is also available as a handle (username) on all the social networks you intend to use. If not, spend some time now to find a short, catchy domain name that relates to your blog’s content and is also available as the brand name across social media sites.”

“Consider that online marketing is based on growing your brand’s influence. Having a uniform name will help to consolidate your branding efforts and make it easy for your audience to find you. A good brand name can be a great asset. In the same way, a bad brand name can turn out to be a constant challenge in your promotional efforts. Setting up your brand with a good name will save you a lot of headache and money in the long run “

– Dubie Bacino

I couldn’t agree more!

4. Create a distinct brand style

Your brand’s style is another important point to consider carefully before starting your blog.

It will take a lot of time to rebrand your blog later.

Moreover, the sooner you develop a strong brand image, the more people will start recognizing your content in social media and other sharing platforms.

The first 6-7 articles in Aggregate blog followed a simple design principle: all images needed to be colourful and eye-catching.

However, after a while, the blog developed a stronger brand image. You might need a small-scale website redesign to bring more personality to your blog.

Now, whenever we share an article on social media, people immediately recognize the ponycorns (yes, they’re not unicorns 🙃).

So how should you think about your blog’s style before the initial launch?

Amy Purdie from Whiteacres Design told us that:

“It’s important to figure out your brand style. This doesn’t need to be perfect at this point, you can develop it as you go – and you probably will – but if you can create a brand style that is easy for you to put together when you’re creating graphics and that is carried through across everything that you do. Then, when you are sharing your posts and repurposing content and spreading the word about your blog everything will have a consistent look and feel, you’ll stand out, you’ll be recognised across different platforms, you’ll be remembered and people will become curious, remember your past posts and want to find out more about you.”

– Amy Purdie

Unsure where to start? Check out these 142 Facebook ad examples that all exhibit a different branded style.

5. Find your content/market fit

It’s an obvious one, but understand your niche, understand your audience. – Samantha Kelly.

When we asked her what’s the most important thing about launching a new blog, Kelly noted that the keywords for your article should match the user intent, not search popularity.

Look to providing the type of content your audience will want to read.

Cameron Conaway, Director of Content at Reflektion, explains this further:

“Find your content/market fit. As with product/market fit, there are many variables to consider and many questions to answer before launching a new blog.”

–Cameron Conaway

Here are two fundamental questions Conaway suggests that you think about:”

1. Do you understand the untapped and/or unfulfilled audience you want to engage?
2. If so, do you have a plan (of content creation, cadence, distribution, and SEO) and the resources to consistently deliver valuable content to this audience?

(We’ll get back to discussing content distribution later in the article.)

6. Define your personal niche

“Before launching a new blog, or anything in the marketing arena like that, I would always make sure you have your niche at least approximately nailed down,” Ashley Faulkes, SEO & WordPress Specialist at Mad Lemmings suggests.

That means doing some research, figuring out where you can stand out from the crowd, where there is enough traffic or a big enough audience (on social channels, for example).

“If you are just going to do what everyone else is doing, you will really struggle. It is far easier, and a faster path to success if you find a narrower niche, at least in the beginning. One that you want to spend time in, and there are people there to listen to you.”

– Ashley Faulkes

For example, Hundred5’s blog focuses on hiring and recruitment.

But not just that – they’re also qualified to talk on the topic, having previous recruiting experience of their own.

How to find your blog’s niche?

Usually, the key to creating valuable content that people want to read is your experience in the field.

(That’s why, famous blogs also prefer contributors who are practitioners, not just freelance writers.)

7. Provide something unique

One of the surefire ways of never making your blog succeed is repeating what others are saying.

If your blog is just an echo of Entrepreneur and Forbes articles, why would anyone prefer it to the original sources?

Think about it… Are you publishing original content that can’t be found anywhere else online?

Dan Marks from Hancock Whitney, suggests that you try to understand your target audiences’ interests and how you uniquely provide value.

According to the marketing legend David Ogilvy, writing a good advertisement starts by studying the product – you need to know what makes it beneficial to its users and different from the competition.

Rosser Reeves, another notorious marketer, explained that your product needs a USP – unique selling proposition.

What he said about advertisements surprisingly well applies to blog articles too:

1. Each advertisement (read: blog article) must make a proposition to the consumer.
2. Not just words, not just puffery, not just show-window advertising. Each advertisement (blog article) must say to each reader: “Read this article, and you will get this specific benefit.”
3. The proposition must be one that the competition doesn’t offer.
4. It must be unique – either a uniqueness of the brand or a claim not otherwise made in that particular field of advertising.
5. The proposition must be so strong that it can move the mass of millions.
6. Your advertisements (blog articles) should pull over a large number of new customers to your product (website).

When starting out with Aggregate blog, I had previously worked as a growth marketer for more than two years. I also had a fair share of blogging experience from working with some of the top marketing blogs.

That’s why, whenever I’m writing an article, I make a point of sharing advice that’s based on real marketing experience, not just on what other people and blogs are saying.

When starting a new blog, ask yourself:

1. Does this blog bring some unique value to readers?
2. Does this blog contain original data & insights not to be found in other articles across the web?

8. Know your reader persona

According to marketing influencer Sam Hurley, you need to know exactly who you’re targeting.

“Blanket approaches don’t work — your blog must be fit for a specific purpose, geared towards a particular audience — else it won’t be successful.”

– Sam Hurley

Mark Traphagen from Stone Temple added that you should think about the needs, wants, hopes and desires of your target audience. That information should then guide everything about your blog, from its design to the content you post there.

Stay true to the reader persona you’ve created, and solve their problem(s) in every blog post – Eric Peters from HubSpot emphasized that you should think about your target audience every time you’re writing an article.

9. Build your audience beforehand

Digital strategist and entrepreneur Ross Simmonds told that the most important thing to do before launching a blog is ensuring that you have an audience to actually launch to.

He’s onto something here.

“Abraham Lincoln once said: ‘Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.’ The same idea holds true when it comes to planning a successful launch for your blog. Spend time building a mailing list, building relationships with people who will share your first post on social media, businesses who will share with their teams and any other opportunities to give your blog launch more life.”

– Ross Simmonds

Marketing consultant Peter Trapasso also suggests that you start building up your social presence once you have secured your domain name. Build up your followers on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn first, then launch your blog and begin posting regularly.

At this point before the launch, you don’t necessarily need to have thousands of fan emails.

All you need is to find your 1,000 true fans – people who will become your loyal readers and help to spread the word.

“Making connections is, by far, the most important lesson I learned since when I started blogging in 2010. Whether you are launching a new blog or promoting an existing one, building relationships with bloggers of your niche ensures new visitors and knowledge exchange.”

– Erik Emanuelli, social media marketer

Another way to build up your blog’s audience is to become part of an online community.

This idea is the curtesy of Joanna Wiebe from Copy Hackers:

“Invest some real time in becoming part of the community you’ll want to read your blog. By “real time” I mean more than 6 months of regular engagement with that community – to the point where people in it recognize your name. And don’t rely on upvoting / liking their content alone. You need to dig into the community. Ask questions, comment in discussions, share interesting content that’s not yours, post about the community on social media — contribute as much and as well as someone who’s paid to.“

– Joanna Wiebe

There are online communities focused on all possible topics. For example, GrowthHackers brings together digital marketers all over the world.

Building up a blog audience before the big launch is not an easy task. However, you will find it a lot easier to distribute your content later.

Tip: You can also use the communities for distributing your blog content in later stages.

10. Set up branded social media pages

If you’ve ever launched a blog, you’ll know how much effort it takes to keep things running and to publish content regularly.

The new blog is going to demand a lot of your time.

That’s why, it’s a good idea to create your blog’s social media accounts before the launch.

Here’s Mike Schiemer from Bootstrap Business:

“In my opinion, the most important thing to do in the early stages of a blog launch is to grow your social media accounts. Initially, your blog will not be getting much or any organic traffic because you don’t have a subscriber list yet, SEO takes time, and PPC campaigns can be very expensive. Social media provides free or affordable platforms to share your new or upcoming content and amplify your reach.”

– Mike Schiemer

Strive to increase followers and engagement on your Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Snapchat, YouTube, Pinterest, and even Google+ pages so you’ll have a sizeable audience.

You’re going to need every platform and follower to maximize the reach of your blog posts and gain shares. The increased website traffic from social media will help your blog significantly in the short and long term, Schiemer added.

Tip: If you already have branded social media accounts, there’s no need to create new ones for your blog.

You can also use your personal brand and tie it to your blog. For example, Joanna Wiebe has tied her Twitter account to her brand Copy Hackers.

Look at your social media accounts as a platform for building new connections and creating brand awareness.

One last thing… Do your best to publish on social media accounts on a consistent basis!

Part 2: The technical aspects of your blog

The second part of this article is dedicated to probably the most overlooked aspect of starting a new blog.

If you’ve never set up a website before, you’ll be surprised by how much technical aspects matter – your choice of website hosting will have a long-lasting effect on your blog’s maintenance costs, loading speed, and SEO results.

After all, you don’t want your blog to be crashing under a heavy traffic load once an article goes viral…

So here are the most important technical details to consider.

11. Select a good hosting provider

Whenever you want to launch a new website with a unique domain name (e.g. a blog without the .wordpress ending), you’ll need to host it in servers.

Luckily, there are many hosting providers out there that also help you with buying the domain name you want.

SEO expert Lukasz Zelezny suggests the following:

“I bet You are launching Your blog on Wordpress. Use server-side version. Then consider a good hosting provider. I am always using SiteGround. WP Engine seems to be good too.”
– Lukasz Zelezny

There are 10+ good hosting providers out there, the most popular ones (and easiest) to use being Hostgator and Bluehost.

Using a hosting service with shared servers often means that when someone loads your blog article, the servers take a long time to respond, and your page loading speed will be low.

Here’s an example of an article page speed load report by Google – their website is not well-optimized for high page loading speed.

We used to have the same problem with Aggregate blog.

The articles took too much time to load, and it was damaging the SEO results.

That’s why, we decided to move the blog over to Google Cloud Platform that’s a bit more expensive, but provides high server response times.

According to Google, there are still many things that could be improved. However, we already have 90/100 points on Desktop and 68/100 points on Mobile.

