Hey everyone, on today’s show I had the opportunity to pick the brain of Damian Bradfield, President and CMO of WeTransfer, the world’s largest file-sharing service.
Tune in to hear Damian share how they managed to build a business through organic growth and acquire 200K users from word-of-mouth, why partnering with artists like Moby and 21 Pilots is a genius marketing move (and why WeTransfer donates a percentage of ad revenue to the arts), and how user design and experience is key to their success.
Download podcast transcript [PDF] here: Damian Bradfield Partnered with Moby in a Genius Marketing Move that Gained WeTransfer 200K Users TRANSCRIPT
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Hey everyone, in today’s episode I share the mic with Vasil Azarov, CEO of the Growth Marketing Conference, a must-attend for startup founders and marketing execs.
Tune is to hear Vasil discuss how the Growth Marketing Conference gets a 30% attendance rate from their 100K community of entrepreneurs and marketers, why events are essential for generating attraction if you already have a product, why he believes that events are the future of marketing and sales, and the best way to build an audience fast.
Download podcast transcript [PDF] here: How the Growth Marketing Conference Brought in $2M in 2 Years in Such a Competitive Space TRANSCRIPT
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Hey everyone, in today’s episode, I share the mic with André Siqueira, co-founder of RD Station, a digital marketing software company based in Brazil.
Listen as André discusses how they were able to secure significant investments (the largest amount in Latin America) despite the political state of Brazil, their struggle with customer retention and their bold decision to do event marketing—something that is not very common in Brazil—and the fact that their biggest competitors in Brazil are businesses who don’t understand inbound marketing.
Download podcast transcript [PDF] here: How RD Station Continues to Double Its Growth Rate Each Year (After Raising $19M) TRANSCRIPT
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This post by Bryan Johnston originally appeared on Single Grain, a growth marketing agency focused on scaling customer acquisition. Marketing is simple, right? Anyone can do it—you just get the word out to entice people to buy your service or product. Nope. Marketing is simple in theory…but that doesn’t mean it’s easy in reality. There’s a lot going on under the hood, and since most of us would never dream of messing around with our car’s engine, it doesn’t make sense to think we can pull off successful marketing without knowing anything about it. Before you can fix your mistakes (and you are making mistakes) you must first know what they are.
Marketing is complex. It is not just sex and slogans. It’s about putting the right product, at the right price, at the right time, in the right place. Those are the essentials, and referred to as the 4Ps of marketing (product, price, place, and promotion). 
Modern marketing can take many forms: content, inbound, outbound, sandwich board on the street (is that still a thing?).
“Marketing is the management process responsible for identifying, anticipating and satisfying customer requirements profitably.” ~The Chartered Institute of Marketing
Marketing is multi-faceted, with its many elements working in harmony to deliver the goods. The many arms of marketing include:
Marketing can be B2C (business to consumer) or B2B (business to business). It can be pushy or pully (to coin a new phrase). Much like a cryptozoologist looking for Bigfoot, it can be hard to find the right tactics and formula to get what you’re after. That’s when the amateur gives up. But that’s not you, is it?
Marketing is also sales. Yes, it leads to sales by getting the word out there through branding and advertising, via both the written word and images, and then luring prospective customers in, but a marketer is not the one to actually interact with the sales lead—that’s the job of the sales person in the sales department. Marketing is also not creative nor does it belong in the content department. Again, marketers work closely with these departments by sharing the analytics and insights they’ve gained from the information and research they’ve produced, but a marketer is not the one to actually produce or design the content. And as mentioned already, marketing is not easy. Many companies—and especially small businesses—make the error of doing all their own marketing without any know-how. That could work, providing you have someone who knows what they’re doing—like your very own Don Draper. But most brands just starting out don’t have that luxury, so they must go it alone. You can do it…if you have a map highlighting all the booby traps. So without further ado, here are the 9 most common marketing mistakes you’re probably making…and how to fix them.
“Attract” and “increase” are two of the most popular words to any business owner. Attract more customers, and increase sales. Those are good reasons to offer your customer base a special rate or discount. It’s not all rainbows and unicorns, though. Discounts can blow up in your face. New businesses often make the mistake of offering big discounts at launch or when sales are stagnating. They’re a quick shot in the arm, like a can of spinach for Popeye. What you don’t see? The leafy green hangover the next day. Likewise, discounts can have serious and long-term negative effects. Giving discounts too often or too casually and they can turn on you like a rabid dog because they:
It’s a question of price versus value. Customers want excellent value for their money and the actual amount in many ways is irrelevant. 
