15 Growth Marketing Tactics to Turbocharge Your Startup
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Julian Shapiro is the founder of numerous startups, including Demand Curve, a growth marketing training program that began life as a Y Combinator investment. He’s also a former marketing columnist for TechCrunch. You can follow him on his website or podcast.
Shapiro graced the Trends team with a lecture on growth marketing, and below, we share 15 of his most actionable tactics.
Table of Contents
1. Retarget Your Newsletter Unsubscribers
2. Do Hyper-Targeted Geo Rollouts to Look Bigger Than You Are
3. Cross-Target Audiences on Multiple Platforms
4. Use Cheap Video Ads to Find What Works
5. Look for Up-and-Comers to Find Cost-Effective YouTube Sponsorships
6. Warm Up Cold Leads Through LinkedIn
7. Turn Blog Visitors Into Leads
8. Do Direct Mail (But Do It Properly)
9. Ease Your Audience into CTAs
10. Use Facebook Ads to Narrow Down Your Copy
11. Figure Out Word-of-Mouth/Referral Programs
12. Grow Your Podcasts Through YouTube
13. Use Break-Even Ads to Raise Brand Awareness
14. Prevent Gmail from Going to Spam
15. Optimize The Time Your Ads Go Out
1. Retarget Your Newsletter Unsubscribers
Background
A customer has unsubscribed from your email list. What can you do to re-engage them?
Tactic
When someone unsubscribes from your email list, they’ve only opted out of receiving your email. There are many reasons this can happen, and most have nothing to do with you. Maybe their inbox is too full. Maybe email is not the format they like.
They may still find your content valuable on other platforms (e.g., Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram). If you have a new product or service, you can reactivate all the people that unsubscribed from your newsletter by using a custom list of churned subscribers.
Examples
Use email lists to create custom audiences of churned subscribers via:
TikTok
Instagram
Facebook Business Manager
Snapchat
Pinterest
LinkedIn
2. Do Hyper-Targeted Geo Rollouts to Look Bigger Than You Are
Background
You’re expanding your presence online. How best to spend your ad money to look 10x bigger than you are?
Tactic
If you’re trying to grow your social presence, you don’t want to waste your ad spend by spreading it thin. Instead, make yourself look like the biggest, hottest, and trendiest player of the moment by concentrating your budget into one location.
Partner with several relevant influencers in the same geographic area. Have them all share your product within the same month. This gives your target market the impression that everyone is talking about your product — and that they have to learn more about it.
Examples
Marketing platforms that can help you identify influencers by geography:
Social Book
NinjaOutreach
Or roll up your sleeves and find influencers for free
3. Cross-Target Audiences on Multiple Platforms
Background
Different channels have different strengths. If you’re targeting certain audiences, you might use…
Snapchat (niche communities): “If you’re selling some digestive problem supplement, Snap might be the only ad channel out there with the niche enough targeting for you to actually target the right people cost-effectively,” Shapiro gives as an example.
LinkedIn (firmographic data): “They’re the only really good ad channel for firmographic targeting, which means targeting people based on their job and company details. How big is their employer? What are their job levels? How many years have they worked there? And so forth.
“Let’s say you’re a B2B company and you’re selling to just engineers or something… You can use LinkedIn data to find those engineers. But invest your ad spend on the channels they prefer.
However, since these channels don’t convert very well, you may want to cross-target to Facebook or Instagram to close the loop.”
Tactic
If there’s an audience you’ve identified that can be micro-targeted on a lower-cost ad channel (like LinkedIn or Snap), you can use that platform to find them, then cross-post to a higher-performing channel (like Facebook or Insta.)
“Pay as little as you can to get the audience you need and then pay as much as you need to on Facebook and Instagram to retarget them. And then that is where you’ll get the net — hopefully conversion that’s profitable.”
Examples
To cross-target ads, options include:
Test out cross-channel advertising software platforms
DIY (here is a great article on combing LinkedIn and Facebook ad tools)
Paying an agency to find and target your audience
4. Use Cheap Video Ads to Find What Works
Background
39% of marketers report that video brings them the highest ROI, according to HubSpot’s State of Marketing research.
Julian is even more confident: “If you can afford the creation of [videos], all other things being controlled, you might see a 50%-100% type improvement in cost per click.”
Thankfully, you don’t have to spend tens of thousands of dollars to find out for yourself.
Julian’s advice? Get started with quick and cheap techniques, but make lots of different versions that can be tested.