12. Upgrade your blog from HTTP to HTTPS

SSL is not a choice, is a must. – Lukasz Zelezny

According to an article in the Moz blog, 50% of page 1 Google results in a 10,000-keyword tracking study set were secure (HTTPS).

If your website does not have an SSL certificate, its links will use http:// instead of https://.

Often, websites without the SSL certificate are marked unsafe by web browsers, and people will see the copy “Your connection is not private” when trying to load your website.

You can get an SSL certificate for free. Here’s a guide explaining how.

13. Work on your page loading speed

Your blog pages’ loading speed is an important factor that Google evaluates when deciding whether to show your blog in the search engine results.

No matter how much better your article is compared to your competition – if it takes 5+ seconds to load it, people will just get tired of waiting.

You can use page speed tracking tools to uncover how your new blog performs.

“This includes speed tests (you can use Pingdom and Google page speed insights), SEO friendliness (there are plenty of onsite SEO tools such as Screaming Frog SEO Spider), Schema testing (google schema tests), Tracking & Analytics (Use Ghostery browser plugin to make sure your code is setup and tracking correctly), Email opt-in functionality and most importantly Security. Only after you are satisfied with the results should you launch your blog and start receiving traffic. “

– Zaid from PPC Masterminds

Use Pingdom to see how much it takes for your blog pages to load.

Tip: Check the loading speed of specific blog pages, not the home page of your blog.

After all, it’s the specific articles you want ranking on Google.

As you enter your landing page and hit the “Start Test” button, you will get tons of recommendations for improving your blog.

What is a good page loading speed?

According to Google’s 2017 research, the average time it takes to fully load a mobile landing page is 22 seconds. Yet 53% of visits are abandoned if a mobile site takes longer than three seconds to load.

Here’s some more stellar advice from Lukasz Zelezny on how to improve your page loading speed:

1. Make sure you are using caching (especially that SiteGround provide 4 level caches).
2. Make sure you minify javascript and CSS.
3. Make sure you are not using too many external scripts.
4. And if you have a bit of money to spend, make sure you are utilizing CDN (like Cloudflare for example.

14. Place your blog on your main domain

Raul Tiru from GlobalOwls emphasized another critical factor of your new blog’s SEO success: Research has shown that placing your blog on your main domain rather than on a sub domain helps improve SEO.

Start a blog as following: yourdomain/blog instead of blog.yourdomain. Here is a video by Moz explaining this.

Do this right from the start, save yourself time later, improve your domain authority and SEO.

15. Use the optimal number of plugins

Plugins are the add-ons that you can use to improve your WordPress site.

For example, there are plugins that help improve your SEO results, collect emails, and much much more.

An article in the WPBeginner blog suggests 24 plugins that are a must-have. That’s slightly misleading. I rather agree with Lukasz Zelezny who said that:

“Make sure you will not install million plugins – if you do, you will kill website performance and you will not be able to rank as high as you would with a well-pptimized website.”

– Lukasz Zelezny

Having too many plugins (24, for example) on your blog will slow down your blog’s loading speed.

However, there are some great plugins that you should install.

16. Get some technical and SEO plugins

Nirav Dave from Capsicum Mediaworks suggests the following:

“If your website is powered by WordPress, then the next step would include installing useful plugins like Yoast SEO (the best on-page SEO plugin), Wordfence Security plugin, W3 Total Cache (to speed up your WordPress website), BackUpWordPress (to backup your entire site and database), Contact Form 7 (to create customise contact forms), Akismet ( to prevent spam), Thrive Leads (best email opt-in plugin) and WP Smushit (to optimize your site’s images).”

– Nirav Dave

Here’s the list broken down:

1. Yoast SEO
2. Wordfence Security plugin
3. W3 Total Cache
4. BackUpWordPress
5. Contact Form 7
6. Akismet
7. Thrive Leads
8. WP Smushit

Equipped with all these plugins, your blog’s both protected, optimized, and working as a lead platform.

17. Make your blog design mobile friendly

Be sure your website and blog are designed to be mobile responsive. – Keri Jaehnig, Idea Girl Media

A recent article I read in the Moz blog was discussing Google’s new feature of mobile-first indexing.

Mobile-first indexing means that the mobile version of your website becomes the starting point for what Google includes in their index, and the baseline for how they determine your website’s rankings.

You can submit your blog to Google and say you’d prefer them to apply the mobile-first indexing on your website. Here’s the main difference with desktop-first indexing:

Is your blog doomed to fail without the mobile-first indexing?

No, not really. Or rather, not yet.

According to Google’s latest article on the topic, if your website is responsive or otherwise identical in its desktop and mobile versions, you’re all good.

What you should do is ensure all your images and content is also loading on mobile, and that your blog’s theme is mobile responsive.

18. Select a good Wordpress theme

Before starting Aggregate blog, I spent more than a day looking for a good WordPress theme. It paid off big time – I’m still happy with the selection I made.

You can browse for WordPress themes on sites like Themeforest.

Here’s how it works: You buy a premium WordPress theme and can then install it to your website. Here’s an installation guide, in case you need it.

What to look for in a WordPress theme:

1. High customizability – can you easily achieve the blog look you want?
2. High page loading speed – read reviews rather than trusting the “Speed Optimized” slogan on a theme’s promotional page.
3. Good UX – is it pleasant for people to browse your blog and read the articles?

Alright… You’ve now set up your blog’s domain and WordPress page, meanwhile making sure it has a swift loading speed and will rock in SEO.

It’s time to launch your new blog.

Part 3: Launching your new blog

19. Launch with a big bang

According to Peter Banerjea, Co-Founder at SuccessIsWhat.com, the most important thing to do before a blog launch is to ensure that you get tons of traffic on the day of launch.

Here are a couple of tactics Peter suggests:

1. Build an email list before you launch a blog. One way of doing that is to do lots of guest posts and have a link to a lead magnet in your bio.
2. Build partnerships with other bloggers and podcasters. Ask them to drive traffic to a launch page or a lead magnet before you launch.
3. Write an incredibly compelling article as the first post on your blog. Then, ask influencers in your niche to contribute quotes, data or any other type of input for the post. Then, when you launch, ask them to share it. That’s sure to drive tons of traffic to your post. Make sure you reach out to several more influencers after you launch and ask them to share your article too.
4. Never try to launch a blog on your own. The only way you will have a successful launch is if you have the support of influencers.

Tip: As you’ve put tons of effort into setting up your new blog, it’s worth taking the extra step and creating a blog launch plan.

20. Get help in promoting your blog

Unless you’re already an influencer in a given field, you probably won’t have thousands of social media fans to share your blog with.

However, there are other influencers who could help you out.

Check out what three marketing experts suggest:

“Once you have the plan in place and started producing your blog content you need to spend the time to build relationships with people in your niche on Social Media. This will help you tremendously with collaboration opportunities, traffic, building credibility and getting your blog content out to a wider audience. Launch your new blog with influencer partnerships, roundup posts or a long-form piece case study on research you did that offer massive value to readers.”

– Adel de Meyer

“Create a launch event where you are collaborating with others that will be enthused about your content and mission. Do livestreams, hold a contest, collaborate with guest authors that can share your content. Launch with meaning! Also be sure your blog is listed in GOOD blog directories so you can attract a relevant readership. {There is a list of things I recommend, but the answer above answers this specific question with quick important things people can do easily}.”

– Keri Jaehnig

“One great way to increase traffic is by quoting industry experts, influencers, fellow bloggers, or thought leaders within your post. Then, when you share the blog post on social, be sure to tag the individual(s) quoted in the article in hopes that they will retweet or share the post on their channel further bringing more brand awareness & traffic to your blog! Taking this tactic one step further, ask the person you quoted if they would do a FB Live or Instagram Live with you to discuss the topic of the article. This way you are creating more content for your audience while driving more awareness to your blog post. “

– Chelsea Krost

21. Don’t launch an empty blog

Sarah Dudley from Marketing Macros pointed out another interesting idea: do not launch a blog that only includes a single article.

“When launching a new blog, have enough content available to entice people to subscribe during the launch period. If you only have one post that goes live the day of your launch, it’s harder to gauge whether that content will be of interest to me than if you have 10 blogs available. Then I get a true sense of the voice of this person or brand and whether I want to see more of what they do in the future. Similarly, have those CTA’s built into your blogs. Having great content isn’t enough if you don’t give people the next step to take, whether it is subscribing, signing up for a service, or downloading a piece of content.”

– Sarah Dudley

If your goal is to get your blog visitors to return later, it’s important they grasp what your blog’s about.

It is difficult to evaluate a blog’s quality based on a single blog post.

Moreover, your blog will look sad and empty with a single article in it.

I would suggest that you write at least three articles before focusing on the BIG LAUNCH. And although these articles may not get that much of a stage light, still make sure they’re top-notch stuff.

22. Start with cornerstone articles

Jason Acidre from Kaiserthesage suggests that you thoroughly plan and build the first set of cornerstone content assets (4-5 comprehensive guides/tutorials/lists).

According to Acidre, your cornerstone articles should:

1. Be evergreen, so that you can run promotion campaigns for the content (through outreach or paid social) in a stretch of 3-6 months. Mainly to lessen the pressure of having the need to consistently create/publish new content on the site.
2. Focus on topic areas that have substantial search volume (and be able to cover both top and middle of the funnel audience).
3. Be linkable and shareable in nature (to attract and earn the right links over time, for them to eventually rank better on search results). And to also ensure that there’s a ton of link opportunities for the topics we’ll be creating content around on.
4. Make an impact on the site/blog’s business objectives. Content assets that should help demonstrate expertise, in order to convert more visitors.

Digital Marketing Strategist (Director of Marketing @solufy) Jacob Varghese suggests that you think about three different types of content:

1. Broader Niche Topics: These are topics on the blog that would tackle the broader interests within your target niche. e.g.: Say you are a personal trainer for executive women over 40, writing about time management (for exercising) for women, benefits of meditation, could be potential broader niche topics.
2. Niche Topics: These topics would be closer to your target audience. Like ‘health and wellness for women over 40’ ‘connection between good leadership and good health’ ‘exercise tips for women’.
3. Target Niche Topics: These would one-to-one conversations with those who are your clients.e.g.: Specific exercises for women over 40.

Although the ‘Target Nice Topics’ could form the bulk of your posts, the other topic clusters will lay strong foundations for longer-term brand vitality and other benefits like more room for creative expression and well-rounded thought leadership in your niche.

