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 VPs 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, on to our community’s advice.
Remember, use ads to find the best copy
Insights from Matt Sornson of Clearbit
Sure, you could use surveys to ask customers which marketing copy they respond best to. But what people say is often different from what they do.
Consider this approach instead: Run Facebook ads to test your copy variations, then assess the click-through rate. You’ll quickly learn which blog titles, lead magnets and messaging resonate best with your target audience. Clearbit even uses this tactic to choose the titles for their books.
The lesson is to be data-driven when making copy choices. Don’t wing it.
If you have an app users love, maybe test making it invite-only
Insights from Nick Soman of Decent
When you have a product people genuinely love, you may see a strong multiplier effect on brand awareness when you make your app invite only — to start.
Meaning, the only way to get access to your app is by invitation from existing users. Gmail started this way. Superhuman is a recent example.
Here’s how they do it:
- Artificially seed your customer base with influencers whose audiences match your own. They’ll get the hype machine started. Incentivize them with money, promotion — whatever it takes.
- Make the exclusivity real. It can’t be a gimmick. Don’t let people freely sign up.
- Limit the number of referrals per user. Scarcity encourages action.
- This next part isn’t optional: Make something people actually want. If users aren’t organically sharing you with excitement, an invite-only approach is a dampener — not a multiplier.
How to handle poor attribution
Insights from Aadil Razvi
Sometimes, you’ll have a hard time measuring whether your latest ad or email campaign is in fact responsible for recent revenue gains.
Here’s one last-resort trick for dealing with terrible attribution data — temporary geographic segmentation:
- If, say, you’re running Facebook ads or email campaigns, only run them in one state, city or country at a time.
- Now, wait two to four weeks for conversions to trickle in, or whatever your purchase cycle is. Measure whether there was a statistically significant boost from your targeted geography. If so, your campaign was likely the cause.
- Next, test new campaigns in nearby geographies. Take the average ROI across these tests and expand incrementally. Throughout, assume your ROI loosely holds. (This isn’t actually true, but it’s a starting point. Your mileage will vary.)
- Continually re-test. Your data will go stale.