You don’t need to wait for a customer to leave your site to initiate a cart abandonment campaign.

Instead, use a chatbot to preemptively engage customers on the verge of leaving your site. It’s often faster and more effective than a traditional cart abandonment email campaign.

Try this:

When a customer’s cursor leaves a window, automate your bot to reengage them with a targeted message. Examples:

• “How about an exclusive offer on your cart?”
• “One of the products in your cart is low in stock. Would you like to check out now?”
• “Did you want free shipping with those items?”

If users still show exit intent after engaging with your chatbot, trigger a high priority message to your customer support team and talk with them.

Finding anything you want through Google search is a superpower that not many marketers take full advantage of.

Here’s a quick tip: Use Google search operators.

The syntax of your Google search can help run market analysis, prospect people on LinkedIn, find investors, retrieve fundraising news, etc.

Examples:

Search: “site:docs.google.com/spreadsheets intitle:startups 2020”

Use case: Find open Google spreadsheets that include “startups” and “2020” in the title. For example, if you offer services for startups that are hiring remotely, you can find a list with thousands of potential leads and email addresses.

Search: “site:airtable.com inurl:VC”

Use case: Find Airtable bases that contain “VC” in the URL. You can find lists of investors that may be relevant to your fundraising needs. These lists often provide you with the names (and occasionally emails) of investors, and also share relevant information about each one of them.

Buying ads in newsletters is an opaque form of performance marketing: There's no algorithm to optimize, and there are rarely options for A/B testing.

But newsletter ads are a highly effective way to reach quality leads.

Know what to look for before you spend any advertising dollars on newsletter ads.

Here’s a framework for buying ads in newsletters:

• Read the newsletter for two weeks before inquiring about a sponsorship. Understand the style, audience, and interests before you throw cash at it.
• Ask newsletter owners for unique open rate and click-through rate. Tip: Have them take a screenshot of the numbers from their email service provider (like MailChimp or Customer.io). It's rare, but some newsletters overstate their metrics.
• Focus on lead gen—not only purchase. Only a small percentage of subscribers will buy straight from your ad. So optimize for email capture and track clicks so you can retarget these new leads and convert them down funnel.

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.

Lookalikes are one of the most reliable ways to scale paid social ads.

But lookalikes haven’t changed much over the last couple of years. Many startups run basic lookalike campaigns and settle for a suboptimal ROAS.

Try these tactics to get more out of your lookalikes:

1. Setup exclusions: You’re probably driving traffic to a lookalike of your best users or customers. But have you tried creating a lookalike of your worst ones, and using that as an exclusion audience? In our experience, this won’t help with your CPA, but it could have a significant impact on your retention and LTV.

2. Use UTM’s to seed cross-channel: Search traffic is often more qualified than social—after all, if people are searching for your product, they’re actively in the market for it. Instead of seeding a lookalike with everyone who has visited your site, try testing a seed with visitors where “URL Contains ‘utm_source=google’”. You’ll be targeting people most similar to those who came to your site with high purchase intent.

3. Try partners' websites: A couple of months back, we wrote about how you can retarget someone else’s website traffic using pixel tracking marketplaces (like Repixel’s). But consider this: once you have access to another site's pixel, create a lookalike off of it. Expand your reach with your partner’s audiences—and not just your own.

Most marketers see TikTok's shockingly high CPAs and give up on ads too soon.

One reason for poor ad performance on TikTok comes down to poor ad creative.

Before ruling out TikTok as an acquisition channel, test these changes to see if your CPAs improve:

1. Sound: Most advertisers don’t put much effort into their ad sound. But TikTok requires videos to have sound. Try using audio to highlight customer testimonials and feature walkthroughs of your product’s benefits.
2. Quantity: Creative fatigue happens more rapidly on TikTok than on other platforms—users consume massive amounts of content and are quick to ignore anything that feels repetitive. So build a queue of fresh videos and change your ads, at a minimum, bi-weekly.
3. Authenticity: If your content feels like an ad, you’re going to get a swift swipe up. So make sure you're creating ads that match the organic content that users come to TikTok for. Shoot on an iPhone and make grittier content that is authentic to how your actual customers will engage with your product.

It’s getting more expensive to run Facebook ads.

One way to try reducing costs is by using a different ad objective—and getting creative.

Say you own a DTC cookware brand. Consider this:

• Create a piece of content that your audience will love, like a seasonal cooking guide. Feature your relevant products within the guide.
• Then run a retargeting campaign to drive traffic to your guide. Make the ad objective “Engagement.”
• Set engagement goals of:

          • Time on page: 20 seconds.

          • Vertical scroll: 50%.

If your content is great, you might experience lower acquisition costs and a higher ROAS.

Why? When you optimize for different objectives, Facebook can distribute your impressions differently to the same audience. And maybe that re-distribution achieves a better cost structure given you’re no longer indexing on the higher cost folks who have a history of purchasing via Facebook ads.

Users who send direct messages (DMs) to your brand on Instagram are likely to be interested in your product—yet many brands don’t do enough to convert them.

Consider running ads directly to people who DM your brand:

1. In FB Business Manager, go to Accounts and click on “Instagram Accounts.” Select your Instagram business account.
2. Go to Audiences > Create Audience > Custom Audience. Select “Instagram Account” and “People who sent a message to your professional account” in the past 365 days. Call it “Instagram DMs” and click on “Create Audience.”
3. Create a campaign to target this audience.