“Ensure that these topics resonate with most of your reader/buyer personas. Use a spreadsheet if you want to keep track of which persona/s and topic cluster each topic is being written for.

Before/during/after your blog launch you also want to use connect (digitally and otherwise) with other influencers and audiences for those topic clusters so you can share, exchange, and amplify each other’s valuable content for mutual benefit.”

– Jacob Varghese

23. Use the skyscraper technique

Johnathan Dane, CEO at KlientBoost suggests that you use the Skyscraper Technique when writing blog articles.

According to a blog article in Backlinko’s blog, following this technique can significantly boost your organic traffic and also the number of backlinks you’ll get.

Broken down to 3 steps, here’s how thie Skyscraper Technique works:

• Step 1: Find link-worthy content
• Step 2: Make something even better
• Step 3: Reach out to the right people

24. Write “the best damn blog post”

If you truly want people to give you their time and read your blog, write what Joanna Wiebe calls “the best damn blog posts.”

“Once you’ve given to that community (and gathered a bunch of karma points along the way), publish the best damn blog post you’ve ever written. It doesn’t have to be long; it has to be incredible. And it has to be the first of several planned amazing posts that you’ll publish regularly over the next X days/weeks/months. As in, have a long-term plan – there’s no such thing as one and done.”

– Joanna Wiebe

What makes a good blog post?

1. It has to be original
2. Don’t just merely copy other blogs
3. It has to cover the subject in-depth
4. Usually, best articles are 2,000+ words long
5. You have to prove your claims with stats and studies
6. You have to have an engaging writing style
7. You need awesome images and illustrations
8. Make sure your article sparks emotions
9. Make your blog article actionable

For more writing hacks, see this article: 16 Hacks for Copywriting for Facebook and Social Media

25. Work hard on your headlines

There’s arguably no other element to your blog article as important to its success than the headline.

A good headline will make people click on your social media posts and makes them curious about your article.

However, a good headline is hard to come by.

Chuck Bankoff from Kreative Webworks explains: People don’t read on the Internet, they scan. They see images and headlines. No mater how good your blog article is, you need to get their attention first.

“Traffic breeds traffic, and nothing jumpstarts traffic to a new blog like an intriguing headline. As David Ogilvy, the father of advertising said, “You have to crap out 25 headlines for every piece of content.
Your headline should be either clever, shocking or interesting. It should be focused, relevant and address your target audiences’ pain.
Tip: Start with a working headline to name your piece, but don’t commit until after the entire blog has been written. You will be amazed at how often the headline writes itself based on the content you just wrote. Try scanning your article for a stand-out sentence, and use that for the basis of your headline.”

– Chuck Bankoff

Research by Conductor showed that people prefer headlines that contain numbers.

Read more: Backed by Data: How to Write Extraordinarily Good Headlines

26. Create a blog promotion plan

“Spend substantial time creating content for your blog — and even more promoting it. There’s absolutely no point in producing material, if nobody is ever going to see it.”

– Sam Hurley, OPTIM-EYEZ

Dan Knowlton from KPS Digital Marketing suggests that 20% of your time should be creating blogs, 80% of your time should be promoting them.

Think about it… You spend around 8-12 hours on writing a great blog article. If you put no effort in promoting it, this time if half wasted.

“Video is one of the best ways to promote your blogs as social media algorithms don’t penalise videos as much as links. Here is an example of how we’ve been creative with video to promote one of our blogs. “

– Dan Knowlton

Here’s another marketing expert weighing in:

“The most important thing you need to do for your launch is to promote it. Do this before, during and after. My secret weapon is SocialJukebox. It’s a great tool for evergreen content on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. It saves me so much time and allows me to “work smarter not harder.”

– Madalyn Sklar

And another…

“Also, think about how it is you’re going to get eyeballs to that content. Just because you hit “publish” doesn’t mean anyone is going to find or read your blog content.

Do you have a robust presence in the social media space? Do you do regular email marketing/send email newsletters? Have you factored in the value of paid social as a way of getting traction for your content? Does your sales team understand the value of sharing well-written, informative blog content? Do they know how to do that? Bottom line: For success with a corporate blog, start with a strategy. Develop the right kind of content, and figure out how you’ll get that content in front of people as part of that strategic plan.”

– Shelly Kramer

The key takeaway from what all three marketers are saying is that you need to spend a lot of time on promoting your article. Otherwise, nobody will find it.

27. Create a content promotion checklist

If you want to consistently succeed in promoting your blog, create a list of best practices that work for you.

Start a content promotion checklist and keep to it with near-religious devotion.

“The most important thing I do before I launch a blog post is creating a content promotion checklist. In a spreadsheet I list all the places I’m going to promote the blog post and the specific tactics I’m going to execute to drive traffic and shares. I also list my estimation of how much traffic each promotional activity will drive. By check-listing every single thing I’m going to do for promotion I can be ready to promote the content effectively.“

– Daniel Wallock

Johnathan Dane suggests that you promote your blog articles via upvoting communities, social channels, and other formats so you get your vanity social proof up.

Also, you can both share and promote your blog articles on Facebook.

Tip: Before you promote your blog article to a wide audience of people (based on their interests and location), promote it to your fans and customers.

28. Engage your blog readers to comment

As you’re starting a new blog, you’re likely interested in engaging with your audience.

One of the best ways to do it is in your blog’s comments section.

Tip: Get the Disqus WordPress plugin to have a good-looking commenting platform in the end of each article.

Chelsea Krost suggests that in order to engage a higher number of readers, always think about that strategic Call To Action to include and the bottom of each blog to kick start engagement in the comments section.

“Make sure to always check the comments section to gain inspiration from what people like or questions asked to determine what topics to cover next.”
– Chelsea Krost

Part 4: Growing your new blog

29. Be consistent in publishing and promotion

After a successful new blog launch, you definitely deserve some praise and a few days of rest.

However, the initial success can easily pass if you leave your blog unattended for the upcoming weeks.

Here’s some solid advice from three marketing experts:

“Once you get traction, keep your content consistent, maintain your website to be fast, modern and a delightful experience for your visitor.”

– Adel de Meyer

“Publish at least twice/week.”

– Johnathan Dane

“Focus more on maintenance than launch. People put so much energy into the launch, but forget to create a system that keeps them accountable for continuing to publish new content. It’s a marathon, not a sprint.”

– Phil Pallen

Moreover, you should give your best to keep sharing your blog articles on social media for maximized visibility.

30. Set up an editorial calendar

An easy way to keep yourself on track with consistent content creation is to set up an editorial calendar.

“Plan an editorial calendar that focuses on your best work that speaks to those three factors so you attract the right readers for your content.”

– Keri Jaehnig

Nothing fancy is needed. For example, I like to keep a Google Doc. with all my blog article ideas. Truth be told, it’s still difficult to keep writing on a consistent basis.

31. Experiment with different content formats

Nirav Dave suggests that you take use of different content formats like infographics, case studies, expert roundups, videos, etc. as this will help enhance engagement with your audience as well as help increase your site’s ranking on SERPs.

Different content formats will help your blog get visibility in a wide range of distribution channels.

For example, infographics can do really well on Pinterest.

Tip: No matter what type of content you publish, make sure it’s SEO-optimized.

If you’re publishing an infographic in your blog, write an intro, so that Google’s algorithms will get more information about the illustration’s content.

32. Build a list of your blog readers

Many people come to your blog only once. Then, they forget about you.

If you want to keep people engaged in the long term and keep notifying them of your latest blog articles, start building an email marketing list.

“Add an opt-in overlay (with an opt-in *and* opt-out button on it) to your blog. Make your opt-in magnet something you KNOW is compelling to the community you’re a part of.”

– Joanna Wiebe

Here’s a great example by Jeff Bullas:

In Aggregate blog, we created an e-book with more than 200 Facebook ad examples that we use as a lead magnet. This far, we’ve got already more than 2,500 downloads.

33. Build and engage your community

Joanna Wiebe suggests that you sometimes ask your community for help.

“Share your blog post with the community, driving them to your blog. And if it’s not stretching the rules of that community, give them a link to one of your tweets about the post so they can retweet it.”

– Joanna Wiebe

However, don’t go overboard with this tactic and only try it on people who really know you and your blog.

34. Repurpose and redistribute your blog content

After you’ve run your blog for a while, there will be a substantial amount of content that you can start to repurpose.

“Content distribution never ends. This is a mistake I frequently encounter. Repurpose and redeploy across multiple channels/platforms!”

– Sam Hurley

For example, you could create an infographic out a listicle post. Or make a 2017 guide into an updated 2018 guide.

35. Do guest blogging to get backlinks

If you want your website/blog to rank higher in Google search results, go guest post for other sites and link back to your site and articles in their posts. – Johnathan Dane

However, as I wrote in a recent article on guest blogging, it’s often not worth your time.

Tim Soulo, Head of Marketing at Ahrefs, conducted an extensive analysis of 273 guest posts and their ROI.

In terms of referral traffic, guest posting is almost as good as doing nothing.

If you’re just starting a blog, focus on creating better-than-life articles for your own blog and build up your fan base.

Then, if you truly have time aside from keeping your own blog filled with new content, think about blogging for others.

36. Don’t expect overnight success

As a final note, I would like to emphasize that your blog won’t get famous overnight.

Even if you write the best articles in the entire universe, it takes time for people to find out about your blog and learn to love it.

“First and foremost, have realistic expectations when you start or plan to start your own blog. Getting traction and building an audience takes time, so don’t beat yourself up about not achieving overnight success.”

– Adel de Meyer

Here are a few key learnings I took away from the first year of growing Aggregate blog:

1. Some of the posts you think are AWESOME won’t get much traffic.
2. It’s partly due to chance that some posts go viral.
3. Consistency really is the key when it comes to growing.
4. The quickest way to grow your blog traffic is via smart SEO.
5. It really is important to outreach and engage with other influencers.

Look at growing your blog as evolution – it’s not perfect from the beginning, but it will keep improving with time.

Alright, folks… This article’s gotten way too long already. I hope you’re at least a bit more inspired to get started with a blog.

Also, BIG KUDOS to all the marketing experts for being part of this article.

If you’ve got any additional must-know tactics for starting a blog, let us know in the comments! 

