Growth Marketing Today podcast.

Let's say your marketing budget has been cut due to COVID-19. What do you do?

With consumers cutting spending in response to COVID-19, for a lot of companies, this is reality.

This week, I have Ruth Zive, the Head of Marketing at Ada, a platform that empowers industry-leading organizations like Telus and UpWork to transform their customer service with AI-powered automation. She shares her tips for what her marketing team is focused on with a reduced marketing budget during this pandemic.

Major companies are often wary of conflict, especially in a polarized time. But some are now taking a stand on racial injustice and police violence. Companies like Nike, Twitter, and Citigroup have aligned themselves with the Black Lives Matter movement. But, Some have called out brands for their canned response. Does this sound familiar? “We at [Brand] are committed to fighting injustice by posting images to Twitter that express our commitment to fighting injustice."

When they redesigned FullStory’s onboarding process, Melanie Crissey, Product Marketing Manager at FullStory, scored some definite wins. However, her team also made a few mistakes along the way. In this episode, Melanie shares the six onboarding mistakes they made so you can avoid them! 

Did you know that 60% of users who signup for a SaaS product only logs in once? That's crazy but it speaks to how vital your onboarding experience is. That's why I decided to hang out with SaaS onboarding expert Aaran Krall and get his advice on how we can build a better experience for our users.

As the team at the SaaS commerce platform Paddle has learned, real growth is about entering new markets, and that takes thoughtful attention to pricing, making inroads into new geographic regions, deciding whether to move upmarket (or downmarket), and offering new standalone products instead of bloated features tacked on to old ones. In this episode, Ed Fry, Paddle’s growth ops, shares his five-star growth framework that describes how Paddle achieved 2,475% revenue growth.

Topic clusters have been a big trend in content marketing and SEO--and with good reason. However, the way the model is created doesn't take the user into consideration. And there's nothing more frustrating as a consumer than being forced down the funnel when you're not ready or not finding the next step you need in your journey. In this episode, Carolyn Lyden, Founder of searchhermit.com, proposes a user-focused content matrix to remedy the inward-looking content generation method with the topic cluster model.

Still trying to wrap your mind around the fast-paced world of TikTok? You’re not alone. Since its launch in 2018, TikTok has quickly become one of the hottest social media apps on the market. However, the concept for this type of app isn’t new. What makes TikTok unique is the speed at which it’s gaining popularity. In this episode, Lauren Pope, Content Manager at G2 and self-proclaimed TIkTok expert, explains how businesses can take advantage of TikTok’s popularity to grow their brand.

These last few weeks have been tough for SaaS and DTC operators. What's been most impressive are the communities coming together, whether it's your local communities supporting restaurants and healthcare workers or entrepreneurs and operators working together to help one another understand and weather the storm. In this episode, Patrick Campbell, CEO and founder of ProfitWell, talks about how SaaS businesses can thrive during these times and how you can take advantage of ProfitWell’s Subscription Stimulus Package

Right now, with the COVID-19 virus spreading and the oil war going on in the Middle East, we seem to be in a perfect storm of things going on that could go either way. It might all recover quickly, and it might get a lot worse. In this episode, John Doherty, Founder and CEO Credo (a marketplace for companies hire pre-vetted digital marketing agencies and consultants), shares his advice to help you navigate your business in these unsettling times.

How can a simple technical SEO fix increase organic traffic by 70% and the number of pages that rank in Google's top 10 and top 100 results by 100%? In this episode, Geoff Atkinson, founder of Huckabuy (a performance-based software for the organic search channel), breaks down the topic of structured data markup, covering what it is, why it matters, how it works, how to implement it, and more. Geoff's company Huckabuy works with companies large and small to implement structured data markup on their websites, and he has seen incredible before-and-after results.

In the last few years, diversity has become somewhat of a buzzword, and having a diverse group of people working together is seen as an advantage. With a diverse group of teams, you're more likely to have a wide spectrum of ideas, backgrounds, and skills that can help your organization develop more and quicker. But, it also avoids embedding biases in your marketing campaigns and product development.

Amanda Munday, Founder and CEO of The Workaround (a parent-friendly co-working space in Toronto), shares practical tips on how to build a diverse team.

In the real world tackling churn and increasing retention is one of the hardest problems a subscription business faces. It is a company-wide effort across multiple roles and requires a team to come together with a coherent strategy to tackle the problem head-on. In this episode, Andrew Michaels, Business Intelligence Manager at HotJar and Host of the Churn.fm podcast, shares lessons he's learned from his experience and discussion with growth marketers from HubSpot, Wistia, Basecamp, and more.

Social media advertising is a must if you’re looking to reach a new, targeted audience—fast. Of course, it can be scary to move from an organic social strategy to putting real money on the table. So, it’s important to understand all the options. In this episode, I talk to Hudaina Baig, a paid social consultant who has managed more than $30 million in ad spend.

When I first caught wind of the trend of companies building “growth teams,” I probably had a similar reaction to a lot of people: “Wait a second, isn’t everyone on the sales and marketing teams at a company already part of the growth team?” Then, of course, the follow-up question: “How about product managers? Aren’t they thinking about how to grow adoption of their products too?” In this episode, Connor Bradley, Growth Manager at Jobber, shares exactly what the growth does to adding value to the product, demand gen, customer success, and marketing teams at Jobber.

In December 2019, Motivo, the first platform for therapist tele-supervision, raised $2.2 million of seed financing. As the Head of Marketing of Motivo, Lauren Patrick knows first hand what it takes to grow a startup. In this episode, Lauren shares the scrappy, but effective ways she helped grow Motivo's revenue by 200% in five months

I built my first website with Yahoo Geocities. It was ugly. But, I was so proud of my creation because but I made it. Today anyone with a computer and access to the internet can build a website using tools far more powerful than Dreamweaver from two decades ago. One of those tools is Webflow, where designers, coders, and marketers can easily build fully responsive, bespoke websites. In this episode, Bryan Chou, Co-Founder of Webflow, shares the early genesis and growth of Webflow.