Instead, try an alternative like earned discounts (such as volume quotas), early payment discounts, or multi-buy options. Focus on the static value of your product or service. Use discounts for appreciation, not retention. Offer only to a select group and be careful about how you announce it. Derek Halpern of Social Triggers believes you should never, ever discount your product. Not sometimes. Not rarely. Never. He likens discounts to a drug, and your customers will become addicted. He suggests that you add value instead of lowering prices. This can lead to the same sales spike without the long-term damage.
With a prospect, it’s a lot like dating. You’re wooing, making promises, offering the best service or product, and you’re in constant communication. You can’t stop thinking about them. You send them little notes all day. They feel loved and appreciated. But once they’re a customer, it can quickly become a bad marriage. You take them for granted. You forget those promises. You don’t call as much. You never send cute little notes anymore. It’s mind-boggling. Customers are the lifeblood, no? A prospect may buy. A customer has bought. And lest we forget, it’s more expensive to get a new customer than to retain an existing one; 3-10x more expensive depending on the source, with some claiming upwards of 20-30x! Even if it’s “only” twice as much, it doesn’t make sense to not focus on customer retention at least as much as customer acquisition. Adobe estimates that for every 1% of buyers that return for another online visit, revenue will increase by approximately 10%. If retailers focused on turning 10% of their customers into repeat buyers, they could double their overall revenue! But businesses spend only about 2% of their marketing budget on customer relationships. What the what? You need a steady supply of leads. Absolutely. But share the love. Bring flowers home for no reason. Offer those special “new customer only” discounts to your loyal and repeat clients. Remind them that you can’t live without them.
Even if you’ve never heard of him, you’re probably using (and abusing) some of his ideas. Robert Cialdini is a psychologist and author of the best-seller Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. In it, he outlines what he calls the 6 principles (or weapons, depending on where you land on the good-evil sliding scale) of persuasion: You can—and should—use these principles in your marketing efforts. Without them, you’re not as persuasive as you could be…and marketing is ultimately about persuading someone to purchase what you’re selling. They help boost conversions and sales. But the principles can be abused. Sincerity is vitally important because consumers are very good at sniffing out insincerity and exaggeration when it comes to marketing. Take the scarcity principle. Use it too frequently, and like the boy who cried wolf, eventually no one will believe you. Think of all the television infomercials abusing this one: Call now! Only available for the next ten minutes! Only 3 left in the world! Today only, and then gone forever! How much do you believe those claims? Not much. Fake scarcity will bite you in the butt with plummeting sales, bad word-of-mouth, low opinions, and a mass exodus of prospects and customers. So don’t do it. The same is true for abusing any of the principles. Use them sparingly and use them genuinely. In our rush to bring our product to the public, we often gloss over the minute details, believing that its sheer awesomeness will bring in customers by the thousands (the “if you build it, they will come” sales philosophy). But that rarely happens. So you need to get out there. You need to show them exactly how and in what way it’s awesome. You need to know—for yourself first and foremost—what makes you better than the rest. You need a clearly defined and articulated unique selling proposition (USP). Positioning is key…what makes you special? You should have a dynamite elevator pitch that explains it perfectly. Skip this and you have no real idea who you are, who your ideal customer is, or how to market to them. And if you’re not sure, why would a customer be? In a global market, you’re competing not only against similar businesses in your town or city, but also the rest of your country, if not the rest of the world. You need to stand out. You need to show and convince prospects that you’re the best choice because [insert your USP here]. How do you do that? It’s tricky but worth it. A few starting points: In order to effectively market anything, you have to understand everything. Your product or service needs to offer or provide or boast something that no one else can. And you need to know exactly what that is. Do. Not. Skip. This. Buy our pizza because you’re hungry? Nope. Any pizza will fix that problem. Buy our pizza because it’s made by artisanal pizza fairies from Naples? Now, that’s unique! Like Goldilocks, you have to find the perfect porridge. The easiest marketing mistake to make is not having any (ice cold), not having enough (lukewarm), or having too much (piping hot). When you’re just starting out, you may believe that you can’t afford it or that marketing will come later, but in truth, you can’t afford not to market. And in the digital age, thankfully, it’s nowhere near as expensive as traditional outbound methods (which is generally pricey and