Important: For best ad performance, study the questions that continuously pop up in your DMs. What do these users want from you? Design your ads with the value props that directly solve their problems.

Most subscriber growth on YouTube comes from the algorithm promoting your videos to new audiences.

YouTube's algorithm promotes videos that get people to stay on the platform longer.

To increase the likelihood of your video being promoted to new audiences, optimize these three areas:

1. Thumbnails. Try testing your YouTube thumbnails with your audience on Instagram or Twitter. Make a poll and ask them to vote for their favorite before using it on YouTube. The more engaging they are, the higher your click-through rate (CTR). And a high CTR keeps users on-platform longer.
2. Retention rate of your videos. Videos that are more frequently watched till the end produce greater on-platform time. In the first 15 seconds of your video, explicitly say what the viewer is going to see and tease why they should stick around until the end.
3. Average view duration. You want users to watch another one of your videos in the same session. Test creating a multi-part video series that spans a specific topic.

Your LinkedIn posts can get significantly more reach with this small tweak.

The LinkedIn algorithm prioritizes "dwell time”—a measurement of the amount of time a user spends viewing a post—when assessing virality.

More dwell time leads to more impressions.

You can lean into the algorithm by creating posts that people stop and spend time on.

Here’s how:

• Avoid single images in your post. Instead, upload a multi-page PDF with key insights or brief case studies on each page. Each page should flow into or introduce the next.
• In the body of your post, tease any surprising conclusions or data. Give your audience a reason to stick around to view the entire PDF.

Remember to only include outbound links in the comments section—the algorithm might demote content with outbound links in the body. You can mention the link in the body of your post so that your audience seeks it out.

When connecting with people on LinkedIn (for B2B outreach), test not including a message with your outreach request.

We’ve found that no message appears ambiguous and, as a result, less like a sales pitch. People accept the request more often.

In contrast, a templated message definitely looks like outreach automation, and it triggers people’s reflex to ignore you.

Most video content is poor. Here's MrBeast's technique for creating videos that get engagement and shares:

1. Describe the video's value in the first five seconds. Don't make users guess what they'll get by watching.
2. Ask a question you don't resolve until the last five seconds. This is the hook that gets users to watch until the end of the video—and satisfies them when the question is answered.
3. Create fewer quality videos over many lesser-quality videos. The YouTube algorithm favors high-quality content. One amazing video will grow your channel more than ten good videos.
4. Integrate quick cuts. Don't give people time to ask if they're bored.

Watch the first 30 seconds of Ali Abdaal's video here to see a job well done.

If you're building an audience on Twitter, consider this:

Growth on Twitter comes from retweets. Retweets get your content in front of completely new audiences, instantly.

We ran a poll to figure out why people retweet. Here were the top 3 responses:

1. To give kudos.
2. To signal which side of a debate they're on.
3. Save and bookmark for later.

So use this to build your audience on Twitter:

• Be concise and novel. People retweet to give kudos to novel, elegantly articulated ideas.
• State contrarian findings. People retweet to signal that they're on your side of the discussion.
• If you really know your subject, tweet step-by-step threads. People retweet to save longer-form content to reference again later.

Links from mainstream news outlets carry a ton of weight:

• They have high domain authority and improve your startup's keyword ranking in Google.
• They have some of the largest audiences on the internet and provide valuable brand awareness and referral traffic.

But most startups only focus on PR for things like fundraising and product launches. That'll only get you so far. To see a real growth lift from earned media strategies, consider intentionally creating content that’s optimized for pickup by news outlets.

Here's how you can do it. Make your content:

1. Relevant: Focus on your publisher's audience first. Re-frame your briefs and think about how to make your content broadly appealing so that your stories get picked up.
2. Objective: Publishers won't link to a story that’s obviously stuffed with keywords or product links. Create content that’s objective and authoritative—not salesly.
3. Timely: Weave in current events and cultural trends. Why would a journalist be motivated to link or reference the article today? Find a hook and use it when pitching.
4. Unique: What makes your story different? Use localization, first-party data, and engaging visualizations. The best way to stand out is to provide a unique, fresh angle that a journalist couldn’t access without referencing your story.

News publications are resource-constrained and looking for unique storytelling that will appeal to their readers. Make it easy for them by being a source of great, compelling content.

Most content marketers aren't thinking enough about distribution before writing. They often create too many single point-of-view and opinion pieces—neither of which have built-in distribution benefits.

Instead, consider interviewing subject matter experts, practitioners, and internal team members. Then create content written through their lens of expertise.

It's likely you'll get a bump in distribution:

• The experts you feature in your piece will be inclined to share it for you. (This works even better if you can work with practitioners who have engaged, online audiences.)
• Ask the people you interview to link to your post from their website. Backlinks to your new post send a positive SEO signal to Google.
• Insights from experts are more likely to be referenced by others than standalone brand opinions are. After the initial distribution boost, it's likely that other writers will reference your piece in their work.

A simple technique for more search traffic:

• Find a subreddit related to your business.
• Pop the subreddit link into Ahrefs (our go-to keyword generation tool) and look for the keywords that the page ranks for.
• Take the list of keywords and use them to optimize your content.
  

Keywords that Reddit ranks for are low-competition.

Reddit has a high domain authority and frequently ranks on page one. But Reddit pages don't tend to outperform great blog posts in search results.

Now that you have a list of low-competition keywords, build superior content that actually answers the searcher’s questions.

You can eventually outrank the original Reddit thread.