How can demand generation and growth teams work together? Some might think that demand gen's role is to just get more signups, while growth takes it from there. In this episode, Sarah Bugeja, Director of Demand Generation at Wave, shares how the demand gen and growth teams work hand-in-hand to bring in qualified leads.

Can you think of the last time you saw something and you just had to tell your friends about it? Do you remember having a great experience at a restaurant and later on tweeting about it? This is, essentially, word of mouth marketing (WOMM). It's an organic way of spreading information that utilizes components of viral marketing, though unlike viral marketing, it spreads by more natural channels. In this episode, Saul Colt, Founder and Creative Director of The Idea Integration Company, shares how he's planned, created, and launched experiential and word-of-mouth campaigns that helped brands like FreshBooks, Xero, Nike, and more to stand out from competitors.

Everyone knows how powerful word of mouth marketing can be for a business. So what’s the problem? Largely word of mouth is unpredictable. One week you can get a ton of new customers through referrals, the next is crickets. For most businesses, it’s like trying to catch lightning in a bottle. Enter Josh Ho, Founder and CEO of ReferralRock, a referral program software. In this episode, he talks about how he started, bootstrapped, and grew ReferralRock.

The difference between hosting a memorable, worthwhile marketing conference and an expensive waste of time lies in the planning. It might seem tiresome and overly picky to think through every contingency before an event, but in nailing down questions in advance, you ensure that your event runs smoothly. In this episode, Amrita Gurney, VP of Marketing at CrowdRiff, shares how she and her team planned, organized, and hosted their first successful conference at CrowdRiff, SEE2019.

Just like you regularly clean your kitchen to keep cobwebs and cockroaches away, you should regularly update old content. If you do, the results can be extraordinary. For example, Derek Gleason, Content Lead at CXL, updated old blog posts for CXL that resulted in 130 percent increase in traffic to those posts.

As you surf through the Internet for content marketing tips, strategies, and case studies, you may find plenty of examples of what works. But, unfortunately, not all of those examples resonate in a "boring" industry. So the questions you may have is: What do you do if you want to make your content exciting in an otherwise boring industry?

70 percent of people from all walks of life, both men and women, experience imposter syndrome at some point in their careers. With over 13 years of experience managing multi-million dollar budgets in various roles, including Geosign, Achievers, and Shopify as Head of CRO, you'd think that Tiffany Da Silva is the 30 percent who chomps on imposter syndrome for breakfast and rise to the top of the corporate ladder. But, deep down, she feels like a fraud. In this episode, Tiffany shares her own experiences along with the framework and tools she uses every day to crush it and get S@# done.

How does your content strategy, acquisition channels, and copy change when targeting businesses of different sizes? In this episode, we're going to take a deep-dive into the difference between marketing to an enterprise level business or a smaller business or solopreneur. Kasey Bayne shares her experience on how she adapted her marketing strategy when she targeted small businesses and solopreneurs at FreshBooks and enterprise companies at DataTrue as Head of Marketing.

There is a ceiling on your conversion rate. It's not your price. It's not your copy. It's not your form. It could be your page load time. Slow websites cause visitors to bounce, which impacts the potential search ranking of your website. In this episode, Lukas Haensch, former Page Speed Specialist at Google and now the Co-Founder and CEO of Pagemonk, shares with you practical tips to increase the speed of your website by up to 3x.

Trends come and go, but content marketing — particularly blogging — remains one of the top marketing channels. In this episode, Kaleigh Moore, freelance content writer for SaaS and eCommerce, shares how to produce top-performing blog posts, promote them, leverage different media types, and make your content as evergreen as possible. Kaleigh has been hired by top companies on the Fortune 500 as well as growing SaaS companies, including AT&T, ReCharge Payments, HubSpot, and BigCommerce.

When you think about A/B testing, the first thing that comes to mind probably is optimizing the conversion rate of two versions of a webpage or app against each other to determine which one performs better. RankScience, a YC-backed company, built technology that enabled companies to A/B test their SEO initiatives with one-line of code. In this episode, Ryan Bednar, Co-Founder and CEO RankScience, shares how their product sits next to your website, making hundreds of experiments to tweak your HTML for improved page rankings.

Onboarding is a such critical phase of the customer journey when customers form their first impression of your product and decide whether to stick around or churn out. Like any first impression, once formed, it tends to stick. This can set you up for long-term success or doom your relationship to short-term failure. In this episode, Aazar Shad, Head of Growth at UserPilot, discusses the fundamentals of customer onboarding.

In her latest book The Manifesto On Content Marketing Teams, Xenia Muntean, the co-founder and CEO of Planable, shares ideas on improving productivity within content marketing teams, making collaboration more inspiring, and presenting content ideas to clients with greater impact. Xenia is on a mission to build “the future of marketing teamwork."

It seems like product-led growth is all the rage in marketing circles these days. What does it actually look like for organizations to be product-led? That's why Despina from ReinventGrowth.co surveyed 40 SaaS organizations and 50 executives who own or lead Product-Led Growth practices. The goal of this was to map, through real examples, Product-Led Growth techniques used and estimate how they affect the customer journey.

Word-of-mouth marketing is one of the most effective marketing strategies when growing a business. According to Hubspot, a whopping 90% believe brand recommendations from friends. But, for most businesses, referrals come in through luck or happenstance. Not for Jason Resnick (also known as Rezzz), who built a couple of successful businesses and hae taught thousands of business owners to create systems that make referral a predictable source of new leads.

Imagine if you could connect with your website visitors the moment they landed on your site. They understood exactly what kind of value your product or solution provided. And they were eager to join your email list or hit the buy button. That's what Jen Havice does for companies she works with. She turns data, user research, customer interviews, and surveys into irresistible website copy that makes visitors say, "Yes!" Jen has been featured on the blog for Unbounce, ConversionXL and CopyHackers.

Since 2005, Hiten Shah has started multiple SaaS companies, including Crazy Egg, KISSmetrics, and FYI. I've been a big fan of his tweets, articles and products. He’s built more than ten different products and has started companies like a marketing consultancy, a podcast advertising network, and a hosting company.

