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Performance marketing agency MuteSix bets on content and data to boost DTC e-commerce
Warby Parker filing to IPO last week was one more sign that direct-to-consumer (DTC) is an extremely powerful e-commerce trend. But LA-based performance marketing agency MuteSix didn’t wait that long to build its business around scaling DTC brands.
Created in 2014 and acquired by Dentsu in 2019, MuteSix was recommended to TechCrunch by Rhoda Ullmann, VP Consumer at Sense, a Boston-based startup building a home energy monitor. “They demonstrate best-in-class expertise with Facebook and Google paid ad platforms. They also have a very smart and efficient approach to creative development that was critical to helping us scale,” she wrote. (If you have growth marketing agencies or freelancers to recommend, please fill out our survey!)
Besides Sense, MuteSix’s former and current clients include companies such as Adidas, Petco, Ring and Theragun, to whom it provides a full range of marketing services, including top-notch direct response videos. But regardless of whether you can afford this, we think you’ll learn interesting lessons from our conversation with their CRO, Greg Gillman. The key takeaway? In today’s highly competitive ad environment, both content and data are kings.
Editor’s note: The interview below has been edited for length and clarity.
What can you tell us about MuteSix as an agency?
Image Credits: MuteSix
Greg Gillman: We’ve been around for about nine years. We started out as a Facebook ad agency — as opposed to a lot of agencies that start out by saying they do everything, we decided to focus on what we were really good at. At the time, it was doing Facebook media buying for e-commerce companies. Primarily here in LA, which is kind of the hub of these companies, but also all over. And then bit by bit, we grew the organization.
At this point, we’re a little over 400 people, and we manage upward of $500 million in spend on Facebook and Google, including Instagram and YouTube. What we’ve grown into is a one-stop shop for DTC e-commerce companies: We manage all the channels that a DTC brand needs. And we’re a performance agency; everything we do is based on results. People come to us to drive revenue into their e-commerce businesses.
Why do you think that performance marketing is the right fit for DTC?
DTC entrepreneurs are more focused on immediate impact, because if they’re not selling product, there’s no large brand propping them up. So I think that doing DTC marketing requires you to be more performance focused. For agencies that work with large brands, usually it’s more about impression buying versus performance buying. They can say: I did a reach campaign today to hit 10 million eyeballs, and whatever happens happens, because at the end of the day, you just told us to do 10 million impressions. It’s different than working with a group like us that’s trying to optimize every small piece of the funnel, and being accountable for the entire funnel to drive as much sales or revenue.
What type of clients do you work with?
The majority of the companies we work with are digitally native DTC companies. We’ve mostly stayed in that lane, because we’re really good at it. That being said, we work with companies of all sizes — startups, companies that are already established, and very large companies that need to rework both their creative and their media buying strategy.
I oversee sales, marketing and partnerships, and my role is really trying to figure out which brands make most sense to partner with MuteSix. We’re looking for high-growth brands that we can scale, and we’ve learned through the years that what works well are demonstrable products that have cool user value props.
We’ve worked with lots of startups at different points in the funnel, starting from the ground up and working with them through various rounds of funding, all the way through acquisitions, including two by unicorns. But these days, ground up is tougher. I like them to have some proof of concept — putting through $10,000-$15,000 per month on Facebook or $5,000-10,000 on Google usually shows me that there’s some life to it. But I don’t want to limit us if it’s a cool idea. I talk to a lot of people who come back once they’ve proven it out a little bit.
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What kind of clients are definitely not a good fit?
It won’t be a fit if there’s no real unique value prop for the product. If it’s just another run-of-the-mill company, a consultant can charge them a lower amount of money and set up Facebook ads, but what we are looking for are high-growth businesses.
The compensation for our campaign managers is actually tied to the performance of the campaigns, so if I bring a bunch of campaigns that we can’t scale, we’re gonna have a lot of unhappy media buyers who ask: “Greg, why would we take on this brand?” It’s a business model that has helped us attract top talent, but we need to make sure that we’re bringing brands that we think we can scale.
And it’s easier than ever to start a company, but it’s tougher now to scale it and take it past the $2 million-$3 million run rate. So I always revert back to asking founders: What are five reasons why people want to buy your product? What are the five reasons that they don’t? If the entrepreneur has trouble answering this, it’s not going to work. If they can’t tell somebody why their business is good, then we’re not going to be good at selling it.
How is MuteSix different from other agencies?
I’d say the main difference is that we have a 70-person in-house video creative team; and what we’re really good at doing is shooting and coming up with performance content. Not just content that looks and feels great, but video that is reverse-engineered to sell product.
