We’ve aggregated many of 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 stay up-to-date on growth marketing tactics — with advice that’s hard to find elsewhere.
Our community consists of 1,000 startup founders and VP’s of growth from later-stage companies. We have 400 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.
Without further ado, onto our community’s advice.
Advertising in Discord/Telegram communities
Insights from Varun Mathure of Midnite
Discord/Telegram can be a great place to find engaged, niche communities for advertising. However, do not treat it like a typical ad channel. Community marketing is its own art, and there are many principles to doing it effectively. Here are just a few:
- Treat Discord/Telegram users like you would Reddit users: they’ll reject being advertised to unless there’s legitimate, authentic value being provided.
- Work with moderators to offer services that make their moderation duties easier. Perhaps a bot or tool that would be legitimately useful to the community while also organically pitching your startup.
- Have a well-respected community member vouch for you — it goes a long way toward building trust with the rest of the community. Always start by building relationships.
- Have a member of your team active in the community. Don’t just advertise; contribute regularly.
- Run promos/incentives that encourage members to post your product screenshots or share your product output in the community. In other words, incentivize a frictionless way for community members to become your brand ambassadors.
Landing page tear-downs [Video]
Watch us critique landing pages. In the process, you’ll learn how to improve your own.
Most common direct mail mistakes
Insights from Jordan Crawford of Scout direct mailing
Most startups ignore direct mail, thinking it’s an archaic customer acquisition channel. It can work; companies do it for a reason. Start by avoiding these common mistakes:
- Buying a low-quality list: We’ve heard decent places to buy lists from include mailershaven.com, constructionmonitor.com, and windfalldata.com.
- Not being ready for direct mail: You’ll need to know your audience and demographics in order to personalize your outreach in a way that maximizes conversions. If your mailers come across as mass marketing, they’ll go into the garbage. You can segment your mailings into distinct groups of recipients: Use relevant images (e.g. show a picture of what they already bought from you) and/or print out their business details (e.g. job title, company, logo). You can programmatically pull in these firmographic details using Clearbit.
- Not sending enough mail: Many folks give up after one unsuccessful mailer. When doing cold outreach, you need a list of at least 10,000 recipients and you should send 3 pieces per address.
- Not having a clear call-to-action with an expiration date on the card: There should be a single call-to-action urging recipients to move onto the next steps. Example.
- Not having a tracking strategy: Don’t just rely on geographic lift. You can use a unique domain on each mailer that forwards to your sales page with expanded UTM tags.
Should I worry about disavowing links (for SEO)?
Insights from Casey Armstrong of ShipBob
If you’re a SaaS company, almost everything else is a higher-leverage activity than disavowing links.
However, if you’re running an extremely large page count site, UGC site, or site that engaged in questionable SEO tactics in the past, then it might be worth your time. But, the ranking algorithms have gotten smart enough to mostly ignore or devalue those questionable backlinks.
Also, there is only so much time in the day. What helped us more than 10X our traffic at ShipBob and BigCommerce was focusing on the content, its semantic relevance, and getting high quality links, then being heads down on visitor-to-lead conversions.