You're hired as VP of Marketing of a fast-growing YC-backed tech company. What do you do in your first 100 days? That was the situation Amrita Mathur was in when she took the VP of Marketing job at Superside.com. From hiring, re-branding, pricing changes and planning experiments, there are so many things to focus on and do. In this episode, Amrita breaks down exactly what she did to set up Superside for a growth trajectory.

Writing your email onboarding series is an art in itself. Not only do you need to know everything there is to know about your product and your users, you also need to know the right timing for communicating with your users. In this episode, email specialist Stephanie Knapp shares her best practices based on 16 full email series breakdowns consisting of over 153 emails

Have you ever walked past a restaurant with a line of customers outside eagerly waiting to get in? Did you join the line because you thought that with a line like that, the food must be outstanding? That's social proof in action! In this episode, Louis Nicholls, author of the Social Proof Handbook, and founder of Sales for Founders, describes his three-step process for crafting social proof that increases conversion by up 2% to 10%.

Tech world is full of jargons – AI, CMS, DNS and more. It may make us sound smart. But, it may just confuse the heck out of potential customers. After helping enterprise companies convert more browser visitors into buyers using content, Jessica Mehring, CEO and Senior Conversion Copywriter, at Horizon Peak Consulting, has experience in making complex subjects relatable, which is why her work in the tech space is second to none. For one of her clients, within the first 30 days, Jessica's work generated $27,000 in new revenue to leads that came from the content she helped us write.

If you value your time, your focus, or your relationships, this episode is a must-listen. Nir Eyal, Wall Street Journal best-selling author of Hooked, just published Indistractable today. As high-achieving marketers and founders, how do we get more meaningful work done in a world full of so many distractions? From the ping of Slack or notifications that you just got mail, inborn tendencies ensure that we’ll always struggle with distraction. However, when you become Indistractable, your attention and your life become your own to focus on tasks to help achieve that next growth milestone.

SEO is a complicated discipline that often requires technical tools and evolves constantly with frequent Google algorithm updates. But, according to Stephen Kenwright, Co-Founder and Technical Director at Rise at Seven, a creative SEO agency, and Co-Founder of SearchLeeds, what you need to focus on to win with SEO is to just give searchers the best customer experience overall. In this episode, Stephen discusses a customer-centric approach to SEO strategy.

It's so much easier to drive traffic to your website when you have a big budget at your disposal. What happens when you don't have thousands of dollars to spend on Google or Facebook ads? In this episode, Nadya Khoja, Chief Growth Officer at Venngage, shares the 4-step content marketing framework, backlink strategy and promotional plan that increased Venngage's monthly organic blog visits 0 to 400k monthly organic blog visits

Imagine having the superpower to read your customers' minds so you know how they talk, what triggers that caused them to purchase or leave your product, and how they describe your product and your competitors. That would be a marketer's ultimate superpower! You won't necessarily be cast in the next Marvel movie with this superpower. What I'm talking about is using Jobs-To-Be-Done (JTBD) framework to supercharge your marketing. In this episode, Claire Suellentrop, Co-Founder at Forget The Funnel, and former Head of Marketing at Calendly, shares exactly how she helped Autobooks use the JTBD framework to create more compelling and effective marketing campaigns.

During her tenure as Head of Marketing, Juliana Casale helped Crazy Egg hit its highest monthly revenue in two years. In this episode of the Growth Today podcast, Juliana opens up about the content, email and acquisition strategies she implemented to achieve Crazy Egg’s highest monthly revenue and increase their trial-to-paid conversion by 75%. Juliana is currently the Head of Marketing at Clearbanc, a fintech startup that offers online brands affordable growth capital so they can scale their marketing campaigns and inventory.

Ryan has grown Fomo, a SaaS social proof tool, from $15K to $100K MRR in just 3 years, all the while traveling over 45 countries and launching several side projects including books, courses and YouTube videos. In episode 53 of Growth Marketing Today, learn how Ryan grew Fomo from $15K to $100K, from pricing strategy, competitive strategy and more. Get the growth cheat sheet from this episode at https://growthtoday.fm/53. Why take notes when you can steal my notes from this episode? Support me on Patreon for as little as $2 per episode at https://patreon.com/growthtoday

SEO is content and content is SEO. Sounds like another marketing buzzword to throw around. But, Alina Benny, Growth Marketing Manager at Nextiva, focus on optimizing content for search intent and user experience resulted in 107% increase in organic traffic in 6 months.

In episode 52, you'll learn from Alina, the exact strategy Alina implemented to increase Nextiva's organic traffic by 107% from October 2018, whether landing page or blog post is best to rank for keywords in Google and Alina's playbook for optimizing content for SEO.

Every business owner faces the same problem: Increasing conversions and reducing churn. With a client list of companies such as AWeber, Buffer, Stripe, AppCues, InVision, AppCues and more, Val Geisler, nicknamed "The Email Marketing Queen", has cracked the code to the email marketing strategy that actually increases trial conversions and reduces churn. The last onboarding emails she re-wrote saw a 209% increase in conversions. In episode 51, Val shares two of her BIGGEST pet peeves when it comes to onboarding emails you should avoid, Val's "Dinner Party Strategy" for high-converting onboarding emails and three retention strategies that helps grow MRR.

