Welcome to the 1078 new marketers and founders who joined last week!
This week we're covering CRO, TikTok, and affiliates.
Experiment with organic content to de-risk TikTok ads
Insight from Brian Blum & Alex Friedman via Marketing Examined.
You can quickly validate TikTok ads with zero ad spend.
Organic learnings happen fast. You'll know in 48 hours whether a post is a flop or poised to go full-throttle. Once you have a winner, pulse it with Spark ads to amplify results.
Here’s the framework:
1. Define your ideal follower. Who and where are they? What content do they desire?
2. Create and publish content. Make your content searchable so that when people search for keywords in your niche, they find your videos. Make it great so people share.
- Source content ideas—Use Answer The Public to determine what people are searching for. Add a few keywords specific to your niche and pick 5-10 questions to inspire your content.
- Start content flywheel—Bake engagement triggers into the content by encouraging viewers to ask questions in the comments. Answer those questions in future content to build momentum.
3. Evaluate performance. After you publish content, track KPIs over 24-48 hours to gauge potential:
- % Watch Time
- Likes to Views Ratio
- Saves or Shares
4. Run your best content as Spark ads. When you post organic content on TikTok, the algorithm determines who you reach. With ads, targeting lets you control who sees your content. The point of this step isn’t to rely on ads, but amplify proven content to accelerate growth.
- Select the campaign objective, "Community Interaction"
- Run A/B test. A: Interest-Based. B: Hashtag
- Spend $75 - $150/day
- Let the ad run for 7-10 days, then turn it off
The additional bump in views and engagement should help TikTok’s algorithm amplify your content, getting it in front of the right people.
Make your affiliate marketing less programmatic and more personal
Insight from Bell Curve.
Affiliate publishers aren’t robots.
Just like your customers, partners, and colleagues, they’re humans. Meaning: They’re driven by connections and emotions.
If you build relationships with them, you could see a sizable bump in your affiliate sales.
Try this. It’s a proven tactic that 99% of marketers (an unscientific estimate) don’t do.
- Get a publisher list on Rakuten or Impact.
- Use your list to scrape contacts on LinkedIn.
- Connect with the contacts you find. Send each a personalized intro note.
- Gather their contact info (emails).
- Shoot them a note every once in a while—especially around times when you want to accelerate sales, like the holidays. Keep it simple and friendly (“hey, wishing you good luck this Q4”) to keep your brand top of mind.
That’s one tactic. But think about other ways you can develop relationships with affiliate publishers. For instance, you could offer them free items or coupons. In a previous role, one of our Bell Curve growth strategists sent his affiliate partner wine coupons. Sales skyrocketed.
Most companies work with affiliates through platforms that programmatically make your ads appear on affiliates’ websites. But the people behind the platforms are the ones who click the buttons that can make those ads show up more than anyone else’s. Strengthen connections with them, and you could grow your sales.
Forms as a visual cue for conversions
Insight from Marketing Sherpa.
Concise, simple landing pages generally convert better.
For instance, it’s best to eliminate any unnecessary copy, creative, and CTAs.
But less isn’t always more. Take a look at this experiment.
A law firm created two variations of a landing page:
- One with the firm’s phone number (with a “call” primary CTA) followed by a lead generation form
- One with only the firm’s phone number—no form
The form got very few submissions. But the variation with the form generated 53.2% more calls than the variation without it.
The reasoning behind this: Forms act as a visual prompt for action.
Though both variations used the same primary “call” CTA, the inclusion of the form made obvious to leads—even people skimming the page—that the next step is to get in contact.
Based on these results, it’s worth testing how conversions are affected by the presence of a form. For example, if you have a landing page with only an email address or phone number, consider adding a form.
News and links
News you can use:
- LinkedIn is rolling out a new link sticker option to help drive more traffic from your posts. (Like an IG Stories link sticker but for LinkedIn).
- Google started showing pros and cons in product review featured snippets. If you haven't already, consider adding pro and con structured data for a potential bump in visibility for product keywords.
- Nano-influencer marketing (sub 5k followers) spend is up 220% this year. That's a growth rate of ~8x the total spend on influencer marketing (28%). Our take: If lesser-known creators aren't part of your strategy, maybe reconsider.
- Related resource: Influencer (Creator) Marketing playbook
Something fun
From @StateOfLinkedIn