The post 36 Hacks for Starting a Blog by 30+ TOP Marketing Experts appeared first on Marketing Fix blog.

Those are the words of advertising legend David Ogilvy, right out of his book Ogilvy on Advertising first published in 1985.

Lately, I’ve been spending some time on reading the advertising classics and discovered that what the agency gurus told 40 or 50 years ago is still relevant today. Even more so, it seems like many modern marketers have forgotten some of the core principles of great advertising.

According to R. Reeves, out of 78 biggest package-goods advertisers in the US, some ads were recalled by 78% of people while others by a mere 2%.

If your advertising fails to get the message to the heads of people, your money’s wasted. And this is happening to millions of advertisers every day.

Having worked through two cult marketing books – Ogilvy on Advertising by David Ogilvy and Reality in Advertising by Rosser Reeves, I feel like I’ve been to the best marketing conference of my life – there are so many applicable takeaways.

All the best practices, research findings, and recommendations by the two advertising legends are still relevant today. Even more so, many marketers seem to have forgotten the core principles of marketing.

Just take a look at these 18 golden rules of advertising and remind yourself how to create ads that do not fail.

1. You need to know your USP

USP, a term coined by Rosser Reeves, signifies the Unique Selling Proposition. Both Ogilvy and Reeves believed that having a strong USP is the key to successful advertising.

According to Ogilvy, writing a good advertisement starts by studying the product – you need to know what makes it beneficial to its users and different from the competition.

Reeves explained that your USP has three parts:

1. Each advertisement must make a proposition to the consumer.
   Not just words, not just product puffery, not just show-window advertising. Each advertisement must say to each reader: “Buy this product, and you will get this specific benefit.
2. The proposition must be one that the competition either cannot, or does not, offer.
   It must be unique – either a uniqueness of the brand or a claim not otherwise made in that particular field of advertising.
3. The proposition must be so strong that it can move the mass of millions.
   Your advertisements should pull over a large number of new customers to your product.

For example, the ad above proposes a clear value offer: Save money by shopping at Sears.

So how can you find the best USP?

2. Research your product and users

The way Ogilvy came up with the advertising copy for Sears was by researching what people thought about the company.

When research reported that the average shopper thought Sears Roebuck made a profit of 37 per cent on sales, Ogilvy headlined an advertisement Sears makes a profit of 5 per cent.

This specific number was more persuasive than saying that Sears’ profit was “less than you might suppose” or something equally vague. Sometimes, it’s worth mentioning specifics.

With all the modern surveying tools, asking for your users’ feedback is easier than ever before. Use that opportunity to learn what makes people buy your product.

3. If you don’t have a strong USP, do this

Most advertisements have interchangeable parts – you could just as well insert a competitor’s name in your ads.

This means that you don’t have a USP that’s limited to only your product.

If that’s the case, Reeves suggested two solutions:

1. The product could be changed/improved to have a USP.
2. If the product can’t be changed, it’s possible to tell the public something about that product that has never been revealed before.

Here’s one of the advertisements that Ogilvy created for the Campbell’s – it’s showing the product from a completely new side.

Do not forget that your Unique Selling Proposition has to be relevant to the audience.

Sometimes, a cool product feature that seems amazing to you does not appeal to your customers.

You could argue that Ogilvy’s ad is focused on an irrelevant USP. However, if you give it some more thought, the USP is not that the soup can be served cold. The core USP of the advertisement is that the product’s easy to consume – and that’s relevant to millions of consumers.

4. Your advertisement needs one big idea

I recommend that you read the following quote at least twice.

“Be cautious, in the course of adding secondary claims, that a distraction claim does not suddenly crystallize, i.e. a second claim which sucks power away from your USP.”

– R. Reeves

A consumer tends to remember just one thing from an advertisement – one strong claim, or one strong concept.

If you’re advertising more than one benefit, chances are that people don’t either remember any of them or develop their own reaction.

As Reeves put it:

“The advertisement may have said five, ten, or fifteen things, but the consumer will tend to pick out just one, or else, in a fumbling, confused way, he tries to fuse them together into a concept of his own.”

So instead of listing three or more product benefits, find the one that truly matters to people and advertise the hell out of it.

5. How to recognize a strong USP?

How to tell a strong USP from a week one?

For one, a strong USP will sell your product times more than any irrelevant message.

Ogilvy also suggested that your advertisement has to contain a big idea. Ask yourself:

• Did it make me gasp when I first saw it?
• Do I wish I had thought of it myself?
• Is it unique?
• Does it fit the strategy to perfection?
• Could it be used for 30 years?

For example, the legendary Lucky Strike ads used USP “It’s toasted” – and used it in consecutive campaigns for many years.

However, don’t focus on minuscule differences. Reever called this “The Deceptive Differential.”

Another interesting fact about “It’s toasted” message is that back then, Lucky Strike wasn’t nearly the only cigarette company selling toasted tobacco.

Which leads us to the next point…

6. You can “acquire” any general USP

According to R. Reeves, the advertiser to first use a Unique Selling Proposition will own that USP.

“Can those USPs be stolen by competitors? – No. Studies of great numbers of brand histories show that the first big advertiser can pre-empt the USP. He is the pioneer, and, protected by his penetration bulwark. Thus, the USP becomes his property.”

R. Reeves

Lucky Strike owned a general USP. And so did Colgate with their ads saying “Cleans your breath while it cleans your teeth.”

Some time later, one of Colgate’s competitors ran an advertising with the message “Freshens your breath while it cleans your teeth – because it has a special mouthwash built in!”

Here’s what happened:

Now may also be a good time to reflect on your advertising messages and think whether they truly belong to your brand or you’re just repeating your competitors’ USP.

7. If you find a USP that works, keep repeating it

If you’re lucky enough to write a good advertisement, repeat it until it stops selling.

According to Reeves, research shows that the readership of an advertisement does not decline when it is run several times in the same magazine.

Readership remains at the same level throughout at least four repetitions. “You aren’t advertising to a standing army; you are advertising to a moving parade.”

In fact, changing your USP too often can have a damaging effect on your brand recognition and sales.

Take a look at the case study below.

Look at this way: You shouldn’t change your USP while it’s working, but this doesn’t mean that you can’t change your advertisements.

You can create different ads, both in design and copy, until they all reinforce your core USP.

8. Your competitors using a consistent USP will outgrow you

According to Reeves, three great basic principles of advertising reality emerged from their research:

1. Changing a story has the same effect as stopping the money, as far as penetration is concerned.
2. Thus, if you ran a brilliant campaign every year, but change it every year, your competitor can pass you with a campaign that is less brilliant – providing he does not change his copy.
3. Unless a product becomes outmoded, a great campaign will not wear itself off.

“Recently, we watched the drama of an advertiser who had 65% penetration on a powerful, sales-winning theme. Then he changed campaigns. In eighteen months his hard-won 65% penetration had dropped to 2.2% – in other words, had almost vanished entirely.”
R. Reeves

If the campaign has really worn itself out, one of two things will happen:

• People’s awareness of your USP will drop.
• The public would cease to respond to the message, and your sales volumes will fall.

Often, when a new brand with a strong USP enters the market, leading competitors panic and start changing their own campaigns. That’s the worst idea.

9. There’s only so much room in people’s heads

Or, if you wish, there’s only so much love in people’s hearts for brands in the same vertical.

Reeves’ research team found that as your branded message becomes increasingly known, the USPs of your competitors fade from people’s minds.

“There is a finite limit to what a consumer can remember about 30,000 advertised brands,” Reeves said. Today, there are hundreds of thousands of brands advertising.

“It’s as if he [the consumer] carries a small box in his head for a given product category. This box is limited either by his inability to remember or his lack of interest.”
– R. Reeves

10. Ogilvy on creating great advertisements

According to Ogilvy, the easiest way to get new clients is to do good advertising.

Easier said than done.

Here are some key takeaways from Ogilvy’s research into what makes some advertisements succeed while others fail.

• Images of finished dishes consistently attracted more readers than photographs of the raw ingredients. In a study of 70 campaigns whose sales results were known, Gallup did not find a single before-and-after campaign that didn’t increase sales.
• Images with an element of “story appeal” were far above average in attracting attention.
• The kind of photographs that work hardest are those which arouse the reader’s curiosity.

• Create ads that people can relate to. When you show a photograph of a woman, men will ignore your ad.
• Most copywriters believe that markdowns and special offers are boring, but customers don’t think so. They are above average in recall.

READ MORE: 12 Hidden Facebook Features 95% of Marketers Don’t Know

11. Make your ads effortlessly readable

One of the golden rules of advertisement design is: Don’t capitalize your headlines.

If you look at the ads in the magazine next to you, you’ll be surprised how many marketers mistake against this rule.

A professor at Stanford established that capitals retard reading – capitalized words tend to be read letter by letter.

Here’s another important rule: Don’t put a period at the end of headlines – they’ll stop the reader from reading more.

Don’t set your copy in reverse type – with white letters on a black background. It’s more difficult to read.

Black type on a white background is easier to read than copy set in reverse type. So think twice before you set your ad copy on a colourful background.

12. Make your product the hero of your advertising

Often, advertisers make the mistake of creating a vampire video – a video that takes away attention from your USP.

According to Reeves, “One wrong picture can steal a hundred words.”

Here’s a best practice that applies to all types of advertisements: Make sure your message and visuals match.

If the message says: “This tablet dissolves into 10,000 tiny bubbles,” show the tablet dissolving into 10,000 tiny bubbles. Make sure your videos interpret your USP.

Do not create ads that steal the attention from your USP.

Here’s another interesting takeaway from Ogilvy: Advertisements with testimonials by celebrities tend to underperform.

Viewers will know the celebrity has been bought and they will remember the celebrity instead of the product advertised.

Here’s another important thing to keep in mind: Do not advertise your competitor’s USP, not to spean of their brand names.

If there’s a comparison with the competitor, they do not mention their name, but say “another leading detergent,” etc.

13. Headline is the most important part of your ad

A Harvard professor used to begin his series of lectures with a sentence that took his students by the throat: “Cesare Borgia murdered his brother-in-law for the love of his sister, who was the mistress of their father – the Pope.”

– A passage from Ogilvy’s book

On average, five times as many people read the headlines as read the body copy.

Unless your headline sells your product, you have wasted 90% of your money. The headlines that work best are the ones that promise the reader a benefit.

