Julian Shapiro
More posts from Julian Shapiro
We’ve aggregated the world’s best growth marketers into one community. Twice a month, we ask them to share their most effective growth tactics, and we compile them into this Growth Report.
This is how you’re going stay up-to-date on growth marketing tactics — with advice you can’t get elsewhere.
Our community consists of 600 startup founders paired with VP’s of growth from later-stage companies. We have 300 YC founders plus senior marketers from companies including Medium, Docker, Invision, Intuit, Pinterest, Discord, Webflow, Lambda School, Perfect Keto, Typeform, Modern Fertility, Segment, Udemy, Puma, Cameo and Ritual.
You can participate in our community by joining Demand Curve’s marketing webinars, Slack group, or marketing training program. See past growth reports here and here.
Without further ado, onto the advice.
What are some new, advanced SEO strategies?
Our community ran an SEO masterclass in which we discussed Google’s algorithm updates and shared advanced practices for writing blog content in a data-driven manner.
Tactics for turning blog visitors into leads
Based on insights from Nat Eliason from Growth Machine.
SEO traffic can sometimes be a vanity metric if you’re not converting it into lead flow. Here are three ways to convert blog visitors into leads:
- Prompt blog readers with quizzes to help them identify the product/plan that’s best suited for them. Then require their email address to see results. Follow up with drip emails.
- Create “Buyer’s Guides” — downloadable PDFs with nice visuals that help readers figure out how to accomplish their goals (e.g. “paleo cooking starter kit.”) Again, require an email for them to download the complete guide.
- Pixel your blog visitors and retarget them with Facebook ads. Have the ads send visitors to landing pages that match whichever blog content category initially drew them to the site.
How to (re-)target business customers with Facebook ads
Based on insights from Nima Gardideh of Pearmill and Julian Shapiro of Demand Curve.
Most people use their personal email address on their Facebook/Instagram account. So if you’re collecting business emails during your user onboarding process, Facebook can have a hard time matching those emails to the corresponding Facebook profiles when creating custom targeting lists.
Here are a few tricks around this:
- Enrichment: You can use People Data Labs to see if a personal email can be matched to the person’s business email. If you have a bigger budget, LiveRamp is another option.
- LinkedIn ads workaround: LinkedIn users are more likely to have business emails attached to their account. And LinkedIn has more firmographic data to be in a better position to resolve/match work-to-personal emails. So, you can test directly targeting LinkedIn Ads to your business emails.
- Retargeting: If you can’t match emails, you can always retarget users. Pixel them in your app. We’ve found Facebook/Instagram retargeting paired with Criteo’s banner ad retargeting (not prospecting) to be a decent combo for maximizing retargeting exposure across the web.
- For all the above, you can experiment with the Lead Form Ad unit (available on LinkedIn and Facebook) as they sometimes provide a small reduction in customer acquisition cost by reducing friction.
What exactly does a SaaS product marketing manager do?
Based on insights from Matt Sornson of Clearbit.
The role of product marketing manager (PMM) varies widely across businesses. It’s sort of a choose-your-own-adventure, which means its definition isn’t universally agreed upon. The commonality is that it’s an enabling function that makes marketing, sales, and product teams run more efficiently and scale more successfully.
Consider a buffet of potential PMM responsibilities:
- product launches
- user research
- sales alignment
- enabling sales
- website copy (or review)
- product research
- competitive intel
- pricing research and development
- PR
SaaS companies will often hire PMMs to primarily tackle two or three of those skills. In doing so, they’re like a product manager who sits between product and marketing, often running the go-to-market research that usually slips through the cracks for both product managers and growth people. Some consider them the unsung heroes of growth.
Here’s a blog post that better explores the distinction between PMM and Product Manager.
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