Roughly 50% of Twitter engagement happens within the first hour of posting.

This means apart from creating interesting social content, timing is crucial for getting your tweet seen.

And according to an analysis of more than 7.6 million Twitter likes and 139,000 follows, you should decide when to post your content based on the type of content you post.

In short:

• Post in the morning if your content is educational in nature.
• This includes how-to guides and business/science news.
• Example: Much of the New York Times’ tweets
• Post in the evening or late afternoon if your content provides immediate gratification.
• This includes memes, celebrity gossip, food pics, and promotional offers, like a flash sale.
• Examples: Entertainment Weekly, McDonald’s

Your Twitter posts are more likely to get higher engagement if you follow this pattern. In fact, this trend even applies on weekends, and to subjects that aren’t relevant to work.

Researchers suspect that this is because our self-control declines over the course of the day—making us prefer more immediately gratifying content in the evening.

To plan your Twitter posts accordingly:

• Categorize your content into two types: educational and entertaining.
• Schedule educational posts to go live before 4 pm and entertaining posts for after this point.
• If you primarily focus on one category of content, adjust your publishing time accordingly.
• Consider experimenting with the timing of your content on other channels, e.g., Facebook, Instagram, even email.

Marketing on TikTok remains an untamed beast for most businesses. The creative requirements are incredibly steep and specific compared to those of other social ad channels.

To get started on the right track, follow these helpful starter strategies:

1. < 1-second thumbstop. TikTok and Instagram Reels have drastically shortened attention spans. You might have a 3-second window to grab someone's attention on Facebook. On TikTok, you only have one second. Design your ads assuming people will only see the first thumbnail. And use catchy headlines and audio to reel them in.
2. Showcase the end-state first. Arrange your creative in reverse chronological order; open your video with the benefit to the customer and showcase the end result. Then show how they got to that end result thanks to your product.
3. Mimic organic product discovery content. Ecommerce products get discovered on TikTok via "digital" word-of-mouth marketing (i.e., everyday people gushing over remarkable product finds, completely organic). To tap into this existing user behavior, design your ecommerce ads to mimic hashtag trends like "TikTok made me buy it" or "things I found on the internet."
4. Authenticity is key. Well-produced, airbrushed content doesn't fly on TikTok. Users value authenticity. Two ways to make your ads more authentic: a) entertain viewers with an earnest performance, like a comedy skit, and integrate your product, seamlessly or b) educate via product demonstration and a believable, emotional reaction of someone experiencing the benefits.
5. Install the TikTok pixel. TikTok needs a lot of data to optimize your ads. Even if you aren't ready to experiment with ads yet, consider installing the pixel now so it'll be ready when you are. This will give you better targeting and ad optimization from day one.
6. Set up an MVP brand profile. Establish an organic brand profile before launching ads to test content types and find your audience. Virality potential is high and feedback, immediate, so if you create quality content, TikTok's algo will find an audience. Once you iterate towards a formula that works, use engagement and video view data for targeting and lookalikes in your ads.
7. Always-on creative testing. Ads fatigue faster on TikTok than any other ads platform. To stay ahead of the curve, set up an always-on creative testing campaign in your ad account. Inject new creatives tests on a weekly basis, and move winners into a dedicated prospecting campaign with your top-performers. Rinse and repeat.
8. Leverage trending audio and video syles. Don't make ads. Make TikToks. Utilize trending audio or video effects in every video you produce. The more organic, the better. Also, use captioning and voice-over to reinforce your core message and help keep viewers engaged.

TikTok got more traffic than Google last year (source: Cloudflare).

That sentence has a ton of implications for marketers. Here’s one: Search might start getting much more visual.

Imagine a truly multimedia search engine, with visual queries, data, and results. It would align more with our TikTok-Instagram world than hyperlinks and text. We’re not there yet, but Google’s making progress with initiatives like its Multitask Unified Model system, which could one day respond to a photo of hiking boots with feedback on whether they’re suitable for a hike up Mt. Fuji.

In the meantime, we already have visual recognition technology like Google Lens and Bing Visual Search. And they’re already advanced. Just snap a pic and get relevant search results.