If you have any news to tell, don’t hide it in the body copy. Say it in the headline.

Include your brand name in the headline – otherwise, 80 per cent of people who won’t read your body copy will never know what product you’re advertising.

According to Ogilvy, some copywriters write “tricky” headlines – double meanings, puns, etc. This is counter-productive. Your headline should telegraph what you want to say.

Moreover, your ad copy should be written in the language people use in everyday conversation. Avoid analogies as they are often misunderstood.

14. Use the right advertisement layout

Ogilvy’s research showed that readers first look at the illustration, then at the headline, then at the copy.

So put these elements in that order – illustration at the top, followed by bu the headline.

On average, headlines below the illustration are read by 10 per cent more people than headlines above the illustration.

Here’s another interesting takeaway from Reeves:

Two-spread magazine ads cost twice as much as single pages, but seldom get twice the readership, or pull twice as many coupons.

You could double the reach or frequency of your campaigns by using single-page ads. So think twice before creating two-spread magazine ads.

15. How to create video ads that sell

In his book, Ogilvy has devoted an entire chapter to video advertisements.

Here are the key takeaways from his years of practice and research:

• When doing video ads, mention your product multiple times to make people remember it.
• Show the packaging and the product. Commercials which end by showing the package are more effective in changing brand preference than commercials which don’t.
• Try to grab the viewer’s attention during the first seconds of your ad.
• Research shows that it’s more difficult to hold your audience if you use voiceover. It is better to have the actors talk on camera.

16. How to succeed in B2B advertising

If you’re in the B2B marketing space, you’ll love the following guidelines:

• Promise what is important to the customer – a supplier of computer software was proud of the size of his company and wanted to make it the feature of his advertising, but research found that his customers were not interested in size. They were looking for responsiveness, support, service – and a good product.
• Make your promise specific. Instead of generalities, use percentages, time elapsed, dollars saved.

• Testimonials work well, as long as they come from experts in reputable companies.
• Even if you think your product boring, it’s not boring to your potential buyers – there’s no need to advertise irrelevant images.
• Don’t be afraid of long copy – if that’s what it takes to explain your product.

Fun fact: Ogilvy was running content marketing ads to get new customers. 60 years ago!!

17. How to advertise like TOP consumer brands

Here are Ogilvy’s key takeaways from analyzing big advertisers’ campaigns, e.g. Procter & Gamble.

There’s a lot you can learn from them.

• They always promise the consumer one important benefit.
• They believe that the first duty of advertising is to communicate effectively, not to be original or entertaining.
• They measure communication in three stages: before the copy is written, after the commercials are produced, and in test markets.
• All their commercials include a “moment of confirmation.” E.g. a demonstration how a cleaning product absorbs more liquid.

• Their commercials talk straight to the consumer, using language and situations that are familiar to them.
• Often, they also show their users some emotional benefit derived from the product – “You’ll be more appreciated if you use Dash.”

18. How to reach the largest audience for your budget?

Is it better to reach a smaller audience, yet reach it more times? Or is it better to reach a bigger audience – yet reach it less often?

Here’s Reeves’ answer – buy dispersion. Try to reach more homes, not the same homes.

Reach your audience less often, but make it as large an audience as you can. (This is especially relevant for consumer products that have a wide potential user base.)

This also applies to digital advertising – e.g. try to reach a wider audience with your Facebook ads rather than show the same ad to the same people for more than 3 times.

Final takeaways

Here are five more amazing quotes from Ogilvy and Reeves that you should remember whenever creating new advertisements.

Don’t create ads that are window dressers – the ads that merely show your product without the USP. – R. Reeves

If the product does not meet some existing desire or need of the consumer, the advertising will ultimately fail. – R. Reeves

If it doesn’t sell, it’s not “creative. – D.Ogilvy

The most dangerous word in advertising is… originality. – R. Reeves

Advertising is the art of getting a unique selling proposition into the heads of the most people at the lowest possible cost. – R. Reeves

– – – – – – –

Ogilvy’s book was first published in 1983 and Reeves’ even sooner, in 1961. It is amazing how the best practices in use back then have made their way into modern advertising.

Everything you read in this article can be applied to your Facebook advertising campaigns, Instagram ads or email marketing funnels. So take one hour and go over all your current advertisements, looking if they have a clear USP and whether they follow the basic best practices.

You might be surprised by your findings.

The post 18 Golden Advertising Rules by Legendary D. Ogilvy and R. Reeves appeared first on Marketing Fix blog.

When Edward from AdvanceB2B reached out to me with an idea to do a podcast together, that was the topic we chose: Growing blog traffic from 0 to 30k+ visitors per month.

LISTEN TO THE PODCAST HERE

Among other growth hacks and SEO best practices, we talked about:

• How to build a growth-focused content marketing strategy
• What are the key mistakes made by B2B and SaaS marketers
• The importance of 10x content and how to balance quality versus quantity in your content marketing
• A two hour hack to quickly boost your organic traffic
• Some of the key learnings from my career this far

I hope you enjoy listening to this podcast as much as I enjoyed recording it.

Do check out the other episodes as well, e.g. the one with Dave Gerhardt, Director of Marketing at Drift.

You can also read about the tactics discussed in the podcast here: From 1.6k to 31k Monthly Blog Visitors – How We Did it

The post [Podcast] Growing Your Blog Traffic to 30,000 Visitors appeared first on Marketing Fix blog.

All I had done was feasting on marketing blogs and podcasts for the previous two months. I was so into digital marketing that I thought I knew everything.fa

As I soon found out, the SaaS marketing world turned out to be a lot more versatile and exciting than I’d thought.

But you know what… It all worked out.

Better than my 21-year-old self could possibly have imagined.

During my last two years as the Digital Marketing Manager at Scoro, we’ve:

• Increased the number of monthly leads by over 300%
• Built our blog readership from 1.6k to 32k monthly organic visitors
• Published tens of new landing pages and hundreds of ads
• Grown into a team of full-stack marketers

However, I’ve got some big news.

Today is my very last day working as the Digital Marketing Manager at Scoro.

Looking back, I wanted to share the key learnings on SaaS marketing that I’ve discovered on this two-year journey, 35 of them to be exact.

SaaS marketing strategy – key learnings

When I joined my first SaaS startup two years ago, there was no all-encompassing marketing strategy in place.

So we started by…

• Defining our buyer personas
• Finding out who’s our high expectation customer – the people who enjoy your product’s most complex and differentiating benefits
• Thinking what are our potential customers’ pain points that our product could solve

SaaS Marketing Lesson #1:
Find your High Expectation Customer

There’s an amazing article on the High Expectation Customer by Julie Supan who’s worked for Airbnb and Dropbox.

If you’re unsure how to answer the following questions, chances are that you’re struggling to position your SaaS product in the market.

SaaS Marketing Lesson #2:
Keep true to your target audience = don’t try to sell to everyone.

Even though we had defined our buyer personas, it sometimes happened that our marketing activities got derailed and we were trying to serve a larger audience than we should have.

This led to delivering low-quality leads to the sales team. Fortunately, in the quickly adaptive environment of a SaaS startup, we were able to quickly recover.

Seriously – the more we worked on defining our target audience, the higher ROI we saw across all marketing channels.

SaaS Marketing Lesson #3:
You absolutely must know your UVP and mission statement

Unique Value Proposition (UVP) is a brief statement that describes your product’s benefit to the customer while differentiating you from your competition.

That’s the utmost reason why anyone should buy your SaaS product.

You should also be clearly aware of why your startup exists in the first place.

Test your mission statement by following this framework – do you know your target customer, your product’s benefits, and the key differentiating element?

Translated into a mission statement, the result will look like this:

If you’re unable to clearly identify your core value offer, you’re going to struggle when developing future marketing messages and organizing big campaigns.

Moreover, your entire team will feel demotivated when working without a clear mission.

SaaS Marketing Lesson #4:
Keep true to your mission statement

Once you’ve set your SaaS company’s mission statement, you should actually act by it.

Offering potential customers a big discounts or trying to keep employees happy with nice office perks isn’t going to cut it.

Today, with tens of thousands of SaaS products in the market, the key differentiator isn’t your product’s features, it’s your branding and mission.

You should regularly ask “Why does our company exist other than to make money?” – knowing the answer will also make it easier to communicate your product’s value to the user.

https://www.mindtitan.com/?utm_source=aggregate&utm_medium=paid-ads

SaaS Marketing Lesson #5:
It’s all about growth

Looking back at the past 24 months, I wish I’d focused even more on growth. I feel like we occasionally got stuck in doing the same things over and over again just because they worked.

However, the biggest increase in our marketing results has come from constant optimization and new ventures.

Key takeaway: Be constantly on the lookout of new ideas to improve your lead flow and increase conversion rates.

SaaS Marketing Lesson #6:
Your growth plan needs to include clear actions, not just nice numbers

It’s not sufficient to just write down the anticipated numbers, you also need to know how to achieve this growth.

The way I’d set up a SaaS marketing strategy is by setting up growth goals, e.g. 10% growth every month and then contemplating how this growth will be achieved.

The growth plan should be created by a large team of people (from marketing, sales, product teams), each contributing their knowledge and ideas.

SaaS Marketing Lesson #7:
There are multiple ways to increase sales

Here’s a graph by KlientBoost, illustrating how every stage of your SaaS conversion funnel is converting at a different rate.

In the end, only a handful of website visitors become paying customers.

If you want to grow your MRR by, let’s say, 10% every month, you have two options:

• Optimize the conversion rates of your conversion funnel stages
• Get more people into your conversion funnel

It’s up to you to choose which path you prefer (usually, it’s the combination of both).

However, the choice should be intentional and every action you take driven by your SaaS company’s long-term marketing strategy.

SaaS Marketing Lesson #8:
Failure = Winning

There’s a simple correlation between the failings and gains in your marketing team’s work.

The more you fail, the more you’ll also grow. That’s because you’ll be testing a significantly larger number of new tactics.

Failure = Testing = Winning

While many of our ideas didn’t work out as expected and cost us some leads and budgets, I’m glad that we tried.

Many experiments also turned out to be great success and helped us increase the number of monthly leads (and sales results).

SaaS Marketing Lesson #9:
Don’t optimize for leads. Optimize for growth.

Speaking of results and sales, you should be aware that new leads do not necessarily translate into more sales.