Another key component is that we have a whole data science team that is also integrated with our media buying team, and that helps companies navigate things like attribution and signal loss due to the iOS 14 update. Right now, that means focusing on looking at the whole picture rather than by channel and working on mix-modeling attribution.
What are some of the things your data team focuses on?
One of the biggest things that brands struggle with is figuring out attribution, and how you continue to spend money even though you may have lost some signal into the platform. If Facebook skews too heavily, and Google is on last click, then sometimes it looks like things are never working. To help companies make informed business decisions, we are building statistical models that show information at higher-than-the-platform level.
We are also building better segments of customer profiles that help the clients understand who their core audience is, but also helps us build predictive audiences for finding new people.
Another big thing we’re trying to solve is incrementality. We work with large brands that have a strong organic following on social media; and their question is: “Hey, Greg, why should I spend more money if I would have acquired those users anyway?” So we’ve done incrementality testing with brands that spend a lot in other channels than Facebook and Google. We helped them build out different ways to look at the data so that we continue to spend in those channels and they actually know the incremental lift that they’re getting.
There’s one other piece that I think is super important and usually overlooked: first-party data. We work with brands to try and acquire as much of that first-party data as possible, segment it and use it, because that’s what they’d be left with if Facebook shut off tomorrow.
How do you prepare and adapt for changes in the marketing ecosystem?
Because we work with so many brands, we have a lot of senior leadership on each channel level. We routinely meet across departments and share insights. The data science team also builds pretty robust reporting. We try to stay ahead of our brands and to be forward-thinking about anything that is ultimately going to impact the agency. We’re constantly trying to hack our way through things like the types of content that work and things that we know will help us scale.
That’s how we have always approached it. Every major shift in our business was done to answer the needs of the brands that we were working with. For instance, there’s a data side to our business because it’s more important than ever to use that. Facebook used to be a platform where you could throw anything at the wall, and you would get a 4x or 5x return. No one’s asking about data when you’re literally printing money out of Facebook, right? It only happens when the margins get tight. But then Facebook became a more crowded platform, and the same happened with Google: more advertisers, higher CPM and a more competitive environment. We needed to be smarter about what we were doing, so we built out our data team.
Now there’s two levers that we can pull: the data side and the creative side of the business. Again, we are a performance marketing agency, focusing on all the levers. Because platforms like Facebook are only going to be more competitive, they’re only going to get more expensive, and we are only going to lose more traffic. So the more agile agencies have to think much farther outside of what we are doing on these platforms; because we’re going to make up the incremental revenue on things like SMS, influencer marketing and organic content, to continue to drive money into the top of the funnel.
Why is your content arm so important as a lever?
We have an integrated solution where our media buyers are paired directly with our video editors and producers to allow us to be agile and quick; because as everyone knows, content is king. What we try to do is optimize around things like what we call the thumbs-up rate on Facebook — three-second video views. If I held someone for that long in their newsfeed, I can potentially get them into our flow. We do the same on YouTube, and we do things like this on programmatic, because the name of the game is to get people into the funnel and work them through it. And we’re using both our data science team and our creative team to build out and optimize on the front end around these quick metrics to get things moving.
In my opinion, there’s no close second to an SMB agency that has a content arm like we do. Leveraging our content team to build performance content is one of the biggest levers that we have. Three and a half years ago, Facebook was telling us: “If you don’t build video content, and if you don’t prioritize video in the newsfeed, it’s not going to work.” At the time, we leaned in very hard — and the pain of growing a creative team of 70 people is real, especially in LA. But it’s allowed us to scale our agency.
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Demand Curve: Tested tactics for growing newsletters
There are very few marketing channels as well rounded as email newsletters. They provide a direct, owned line of communication with your audience; nearly 40x return on investment (~$40 generated per every dollar spent), are infinitely scalable and virtually free.
But to unlock these benefits, you’re going to need to be strategic. In this article, I’m going to share tactics we’ve used at Demand Curve to grow our newsletter list to over 50,000 highly-qualified subscribers and maintain an open rate of over 50%.
Increase popup conversion using the 60% rule
While they’re often thought of as intrusive, pop-ups work. On average, they convert 3% of site visitors, and strategic, high-performing pop-ups can reach conversion of about 10%.
To make higher-converting, less intrusive pop-ups, try the 60% rule.
- Choose a page you’d like to put a pop-up on. We recommend pages that aren’t conversion-focused (like product pages, checkout and sign-ups). We’ve found content pages work the best and they can act as a signal for visitors who are looking for something specific.
- Open your website’s analytics and see what the average time spent on that page is.