To optimize for a visual-search world:

• Make sure your pages pass Google’s mobile-friendly test. Pretty much all Google Lens searches are done on mobile.
• Add descriptive image file names and alt text wherever they’re missing from your content.
• Visual search is yet another reason to optimize your site content as a whole. High-authority pages and sites are more likely to appear in Google Lens results.
• Keep creating high-quality written content. Brian Dean found that the pages Google Lens pulls image results from have an average 1,631 words of text. That text provides context, helping Google Lens do its job.
• Visual search could increase brand exposure. E.g., someone takes a picture of a competing product → your logo’ed product appears in results. Consider adding branding to items that don’t have it.

Most growth marketers are familiar with the following:

• Say-do gap: when customers say one thing during interviews/surveys, then do another
• Referral gap: when customers say they’d be comfortable giving a referral, but don’t
• Creepiness ditch: the void where personalization starts to feel creepy, resulting in fewer conversions, not more

Here’s another one: the gap between site browsing and adding products to cart. Aka the browse-cart gap.

It’s a pretty big deal. Salecycle found that 43.8% of retailer site sessions include product page views, but only 14.5% result in add-to-carts.

One way to reduce the gap? Browse-abandonment emails. They’re a form of retargeting that aren’t as common as cart-abandonment emails—even though compared to traditional emails, they have a 50.5% higher click-through rate and 80.9% higher open rate.

• Use browse-abandonment emails to remind site visitors of what they were looking at. Feature product images, and make it easy to get back to browsing with high-contrast CTAs. This is a good space for overcoming objections—you could highlight free shipping or your easy return policy—and sharing social proof, like customer reviews.
• Consider that visitors might have decided against the products they were viewing, so open up the playing field. Showcase other products that might draw them back in. These could include best-sellers or products that are relevant to viewed product pages or past purchase history.

As with all email, you should segment and personalize. You’ll only be able to retarget people who are already on your email list, and while that’s limiting, it does mean stronger brand interest and possibly higher intent. Take advantage of that to close the gap and the sale.

In-cart cross-sells can boost AOV.

But only if the products you’re featuring are relevant to the items already in your customers’ carts.

A Baymard study found that 52% of sites recommend products that are either completely irrelevant or based only on what other customers bought.

In 2022, most people expect a personalized online shopping experience, which is why irrelevant cross-sells rarely work. And worse, they erode users’ confidence in your site and business—dragging down your AOV.

If cross-selling is part of your ecom strategy, consider these 6 tactics to help improve take rate and AOV:

1. Avoid listing a fixed number of products: One highly relevant suggestion that stands alone will get more attention than if it’s buried amongst four irrelevant suggestions. For example, If someone is buying a computer mouse, only show them the batteries they'll need, not batteries plus a random selection of office supplies just to fill up space.
2. Be cautious about listing alternative products: Introducing alternative products during checkout can cause the customer to second-guess their decision, consider other options, and abandon the checkout process—the last thing you want. Products that complement the item in the cart should be shown over alternative products. For example, if someone is ready to buy a pair of AirPods, don't recommend a headset from Bose or Beats by Dre.
3. Use labels to define the context: If you want to present a cross-sell but don't have a high relevance product, consider using labels like "Inspired by Your Browsing History," "Frequently Bought Together," or "Other Products in This Collection." Users will be less dismissive of questionable product recommendations if you simply give them a reason.
4. Prioritize products of the same use case or theme: Giving priority to products of the same use case or theme can prevent seemingly unrelated items from being displayed. For example, cross-sell sections with labels like "Winter Essentials", or "Back to School" allow sites to make reasonable suggestions as long as they're thematically related.
5. Feature products that customers need to get started: Some examples: A toy that requires batteries to operate, a mobile phone with specific dimensions for a protective case, or a camera needing a particular memory card type.

If you’re building a brand, you need quality assets. Think, photo and video for your site, social channels, ads you might run, and the content you create.

Here’s an effective workaround for brands looking for a fast, inexpensive way to source the top three types of quality creative assets you need using vendors.

