10/25/2022

October 25, 2022

Hey 👋

Paul Graham, founder of Y Combinator, famously wrote an essay titled "Startups = Growth." In that article, he explained how a startup is a company that is designed to grow fast.

One thing startups are encouraged to do during YC is to strive for a growth rate of 5-7% each week — with "growth" ideally referring to revenue.

This 5-7% growth goal gets founders and early-stage marketers scrambling to find the right combination of channels, messaging, CTAs, and products to deliver on.

But what happens, especially in the early growth phase, is that marketers at startups begin spreading themselves too thin.

They try to be good at every marketing channel. They do SEO, they run Google ads, they build out an affiliate program, they host events, they post on social media, and the list goes on.

But if we look at some of the most defensible and sustainable companies, we can see that they all have one thing in common.

They all focus on creating a competitive advantage in at least one marketing channel.

  • SEO: Yelp, Quora, HubSpot, Canva, Zapier

  • Paid ads: Monday.com, Athletic Greens

  • YouTube: BuzzFeed, PRIME Hydration

  • Network effects: Instagram, Airbnb, Uber

Bottom line is you don't need every channel to work for you. It's a marketing leader's job to identify the right channel (usually it's just one, maybe two) and to double down on what makes the most sense in terms of product-channel fit.

For example, if you're seeing great conversion rates from SEO but have low traffic, focus on scaling your SEO efforts before you dump resources into paid ads.

On the flip side, if you're attracting high LTV customers from LinkedIn ads at an affordable price, keep scaling your LinkedIn ad efforts before you explore organic TikTok content.

These are just examples. The main idea is to find that one traffic source that works and scale it as much as you can.

If you want to learn more about this, along with 9 other startup marketing principles, you should definitely check out the first link in the "Extra stuff" section of this newsletter.

With that, let's get into what we have in store this week (lots of good stuff):

  • Marketing news from the past week

  • Acquisition, conversion, and retention strategies for B2B SaaS

  • The secret to super successful sales copy

  • Using REGEX in Google Search Console to find keyword ideas

  • 10 principles of startup marketing

  • Ad from the past

  • Website of the week

  • Cool marketing jobs

  • And much more

🗞 In the news

🚀 All things growth & product

Acquisition, conversion, and retention strategies for B2B SaaS, how to calculate LTV-to-CAC ratio, getting tactical about subscriber churn, how people discover new products, and building a demand gen flywheel.

StackPath

https://productled.com/blog/how-acquisition-and-retention-work-together/?ref=marketermilk

A More Holistic Way to Calculate Your LTV-to-CAC Ratio

Businesses often leverage their LTV-to-CAC ratio to determine the ROI dynamics of their growth spend as they gain new customer cohorts. While there’s no doubt that this metric is meaningful for companies as they look to drive growth, there’s still room for improvement in how the industry measures what they hope to understand from this metric.

https://headline.com/blog-latest/article-latest/a-more-holistic-way-to-calculate-ltv-to-cac?ref=marketermilk

Getting Tactical About Subscriber Churn

While some subscriber churn is inevitable, there are proven strategies you can use to combat churn before it happens.

https://iterable.com/blog/getting-tactical-about-subscriber-churn/?ref=marketermilk

How people discover new products

The seven places we learn about new stuff

https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-people-discover-new-products/?ref=marketermilk

Constant demand: building a demand gen flywheel for B2B SaaS

Almost every SaaS wants to start off with a low touch model and later add a sales team so they can move up market.

https://iammarcthomas.medium.com/constant-demand-building-a-demand-gen-flywheel-for-b2b-saas-a9ba4567c91a?ref=marketermilk

💭 Guess the riddle

The more these are taken, the more they are left behind. What are they?

Answer is at the bottom of this email

✍️ Content, copy, & email

B2C content marketing example, the 5 stages of building a community on a blog, the secret to successful sales copy, and how to write a cold email.

B2C Content Marketing Example: How We Grew Cognitive FX to 70,000 Pageviews in 14 Months - Grow and Convert

We share the strategy behind how we grew Cognitive FX through content marketing and outranked sites like WebMD, Healthline, and more.

https://www.growandconvert.com/content-marketing/b2c-content-marketing-example/?ref=marketermilk

The 5 Stages of Building a Culture of Community on a Blog

Last week we looked at some of the benefits and costs of building community on a blog – today I’d like to move onto some of the ‘how to’ by examining the stages of building community that I went through on Digital Photography School. Build a CULTURE of Community – ...more

https://problogger.com/the-5-stages-of-building-a-culture-of-community-on-a-blog/?ref=marketermilk

The Secret to Super Successful Sales Copy

If you want to generate more sales, you need to understand one thing about copywriting

https://medium.com/weirdo-poetry/the-secret-to-the-most-effective-sales-copy-is-not-what-you-think-a1e69b3f58b1?ref=marketermilk

How to Write a Cold Email: A 9-Step Guide | Demand Curve Blog

Follow these steps to write cold emails that get responses—and conversions. Including guidance on crafting compelling intros, body content, and CTAs.

https://www.demandcurve.com/blog/how-to-write-a-cold-email/?ref=marketermilk

⚙️ SEO

Using REGEX in Search Console to uncover hidden keywords, how to 10x your organic traffic in less than a year, and growing websites with aged domains.

How to 10x your organic traffic in less than one year — a simple guide.

I led a team that scaled a company’s site traffic from 150k to 1.5+ million organic sessions per year in the healthcare space. Here are…

https://jovos.medium.com/how-to-10x-your-organic-traffic-in-less-than-one-year-a-simple-guide-b0176dd63947/?ref=marketermilk

How Agencies Can Grow Client Businesses Using Aged Domains - 201 Creative

One of my favorite strategies for powerful traffic growth is using aged domains. While some affiliate marketers have caught on to the strategy that building a

https://201creative.com/grow-using-aged-domains/?ref=marketermilk

🧠 Extra stuff

My 10 principles of startup marketing

A very personal list of things learnt over a decade and a bit of my career

https://thecmojournal.substack.com/p/my-10-principles-of-startup-marketing?ref=marketermilk

Louis-Xavier Lavallée on LinkedIn: 3 Psychology lessons from the book: Ogilvy on Advertising | 37 comments

I'm starting a new case study on the 🧠 psychology of ads... During my research, I re-read "Ogilvy On Advertising" and found a few gems (see slideshow... 37 comments on LinkedIn

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/louisxavierl_3-psychology-lessons-from-the-book-ogilvy-ugcPost-6907679997407170561-tuxC/?ref=marketermilk

B2B Marketing Attribution with Steffen Hedebrandt

You’ll learn about the typical customer journeys in B2B SaaS, which channels are the easiest to measure, tips for running marketing experiments, and more.

https://userlist.com/podcast/b2b-marketing-attribution-with-steffen-hedebrandt/?ref=marketermilk

📣 Ad from the past

America's Electric Light & Power Companies (1953)

1953 looks forward 20 years: America's Electric Light & Power Companies

💻 Website of the week

Free AI image generator: Art, Social Media, Marketing | Playground AI

Playground AI is a free-to-use online AI image creator. Use it to create art, social media posts, presentations, posters, videos, logos and more.

https://playgroundai.com/

🏝 Cool marketing jobs

Okay, that's it for now 🖤. See you next Tuesday!

Bye car

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Riddle answer: Footsteps