- Set your pop-up to appear after 60% of the average time of that page has elapsed.
So if the average time spent on a page is 50 seconds, set your pop-up to appear 30 seconds (60% of total time) after visitors land on that page.
Why 60%? Readers have shown interest in your content, but are nearing the end of their session. Prompting them to join your newsletter to see more relevant content in exchange for their email will feel fair.
To encourage new subscribers to open your welcome email, try breaking the welcome email pattern using delayed gratification and a recognizable sender.
Give samples of your newsletter to prove quality
If a visitor is new to your content, asking them to sign up for your newsletter can be a big step, and most new visitors won’t convert. To narrow the gap between a new reader and subscriber, provide a sample on the sign-up page. Use your most engaging newsletter as a sample to prove that your content is high quality.
To source your most engaging content, filter by open rate and replies. In your email service provider, sort your previous editions by open rate. This will help you identify which subject lines are most popular with existing readers. Modify your most popular subject line to turn it into a header on your newsletter sign-up page.
Next, go into your inbox and sort by replies to your newsletter. Identify which newsletter got the most replies from your readers. This is a positive signal that the content from that edition resonated the most and would be a solid choice for your free sample.
Image Credits: Demand Curve
Emails from real people are opened more often
People reflexively ignore welcome emails after they sign up. But, those who do open your welcome email are more likely to consistently open your newsletters.
To encourage new subscribers to open your welcome email, try breaking the welcome email pattern using delayed gratification and a recognizable sender.
Delay your welcome email by 45 minutes. This will bypass the reflex that new subscribers have to ignore an email that pings them seconds after signing up. We’ve found 45 minutes to be ideal, because the delay is long enough that it breaks the pattern, but not so long that your email gets buried in their inbox.
Send your welcome from a person, not from a business account. We’ve found this tactic to be especially effective when the sender is the founder of the business or someone with an established audience. Use a photo of that person and not your company logo to help the email stand out.
To avoid overflowing the sender’s real inbox, create a subdomain for your website that will be used exclusively for sending emails. Create an account for your sender and begin using it for your newsletter. This avoids overwhelming their inbox and maintains the health of your sending domain.
Image Credits: Demand Curve
Send a superissue to new subscribers
A new subscriber will be keen to receive their first issue. To ensure they’re satisfied, piece together your best content from past issues into a superissue. But be careful not to use the same content you included as samples on your sign-up page.
Send this first superissue with the welcome email so that your new subscribers are immediately receiving value from your newsletter. Starting with your best content first will get your subscribers excited to open future emails.
We’ve found that shorter welcome emails perform better than long-winded ones. Keep your welcome message short and your opening issue tight. Once they’ve received the welcome email and the first superissue, add them to the regular email cadence.
Image Credits: Demand Curve
Consider sending fewer emails
We polled over 24,000 marketers on Twitter asking whether people suffer from “newsletter fatigue,” causing them to unsubscribe.
The results: 80% of respondents unsubscribe when they get too many emails.
To avoid overwhelming your subscribers:
Give your subscribers control over how often they are emailed: Some subscribers want them weekly, while others want monthly. In the footer of your email, create opt-out links that allow subscribers to customize the cadence they’ll receive emails. Giving them the opportunity to opt out of frequent emails while still remaining subscribed keeps them as valid contacts on your email list. You want to avoid losing them completely as a subscriber.
Send fewer emails: Putting a constraint on how many emails you’re allowed to send every quarter will force you to be more thoughtful about the contents of those emails. A high volume of emails just for the sake of being in your subscribers’ inbox can burn you and your readers out. We’ve seen very little correlation between volume of emails and the resulting conversion rate.
Make your emails fun — not just educational
Most emails in your inbox are serious. To stand out, consider injecting some lighthearted memes, jokes or interesting links from around the web.
We’ve found this tactic works extremely well, because it gives your readers a dopamine hit in every email. Not every piece of newsletter content you write will resonate with every subscriber. Humor, on the other hand, can have broad appeal. Including interesting and fun content will ensure that every reader is left feeling satisfied.
It also helps build a habit. If every edition is slightly different, your reader will never be sure what they’re opening when a new edition hits their inbox. We’ve found that including something fun at the bottom of the newsletter gives readers a reward: Read the serious stuff, then get rewarded with the fun stuff.
We add a meme to each issue. People reply to tell us how much they appreciate it.
Image Credits: Demand Curve
Make referrals seamless
Referrals are a free way to grow your newsletter. To increase the chances of subscribers referring you to others, make sure the process takes no longer than 25 seconds.