• Product shots. Use Soona for a quality virtual shoot. Simply choose what types of shots you’re looking for, provide details, and ship your products. You’ll live chat with your photographer so you can make sure you get the shots you need. And you should have finished assets in about 2 weeks.
• High-quality stock video. Use Social Motion Packs for beautiful video content. You can buy individual content packs or a subscription to their library.
• UGC. Use Billo to source talent. Spec out exactly what type of UGC you want. Creators will apply for your project and you choose those who best fit your brand. Send them products. Approve their content as they submit.

Pencil used this process and sourced loads of quality content for their brand ... at a cost of $343.

Most content marketers know how to use Ahrefs for keyword research, backlink research, and site analysis.

But there are other powerful ways you can use Ahrefs that many marketers don’t know about. If you’re working in content marketing, consider trying these three tactics:

• Size your market. Using Keyword Explorer, look up your target keyword. Then click on the three dots in the corner of the Volume box and click “Export as CSV.” The CSV file shows how the volume of your target keyword has fluctuated over the last 5+ years. This will help you figure out whether your market is shrinking or expanding—which is nice to know before you invest in creating content for that keyword.
• Define your content clusters. When your keyword research turns up a group of similar or related keywords, it’s hard to decide how exactly to structure your pillar page. For guidance, enter these keywords into Keyword Explorer. Then in the sidebar, click “Traffic Share By Pages.” Look at the page that ranks for the most keywords you entered and earns the largest share of traffic—you can take notes on page structure, depth, and topics to use for your pillar page.
• Build links from pages with greater traffic potential. Avoid simply judging link-building targets based on their domain rating (or another authority score)—most of these scores matter less than they did years ago. Instead, prioritize building links from sites that drive more traffic. To do this, look up the URL of a competitor page that ranks for your target keyword in Site Explorer. Go to Backlinks and sort by page traffic. The top referring pages that drive the most traffic are the sites you should prioritize getting a link from, regardless of their domain rating.

Many B2B and consumer SaaS startups create free resource templates for their target audience to use with the goal of nurturing them into paying customers.

They tend to offer these templates as part of a blog post. For example, an email service provider might provide cold email templates as part of a guide to cold outreach.

This SEO strategy is a great way to attract visitors—but you can get even more from it by creating standalone landing pages for each of your resources. Hypercontext, an employee engagement app, did exactly this by creating separate landing pages for each of its 60+ meeting templates. The result was a 51% organic traffic boost in just three months.

To be clear, Hypercontext still includes its templates in some of its blog posts. For example, it’s published:

• 4 things to include in your daily scrum meeting agenda [Template]: A blog post giving best practices about planning scrum meetings
• Scrum Team Meeting Template: A landing page where users can immediately access Hypercontext’s free template

To avoid keyword cannibalization, Hypercontext focuses its blog posts on other relevant info not provided in its templates. Meanwhile, it keeps its template pages very short and to the point.

Why does this strategy work? The standalone pages grab more long-tail template-related keywords than a blog post might. And since users searching specifically for templates usually have more of a transactional intent (and likely less interest in reading a long blog post), your standalone template pages actually better satisfy user intent.

Common marketing wisdom tells us that on-site user reviews are a great form of social proof for converting prospects.

This is generally true. But for DTC ecom brands, you might be collecting and displaying your reviews in the wrong place.

Research shows that users spend little time looking at DTC site-provided reviews—they believe these reviews have a higher likelihood of being manipulated.

Users would rather look at external reviews on Instagram, Reddit, YouTube, or another third-party source.

So if you’re a DTC ecom brand, rather than focus on gathering on-site reviews, consider these tactics:

• Encourage customers to review your product on third-party sites. Since shoppers perceive reviews on third-party review sites as being less biased, you’ll get more ROI from these reviews than ones on your own site.
• Feature user-generated social media content instead. People trust reviews from your users on social media more than the reviews on your site. The logic: If people are willing to speak positively about a product on social media for their followers to see, then the brand can be trusted. So you can embed social media posts from real users directly on your site, as opposed to reviews, and come off as more authentic.
• Prioritize influencer marketing. This is a more involved approach to reviews—you can give micro-influencers your product for free in exchange for honest reviews. People turn to influencers for recommendations. Lean into a source they already trust. To go deep on influencer strategy, check out our influencer marketing playbook.