less effective, anyway). Not doing anything or only a little? You’re missing out. Yes, having a quality product to sell is important, and the satisfied customers you do have will likely spread the word for you. But as they say in the business world, if you’re not growing, you’re dying. The money you spend on marketing now—provided you work to see a positive ROI—will come back to you and then some. So invest in yourself. “I have enough money/customers already.” ~No One You gotta spend money to make money, but you can’t be constantly pitching your product either. Consider how annoying it is when you see the same television commercial all the time, hear the same radio ad multiple times each hour, encounter the same pop-up banner online, or receive dozens of e-mails hawking the same service every week. Ever feel compelled to buy whatever that annoying company is selling? Exactly. Too much is never a good thing, as you run the risk of becoming over-exposed and completely irritating to those people you’re trying to entice. So what’s the right marketing mix model? Depends who you ask. In social media marketing, there are plenty of sharing ratios to choose from: The bottom line? You have to do something. But not too much. Find the “just right” porridge temperature. Let your e-mail subscribers select their own frequency (daily, weekly, monthly). Pick a sharing ratio that works for you and your goals. Talk more about them and less about you. Like salt, alcohol, and Tex-Mex food…everything in moderation. It’s tempting to aim your marketing efforts at everyone. Don’t. You need to be specific. Who’s your ideal customer or prospect? Grant Leboff of Sticky Marketing Club suggests these six steps to identify him or her: If you can’t answer everything, ask! Talk to your existing customers to fill in some blanks. And remember that you may have more than one ideal customer…and that’s okay. It’s fantastic, actually. Wide appeal and all that jazz. Create a buyer persona for each of them. Once you’ve identified the relevant buyer personas, you can market directly to them, where they hang out, and speak to them in ways that resonate with them on a visceral level. Marketing today must be personalized and feel tailor-made to have any shot at success, and that starts with knowing exactly who you’re targeting. It’ll save you time, money, frustration, and countless nights spent wondering why no one is buying. Marketing is not just about getting the name and e-mail address that leads to the sale. Yes, it’s a big part, but there’s more to be done after they sign on that digital line. Too many businesses fall into this trap and believe that marketing ends when money is exchanged. Big mistake. Huge. In the digital domain, the follow-up is equally—if not more—important. A typical buyer decision process includes five steps: After we slap down the dollars (or pounds, or euros, or yen…), we usually evaluate our experience from start to finish. Did we make the right decision? Does the product actually address the need/problem? And how well did the company meet our expectations? You need to exceed the customer’s expectations. And you do that with the sales follow-up. Send a thank you note via e-mail. Check in a day or two later to see if they have any questions or issues. Establish channels of communication (e-mail list, social media, customer service phone line) and keep them open. Offer tips and tricks to enhance their purchase. Depending on your product, there may be opportunities for upselling and/or reselling. But the bottom line is that you have to stay connected and available. A bad experience, or a customer who feels abandoned or forgotten, can kill you with negative social proof. Everyone has a potential audience of millions today, what with blogs and the myriad of social networks. Bad word-of-mouth will damage your reputation, guaranteed. Consider: Follow up, follow up, follow up. Take steps to identify and fix bad experiences before someone has the chance to air their grievance on a very public forum. As in you fly by the seat of your pants. The opposite is a planner. Now, before anyone writes angry letters extolling the virtue of an unplanned life, let me just say that I agree with you. Except when it comes to your business and your marketing. Your marketing must have a plan. Otherwise, you’re quite literally throwing money away (much like anyone who invested in Trump Steak, or Trump University, or Trump [blank]). And it doesn’t matter whether you prioritize inbound or outbound techniques. A plan should be step #1. A good marketing plan explicitly states: Content marketing, for example, can be used for a wide and far-reaching number of different goals. Just be sure to make them smart goals, goals that you can actually achieve. Spread brand awareness, generate leads, increase revenue, maintain and develop customer relationships…no matter what the goal, make it specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely. Remember that the most effective marketers track the ROI of their efforts. In fact, those who checked at least three times each week were a full 20% more likely to see a positive return. There’s no shortage of metrics you should be checking. It all depends on the particular goal of a particular campaign. This one seems incredulous in 2016, but many businesses still don’t have a website. Nearly