Google the term "sales funnel stages" right now. The first organic result is written by Marijana Kay, SaaS content writer, for Pipedrive. Do you think that's a fluke? Google the term, "how to build a mobile app." Yup, you guessed it – the first organic result is Marijana's article for buildfire.com. Marijana knows a thing or two about writing content that rank #1 on Google. In episode 50, she reveals her step-by-step process to do so. We also discuss whether long-form or short-form content is better for ranking on Google and how she got her first client as a freelancer (and how you can too). Download the growth cheat sheet with actionable growth tips to ranking #1 on Google at https://growthtoday.fm/50

Alexandre Ferrari, founder at Brazillian growth agency Tracao.online, has implemented and ran the growth process at YC-backed companies as well as multi-national brands like Unilever. In this episode, find out the exact growth process Ale uses and how to create a culture of growth in a bigger company. Get the show notes, tweetable quotes, key actionable takeaways and more from this episode at https://growthtoday.fm/49

HubSpot, Hotjar and AWeber – these are some of the companies that Josh Garofalo, SaaS copywriter and founder of Swaycopy, has worked with to double or triple their conversions. In this episode, learn Josh's exact step-by-step copywriting process that he uses for A-list SaaS companies, why Josh actually doesn't "love" copywriting even though he's so good at it and one tip that can turn your copy from good to amazing. Get the growth cheat sheet with all the actionable tips from this episode at https://growthtoday.fm/48

The first year of a startup is usually the toughest, especially if you're competing against large enterprise companies with deep pockets. That's exactly what Daryna Kulya faced when she started OpenPhone with Mahyar Raissi. In this episode, learn exactly what Daryna did to acquire OpenPhone's first 1,000 paying customers without spending a single dollar on ads and the best advice Paul Graham gave to Daryna her the OpenPhone team during their time at YCombinator. Get the one-page cheat sheet of actionable growth tips, tweetable quotes and key takeaways from this episode at https://growthtoday.fm/047

What does it take to grow a SaaS or subscription business in 2019? With access to the metrics of thousands of SaaS companies, Corey Haines, Head of Growth at Baremetrics, should know. In this episode, learn how Corey used personalized value-packed videos to double Baremetrics trial-to-paid conversions, why ARPU is one of the most important growth levers for SaaS and Corey's bottom-up approach to growth. Download a one-page cheat sheet packed with actionable growth tips from this episode at https://growthtoday.fm/046. Only available for the next 5 days.

LinkedIn is the place to be if you're in the B2B space. The problem is that LinkedIn is often a cesspool of spammy sales posts or congratulatory posts for a job well done. How do you utilize LinkedIn to grow your company's brand so it stays top-of-mind to your potential buyers? Gaetano DiNardi, Director of Demand Generation at Nextiva, has figured out a way to build a following and get hundreds and thousands of impressions on his posts. In this episode, Gaetano discusses the 5 types of content that have a higher chance of going viral on Linkedin, the best way to structure your LinkedIn post and how to turn the viral content into inbound leads. To get the free show notes, three key actionable takeaways, tweetable quotes and more from this episode go to https://growthmarketing.today/045

SaaS companies that invest in customer research grew 2-3x faster than companies that don't. The problem is that 65% of marketers rarely do customer research. That's where Katelyn Bourgoin comes in. Her mission is to make customer research sexy again and help frustrated product and marketing teams use customer insight to guide innovation and identify untapped growth opportunities. In this episode, Katelyn reveals her step-by-step process in helping companies identify their best customers and trigger them to buy more. For the show notes, key takeaways, tweetable quotes from Katelyn and other valuable resources, go to https://growthmarketing.today/044

Is it worth investing in SEO in 2019 when it's getting harder to rank for keywords? According to Kevin Indig, VP of SEO at G2, you need to forget about blogs and drive organic traffic with his secret SEO strategy, he dubbed "microsite 2.0". Kevin has worked for companies such as eBay, Pinterest, Atlassian, and G2 acquire more than +100M users using SEO. In this episode, we talk about something Kevin dubs as "microsite 2.0" strategy that doubled the organic traffic from 4M to 8M at Atlassian. We also talk about a link building strategy that Kevin called "account-based link building." Finally, we talk about big shifts in SEO in 2020 and beyond. For the show notes, key takeaways, tweetable quotes and other valuable resources, go to https://growthtoday.fm/043

Hiring marketers can be a hit or miss. Building a high-performing marketing team from 1 to 35 employees that scales a SaaS company's annual recurring revenue from $1M to $15.6M in 5 years with no major funding is even harder! That's what Georginia (aka as Gia) Laudi, the former VP of Marketing at Unbounce (2012-2017), did exactly. As an early employee, she built a team which surpassed targets and more than doubled acquisition in its 2nd year. For the show notes, key takeaways, tweetable quotes and other valuable resources, go to https://growthtoday.fm/042

The #1 killer of growth for SaaS company is churn. For a SaaS business of almost any scale, the valuation impact of better retention is in the tens of millions over time. The problem is that only 44% of companies focus more closely on acquisition, while only 18% cited retention as a higher concern (source). In this episode, we have Kristen DeCosta, Growth Lead at ChurnBuster.io. Kristen shares some proven and simple strategies to reduce SaaS churn that kill growth.

How did YC-backed startup BxBlue, which is based out of Brazil, get their first customer using SEO within a month? In this episode, I chat with Roberto Braga, CMO of BxBlue, on an in-depth look of their SEO strategy, his experience and biggest learnings with being part of Y-Combinator and the challenges of growing a startup in Brazil. For show notes from this episodes, my key takeaways and other goodies, go to https://growthmarketing.today/040

April Dunford, market positioning expert and author of the just released book Obviously Awesome, shares why for most lead gen, customer acquisition or sales problem, it's really a market positioning problem. They don’t really know the value their product is giving to the right target audience. April goes through her methodology in helping companies from startups to 40 billion dollar company just do that. For the show notes, tweetable quotes from April (there are so many!) and other goodies, go to https://growthmarketing.today/039

From professional poker player to SEO and Paid Acquisition Manager at Drift, Bill King shares how the skills he learned in data, strategy and game theory as a poker player helped him become the marketer he is today. Prior to Drift, he was the Senior Growth Marketing Manager at AvidXchange, Senior Inbound Marketing Professional at Hubspot. For the show notes, tweetable quotes from Bill and other goodies, go to https://growthmarketing.today/038

For freemium and free trial SaaS marketers and owners, one of the biggest struggles is converting more free or free trial users into paying users. Wes Bush, a product-led growth consultant and upcoming author of the book Product-Led Growth, shares his secrets to doing just that. Learn why product-qualified leads are so much more “qualified” than marketing-qualified leads, how to increase your freemium or free trial conversion and why are some big mistakes marketers make when implementing product-led growth. For this episode's show notes, tweetable quotes and goodies, go to https://growthmarketing.today/037

Joel Klettke, B2B SaaS copywriter extraordinaire and CRO consultant, shares with use his process for creating copy that multiplies conversion rates and sells. He’s done some amazing work, including doubling the conversion rate of Hubspot. As a sign of how funny and great Joel’s copy is, check out his twitter bio - Pray for your competitors: after you hire me, they’ll need it. For the show notes, tweetable quotes from Joel and more, go to https://growthmarketing.today/036.