When you find one that resonates—meaning it has a good click-through rate (CTR) or cost-per-click (CPC)—then you can consider increasing the production value.
Tactic
What exactly does quick and cheap look like? That depends if you’re B2B or B2C.
B2B Ads
Here is an easy two-step process to cost-effectively make a B2B ad:
1. Show how the product works.
Use a tool like Telestream’s ScreenFlow (or pick your preferred alternative) to record the screen of your app, including the workflow and features.
2. Add professional voiceover.
Use a service like Bunny Studio to have a professional voiceover recording on your video.
B2C Ads
Julian’s tips for cheap consumer-facing video ads:
1. Make an animated video.
For $100 or so, you can go to Fiverr and get a quick product video done.
2. Make a Buzzfeed-style image video.
You can use a tool like Animoto—a drag-and-drop video creator—to splice together static images in rapid-fire, 30-second videos with some overlaid text.
Pro tip: HubSpot’s free Clip Creator tool can make a slideshow-style video (with no watermark) in minutes.
Example
Grammarly has great ads showing its product in use. Here is a punchy example detailing the product’s key spell-check features:
5. Look for Up-and-Comers to Find Cost-Effective YouTube Sponsorships
Background
There is a disconnect in the YouTube sponsorship model.
YT creators often charge based on their number of subscribers, but that doesn’t always translate 1:1 into views of your ad.
Tactic
First, look for the up-and-coming creators that speak to your niche or community.
“One discrepancy you can take advantage of is to find folks with low subs, but their videos get a ton of views because they’re talking about something hot and viral. The idea basically is before they’re fully priced in and they’ve built up their subscriber base, try to go for some of those folks who are really breaking out.”
Second, negotiate to pay for views, not subs.
Also, get that ad in early in the video:
“People in the Demand Curve community tell me that sponsorship spots that run in the first 30-60 seconds of the YouTube video significantly outperform those in the middle or at the end.”
Example
Only a handful of years back, musician Mary Spender had a five-digit subscriber count but managed to score a sponsorship from British amp manufacturer Orange.
Today, Spender boasts almost 750k subscribers and her videos often tip into the millions of views. That’s a lot of eyes on Orange.
And while getting in on the ground floor isn’t necessarily the goal of this tactic, I bet a number of other guitar companies are kicking themselves for not seeing it sooner.
6. Warm Up Cold Leads Through LinkedIn
Background
To state the obvious, warm leads are better than cold leads. Pre-targeting is a digital way to warm up leads before a cold outreach.
The concept is to run ads in front of people before you email them. You do so to raise brand awareness so that when they get your email they’re like, “Oh, of course, I’ve heard of you guys.”
With pre-targeting you see better:
Open rates
Click-through-rates
Odds of getting a call back
Tactic
Per Julian, the most effective use of pre-targeting is via LinkedIn:
“Take your list of [email contacts] and upload that to LinkedIn ads. It’ll match some percentage of those folks, and then you run ads to them for 2 weeks—just talking about what it is that they don’t yet know they’re going to be emailed about.”
7. Turn Blog Visitors Into Leads
Background
A lot of high-traffic blogs aren’t focused on turning those visitors into leads. They could become major sources of conversion by taking a page from email capture techniques.
Tactic
Here are 2 of Julian’s favorite tactics to capture an email from blog traffic:
Quizzes
“Offer a quiz if you’d like, and require an email from them to see the quiz results. With that email, you send drip emails and so on, follow up emails in the future, and now you have a real contact, a real lead that you can do something with as opposed to traffic that disappeared.”
Gated content
“A second strategy for grabbing emails that I’ve seen work is buyer’s guides. So put together a PDF—really high-quality, awesome consumer reports. Give people the first 2 pages as a teaser and say, ‘If you want this whole thing, give us your email.’
And it doesn’t have to be a buyer’s guide. This tactic also works with templates, calculators, whitepapers, or original survey data. Anything that provides your audience genuine value.
“And they’ll share it around too, and then that’ll bring more people in.”
Example
Sample Quiz (Murad Skincare): Take quiz –> email results.
Quiz-Making Tools: Hubspot, Typeform, SurveyMonkey
8. Do Direct Mail (But Do It Properly)
Background
As advertising moved to the internet, direct mail (AKA snail mail) became underutilized. But with the right techniques, that channel can still be effective.