half (46%) of U.S. small businesses don’t have one, with the majority listing either “Not relevant to my industry” (32%) or “Cost” (30%) as the principal reason. But guess what? It is relevant to every industry, and the cost is negligible compared to the potential lost revenue from not having one. If you don’t have a website, you’re losing money. Period. And here’s why: What’s the takeaway here? The potential mistakes are many. But before you drop to your knees, eyes skyward in anguish, and release a heart-wrenching “Why God, why?!”, know this: most mistakes are easily avoided. And most are easily fixed (although avoided is better than fixed if we’re ranking). Follow these steps to know what to watch out for and then market like a pro. Hi everyone! Today’s interview is with David Darmanin, CEO of Hotjar, a powerful tool that allows you to see how visitors are really using your website, collect user feedback, and turn more visitors into customers. Today we’re talking about this great all-in-one analytics tool and how they’ve grown rapidly via both paid and unpaid advertising, how they’ve increased retention over time by building new features, and why finding the right people for your team early on is so important. A Passion For Creating David always had a passion for creating visual stuff which, back in the day, was flyers (and later web design), and he was determined to understand what made a design good (or bad). Eventually he became a consultant who worked for big clients, but he wasn’t happy using the tools that were available, wasn’t happy with how they worked or how they were priced. So he reached out to some of the talented people he had worked with before and they got together and basically changed the way this industry works—which is the industry of how a website is being used and what your users think about it. Hotjar Is an Easy Way to Truly Understand Your Web and Mobile Site Visitors While Google Analytics shows you where your visitors are going on your site, Hotjar actually shows you what they’re doing and what they think. It shows heat maps and aggregate visualization—like where your visitors are clicking, how they’re moving their mouse, how much they’re scrolling—and you can even record and replay a whole session. They’ve even made it possible to get feedback, so you can ask questions, do surveys, or recruit people to join you on a user test. In summary, Hotjar is an all-in-one analytics and feedback tool. 80,000 Customers and $1M in ARR in 6 Months—Clearly They’re Doing Something Right Hotjar is a free tool, so even though they have customers on higher-tier plans, their vision is to change the way the web is built and improved. As such, one big metric for them is how many people are actually using the tool. They have 80,000 subscribed users and out of that they have about 6,000 paid organizations—and this number is growing quite quickly. This is not something they optimize against, but obviously their customers are important, so they make sure that their users are getting the most value out of Hotjar. After all, having satisfied customers is the best way to grow. David says they were lucky that after a 7-month initial beta program, within 4-6 weeks they were already covering all their operation costs because they had so many users who were willing to pay to continue using it, and within 6 months they hit $1M in ARR (Annual Run Rates). So the real core of why they managed to succeed, after David had already failed at two previous projects, is that they focused on solving a problem that many people have. They approached the business in a very lean way; by kicking off with a 7-month beta program, it was very easy to grow, spread the word, get people using it, get feedback, and make sure they built a kickass product. Get Fans to Spread the Word by Giving Them a Great Product If you’re building a product or running a business, you can’t force people to spread the word, so the key is to build a product that generates that type of enthusiasm. Then you can do a lot to incentivize it and make it easy for fans to spread the word for you. During their beta run, they gamified the idea of getting access to Hotjar by having a queue system where the more you share the higher up you go and the earlier you get access. They were disrupting an industry where most companies are charging high prices and investing in their sales team, so David made sure to tell their users during the beta program, “Helping us spread the word is the fastest way to make this product accessible for yourselves.” Acquiring Those First 1,000 Customers David and the other founders put a lot of effort into speaking to sites that cover beta programs, sent out email blasts to their communities, got really good coverage twice on Product Hunt, and had a lot of bloggers talking about Hotjar. And then, to add fuel to the fire, they also did some paid stuff, like Facebook targeting to typical users. So even though some of this was paid, it was not advertising so much as facilitating and accelerating the spreading of the news. Increasing Retention By Building New Features With tools like Crazy Egg, many people find that once they’ve got the heat map they don’t really need to keep using, so they get what they want, cancel, and possibly come back later. This also happens with Hotjar, so they’ve focused on building a product where