People love receiving free rewards from brands.

But don't wait for birthdays—that's when customers receive gifts from lots of other brands.

Try this instead:

• Reach out with a freebie at a random time of the year: Not for a birthday or a holiday. Simply a surprise for being a loyal customer. People will remember your thoughtful, random gift—more than they would if you sent them an email that got buried in their inbox next to 50 other brands' gifts.
• Relate your gift to your core value prop. E.g. Chewy—the pet eCom store—randomly sends customers pet portraits. People want more of what they pay you for. This will lead to more affinity.

LinkedIn has insightful firmographic data, yet most marketers rarely consider running LinkedIn conversion ads—they're often far too expensive.

But you can combine LinkedIn's B2B targeting with Facebook's conversion-focused ad platform to create a highly-targeted B2B funnel.

Here's how:

1. Create a LinkedIn ads campaign promoting an article or landing page using the “website visits” objective. Make sure your article or landing page has a quality lead gen offer and that your pixel tracks the conversion.
2. On Facebook, create a custom audience targeting the visitors who visited your article or landing page from your LinkedIn ads campaign but didn’t convert.
3. Run a FB "conversions" campaign to this audience promoting your lead gen offer.

Taking this approach, your CPC and ROAS could be much lower than you’d get if you ran the entire lead gen campaign through LinkedIn’s ad network.

When writing for SEO, avoid chasing trophy keywords—words that have high traffic potential but drive little value for your startup.

Example: If your business sells software to accountants, a trophy keyword would be “accounting software,” which carries 28,000 monthly searches.

Though this term drives plenty of traffic, here’s the reality: High-intent, professional accountants will rarely ever search for such a generic term.

When you decide to attempt to rank for a keyword, avoid asking the most obvious question: What would drive the most traffic to my site? Instead, ask yourself:

• What terms would my target audience search for?
• What terms have the highest purchase intent?
• What terms would educate my audience and lead them to convert?

Then, act on your answers:

• Use Ahrefs to create a keyword list using the questions above.
• Measure them by competition and potential traffic.
• Then seed your target words in your page titles, headers, and content to rank quickly.