Remind readers at the end of each issue that they can refer others. A simple way is to ask them to forward the email to a friend who would find it interesting. Include a short sentence in the intro to your newsletter telling people being referred where they can subscribe. Include a link.
An advanced tactic is to include a subscriber’s unique link to a referral program so they can track how many people they’ve invited. Give them the option to share through email or social media.
You should also have a web version of every issue so that your content can be easily shared outside of email. Most email service providers will automatically generate a web link that you can promote through social media or elsewhere. You can also copy the content and post it to your website as a blog post to generate traffic from search engines.
Consider providing rewards to those who refer your newsletter. Merchandise will likely only work as an incentive if your brand is well known or very unique. We suggest incentivizing referrals using exclusive content. Send a monthly bonus issue to subscribers who have referred five or more friends. This will keep your costs down and give your subscribers more of what they already want.
Note that you will need a critical mass of subscribers before referrals will prove to be effective. We’ve found the threshold is about 10,000 subscribers. But if your audience is extremely engaged or the community you serve is active, implementing a free referral program has virtually no downside.
How to turn followers into subscribers
Your subscribers will likely become aware of your content through a social media channel, but social media audiences are rented from the platform — you do not own a direct channel to communicate with them. Converting followers into newsletter subscribers is one way to control a direct line of communication and deepen your relationship with your audience.
When pitching your followers to subscribe to your newsletter, include a link in your bio. This may sound obvious, but many people don’t do it. When someone comes across your social media profile, make signing up for your newsletter the call to action. Otherwise, they’ll have no idea that you even have a newsletter.
You could also cut a Twitter thread or LinkedIn post short and tell people to subscribe for the rest of the insights. You probably don’t want to overuse this tactic.
Create an offer or unique piece of content that can only be accessed through the newsletter. This will motivate your followers to join your email list to get access to exclusive content or unique offers.
Recap
Getting new subscribers: Use pop-ups that are relevant and only to high-intent readers on your site. Provide proof of why they should subscribe to your newsletter with sample content. Make your welcome email stand out and front-load the first issue with your best content.
Keeping subscribers: To keep your subscribers wanting more, send fewer emails. Sprinkle in humor and interesting links to turn your newsletter into a habit.
Promoting your newsletter: Use exclusivity and offers to hook your social media followers into subscribing to your newsletter. Ask your subscribers to refer your newsletter to others to grow your subscriber base.
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Growth marketing roundup: cool SaaS, marketing lies, VR ads and more
One might think that a short week due to a U.S. holiday calls for a short weekly recap, but we have plenty to share about growth marketing from our coverage over the week. With the help of your recommendations, this week we were able to interview Peep Laja and Lucy Heskins, and publish multiple guest columns on growth-related topics including homepage testing, marketing lies to watch out for, VR ad opportunities, company-naming and ad compliance.
TechCrunch is collecting responses in this survey to find the best growth marketer for founders to work with. We’ve included some of our favorites, below the links.
This early-stage marketing expert says ‘B2B SaaS is actually very, very cool now’: Extra Crunch reporter Anna Heim interviews Wales-based growth marketer Lucy Heskins about her experience working with start-ups, how content marketing is best used, and more!
Navigating ad fraud and consumer privacy abuse in programmatic advertising: Did you know that “ad fraud exceeded $35 billion last year, a figure expected to rise to $50 billion by 2025”? Jalal Nasir, CEO of marketing compliance startup Pixalate, lends his thoughts about how business leaders and brands can ensure they don’t fall victim to the problem.
To stay ahead of your competitors, start building your narrative on day one: Anna also sat down with Peep Laja to discuss the importance of a startup being the one to write their own narrative and how it can mature with the company.
Demand Curve: How to double conversions on your startup’s homepage: Head of content Nick Costelloe looks at when it’s good to be unique, and when it’s best to stick to the status quo when working to double conversions on your homepage.
(Extra Crunch) Demand Curve: 10 lies you’ve been told about marketing: For subscribers, Costelloe goes through 10 lies you’ve heard about marketing, and what to try instead to create better results.
(Extra Crunch) Can advertising scale in VR?: Have you been on the fence about VR advertising for your company? AR/VR analyst Michael Boland lists out the pros and cons in this article.
(Extra Crunch) What I learned the hard way from naming 30+ startups: Naming a start-up might require more thought than you imagined. Marketing executive Drew Beechler takes us through what should be considered when picking out a name, like strategic alignment.
As always, please let us know if you can recommend a top-tier growth marketer who works with startups by filling out this quick survey.