you can upgrade or downgrade whenever you want, since there’s no yearly requirement. Flexibility is really important for long-term relationships with their customers. From a business point of view, of course, there are gains to keeping customers as long as possible, so to that end they’ve got some exciting new updates in the pipeline (which they’ve developed as a result of feedback from their users), such as new functionality for day-to-day use, like event tracking or continuous inbound feedback. One Big Struggle They Faced While Growing the Business One of the biggest challenges they faced was finding the right people early on, which can be very difficult for a small startup. It’s very easy and tempting, especially when you’re building something that is gaining visibility and momentum, to quickly bring on board those people who reach out to you because it seems like a good opportunity. But it’s really important to define a long-term vision and a roadmap and then plot out who you need in terms of roles and responsibilities. That way you avoid just going with the first choice that comes along. And if you don’t find the right person right away, you must patiently wait until you do. People will advise you to employ your friends, which can be good if you’ve already worked with them in the past, but only if they fit into the role you’ve defined. Don’t take shortcuts because it can be much more painful later on. So just as you build demand for your product, you have to be thinking about how to build demand so that the right people will be attracted to working for you. Finding the Right People & the Right Tools for Hotjar Because Hotjar is a remote business, it can be tricky to bring someone on who doesn’t have remote experience. So they advertise on sites like We Work Remotely or Stack Overflow, as well as leveraging their 80,000-user base by asking them if they know of anyone relevant when a new position opens up. The most indispensable tools they use at Hotjar to work remotely are HipChat (Slack is a great alternative), where you can create separate channels for different topics or quickly communicate directly with individual team members, and Hangouts to launch calls and use the calendar. And they run the whole company on Google Apps. These are the HipChat channels they’ve created: What Their Remote Working Environment Looks Like David finds that the key around culture in a remote company is to have the right tools in order to leverage very transparent communication, which doesn’t need to be over-complicated, but you do need a good structure. It’s important to focus on documentation and process because when you’re not there personally, the processes become much more important. So the key for them has been to have everything built around a predictable and structured weekly basis. For example: Advice To His 25-Year-Old Self He would definitely tell his younger self to focus much more on the user than on the business. At 25 he was already building and growing businesses, and he wishes that he knew back then what he knows now, which is: if you center your strategy around value for the user—what they think and feel, and what their problems and needs are—you’ll be much more successful at a faster rate. His Daily Structure: One Must-Read Book It’s always hard to choose just one book that’s had an impact on his life, so David gives us two: Resources from this interview: Leave some feedback: Connect with Eric Siu: Podcast: Play in new window | Download Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS Selected Links from this Episode: Leave some feedback: Connect with Eric Siu:Free Bonus Download: Get a list of insanely actionable first steps to identifying the perfect influencers – actionable advice to help you get started not found in this post! Click here to download it free.Mistake #3 – Abusing the Six Principles of Influence
Mistake #4 – No Unique Selling Proposition
Mistake #5 – None, Not Enough, or Too Much Marketing
Pick your poison. No matter which you choose, the amount of self-serving promotional posts should be small. The bulk of your social media or content marketing should be useful material for your fans and followers. Too many e-mails, too much self-promotion, or too many sales pitches, and your audience will leave you. Figuring out exactly how much to spend can involve numbers, customer acquisition costs and lifetime values, and good old-fashioned math. If that makes you want to hide under the bed, just remember that it doesn’t necessarily have to be complicated (yet). Inbound marketing is the most effective and cost-friendly route to get started. Free Bonus Download: Get a list of insanely actionable first steps to identifying the perfect influencers – actionable advice to help you get started not found in this post! Click here to download it free.
Mistake #6 – No Specified Target Market
Mistake #7 – Believing that Marketing Ends with the Sale
Free Bonus Download: Get a list of insanely actionable first steps to identifying the perfect influencers – actionable advice to help you get started not found in this post! Click here to download it free.Mistake #8 – You’re a Pantser
Mistake #9 – No Website
Key Takeaways
Welcome to another episode of Growth Bites. Today we’ll talk about how you can reduce customer churn rate, and I’ll point you to a helpful resource to help you do so.