If you’ve already invested in getting reviews on your site:

• Make it easy to sort and filter them. Otherwise, users will further perceive your site as being manipulative in the kinds of reviews it features.
• Allow users to upload images with their reviews. Reviews with photos convey more authenticity than those without.

Nearly one out of every five users abandon their online purchase because the checkout process is “too long or complicated.”

But research shows that it’s not the number of checkout steps that takes the greatest toll on users—it’s the number of form fields. Why? Users increasingly shop on phones where they struggle to navigate between mobile forms and inefficient keyboards.

Below are a few simple but effective tactics for minimizing the number of fields in the checkout process:

• Use a single “Full Name” field rather than separate “First” and “Last” names. Users tend to type their full name into the first name field anyway.
• Hide Address Line 2, Company, and Coupon fields behind a link. These fields generally apply only to a minority of customers.
• Use city and state auto-detection based on zip code. Besides reducing the number of necessary form fields, this auto-detection feature eliminates potential typos in city names and helps users avoid scrolling through long state drop-downs.
• Hide separate fields for billing address. By default, assume that customers’ shipping address is the same as their billing address. Provide a pre-checked checkbox (“My billing and delivery information are the same”) that users must uncheck to reveal separate billing address fields.
• Encourage users to create an account at the confirmation step—not at the beginning of the checkout process. Since they’ll have already filled out necessary user information in the earlier steps, creating a unique password won’t be so fatiguing. (Whereas if you nudge users to create an account at the beginning of the checkout flow, it feels like a tedious extra step.)

There's often a significant time delay between posting a new blog post and when it actually starts generating traffic.

But you can reduce this time by signaling to the search algorithm that a new page is high quality and should be indexed quickly.

A simple way to kickstart this process: Link to the new article from existing high traffic pages.

Here's how to quickly find high-quality opportunities for internal links:

1. Use Google to run a site search for the topic of your new article. In the search bar, type: site:yoursite.com "topic" For example: site:mparticle.com "data governance"
2. This query will return all pages on your site that have that keyword in them, ranked by relevance.
3. Open the first one in your CMS, quick-find the keyword using "control/command + F". Highlight the first time the keyword appears and hyperlink it to the new blog article.
4. Repeat this process for the top 10 internal pages that have this keyword.
5. Once all 10 internal backlinks are complete, go to Google Search Console and enter the URL of the new blog article. Under URL Inspection, click Request Indexing to ensure the page and associated links are crawled as soon as possible.

You can use this same process for content pillar pages that link to internal blog articles relevant to the keywords mentioned. Backlink hygiene helps search engines understand what your website is about and increases the likelihood that readers click through to multiple pages of your site.

Common belief: Pricing pages should be as simple as possible. No bells, no whistles, no anything that can draw attention away from the “buy” CTA.

But instead of thinking strictly about how much is on your page, think about how much value and friction each element adds.

• Value: Reaffirm that your product is worth buying. Overcome last-minute objections.
• Friction: Minimize confusion and distraction.

What that means in practice is that you can have more elements on your pricing page—as long as each one adds value and reduces friction.

Here are four that might fit the bill, depending on your product and audience:

• Live chat: Some companies only include live chat on their homepage or landing pages. But for high-priced items where customers might have questions before converting, we suggest testing live chat on product pages. You can instantly connect with prospects, resolve their final objections, and optimize your pricing based on the common questions you get asked.
• FAQs: Semrush’s pricing page helps prospects overcome common objections like levels of commitment (“can I cancel my subscription anytime?”) and investment (“what is Semrush’s refund policy?”) Google Workspace has a “Top Questions about Google Workspace Pricing” section on its product page, with questions about plans and users. If you’re aware that users are often struck with questions when they reach your product pages, don’t make them load another page to get those questions answered.
• Social proof: Testimonials, media mentions, or customer logos confirm that your brand is trustworthy and your product is popular. They often prove to be the tipping point for on-the-fence prospects.
• Word counts: Most companies keep their pricing page word count to 200-600 words. You should highlight your unique benefits and most valued features, but if your feature list is huge, consider linking to it instead of putting everything on your pricing page.