Marketer: Nikita Vorobyev
Recommender: Ruby Club
Testimonial: “Nikita & his company, Buildrbrand, have worked tirelessly to bring my idea to life and did everything in his power to get it to the level it is today. He & his team created a world-class conditional quiz visual experience that I think would be really cool for him to share with the industry. He doesn’t know I nominated him, but I definitely wanted to give back to him in any way I can since I believe his agency creates some of the best brands going viral online right now.”
Marketer: Max van den Ingh, Unmuted
Recommender: Harry Willis, ShopPop
Testimonial: “They [have] shown considerable and demonstrable growth marketing success at various companies. One of them being MisterGreen, a Dutch Tesla-leasing company that had grown 10x under Max’s leadership.”
Marketer: Patricia (Patty) Spiller, Chief
Recommender: Livongo
Testimonial: “Hired her to lead Product Marketing and she identified the opportunity to do growth in a much different way, which could significantly accelerate our company’s growth. So, she founded the Growth Marketing team and scaled the team from 1 person to 30 people in less than 2 years, based on all the success they had in growing our member base.”
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5 questions startups should consider before making their first marketing hire
“Who should my first marketing hire be?”
This is (by far) the most common question I’ve received since starting as Fuel’s CMO, and for good reason. Your first marketer will have an outsized impact on team dynamics as well as the overall strategic direction of the brand, product and company.
The nature of the marketing function has expanded significantly over the past two decades. So much so that when founders ask this question, it immediately prompts multiple new ones: Should I hire a brand or growth marketer? An offline or an online marketer? A scientific or a creative marketer?
Once upon a time, the number of marketing channels was fairly limited, which meant the function itself fit into a neater, tighter box. The number of ways to reach customers has since grown exponentially, as has the scope of the marketing role. Today’s startups require at least four broad functions under the umbrella of “marketing,” each with its own array of subfunctions.
The reality is that anyone who excels across all marketing functions is a unicorn and nearly impossible to find.
Here’s a sample of the marketing functions at a typical early-stage startup:
Brand marketing: Brand strategy, positioning, naming, messaging, visual identity, experiential, events, community.
Product marketing: UX copy, website, email marketing, customer research and segmentation, pricing.
Communications: PR and media relations, content marketing, social media, thought leadership, influencer.
Growth marketing: Direct response paid acquisition, funnel optimization, retention, lifecycle, engagement, reporting and attribution, word of mouth, referral, SEO, partnerships.
Have you worked with a talented individual or agency who helped you find and keep more users?
Respond to our survey and help us find the best startup growth marketers!
As you can imagine, that’s a lot for one person to manage, let alone be an expert in. What’s more, the skill set and experience required to excel in growth marketing is quite different from the skill set required to succeed in brand marketing. The reality is that anyone who excels across all marketing functions is a unicorn and nearly impossible to find.
So who do you hire first?
Unless you’re lucky enough to nab that unicorn, your first hire should be a generalist who can tend to the full stack of the marketing function, learn what they don’t know, and roll up their sleeves to get things done. Someone smart, savvy and super scrappy who understands how to experiment across marketing channels until they find the right mix.
But this utility player should also bring deeper expertise in one of the big marketing functions: brand, product, communications or growth. Before making this key hire, you need to figure out which marketing priorities are most urgent and, consequently, which marketing “persona” is most appropriate for your business at the earliest stages.
To figure out which skill set you need most in-house, consider these five questions:
Which marketing channels have proven successful to date?
If you’ve done some marketing experimentation previously, have there been any bright spots? Which channels are proving the most efficient from a customer acquisition, conversion, retention, engagement, whatever your key KPI is, perspective? If you find a promising area, find a candidate that has expertise in it. For example, if you are seeing good results with Instagram ads, hiring a candidate who has expertise in growth marketing makes sense.
Where are the target customers?
If you don’t have much data from channel testing, consider how your target customers are currently finding competitive products or services. At TaskRabbit, we knew from early customer research that clients were finding help with home services either through recommendations from friends or by asking Google (i.e., SEO and SEM).
So, that was a natural place for us to start. Our focus from a resource and staffing perspective in the early days was on growth marketing — driving more word of mouth, plus optimizing our SEO and SEM.
How competitive is the market?
How competitive is the category you’re playing in? Are there dominant players with strong brands? Do these brands have endless marketing budgets? Are CACs exorbitant because well-capitalized competitors are outbidding each other? If so, you might want to focus on building an exceptional brand and product/customer experience.
That means disseminating a unique story through organic channels (word of mouth, PR, influencers and organic social media). A brand marketer or someone with deep PR and communications experience makes sense in this scenario.