Leads ≠ Sales

You can get thousands of low-quality leads, but if none of them converts into paying customers, you’ll soon be out of business.

When I started managing Scoro’s AdWords account and working with PPC agencies, I discovered we were targeting lots of keywords irrelevant to our product.

While these keywords brought in leads at acceptable CPA (cost per acquisition), they never ever converted into buyers.

After we cleaned up our campaigns, we started getting more qualified leads.

Key takeaway: Measure the number of qualified leads you get from every marketing channel, not just the overall lead count.

SaaS Marketing Lesson #10:
Track the right metrics

The more I’ve spoken with successful SaaS marketers, the more I’ve grasped the importance of tracking the right marketing metrics.

So what are the right SaaS marketing metrics you should track?

I would suggest that you select 3-5 key marketing metrics that you use for decision-making and only then build a list of supporting metrics.

These 3-5 key metrics should be directly tied to your company’s growth, thereby they could be:

• Increase in MRR
• Cost per acquisition per paying customer
• Average lifetime value

The CPA per lead could be a secondary metric that you use to evaluate the performance of marketing campaigns.

Of course, your SaaS metrics really depend on the product you’re selling. Maybe none of the metrics I just mentioned makes any sense with your particular strategy.

SaaS Marketing Lesson #11:
Trust in your LTV

Until recently, I had never thought of the customer lifetime value as a key metric to SaaS marketing strategy.

However, your average users’ LTV can easily predict how much you should be willing to pay for leads and paid customers.

You should opt for the CPA to be 3 times lower than the LTV, meaning for every dollar you put in your SaaS machine you’re getting 3 out.

However, I’ve seen many SaaS companies struggling with this paradox: Once they find a marketing channel with a positive ROI, they keep limiting their budgets.

SaaS Marketing Lesson #12:
Once you’ve found the perfect growth channel, use it to its full potential

Most of the successful SaaS marketers I’ve talked with aim to find marketing channels with a positive ROI and then use them to their maximum capacity.

For example, if the avg. CPA for a paid customer on AdWords is $1,2k and the LTV of that customer is 10k, it would make sense to extend your marketing budget as much as possible to grow faster.

Once you’ve found a profitable marketing channel, increase the resources spent on it. E.g. if you’re happy with your Facebook ads CPC, increase your Facebook advertising budget.

SaaS Marketing Lesson #13:
Segment your LTV by marketing channels

Not all of your SaaS marketing channels bring identical leads.

You can conduct an analysis on different lead segments and see what’s the average LTV across different channels, countries, and other customer segments.

You’ll find it a lot easier to evaluate whether a marketing channel has a positive or negative ROI.

You’ll also avoid keeping some poorly performing campaigns running and won’t close the ones with a high potential due to generalizing.

SaaS Marketing Lesson #14:
Know when to say “We tried but failed”

Working in SaaS marketing has also taught me a couple of lessons about sunk costs.

In terms of marketing, a sunk cost is a cost that has already been incurred and cannot be recovered. And often, it makes us want to keep pushing a failing marketing incentive in the hopes of it starting to work.

In SaaS marketing, it’s especially important that you notice the budget-draining projects early on, before they exhaust your budgets and resources.

Train yourself to be the wake-up-call for the entire marketing team whenever it happens.

Here’s an easy litmus test for uncovering low-performing projects.

Ask your team: “If we could devote our resources (time and budget) on a different marketing project, would we?”

If you’re able to name some ideas with a bigger potential, that’s where you should focus.

SaaS Marketing Lesson #15:
Prioritize based on numbers and data

A couple of days ago, I read a blog article by Peep Laja where he mentioned that many marketers prioritize their website A/B tests by the ease of implementation, not the possible gains.

Let me repeat it…

Often, marketers choose their projects by the ease of implementation, completely ignoring the data.

Guilty as charged.

Where you spend your time and resources should be directed by data, not your gut feeling or comfort zone.

SaaS Marketing Lesson #16:
Set up a strong lead tracking system

If I could turn back time, I’d travel back to 2015 and set up a comprehensive lead tracking framework.

Customers have so many possible touching points with your ads/content and take so many different actions before converting.

And if you’re unable to track all of it, you’ll have no idea of what actually works.

So looking back, I’d draw up a customer journey map and start using tools like HubSpot, Mixpanel, and Kissmetrics in the early phases of SaaS marketing.

Using those tools is crucial to understanding how our leads and customers interact with your ads, content, and the SaaS product.

Content marketing – key learnings

When I joined Scoro, one of my first tasks was to create a content marketing strategy and start publishing articles that would translate into sales.

In the past 20 months, we’ve grown our blog’s organic traffic from 1.6k monthly visitors to 32k visitors/month.

That’s a 1,843% growth.

However, the fastest growth has happened in the past 11 months while we grew our traffic from 6k/month to 31k/month.

In fact, I wrote an in-depth article on the SEO hacks and content marketing tips we used, you can read it here: From 1.6k to 31k Monthly Blog Visitors in 20 Months – How We Did It

So how did we achieve the nearly 2,000% growth?

And how can you replicate the success in your SaaS startup’s blog?

SaaS Marketing Lesson #17:
Give instead of taking

As a general rule, SaaS companies aren’t non-profits.

This means that every presentation, gift or blog article ever made should translate into sales.

That’s true, but don’t take it literally.

Before you can take, you should learn to give.

So instead of contemplating your masterplan on how to get everyone buying your product…

Think instead how you could provide value to your target audience.

SaaS Marketing Lesson #18:
Don’t publish content for the sake of publishing

WordPress users produce about 84.3 million new posts and 41.8 million new comments every month.

The top 1% of these posts are read by 99% of the readers.

If your goal is to create content that’s engaging people and will ultimately help to increase your SaaS product sales, you can’t just publish any content.

When I joined Scoro, the company was buying articles from an agency in the US. These articles were a content marketer’s nightmare – 600 words long texts lacking any actionable advice.

As you may have guessed, nobody read nor shared those articles.

Only after we started creating high-quality and SEO-aware content, did the leads start to pour in.

SaaS Marketing Lesson #19:
“Quality vs. Quantity” is a wrong approach

After managing Scoro’s content marketing strategy for two years, I’ve learned that while consistency is the key to success, so is the quality of the articles.

So what are you to do: Choose the quality over quantity or vice versa?

Actually, you should aim for quality and quantity.

When given a choice – take both.

After publishing 2 articles per week for a short period of time, we decided to cut it back to 1 article/week and focus on publishing content with higher value, while maintaining the weekly schedule.

SaaS Marketing Lesson #20:
Awesome content will get the attention it deserves

I’ve heard so many marketers complain “We’re publishing high-value content, but people just won’t find nor read it.”

That’s so untrue!

Take this blog you’re currently reading. It’s only 4-5 months old. However, all the previous three articles have been widely shared and read.

How? – By being packed with value.

Of course, there are the “superstar” blogs that have accumulated large readerships and can now enjoy even their mediocre articles getting thousands of shares.

And of course, it also depends on luck to some extent – will people notice and pick up your articles.

However, if you’re just starting out, you need to work hard on writing content that’s on par with the very best articles on a similar topic.

That’s the only surefire road to building a popular blog.

SaaS Marketing Lesson #21:
Publish original content & research

While high-quality content can help build an engaged audience and expand your marketing funnel, it’s the original research that can bring you near-magical results. ✨

Here’s an example by Ahrefs: an article based on original research and measuring how much time it takes to start ranking well on Google.

High-quality and actionable research articles get picked up by other industry blogs and will become widely shared.

That’s exactly the kind of attention you need on your SaaS product.

Now that you’re all excited about conducting original research and publishing an epic blog article, I’d also like you to consider the next rule…

SaaS Marketing Lesson #21:
Measure your content marketing ROI

The ROI of content marketing is different from say, paid advertising, in that it’s not as clearly measurable.

Content marketing can be perceived as a top-of-the-funnel tactic that’s attracting new audiences without necessarily converting them into leads.

And that’s just fine.

If you can prove that content marketing is supporting your marketing funnel and eventually, sales, it’s definitely worth pursuing.

However, I’m a lot more sceptical about eBooks, webinars, Twitter chats, and other similar large-large content formats.

I’m not saying they’re not working, especially if you’re an established company with a large marketing team, like Marketo.

However, when we calculated the benefits we got from publishing and promoting eBooks and thought what else all those resources could have brought us in terms of leads and sales, it was a lousy deal.

As eBooks didn’t have a positive ROI in the case of our SaaS marketing strategy, we focused our time and effort on other activities with a higher ROI.

SaaS Marketing Lesson #22:
Do guest blogging only if you have a clear goal

You’ve probably heard all the marketing influencers tell that you should be guest blogging to acquire high-quality backlinks and get more website traffic.

Well, that’s only halfway true.

While guest blogging can certainly help you get quality backlinks, it isn’t necessarily worth your time.

For 10 hours of your marketing team’s time, what has more value:

1. Writing a top-notch guest blog post for a popular blog and giving away all your rights to the content.
2. Writing a 10x SEO-optimized article for your own blog, getting all the branding benefits, and later thousands of organic visitors.

Tim Soulo has written guest posts for tens of marketing blogs.

In his experience, writing a guest post in a top blog brings you about 100 website clicks.

The key takeaway here is that you shouldn’t be writing guest posts for the sake of driving traffic to your website.

Rather, write guest articles to establish your brand as an industry expert and build relationships.

SaaS Marketing Lesson #23:
Build relationships with other blogs

There’s another awesome benefit to guest posting that you could aim for: the relationships you build.

When we got started with Facebook advertising, I wrote a guest post on AdEspresso’s blog titled 6 Facebook Advertising Hacks I Wish We Had Known Before Launching Our First Campaign

The collaboration didn’t end there.

They asked me to become a regular contributor, which in turn led to new guest contributions in the top marketing blogs such as:

• Content Marketing Institute
• Social Media Examiner
• Copy Hackers
• AdEspresso
• Kissmetrics

Later, I was able to include Scoro’s marketing tactics as examples in my articles, getting us lots of quality backlinks.

SaaS Marketing Lesson #24:
Build relationships with other SaaS brands

If you take a good look at brands and people featured in blog articles, they’re often the same across the web.

That’s because those people and brands have built relationships with each other.

For example, my latest article in this blog featured SaaS marketing hacks. When compiling the article, I also interviewed some successful SaaS marketers.