Talia Wolf, a conversion optimization expert, who pioneered the emotional targeting methodology, shares with us how she's able to increase her client's conversion rates by 10X or even 20X over and over again. It’s a methodology that taps into your customer’s most inner emotional needs and cater to them in your design. For the show notes, tweetable quotes from Talia and more, go to https://growthmarketing.today/035.

Kristian Borghesan, Marketing Manager at Planswell and Co-Founder at Bruha, talks all about growing an event ticketing startup, why often the best growth marketers are entrepreneurial and 3 growth experiments that the Bruha team ran that resulted in the greatest lift. For the full show notes, tweetable quotes from Kristian and other goodies, go to https://growthmarketing.today/034

Asia Matos of Demand Maven quit her day job completely cold turkey last year and started Demand Maven, which partners with early-stage SaaS companies to help build their marketing engines and get them to their first 100 customers. For the full show notes, tweetable quotes from Asia and other goodies from this episode, go to https://growthmarketing.today/033

In this episode of Growth Marketing Today, I chat with my buddy Kamil Rextin about Spotify Programmatic Audio Ads. Is it worth it? How easy is it to launch a spotify ad? The Spotify ad platform launched in Fall 2017 in US and March 2018 in Canada and UK. Originally, you had to apply as an advertiser into the Spotify Ads Platform. But it's as easy as Facebook and Google ads. If you prefer, you can listen to the podcast on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher or YouTube. You can also check it out https://growthmarketing.today/032

In this episode of Growth Marketing Today, I explain where I've been in the last three and half months since the last episode – hint: I got married :). I also review my stats and explain three ways this podcast has helped me close over $43,000 worth of contract as a digital marketing educator and consultant in 7 months. Finally, I talk about lessons I've learned from this podcast.

Jaxson Khan, Director of Marketing at Nudge.ai serves as host of the #AskAI podcast, a mentor at Techstars, a judge at Venture for Canada, an advisor to Century Initiative, and a member of the World Economic Forum. In this episode, learn how you can use AI to grow your company and how important relationship strength is for your business strength. For quotes and episode outline of this episode, go to https://growthmarketing.today/030 What You'll Learn in This Episode Nudge.ai's Most Connected Lists How they gather data How to do an effective Product Hunt launch with a focus on relationships, community, and network intelligence The future of AI and how it’ll affect marketers About Jaxson Khan Jaxson is Director of Marketing at Nudge.ai, a relationship intelligence platform. In the community, Jaxson serves as host of the #AskAI podcast, a mentor at Techstars, a judge at Venture for Canada, an advisor to Century Initiative, and a member of the World Economic Forum. Previously, Jaxson founded Young Diplomats of Canada, an NGO that engages with the United Nations, World Bank, and G20. He also served on advisory boards with AstraZeneca and The Globe and Mail and was elected to the Peel District School Board. Jaxson is a published author and speaker on technology, education, and policy, including the International Economic Development Council Journal. Jaxson graduated from Western University as a 3M National Student Fellow and one of Canada's Top 20 Under 20.

I just interviewed Andrew Warner. Andrew is best known as the pushy interviewer who founded Mixergy, the place where proven entrepreneurs teach. But I turned the tables and interviewed him. Andrew came on to talk about chat bots. Specifically, why major companies are making chat bots a big part of their marketing and sales strategy. PS. You may have heard Facebook temporarily paused new chatbots on their platform. I asked Andrew about that, too. I think you’ll want to hear what he had to say. It's one of my best interviews to date. Andrew has created a bot just for this podcast. Check it out at botacademy.com/growthmarketing For quotes and episode outline of this episode, go to https://growthmarketing.today/029 3 Reasons To Check Out This Episode He explains what the heck a chat bot is. And if you already know what it is, you’ll still discover some interesting (and profitable) uses for chat bots Andrew invested in chat bot companies early on. He’ll reveal what he saw in chat bots that lots of other people missed You’ll see the incredible response rates you can get with chat bots. Andrew is a numbers guy, and he shared the cold, hard data About Andrew Warner Andrew Warner is an internet, startup entrepreneur. In his 20s, he used credit cards and ingenuity to create a $30+ mil / year (in sales) internet business with his younger brother. He then created Mixergy to help ambitious people who love business as much as he does learn from a mix of experienced mentors. Andrew does that through interviews where founders tell their stories and courses where they teach a solution to issues that can cripple founders. On Mixergy, he invites proven entrepreneurs to teach how they built their startups. The entrepreneurs who've helped me out by appearing on Mixergy include the founders of Wikipedia, Groupon, LivingSocial, LinkedIn, and over 600 others.

Rob Mann, UX Copywriter at Manulife, has worked with brands such as Uber, Twtter, Toyota, BMW and more. In this episode, learn the process to write remarkable content and copy using the UX design process and his top tips if you want to get good at writing copy. For quotes and episode outline of this episode, go to https://growthmarketing.today/028 What You'll Learn in This Episode Rob's copywriting process What UX copywriting is Why most traditional ad's copy are failing How Rob uses Reddit to do user research when writing copy His top tips to get better at writing remarkable content About Rob Mann Over the better part of the past decade, Rob Mann has gotten to work with some awesome agencies and companies, creating copy and content for everything from tech products and corporate websites to ad campaigns and social channels. He's created content for brands such as Uber, Toyota, Johnson & Johnson, Budweiser, Twitter, Toronto Tourism and Public Mobile. He is currently a UX copywriter at Manulife. Prior that, he was the former Head of Community at Crew Labs.  