Where do the founder’s skills lie?
Another aspect to consider is the skills the founder(s) — or other members of the founding/early team — bring to the table. If a founder has a strong vision for the brand and extensive experience building brands, then focus less on a brand marketing hire and rather supplement the branding skill set with another marketing priority (i.e., product marketing). Likewise, if a founder has a strong vision for the brand but no one on the team knows how to build one, that’s a skill gap that your first marketing hire should fill.
How important is trust building?
Trust building has become an increasingly important aspect for brands as customers become more and more discerning. But trust building tends to be more critical in certain areas than others: New, nascent industries or markets, sectors with a lot of human interaction (services businesses, dating platforms, etc.), industries that are fundamentally changing consumer behavior (ride-sharing in its earliest days), or industries where the stakes or cost is relatively high (luxury goods).
If trust building is critical, consider a branding expert who understands how to build trust and credibility, and build an experience that consumers are passionate about. This person will likely have deep expertise in PR and brand building, as these channels tend to inspire the most trust among consumers.
What level of experience is necessary?
Once you’ve answered these five questions, you should have a pretty good idea of the type of marketing experience you want. But just how much experience should that person have? I typically recommend that seed-stage founders look for senior manager or director-level candidates at midsized companies.
At this experience level (six to 10 years), these candidates’ salaries tend to be more in line with a young company’s budget. Moreover, at this stage of their career, they tend to be both strategic and tactical. This means they can level up and think strategically about the business and the marketing function, but they are also happy to get their hands dirty and execute — actually dive into the Facebook platform and create ads, plan and host an event, or pitch a journalist.
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Even startups on tight budgets can maximize their marketing impact
Search engine optimization, PR, paid marketing, emails, social — marketing and communications is crowded with techniques, channels, solutions and acronyms. It’s little wonder that many startups strapped for time and money find defining and executing a sustainable marketing campaign a daunting prospect.
The sheer number of options makes it difficult to determine an effective approach, and my view is that this complexity often obscures the obvious answer: A startup’s best marketing asset is its story. The knowledge and expertise of its team, together with the why and the how of its offering provides the most compelling content.
Leveraging this material with best practice techniques enables any startup, no matter how limited its budget, to run an effective marketing campaign.
Many startups make the mistake of choosing systems and employing procedures to solve the immediate needs of the department that requires them.
I know this approach works, because this is exactly what I did with my co-founder Alex Feiglstorfer when we set up Storyblok. To be clear, we are developers not marketers. However, our previous experience building CMS systems taught us that the main driver of organic engagement for most businesses was customer conversations around content.
Specifically, sharing experiences, expertise and what we learned. We had committed nearly all of our available cash to developing our product, so we knew that the only way to market Storyblok was to do it all ourselves.
As a result, we focused solely on problem-solving content. This took the form of tutorials on web development and opinion pieces on headless CMS and other topics within our areas of expertise. The trick was that what we published wasn’t made just for marketing, it was based on our own internal documentation of problems we encountered as we developed our product. In essence, we were “learning in public.” Through this approach we were able to acquire thousands of customers in our first year.
Retelling this story isn’t to blow my own trumpet, it’s to make clear that you don’t have to be a marketer by training or commit a huge amount of time and resources to successfully market your startup. So, how do you get started?
Getting your structure and technology right
Although there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to how you organize your startup’s marketing function, there are some basic principles that apply in nearly every situation. A recent survey of 400+ executives from CMS Wire helpfully identified the following factors as the “top digital customer experience challenges” for businesses:
- Limited budget/resources.
- Siloed systems and fragmented customer data.
- Limited cross-department alignment/collaboration.
- Outdated/limited technology, operations or processes.
- Lack of in-house expertise/skills.
Challenges two to four are the pitfalls that we can focus on avoiding. They are directly related to how a startup produces, organizes and distributes its content.
With regard to the siloing of systems and fragmentation of customer data, the overriding goal is to ensure all your systems are integrated and speak to one another. In practice, this means that the data gathered in different departments — whether its feedback from sales, engagement on your website, customer service responses or product development information — is collected in a uniform and methodical manner and is readily accessible across the business.
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2 strategies for creating top-of-funnel marketing content
Amanda Milligan is the marketing director at Fractl, a prominent growth marketing agency that’s helped Fortune 500 companies and boutique businesses alike earn quality media coverage, backlinks, awareness and authority.
More posts by this contributor
Even when you’re excellent at making the sale, you still need people to know you exist in the first place.
Content is excellent at making the case for your product or service, but it also excels at providing value to potential customers in a more tangential way, introducing them to your brand and building awareness and authority.