After I’d published the article, those marketers also helped to promote it and shared the article with their audience.

Here’s another example of collaboration of Venngage, Aggregate blog, and Copy Hackers – we partnered on an infographic and blog article.

If you’d like to read more about how we grew Scoro blog’s organic traffic and which SEO tactics we applied, read this article: From 1.6k to 32k Monthly Blog Visitors in 20 Months – How We Did It

Paid advertising – key learnings

Paid advertising is an integral part of most SaaS marketing strategies.

Even if you’re lucky to be driving sales with “free” marketing activities such as content marketing and social media marketing, you can use the paid ads to accelerate your SaaS startup’s growth.

At Scoro, we focused mainly on two PPC channels – Facebook and Google AdWords – and combined them with some smaller paid lead sources (review sites, display ads, LinkedIn ads, etc.)

Paving our way to a solid PPC strategy wasn’t always the easiest challenge.

Luckily, we also had many small victories on our journey that made us want to test even more new ideas.

However, it wasn’t always as sunny in the PPC land.

When we got started with Facebook advertising, we failed to attract any new leads.

Why?

Because we were targeting a cold audience and trying them to sign up for a free product trial right off the bat.

SaaS Marketing Lesson #25:
Most people don’t care about your salesy ads

The cold hard truth about your SaaS product is that most people just don’t care enough to buy it.

If you set up a Facebook ads campaign targeting a Saved Facebook audience (based on people’s location interests), and show them an ad like this…

Most people will be like…

They’ll never click on your ad nor sign up for the free trial you’re offering.

That’s because you’re serving your sales pitch too early in the sales funnel, asking for too big a commitment.

In the Awareness stage of your marketing funnel, focus on educating and helping your target audience instead of jumping right on the sales pitch.

Read more tips and hacks in this guide on SaaS Facebook advertising.

SaaS Marketing Lesson #26:
Target sales messages on remarketing audiences

One of the a-ha moments we had regarding our SaaS startup’s paid advertising happened when I set up our first segmented retargeting campaigns on Facebook.

To the people who had previously visited our landing pages about Project Management Software, this Facebook ad made a lot more sense:

When delivering sales messages to Facebook Custom Audiences of past website visitors, we finally started to see some positive results.

Key takeaway: Start by attracting cold audiences with soft-sell ads and organic reach. Then, create paid remarketing campaigns targeting people that already know about your SaaS product.

SaaS Marketing Lesson #27:
Segment your remarketing audiences

Once we had set up our Facebook remarketing campaigns, we started looking for ways to optimize them.

One of the best ideas we had was to segment our website visitors into several groups.

This way, we were able to create more personalized marketing messages, depending on which exact landing page our audience members had visited.

Instead of delivering the same offer to everyone who had visited our website in the past 30 days, we only targeted our ads on the visitors of specific landing pages and blog articles – the people who were most likely to start a free trial.

As a result, our average Facebook marketing CPA decreased by 80% while the number of total conversions grew.

SaaS Marketing Lesson #28:
Good design is paramount

In the past 12 months, I’ve spent a lot of time on creating, managing, and optimizing both Facebook ad and AdWords campaigns.

One key thing I’ve learned is that design matters. Big time.

We’ve tested tens of different Facebook ad designs as that’s one of the key elements that makes the biggest difference in Facebook campaigns’ performance.

Learning to design basic visualizations isn’t as difficult as you might think. Start with a tutorial of Illustrator or Sketch and soon, you’ll be able to create all your SaaS company’s ad designs.

If you’d like to learn more about A/B testing your ads, see this guide on Facebook ad testing.

SaaS Marketing Lesson #29:
Don’t leave the PPC strategy (entirely) up to your marketing agency

Having worked with several PPC agencies, here’s what I think:

No PPC agency is as invested in your SaaS company’s growth as you are. That’s simply not possible.

Yet even though the agencies aren’t always perfect and answering your emails as often as you’d like, you still need them.

It’s a tough relationship.

95% of the time, hiring a PPC agency won’t immediately bring the results you’re hoping for.

Now, the way I imagine the perfect SaaS-agency relationship goes like this:

• Your in-house team sets the long-term and monthly PPC strategy
• Your PPC agency sets up the ad campaigns (writes the ad copy, designs ads, sets up the campaign structure)
• Your in-house team regularly reviews the paid ad campaigns and asks for small changes and optimization

Key takeaway: Even when working with world-class PPC agencies, you should still review your ad campaigns on a regular basis and contribute new ideas for improvement.

SaaS Marketing Lesson #30:
Keep testing new (and old) marketing channels

Even though you’ve found your top-performing marketing channels, there may be even better ones out there.

Moreover, the paid advertising channels that didn’t work in the first place could deliver good results the second time you try.

Set up a dedicated monthly “testing budget” for experimenting with new marketing channels. There’s a chance you’ll uncover a hidden gem.

SaaS marketing– general learnings

SaaS Marketing Lesson #31:
Don’t let your growth slow down

Once you’re in the frenzy of month-over-month growth, do your best not to let it slow down.

Trust me, it will be hard to get back on the train later.

Be constantly on the lookout for small tweaks and improvements that either bring more people to your marketing funnel or help to increase the conversion rate at different stages of the funnel.

However, remember that if you write month-over-month growth into your marketing strategy, you also need to add how you’re going to do it.

SaaS Marketing Lesson #32:
Keep your eyes on the road instead of competition

Scoro is a project management solution and guess what… There are hundreds of different project management tools out there.

However, none of these tools does all the exact same things as Scoro.

While you might feel the urge to copy your top-performing competitors… You should work in proactive mode rather than reactive.

Adjusting your goals and marketing tactics by perceiving your competition will get you derailed quickly.

There’s no single SaaS product in the world that would have 100% matching audience and solution with yours.

Or if there is, maybe you should rethink your UVP (unique value proposition).

SaaS Marketing Lesson #33:
Listen to your customers

When marketing a SaaS product, it’s incredibly easy to get caught up in the industry jargon and emphasize the wrong product benefits.

That’s why you should devote at least 5% of your time on learning what your customers think, how the interact with your product, and what are their core problems.

Yes, you really should reach out to 5-10 customers every three months and conduct survey in the meantime. You could also listen to the sales calls, read customer support emails, and check analytics to see how people use your product.

Listening to your customers helps to:

• Realize you product’s top benefits
• Improve your marketing messages
• Uncover missing / unnecessary features
• Discover how to keep your customers happier
• Improve your product’s UX
• Reduce churn

SaaS Marketing Lesson #34:
Think of your customers as people, not numbers

You sign up for a free SaaS product trial and for the next 12 months, your inbox is going to be flooded with their marketing emails.

Sounds familiar?

More emails and push notifications ≠ more customers

Don’t forget that your leads are real people and respect them by sending them only the marketing messages that are truly relevant to them.

A couple of lead nurturing emails is all good, but if you lock them into your marketing funnel forever, sending them irrelevant content every month, you could damage your brand instead of getting more customers.

Respecting your customers also applies to every other aspect of your SaaS strategy – sales calls, support emails, product developement – don’t forget it’s the customer you’re building the SaaS product for.

SaaS Marketing Lesson #35:
Keep reading and learning

When interviewing new potential marketing team members, I always ask what blogs and magazines they like to read.

That’s one of the key indicators whether a person’s passionate about marketing.

There are so many insightful articles and resources on SaaS marketing. Just to name a few:

Intercom on Starting Up eBook by Intercom
The Beginner’s Guide to SaaS Conversion Optimization by ConversionXL
The entire blog of First Round Review by First Round
The best SaaS newsletter I’ve seen this far by Hiten Shah

If you’re managing a SaaS marketing team, you could schedule the “reading hours” to every second Friday and make it a habit to share new tactics and ideas with the team.

What’s next?

As I said at the beginning of this article, I’ll be leaving Scoro as of June.

It’s both sad and exciting to be leaving.

I’m planning to take a looong vacation, go travelling, and devote even more time to reading and learning. I’ll also be working on some freelance projects.

In the long term… Who knows…

The post 35 SaaS Marketing Lessons I Wish I’d Known 20 Months Sooner appeared first on Marketing Fix blog.

• It’s about real growth, not “a 400% growth without any mention of the initial traffic numbers” (growing 400% from 100 website visitors to 500 visitors is no big deal. Growing from 1.6k to 30k+ is a real deal).
• All the tactics mentioned here really work. They’ve been tried and tested, not copied from other blogs.
• It’s also an honest account of what didn’t work. It’s not just shiny victories that paved our way to 30k+ monthly blog visits.

In September 2015, our startup’s blog had the total of 1,615 organic visits from Google. By March 2017, this number had grown to 31,375 visits.

A quick calculation shows that in the past 12 months, our organic blog traffic increased by 1,843%. This has also translated into a significant growth in the number of leads and sales.

However, the fastest growth has happened in the past 11 months while we grew our traffic from 6k/month to 31k/month.

To be honest, this good-looking growth curve did not always result from a solid SEO strategy. Rather, it was a series of a-ha moments and sudden revelations that guided the process.

We got an abrupt idea, applied it to our website, and kept our fingers crossed to see whether our (often crazy) ideas work. Sometimes, they did.

And that’s how we grew from 1,6k organic blog visits to 30k+ visits.

You know how some people say there are no golden nuggets and it’s only the long-term strategy that leads to goals… That’s not entirely true – the best results appear when a strong long-term plan gets mixed with bold ideas.

This article’s about the hacks and growth tactics we used to build our website traffic. The best part is that they can be easily applied to your marketing strategy as well.

IMPORTANT NOTE: I’d also like to give credit to our brilliant colleague Merily who’s been rocking our SEO, content, and CRO.

Here’s another article you might like: After Guest Blogging 50+ Articles to Top Blogs, Here’s What I’ve Learned

How we got started:

When I joined Scoro, I was eager to get started with content marketing right away.

Up to this point, the SaaS startup had been buying generic 800-word articles from an agency. Nobody wanted to read them, and it showed in the blog’s readership numbers.

Key takeaway #1: Don’t outsource your content marketing to an agency as they can’t see your SEO results nor do they plan for your long-term growth. (At least the agencies I’ve seen in action)

What you should do instead, is to establish a solid content strategy and a growth plan with two main goals:

• Building brand awareness and acquiring fans
• Publishing content that will bring you traffic in the long run

Rather than publishing three short articles per week, we aimed to publish one really good article once a week. This tactic’s also been explained by Rand Fishkin in his Whiteboard Friday episode on 10x content.