As a growth marketer, data is king. But, there's so much data everywhere! How do you make sure you don't drown in data? Nick Drew, currently CEO of a boutique data agency called Fuse Insights and previously data and research roles at Yahoo Canada, Microsoft and Financial Times, gives fresh perspective on forming a data-driven growth strategy. In this episode, learn Nick's process for gathering and developing actionable insights from data, why curiosity is the most important thing when interpreting data and why more data might actually be a bad thing. For quotes and episode outline of this episode, go to https://growthmarketing.today/027 What You'll Learn in This Episode Nick's process on gathering and developing actionable insights from data Why curiosity is so important when interpreting data Why more data may not be the solution for your business or startup How AI and machine learning is changing the game for data analysis About Nick Drew Nick Drew has been a researcher for more than fifteen years and a research client for ten. After working at the Financial Times and Microsoft, he spent several years as Head of Research for Yahoo across Canada and Latin America, developing and managing a program of award-winning research from small tactical projects to large-scale thought leadership initiatives. He later set up the Research and Analytics function for FleishmanHillard Canada, helping the company to incorporate research and data into its ways of working, and supporting a wide range of clients across the public and private sectors in their research and insights needs. Nick’s interspersed his career with time working for agencies ranging from large multinationals to small boutique shops. But it’s the time he spent working as a research client that he really found a passion for the art of taking business challenges and turning them into questionnaires, and transforming data and qual transcripts into meaningful outcomes for marketers, sales folks and C-Suite leadership.

Having worked at a startup, ConversionXL and HubSpot, Alex Birkett is the right guy to shed some light in how to do growth in a startup, an agency and a billion-dollar company. In this episode of Growth Marketing Today, Alex shares the tactics he used to grow ConversionXL's monthly blog visitors from 125K to 250K. Alex also opens up his tips about doing SEO and getting the most out of conferences and meetups. For quotes and episode outline of this episode, go to https://growthmarketing.today/026 What You'll Learn in This Episode How Alex grew ConversionXL's monthly blog visitors from 125K to 250K The content promotion strategy he used at ConversionXL The growth process at HubSpot How Alex does SEO at HubSpot About Alex Birkett Alex Birkett is a Growth Marketing Manager at HubSpot where he focuses specifically on freemium acquisition strategy. In the past, he's been a startup growth guy at ConversionXL, and before that, at LawnStarter. Alex's main strengths and focuses are in growth strategy, data analysis, experimentation design, and search engine optimization. He's dabbled in most marketing channels, though. Generally, Alex is quite "T-Shaped" (to use industry jargon), which his deep focus areas being CRO, SEO, and content. He writes over at iamalexbirkett.com. Come say hi.

Ever thought about running an influencer marketing campaign? In this episode of Growth Marketing Today, I have the Richard Wong, VP Marketing of #Paid, one of the biggest influencer marketing platforms in the industry. They've recently raised $9M in Series A funding to fuel their platform's expansion with AI. Learn why you should consider running an influencer marketing campaign, how to run a successful campaign and how to measure the success of that campaign. For quotes and episode outline of this episode, go to https://growthmarketing.today/025 What You'll Learn in This Episode How has marketing in tech changed in the last 5-10 years The history and impact of influencer marketing One winning influencer campaign they ran in an unsexy industry (hint: it's the financial/bank field) What #Paid's marketing team looks like How to run a successful influencer marketing campaign How to measure the success of influencer marketing campaigns Tips for recent marketing grads on how to get their first job About Richard Wong Richard Wong is a Toronto-based marketing leader who is currently the head of marketing at #paid having previously worked at Google, Johnson & Johnson, Procter & Gamble. His work has been featured in AdWeek, DigiDay, Media in Canada, Strategy Magazine, the American Marketing Association (AMA) blog, DX3, and other publications. He also teaches the digital marketing classes at tech schools—Brainstation, RED Academy, and Camp Tech.  

We're back with Sarah Stockdale, former Director of Global Community Growth at Tilt.com (acquired by AirBnb) and principal at Sarah Stockdale Growth Consulting. In this episode, learn the fastest way to grow your startup-up, the story behind the acquisition of Tilt.com's by AirBnb and Sarah's tips for doing growth experiments. She also shares her tips for anyone trying to get into growth marketing. For quotes and episode outline of this episode, go to https://growthmarketing.today/024 What You'll Learn in This Episode The northstar metric that the Tilt.com growth team looked at The fastest way to grow (hint: it’s not a spray and pray approach) The story behind the acquisition of Tilt.com by AirBnb An experiment that really worked well for Tilt.com Sarah’s tips for growth teams who are doing experiments Tips for anyone trying to get into growth marketing About Sarah Stockdale Sarah Stockdale is a growth veteran, with 7 years of experience growing and scaling early stage technology companies. With experience working at venture-backed companies out of both Toronto and Silicon Valley, Sarah has grown companies from scratch and led large growth teams. Past experience includes Product Marketing and Business Development at Wave and most recently, Sarah led a multi-national growth team at Tilt as the Director of Global Community Growth. Sarah mentors with Venture for Canada and 500 Startups, and has taught and spoken at Ryerson, Queen's, Brainstation, HackerYou, McMaster, George Brown and Mohawk College.

Sarah Stockdale, former Director of Global Community Growth at Tilt.com (acquired by AirBnb) and principal at Sarah Stockdale Growth Consulting, is a growth veteran who has experience growing and scaling early stage venture-backed companies out of both Toronto and Silicon Valley. In this episode, Sarah shares the growth process at Tilt (before they got acquired by AirBnb), what she looks for when hiring for a growth team and how to get users addicted to your app. For quotes and episode outline of this episode, go to https://growthmarketing.today/023 What You'll Learn in This Episode Sarah’s career progression (hint: she didn’t start in growth or marketing.. ahem MTV). The growth process at Tilt before they got acquired by AirBnb. What Sarah looks for in hiring growth marketers (hint: it’s not sexy resume!) How to hire for your #growth team How you get users addicted to your app   About Sarah Stockdale Sarah Stockdale is a growth veteran, with 7 years of experience growing and scaling early stage technology companies. With experience working at venture-backed companies out of both Toronto and Silicon Valley, Sarah has grown companies from scratch and led large growth teams. Past experience includes Product Marketing and Business Development at Wave and most recently, Sarah led a multi-national growth team at Tilt as the Director of Global Community Growth. Sarah mentors with Venture for Canada and 500 Startups, and has taught and spoken at Ryerson, Queen's, Brainstation, HackerYou, McMaster, George Brown and Mohawk College.  