Here’s how utilizing content marketing and digital PR can make huge strides in getting your brand name out there.
Ranking on-site content for awareness keywords
When on-site content you created ranks well in the search engine results pages (SERPs), that doesn’t just mean you get more traffic (although that’s certainly a major benefit).
You’re also getting your brand name in front of searchers because you’re appearing in the results. You’re building authority because Google appears to believe you have the best answer for their query. You’re giving the searcher and answer to their question and beginning to build trust.
So how do you know which keywords/topics to target and what kind of content to create? You perform keyword research, which basically means examining what keywords people are searching for, how many people search for them per month and how hard it’ll be to rank for them.
Google Ads Keyword Planner provides this information, but you can also use Chrome plugins like Keywords Everywhere and Keyword Surfer or free tools like Ubersuggest.
Image Credits: Ubersuggest (opens in a new window)
When your goal is to build awareness, it’s important that the keywords and topics you target have high volume. In other words, they’re searched a lot. Awareness objectives mean reaching as many people as possible so more people know that your brand exists and begin to understand what it’s about.
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Earn the best backlinks with high-quality content and digital PR
Amanda Milligan is the marketing director at Fractl, a prominent growth marketing agency that’s helped Fortune 500 companies and boutique businesses alike earn quality media coverage, backlinks, awareness and authority.
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A lot is debated in the SEO world, but nearly everyone can agree that links are and will continue to be vitally important to the health and rankability of a website.
Luckily, link building and brand awareness goals can be built into your content marketing strategy, which can be vastly elevated by combining your efforts with digital PR.
I’ll walk through how creating high-quality content and pitching it correctly to top publishers can earn you the valuable backlinks you’ve always wanted (and if you employ this strategy on an ongoing basis, the increase in organic traffic you’ve always wanted, too).
Choosing the right content idea
I have to start by saying that the most important thing about being cited in news sources is that you have to be newsworthy. Now that might go without saying, but what we as marketers might consider newsworthy about our brands isn’t necessarily newsworthy to a writer or to the greater public.
Content ideation tip #1: The best way to ensure your newsworthiness is to gather and analyze data. Even if the data set already exists, if it hasn’t been analyzed and presented in a straightforward, applicable, easy-to-understand way, your illustration of the data could be considered new and valuable.
I’ll touch on this again in a moment. But first, let’s dive into the content example I’ll be using throughout this piece.
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We throw away 80% of our content ideas, and you should too
Amanda Milligan is the marketing director at Fractl, a prominent growth marketing agency that’s helped Fortune 500 companies and boutique businesses alike earn quality media coverage, backlinks, awareness and authority.
More posts by this contributor
We’ve talked a bit publicly about our ideation process, but to be honest, it’s constantly evolving. With every piece of content we create and promote, we gain a better understanding of what works and what doesn’t.
But part of that process has always been allowing for the creative freedom to come up with ideas and then — and most importantly — kill your darlings if they don’t meet the criteria for a good idea.
It’s not always easy; creativity is personal. But culling the list of ideas is necessary for a successful content plan.
So how do you know which ones to cut?
Ask yourself these questions.
Is the idea packed with emotion?
Make a list of all the emotions associated with your idea. If you can’t think of any, it means the idea may need some tweaking, or you need to explore it in more depth.
Even helpful how-to content is tied to emotion. Take, for example, “Give Your Kids the Gift of Automotive Repair Skills While You’re Home Together,” a genius piece of content by Car and Driver.
There’s the emotional component of it being in the context of COVID-19, yes, but it’s more than that. It’s about spending quality time with your children and teaching them crucial skills. Related emotions include love, pride, empowerment, accountability, parental responsibility and more.
And the content creators were smart enough to call out the emotional component, like they did here:
Image Credits: Fractl (opens in a new window)
The post garnered nearly 5,000 engagements on Facebook, which to me indicates it hit the sweet spot of being helpful while also tapping into our emotions.
Fractl did a study back in 2013 that explored which type of emotions were the most prevalent in viral images, and, as it turns out, positive emotions had more representation than negative ones. Most prevalent of all? Surprise. People enjoy being astonished, delighted and unexpectedly joyful. Do any of your content ideas fit this bill?
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What we’ve learned from building 40,000+ links for clients
Amanda Milligan is the marketing director at Fractl, a prominent growth marketing agency that’s helped Fortune 500 companies and boutique businesses alike earn quality media coverage, backlinks, awareness and authority.
Since our agency opened in 2012, we’ve learned a lot about how to build quality links through content marketing.