Key takeaway #2: Don’t publish for the sake of publishing – focus on quality, not quantity. (I bet you’re tired of hearing this, but it’s 100% true)

Our initial content marketing strategy was simple. It included a topic, headline, keywords, and a publishing date. We’re using a similar approach to this day.

Building a growth-focused content marketing strategy

At the beginning, our content marketing strategy was like a vacant parking lot – there were so many potential keywords and opportunities waiting to be employed.

Not to waste a single opportunity, every article we published had to show a huge organic traffic potential.

According to research by Ahrefs, the average Top10 ranking page is 2+ years old. It takes nearly three years to land the #1 spot.

The fact that it may take 2+ years to have your blog articles rank on Google means that you need to focus on the long-term strategy and build “content bundles” with articles complementing each other.

#Key takeaway 3: Plan and create content with long-term gains in mind. It may take up to two years for an article to start ranking in the TOP10 on SERPs.

Actually, I can assure you that some articles only take a month or two to start ranking high on SERPs. But it doesn’t change the fact that the focus should be placed on the long-term growth.

Instead of brainstorming fun headlines, we defined the five main topics to center our content around. I like to call those overarching topics the “content bundles”.

Creating content bundles as an SEO strategy

When analyzing our past three months’ website traffic, we noticed that 75% of the organic traffic resulted from two types of articles – software lists and KPI-related content.

I’ve never been a big believer in the 80/20 rule, but it sure seems to apply to our blog strategy. Most of our organic traffic comes from two content bundles that we’ve been expanding since 2015.

Just to be clear, here’s how I like to define content bundles:

• A series of articles around one key topic
• Each article focuses on a different (yet related) keyword

By interlinking the articles inside a content bundle, you’re able to create a keyword bubble. And for what I’ve seen, Google loves these kinds of bubbles around a specific topic. After some time, Google will begin to perceive your blog as an expert resource in the given field, assigning your articles a higher rank in SERPs.

Key takeaway #4: Create content bundles – a series of articles centered around one key topic.

For example, we’ve been working on the content bundle focusing on the keyword “KPI dashboard” for over 15 months. It’s a sweet keyword – the exact match has over 1k monthly searches in the US alone.

The other pages ranking for this keyword have a considerably higher domain authority. However, we’re now ranking as the #4 result in SERPs in the US.

Slowly but surely developing the content bundles has certainly been one of our highest-ROI tactics. The best part is that it’s easily applicable even to sites with a low domain authority – to blogs just starting out.

https://www.mindtitan.com/?utm_source=aggregate&utm_medium=paid-ads

The secret SEO tactics that bring skyrocketing results

Alright, it’s time for the best part of the article – the no-BS tactics that helped to grow our organic blog traffic at a fast pace.

As you might have guessed, it all starts with keyword research and identifying the best opportunities.

?SEO hack 1: Learn to do SEO research the right way

Instead of simply checking the Google Keyword Tool to see the monthly search volume of specific keywords, you can take your research to a higher level. I’ve also written about this method in-depth here.

Step 1: Google your keywords

After you’ve discovered some keywords with a great monthly search volume, head to Google and, well, google. (You can use a tool like ISearchFrom to see the results in specific countries)

Let’s say you want to create a list of Top SEO Blogs.

A quick Google search will reveal a list of results:

While it’s a good general overview of your competition, there’s a simple way to learn a lot more.

Key takeaway #5: Don’t limit your SEO research to the Google Keyword Tool. Dig deeper.

My personal favourite tool for competitive SEO research in the Moz SEO Toolbar.

Step 2: Use the Moz SEO Toolbar for advanced research

Use the Moz SEO Toolbar to get more insight about the articles in search results. Most of the features are free, simply add the extension to your web browser.

The SEO Toolbar will show you the Domain Authority and Page Authority of each website on the search engine results page.

What you want to do is to look for pages with a low domain authority that have managed to get listed among the high-DA pages. This means they’ve published such good content that Google thinks it’s necessary to refer to their site.

For example, an article from a site with the DA of 29 could appear between other pages with a DA of 80+.

The guys over at the low-DA site must have done something right. Analyze what differentiates their content from all other results.

Often, you’ll find that those low-DA pages have 10x more comprehensive content or have an exact keyword match. That’s what you’ll want to copy when creating content to rank for the same keyword.

Key takeaway #6: Find content marketing and SEO opportunities by discovering low domain authority sites that rank among pages with a high domain authority.

Once you’ve discovered that another low-DA site is able to rank in the TOP10 SERP results for a particular keyword, so can you.

?SEO hack 2: Spend more time interlinking

Remember when we talked about the content bundles in the first half of this article?

Adding links in between your blog articles helps to strengthen your keyword bubbles and make them visible to Google (and get your new articles ranking more quickly).

While most websites make an effort to add links to older articles inside the newer content, we took it one step further. After we had published a new article on a given topic, we went and edited older articles around the same subject, and added links to the new article.

For example, when we published this article on KPI Reporting in February 2017…

We went ahead and linked to it in a KPI-related article published one year before.

As a result, the new article picked up more quickly and appeared in the TOP20 SERPs two weeks after publishing.

Key takeaway #7: Interlink all the articles around a related topic to create keyword bubbles and improve your search rankings.

By interlinking our blog articles, we steadily built a network of links, supporting each individual keyword and helping our articles rank higher on Google SERPs.

https://www.mindtitan.com/?utm_source=aggregate&utm_medium=paid-ads

?SEO hack 3: A/B test new headlines and meta descriptions

The two SEO tactics mentioned previously helped us to grow our blog’s organic traffic by over 1,500%.

However, it’s this third trick that gets credit for the latest improvements in our SERP rankings. It’s about rewriting and A/B testing your article’s headlines and meta descriptions.

Hearing about this SEO hack was definitely one of the few a-ha moments on our journey to 30k+ monthly organic (blog) traffic.

Key takeaway #8: Rewrite and A/B test your article’s headlines and meta descriptions.

Here’s how it works…

Step 1

Select an article that’s ranking in the TOP20 search results and is optimized for a high search volume keyword.

I like to use Moz’s keyword ranking reports for that.

The keyword “What is a kpi” has a considerable search volume, and the current ranking #15 shows that it has a potential to move up the ranks.

Step 2

Google the keyword to see what other articles rank next to yours.

In this phase, you’re going to sherlock on your competition, looking for their article’s headlines and meta descriptions.

We like to approach this stage by asking: What would make our article differentiate from the crowd and make people click?

In this case, all the headlines seem pretty generic and boring. What if we could rewrite the headline to make it more noteworthy (and clickable)?

Key takeaway #9: Rewrite your headlines to increase the CTR on search result pages, and thereby raise your SERP rankings.

We usually rewrite both the primary and SEO headline – if we come up with a better solution, we also want to have it in our blog.

The key tactics we use to write powerful headlines:

• Create a curiosity gap so that people will click on the headline.
• Include your main keyword in the headline to be highlighted in search results.
• Create comprehensive lists with odd numbers.
• Make your headlines actionable by using action verbs such as “Learn”, “Get”, etc.

Google evaluates search results based on their click-through rates. It makes a lot of sense to put effort into increasing your top article’s CTRs.

Higher SERP click-through rates = higher rankings

Step 3

Use the Google Search Console to A/B test and measure results

A marketing tactic is useless without proper measurement.

What if you rewrite your blog headlines, but instead of increasing, your CTR actually drops?

We’ve seen both success and failure with this SEO hack. It’s a good thing we measured the results and were able to restore some changed headlines and meta descriptions to their original state.

By using the Google Search Console, you can easily track your keywords’ and article’s click-through rates on Google.

To get a report that looks like this…

Follow these steps:

1. Log in to Google Search Console
2. Select “Search Traffic”, the “Search Analytics”
3. Tick the box in front of CTR
4. Change the columns from Queries to Pages
5. Select the dates you’d like to compare

Using these reports has been of tremendous help in optimizing and A/B testing our article’s meta descriptions and headlines.

Key takeaway #10: Measure your marketing experiments’ results to see what actually works.

And now, it’s time for the sweetest part of the article – the fuckups.

You can’t always win – our biggest failures

I promised to also share our failures. While some of them being embarrassing to think of, we can at least say: We tried.

In retrospect, many of these failures make us feel like this…

But there are also the mistakes that make us feel more like…

It’s up to you to guess which failures make us feel in certain ways. (I’ve boldened my favourite ones)

• We tried Outbrain for content promotion, but it never delivered the anticipated results.
• We forgot to add UTM codes and REF codes behind our paid promotions’ links.
• We sometimes created content that stole our landing pages’ place on SERPs. We fixed this by adding CTAs inside blog articles.
• We created a Christmas infographic on productivity that we published 20 days too late.
• We tried some crazy headline and meta description changes that significantly decreased the CTRs to our articles. Luckily, the rankings recovered in a few weeks.
• Once, I mistakenly thought Outbrain’s budget signifies the total campaign budget. It was the daily budget. You might have guessed why I don’t like Outbrain…
• We waited for too long to update our blog layout and redesign the article page.
• We didn’t do enough outreach and collaborate with other industry blogs.
• For the first 8 months, we focused on vanity metrics such as social shares, instead of website traffic and lead conversions.
• We spent 30+ hours on an eBook campaign that returned only 4 leads.

For us, guest blogging didn’t work. At all.

While everyone’s praising guest blogging as a brilliant SEO tactic, I’m going to play the devil’s advocate here.

We did lots of guest posting on other sites, like here, here, and here. However, considering the time and resources spent, this is not a high-ROI way to grow your blog traffic.

I would recommend that you do PR, but forget about guest posting – focus on publishing excellent content in your own blog instead.

Over to you

As you can see, nothing too serious went wrong. We were able to happily test away all our new ideas.

If you intend to grow your organic blog traffic, know that there is no instant way to win (Ahrefs’ case study perfectly illustrates it). Use what you’ve learned in this article to accelerate your journey to tens of thousands monthly blog visitors.

I hope this helps and would love to hear the hacks that have helps you to grow your website traffic. Let’s have a discussion in the comments.  ???

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