We're back with Kieran Flanagan, VP of Growth at HubSpot, for part 2 of 2. In this episode, learn how the HubSpot's global growth team is structured (hint: it's not by product!). You'll also learn what Kieran looks for when hiring for his growth team at HubSpot, his biggest lessons as a leader of a global growth team and where he sees marketing going in 5 to 10 years. For quotes and episode outline of this episode, go to https://growthmarketing.today/022 WHAT YOU'LL LEARN FROM THIS EPISODE How is HubSpot’s global growth team structured (hint: it’s not by product!) How they make sure each of their growth teams are aligned in goals What Kieran looks for in marketers when hiring His biggest lessons as a leader of a global growth team Where he sees marketing going in 5 to 10 years His advice for those trying to get into growth marketing ABOUT KIERAN FLANAGAN Kieran Flanagan has a proven track record in helping SaaS businesses, from start-ups to enterprise-level companies grow their traffic, users and revenue. He is a thought leader on growth marketing and speaks at events across the globe on the topic. Kieran is currently the VP of Growth at HubSpot where he is responsible for acquisition of free users, monetization of those freemium funnels and optimization of our global web strategy. Outside of that role, Kieran advises startups on all things growth.  

Kieran Flanagan, VP of Growth at HubSpot, has a proven track record in helping SaaS businesses, from start-ups to enterprise-level companies grow their traffic, users and revenue. In this part 1 of 2, Kieran shares with Growth Marketing Today how he manages a global growth team that spans multiple time-zones. You'll also learn tactics HubSpot uses to activate free users into paid users. Find out incremental and disruptive growth experiments at HubSpot in 2018. For quotes and episode outline of this episode, go to https://growthmarketing.today/021 WHAT YOU'LL LEARN FROM THIS EPISODE What the global growth team look like at HubSpot Tactics HubSpot uses to activate free users into paid users The difference between “safe bets” and “big swings” experiments Incremental and disruptive growth experiments at HubSpot this year (2018) ABOUT KIERAN FLANAGAN Kieran Flanagan has a proven track record in helping SaaS businesses, from start-ups to enterprise-level companies grow their traffic, users and revenue. He is a thought leader on growth marketing and speaks at events across the globe on the topic. Kieran is currently the VP of Growth at HubSpot where he is responsible for acquisition of free users, monetization of those freemium funnels and optimization of our global web strategy. Outside of that role, Kieran advises startups on all things growth.    

Alyssa Atkins, VP of Marketing at CareGuide, has mastered the art of smoke testing, automating and scaling user acquisition channels, down to a science. In this episode of Growth Marketing Today, find out CareGuide's 5-step process to exploring and scaling new marketing channels. You'll also learn what Alyssa looks for when hiring for her team (hint: it's not experience or a great resume!). For quotes and episode outline of this episode, go to https://growthmarketing.today/020 WHAT YOU'LL LEARN FROM THIS EPISODE Why she values and only hires marketers who have an entrepreneurial mindset As marketers, how to find the balance between hustling and high-impact activities CareGuide's 5-step process to smoke test, automate and scale user acquisition channels How Alyssa hires for their marketing team ABOUT ALYSSA ATKINS Alyssa Atkins is the VP of Marketing and early employee at CareGuide, which owns vertically focused marketplaces for everyday care services, such as CanadianNanny.ca, Housekeeper.com, Sitter.com, and 20 or so others. She takes a data-driven approach to discovering, automating, and scaling profitable marketing channels. Her strengths lay in hiring, scaling marketing channels, and analytics. Alyssa has basic proficiency in HTML, CSS, and SQL.    

Mobile marketers are using only about 5% of the data they have available to make decisions. That’s a 95% gap in how they can make a more informed decisions. Kara Dake, VP of Growth at CleverTap, share tips on how to use data more effectively to have more personalized messaging. For quotes and episode outline of this episode, go to https://growthmarketing.today/019

Learn how Hailey Friedman started and grew the Affiliate Program at RealtyShares, a Union Square Venture, GC and Menlo backed real-estate investing marketplace. Based out of San Francisco, Hailey is also the President of Bad-Ass Marketers and Founders SF, Silicon Valley's largest community of marketers & founders (over 16,000 members). You’ll also learn from Hailey how she does product marketing and how you can stand out as a marketers. For quotes and episode outline of this episode, go to https://growthmarketing.today/018

Find out what it takes to build a holistic user journey in this episode of Growth Marketing Today. Ray Kanani, Director of User Experience Transformation at Intelex, shares why he used a comic book format to communicate the whole user journey of a company. This is something he got from the AirBnb’s UX team. Every marketer, designer and product people focused on UX growth can learn a thing or two (and even more!) from Ray. For quotes and episode outline of this episode, go to https://growthmarketing.today/017  

Named as one of "12 Innovative Founders To Watch And Learn From" by Forbes Magazines, Josh Fechter is one of the people who popularized the genre of poetic LinkedIn posts. Josh manages Bad Ass Marketers and Founders (BAMF), one of the biggest and most active Facebook groups, which gave him the opportunity to meet the Zuckerberg himself! In this episode, learn how Josh started and grew the BAMF community from 0 to 15,000 members.

Ever wonder what marketing will look like in 2020? Jeff Goldenberg, Chief Strategy Officer at Abacus Agency and Former Head of Growth at Borrowell, dishes out his thoughts on machine learning, attribution, data, accountability and more. He also shares with us the difference between “champion” and “challenger” campaigns and how to split your marketing budget between the two.