The industry has evolved for a variety of reasons, including Google’s algorithm updates and the state of digital media. We’ve had to change along with them.
Over the years, we’ve completely revamped the way we develop content ideas, report on results, identify pitch targets — everything except for our core belief: a combination of content marketing and digital PR is the best way to build top-tier links.
I want to share three of our biggest insights from our experiences adapting so you don’t have to start from scratch or wonder which of your processes needs an update.
Instead, you can get to building the best backlinks you can.
Building the best links requires original research
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Virtual product placement is coming for TV and movies and Ryff has raised cash to put it there
In a world where ad rates are declining for traditional broadcast media, the corporations responsible for making the fictions that millions devour daily need to find a new business model.
Subscription services are on the rise — with every major broadcaster launching an on-demand service — and so are ad-supported video streaming services to replace the traditional networks.
But there’s another Holy Grail of the advertising industry, long thought to be too technologically difficult to achieve, that may finally be within reach. It’s the on-demand product placement of branded goods in a video, and it’s the technology that Ryff has been developing since it was founded in early 2018.
Product placement is an increasingly big business in the U.S., raking in some $11.44 billion in 2019, according to data collected by Statista. That figure is up from $4.75 billion in 2012. The same report indicated that roughly 49% of Americans took action after seeing product placement in media.
The effectiveness of product placement has even been proven by researchers from Indiana University and Emory University. They found that “prominent product placement embedded in television programming does have a net positive impact on online conversations and web traffic for the brand.”
And while streaming services enjoy the dollars their subscribers are throwing at them, they’re also looking at ways to diversify their revenue streams. Netflix and Hulu are both expanding their product marketing divisions and analysts like those from Forrester Research predict that product placement will be a huge moneymaker for the company as traditional ad rates decline.
There are companies that handle product placement already. Startups like Branded Entertainment Network, which works with brands and producers to place real brands into contextually relevant scenes in movies and television, and Mirriad, which adds branded billboards to scenes, are working to bring more money to platforms and producers.
Ryff takes the technology to the next level, using computer vision, machine learning and rendering technologies to identify objects in a scene and replace them with branded products that can be tailored based on customer data.
“The infusion of SVOD/streaming platforms into the market, combined with platforms like Netflix that are unsuccessfully trying to grow their subscriber base will force those same platforms to explore and embrace alternative revenue streams,” said Marlon Nichols, managing general partner at MaC Venture Capital, and a new director on the Ryff board. “In addition, consumers on paid platforms do not want their content consumption interrupted by ads. As such, product placement will be an important growth channel and Ryff’s new marketplace and unique technology set it up to be the unequivocal growth market leader.”
To continue its technology development and ramp up sales and marketing, the company has raised $5 million in financing. According to Crunchbase, Ryff had previously raised $3.6 million from investors, including a subsidiary of the Mahindra Group and undisclosed investors. The new financing came from Valor Siren Ventures, MaC Venture Capital, Moneta Ventures and Vulcan Capital.
“Ryff’s offering is well-timed with the rapidly increasing demand for solutions that extend the reach of a brand’s content and drive business results,” said Uday Ghare, vice president for media and entertainment at Tech Mahindra, in a statement at the time of the company’s investment. “We believe the market will continue to see a shift of brand dollars to both content marketing and programmatic advertising as brands increase their reliance on content-centric programs and look to scale those efforts.”
Ryff’s ads can be tailored to the viewer’s taste, the platform on which video is being distributed, the geography of the broadcast, the date and time of the broadcast and a broader demographic profile, according to the company. Basically it’s like AdWords for videos.
In a blog post writing about the rationale behind his investment firm’s capital commitment to the company, Marlon Nichols of MaC Ventures wrote:
Imagine a future where an IP owner can maximize the value of its content by putting it on the Ryff marketplace, where that content will be mapped for dozens if not hundreds of product placement opportunities and be layered with restrictions that comply with creative needs. Those opportunities will be ranked and priced by their effectiveness to drive marketing goals for brands. Brands can bid on in-video placement opportunities that fit their marketing strategies and budgets. 3D brand assets can be uploaded and inserted dynamically into content right before the moment of video delivery.
Ryff’s first disclosed partnership is with the “reality” television producer Endemol Shine.
“Ryff successfully takes the concept of product placement, the only advertising format that can’t be skipped by the viewer, and delivers a scalable and adaptable advertising solution that can be applied to any content, at any time and in any market,” said Roy Taylor, founder and CEO of Ryff, in a statement. “The result benefits all — content free from annoying distractions, audience-specific brand placement and delivering a new means towards monetizing video assets.”
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