Tactic
There are 3 key hacks to make direct mail effective:
Test it with a large enough sample size
“Really important thing here is you need a sufficient sample size and it’s going to be a lot larger than you probably think. So you want to send to at least 10k recipients and you want to send them each mail three times. So 30k pieces gets you that sufficient sample size to start having some idea as to whether this might actually work for you.”
Include time pressure and a clear CTA
“The second thing people do wrong is they don’t actually have a time pressure and clear call to action on the piece of mail. So on that piece of mail, it should be, ‘Hey, you have 3 days to use this coupon to do this following thing, which we think is relevant to you.’”
But what if they don’t get the mailer within those three days?
“Don’t worry, that’s why you’re going to send three pieces of mail staggered. They’ll get it on the second or third trial.”
Track performance via a custom domain name
“The third thing people do wrong (and this why direct mail gets a bad rep) is they don’t have a proper tracking strategy. And so obviously you can add a coupon on the mailer, that’s the obvious approach, but a lot of people just hit up your website, forget about the coupon and you have no idea where they came from.”
Believe it or not, there’s a tech solution even with this low-tech tactic.
“So an alternative is having a custom domain name that’s only used for your mailers. Let’s say your domain is demandcurve.com, for your mailers, you could have dcmarketing.com. They don’t know which one’s your real domain name, but when they type that one into the browser, it forwards to demandcurve.com and expands a full list of tracking codes called UTM tags in the URL, so now you can track it.”
Example
A more modern example of direct mail marketing is the integration between PostGrid and Postalytics with HubSpot. Connecting your printing service to your CRM allows you to automate drip campaigns, postcards, and more.
For example, you could set up a campaign to automatically send a birthday card with a coupon on each customer’s special day.
9. Ease Your Audience into CTAs
Background
A call-to-action (CTA) is a bit of content that tells the reader how to take the next step. In digital marketing, that’s usually a button that moves you to the next step of the purchase funnel.
Done right, a well-placed CTA nurtures a visitor into a customer — but you can actually hurt your conversion rate if your CTAs are too aggressive too soon.
Consider a website with a “Buy Now” CTA right at the top of their home page. Suddenly the visitor is being asked for contact info or credit card details before they’re convinced they even want your product.
Tactic
Really think about the journey prospects take while on your landing page.
Per Julian:
“It’s really effective to actually ease off the CTAs [on your landing page] and just write exceptionally good copy. Convince people that what you’re doing is exactly for them and get them so excited that when you do introduce the CTA halfway down the page, now they’re stoked, they click it and they fill out all your stuff.”
Example
Here’s an example of non-aggressive landing page copy:
No pressure. No sales lingo. Just find a domain name for your website. We’ll talk about price later.
10. Use Facebook Ads to Narrow Down Your Copy
Background
With CTAs and paid ads, even subtle changes can make an outsized difference in conversion performance. It’s important to always be testing and refining your ad copy.
However, doing such tests directly from your website (or in your pricey ad space) may not be practical.
Tactic
The best way to test changes in copy is on Facebook: it costs pennies for thousands and thousands of impressions.
Here’s how:
Have 10 Facebook ads (or however many variations you think of)
Make controlled changes between the versions (Ex: change the copy, but keep the imagery and audience the same)
See which ad has the highest CTR
Pick the winner and run it everywhere else
Repeat this process for all types of text (e.g., blog titles)
Example
Here is how to split test ad versions directly on Facebook.
And for you HubSpot users, here’s how you can create and track FB ads straight from Marketing Hub.
11. Figure Out Word-of-Mouth/Referral Programs
Background
While all paid acquisition channels (e.g. Pinterest, Google, LinkedIn, etc.) have analytics dashboards to help you with ad spend attribution, there are so many ways for conversions to fall through the cracks.
People change devices, go into incognito mode, or use other people’s computers. And the attribution challenge is even harder when it comes to figuring out word-of-mouth (WOM) and referrals.
Luckily, there is a way to determine how much new customer acquisition volume is not being accounted for: it’s called geographic lift.
Tactic
Geolift is frustratingly underused because it’s hard to explain well. But once you understand it, you’ll find that it’s as simple as it is powerful. (And, bonus: it doesn’t require third-party identifiers.)
Say you want to test a new Facebook ad campaign. You start by picking two geographic markets with similar marketing/sales performance.
You focus all of your ad spend on just one of those markets. We’ll call that one Market A. Or, as Julian puts it: “Let’s say you just blast your typical budget for a month exclusively in one area like San Francisco.”