Learn copywriting secrets (backed by psychology) that tripled HubSpot Sales revenue from Scott Tousley, the Head of User Acquisition of HubSpot Customer Hub. In this episode, you’ll also get Scott’s tips on the quickest way to become a T-shaped marketer and the top mistakes marketers make when it comes with email marketing.

In today’s episode, we chat with Ethan Garr, VP Product for TelTech Systems. Ethan discusses how he kick-started the growth process at his company. Find out why you need a cheerleader for the growth process in your company. You’ll also learn how to structure your growth team and how to run the growth process.

In today’s episode, we talk with Rokham Fard, founder at PsychologyCompass.com. Rokham shares with Growth Marketing Today his growth secrets to how he started and built one of Canada’s 50 fastest growing tech startups at TheRedPin.com, and grew the team from zero to 150 strong. In this episode, learn why it’s more important to fall in love with the process rather than the results, how to improve your focus by up to 67% with this one productivity hack and the one thing that Rokham looks for when hiring marketers.

In today’s episode, we have Bennett Fitzgibbon, the former director of marketing at Turnstyle Solutions before it was acquired by Yelp. He helped facilitate growth using a marketing strategy that focused primarily on nurturing and lead generation. The University of Calgary graduate was also marketing manager at Yelp WiFi for 4 months. Currently, he is the digital marketing manager at Microdea Inc.

In today’s episode, we talked to Desmond Choi, the head of growth at Diamond. Diamond is an enterprise search engine that can optimize employee workflow. The University of Waterloo graduate is also the VP of operations for Mappedin and the CEO of SparkGig, a community driven marketplace for those who would like to list, discover, and book live performances. Listen in as Desmond shares valuable tips and insights on scheduling meetings with executives, other growth marketing strategies aside from sending e-mails, the entrepreneurial mind-set, and many more.

Peter Sum, Growth Manager at OpenCare, shares his top growth tips. OpenCare is a startup  focused on connecting patients to exceptional dental care, which means only recommending the top 10% of dentists in the city. Learn from Peter the secret on why the OpenCare team spent $10K on customer surveys, the framework he uses to get actionable insights from tremendous data and why it’s important find the balance with creative and data-driven side of marketing.

In this episode, we talked with Turgut Jabbarli, the Head of Growth at DeepPixel. DeepPiXEL Inc. delivers solutions to corporations looking to add an AI based customer service assistant to their products, services or engagement channels. Turgut has a math and business degree in the University of Waterloo and had worked with Blackberry and also as a Junior Data Scientist in InMoment. Learn from Turgut about growth hacking, growth marketing culture, and a lot more.

In this episode, we talked with Kent Fenwick, the Head of Growth at Hubba. Hubba is the largest network of brands, buyers, distributors, and influencers. Kent is one of those  who can do marketing and write code at the same time. Learn from Kent how to win with data advertising, how being able to code can really change the marketing game, what is the biggest problem that companies and marketers make, and a lot more.

In this episode, we talked with David Lau of SnapTravel. David Lau thrives in the startup world. He is currently part of the growth team at a startup called SnapTravel – a booking startup that helps travelers find great hotel deals over Facebook Messenger and SMS. In July 2016, SnapTravel raised $1.2 million in its Seed round. Since then, they’ve been seeing rapid growth and hope to become every traveler’s go-to booking service. Learn about David’s journey today!

In this episode, we talked with Cristian Contreras, the Head of Growth at HeyOrca and he is also one of the organizers of Growth Hackers meet-up in Toronto. Learn the meaning of growth, the difference between incremental experiments and disruptive growth experiments, and his predictive model as Cristian shares his knowledge and a lot more.

In this episode, we talked with David Hurley, the head of growth at Planswell. This show is jampacked with various topics that will give you an idea on how growth works and how certain learnings and turns in life could help develop your overall growth process!

In this episode, Rhamli interviewed Sylvia NG. Sylvia Ng is the VP of Growth and Analytics at 500px. A lot of people look up to Sylvia for her knowledge and experiences with growth process, growth hacks, frameworks, start-up and a lot more. Learn about the different skills and attitudes needed as a growth marketer, importance of failures, and culture through Sylvia’s journey.

When you grow yourself, you grow your business. In this episode, Ramli chats with Elan Marko. He is the founder and growth at Business Basecamp and has become a growth marketer for a lot of startups, helping entrepreneurs push themselves forward through being uncomfortable. Learn about his story and how this unique way to grow your business could possibly be the next big thing for you! “I would market really hard to a few people and go real deep with those people.”- Elan Marko About Elan Elan Marko has rockclimbed over 280,000 vertical feet, and lives for adventure. By day he's addicted to learning, innovating, and growing ideas from seeds to trees. On a mission to elevate entrepeneurs to achieve their potential to impact the world. He works with heart centered entrepreneurs and help them grow revenue through business consulting and group business programs. You'll find him spending his free time connecting with great minds, brainstorming the next big idea, and getting fired up to push boundaries of what's possible.  

In this pilot episode, I interview John from Obie.ai. Learn his journey on how he became the head of growth at Obie.ai. Discover as well what a growth marketer is, how growth experimentation works, and many more. Don’t miss this episode. “Small activities can make big impacts.”- John Kyeremeh About John John is passionate about helping companies scale from product market fit. His core specialties are in customer acquisition, data analysis, designing and running experiments and creating processes within companies to scale. John's life long dream is to help companies with this traction goal. His startup experience started as the first official full-time Business Development Representative (BDR) at Vidyard (YC Company - has over a 300M valuation & joined early - under 18 employee), where he helped craft the sales process that is being used today. There, he fell in love with marketing. He's currently the head of growth at Obie.ai (500 Startups Batch 20).

Welcome to the introductory episode of Growth Marketing Today. In this episode, you will learn what this Podcast is all about, who the Ramli Solidum (the host) is, and why you should subscribe today! This is definitely not an ordinary podcast and if you ever want to know more about “Growth Hacking,” then you should listen to this! Topics discussed: Who is Ramli John How taking MBA changed his course Starting a company with a friend What is a Growth Hacker Brian Buffer of Hubspot Getting growth insights from today’s top startups and many more!