Dark mode is becoming more available across all apps, browsers, devices, and email inboxes.

Some surveys suggest that 90%+ of users prefer dark mode wherever it’s available. Even if the 90% is overestimated, it’s safe to say that a large percentage of users experience the internet through dark mode.

So if you’re designing ad creatives solely with light mode in mind, your ads’ CTRs might be taking a beating.

Why? Colors appear differently. With dark mode turned on, contrasting ads originally created for light mode may blend in.

To earn more users’ attention, consider designing and optimizing ad creatives for dark mode:

• Use a patterned or textured background to keep your ad from blending into the surrounding site.
• Choose a color other than black or white for your creative’s background; this will make it stand out in both light and dark mode.
• If you’re showing a product screenshot that blends into the surrounding site, consider adding a frame along the edges of the creative to make it stand out.
• Avoid using thin font weights, which are less readable against a dark background. (Visibility worsens when viewed in dark mode.)
• Create different versions of your existing ads to test colors opposite to those currently used.

Ambiguous delivery dates are a conversion killer for ecom companies.

Shoppers want to know exactly when they'll receive their order before purchasing.

So consider this simple tactic to increase conversion: Add estimated delivery dates to your product pages.

Estimated delivery dates satisfy shoppers' urge to know when they'll receive their orders, yet they're less often used by marketers.

If you have a Shopify site with a 2.0 theme, you can easily add estimated delivery dates to your product pages.

Go to Online Store > Themes > in your theme, click Customize. Open Product > Default Product (or a product template if you’re using one). Add a Custom Liquid section to your product page. Then copy this code and paste it into the Custom Liquid box.

Your delivery dates will update automatically.

Consumers shop differently around the holidays than they do during other times of the year.

Purchasing intent may be more focused on gifting—completely different than how they shop for themselves.

Given the difference in intent, consider tailoring your product copy during the holidays. Doing so can make your pitch more persuasive and increase conversions.

There are a few ways to go about this:

• Help customers envision how your product will bring joy as a gift. For example, you might include copy like “Show your partner how much you care with this deep-kneading shiatsu massager to soothe her back and neck tension.” The copy connects the dots for users by framing products they might not have even previously considered as potential gifts.
• Address concerns from other audience segments. This is especially effective for products that are more commonly given as gifts during the holiday season, like video games. Since parents and relatives may be more likely to purchase a video game than the actual game player, tackle the product from their perspective. Consider adding answers to questions like: what rating does it have? Why does it have that rating? What do other parents think of the game? The point is to reposition your products from the viewpoint of new consumers (gift givers).

Viral cycle time (VCT) is how long it takes a user to invite other users to a product.

It's a vital element of growth, even though it's not discussed nearly as often as viral coefficients (how many new users an average user brings in). To experience product-led growth, your VCT needs to compensate for churn.

TikTok has a short VCT. A daily user sees a great video > shares it > recipients become new users. Lower-frequency products tend to have longer VCTs. B2B enterprise products, for instance, typically take more time to get into, learn, and recommend.

Ignoring VCT is like ignoring your payback period when calculating annual revenue per user (ARPU). If it takes years for your product to make money, you’ll have slower growth than products with quicker earnings. (That’s why you should always factor your payback period into your ARPU:CAC ratio.)

VCT has an inverse relationship with engagement: The higher your engagement, the shorter your VCT. Two ways to factor this relationship into your product build:

1. Design your product so its content is meant to be shared on the spot—not bookmarked and saved for later. Examples: Spotify, social media platforms
2. Design your product so users can easily and immediately collaborate or transact with others, and that interaction makes their user experience better. Examples: Slack, Zoom

Note: Nir Eyal discussed VCT at our Growth Summit in November. You can watch his talk here and join the waitlist for the next one.