At the end of a predetermined time period, you compare the performance of Market A and Market B.
Obviously, that shows you how your ad campaign performed. Now comes the less obvious part.
You subtract the leads or sales of Market A from your total leads and sales for all markets during the time the experiment was run.
The remainder must have come from untrackable efforts like word-of-mouth, referrals, brand awareness, etc. Therefore, you now have a ratio of trackable-to-untrackable leads/sales.
And if you apply that ratio to your KPIs it allows you to estimate existing unaccounted conversions and even project for their future impact.
12. Grow Your Podcasts Through YouTube
Background
There are numerous platforms to help you quickly launch a podcast: Spotify, iTunes, Buzzsprout, etc.
According to Julian, if you’re going to launch a podcast, you should strongly consider cross-posting on YouTube.
Tactics
Julian lays out the case for YouTube as a podcast growth engine:
The ultimate viral machine
“YouTube is the best viral algorithm machine for distributing your podcast, and if you rely exclusively on Spotify or iTunes to get distribution, [you’ll have issues] unless you’re a celebrity or you have PR contacts or are the features editor at iTunes or Spotify.”
Thinking YouTube first
“It’s actually quite advantageous to have a video-based podcast. Audio content on YouTube, like a long form audio interview, doesn’t perform very well. It’s not going to be as performative as a sit-down, face-to-face video interview. YouTube prefers the video stuff [and] so do viewers—that’s why they’re going to YouTube.”
Make your podcasts timely
“If there’s this big news coming out and that was something you wanted to talk about on your podcast, talk about it that week while the news is hot and make sure they’re relevant keywords in your YouTube video title—and when people search for that topic on YouTube… you will now pop up. And if you tie it properly, you can take advantage of all these search trends.”
Get guests with built-in audiences
“Probably the easiest way to grow is just to interview people who actually have their own networks, people who have their own audiences—so when they come on, they bring their fans with them, and their fans will search their name on YouTube throughout the coming years and will find you.”
Example
Jenna Kutcher’s Goal Digger podcast is a Forbes top-rated show that boasts over 100 million downloads.
Yet she still cross-posts to YouTube, where her most popular videos regularly pull an additional 2-3k views.
That’s a few thousand more eyeballs who may have never found her otherwise.
13. Use Break-Even Ads to Raise Brand Awareness
Background
A lot of times, companies will barely get ads to break even (meaning the value finally covers the cost) and then they’ll turn them off and say, “That was a waste of time.”
This is not always the right move.
Tactics
Obviously, the first goal of running ads is to be profitable. However, if your campaign is in the break-even range, there is an opportunity to keep running it for brand awareness.
Per Julian: “Think about how many companies spend millions of dollars to increase their brand awareness,” so that you’re already primed to buy by the time you see a more targeted ad.
“So if you’re getting break-even ad spend, it’s not a bad thing, it could be an awesome freeway to get tons of brand awareness.”
14. Prevent Gmail from Going to Spam
Background
The bane of email marketing campaigns is getting rerouted to the spam box. Familiarize yourself with Gmail’s spam rules to best optimize your email campaigns.
Tactics
There is no quick hack here. Familiarize yourself with Google’s Email Sender Guidelines.
Though this thread is now a few years old, the advice from a Google Diamond Product Expert is still on point. Focus on these areas when reading the guidelines:
Authentication & Identification
Subscription
Unsubscribing
Format
Delivery
3rd-Party Senders
Affiliate Marketing Programs
15. Optimize The Time Your Ads Go Out
Background
If you’re selling pizzas, you should definitely run your ads at night. Otherwise, you don’t want your customers to encounter your ads when they can’t act on them.
So if your business relies on you being present for the interaction, you need to control the time when your ads are displayed.
To make sure that your ads aren’t running at night, you have to apply the concept of day parting (which automatically turns off your ad targeting at night).
If you’re not using day parting, you’re probably missing out on ~30% of ad spend efficiency.
This is particularly true if you’re running ads on LinkedIn. They are notorious for running ads at midnight which—as you can imagine for a professional network—is a terrible time to reach people.
Tactic
Per Julian: “To do day parting on Facebook can be a pain, unless you do something called campaign-based targeting. It’s not conducive to having most professionals run ads, at least in my experience, so what I do is I use a 3rd-party tool (e.g., AdEspresso) that lets me do day parting on Facebook and Instagram.”
Example
Here is an explanation of how to do dayparting on Facebook.
