Growth Marketing Stories: Recent Episodes
Aazar Ali Shad
Growth Hacking is BS. There’s no quick way of making tons of money in the short term. Instead, we should focus on growth stories and growth flywheels. I believe you have to wait it out and do consistently smaller experiments, and initiatives to grow business as a growth marketer. This show is for growth marketers.
This is a show about growth marketing stories, where we explore how growth marketers and their case studies explore deeply what’s really moving their business needle and to get inspired.
Every week we’ll focus on one inspiring story that will tickle your creative neurons to find inspiration for your own work.
This is Growth Marketing Stories.
Growth marketing stories will have more paid social marketing guests. Here's our first one: Cody Plofker.
This was discussed in our mastermind group; if you want to level up your paid social marketing skills, join our group here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeMAeF1jMu7oukDdCYNJfVacxUmTjv85W8IKQNMw09rQx6dqg/viewform?usp=send_form
In this episode, we discussed the following:
- Education on paid social
- Ad account structure
- Creative testing process
- The new meta guidelines
- TikTok vs Meta ads
Links:
Check out Cody's content and profile to learn more:
- Down to Chat Podcast
- Cody's newsletter
You can also read these lessons here:
If you want these lessons in text: https://twitter.com/Aazarshad/status/1414585344058564611
Join my newsletter where I share marketing frameworks I learn and I ask my guests to share it too: https://aazarshad.com/newsletter/
Join the paid social mastermind here: https://forms.gle/a7m2G4bQGueFdLWV6
In this episode, Daphne broke down her process how she increased her company's conversion rate.
Below are some timestamps:
00:59 - A bit about Daphne's growth background
03:22 - The heights story of increasing 300% conversion rate
12:03 - How they drilled down 16 to 3 key value props
13:38 - How churned customers helped
15:35 - How founders were a key persona and why they should not have ignored it.
9:22 - 3 key mental models from this story
Show notes
- Daphne's LI profile
- 300% increase article
- My LI and Twitter if you wanna connect.
15 tactics of cold email I am sharing from my last 10 year experience.
And here's a good email as an example: https://twitter.com/Aazarshad/status/1555179700087029766
Here are the show notes:
- The main thread: https://twitter.com/Aazarshad/status/1432689651823742978
- How to launch on Product Hunt: https://www.swipefiles.com/articles/how-to-launch-on-product-hunt
- Quora Marketing: https://albacross.com/newsroom/organic-quora-marketing/
- Slack marketing: https://awario.com/blog/slack-for-social-media-marketing-user-acquisition/
- Newsletter for more: aazarshad.com/newsletter
You can see these lessons here:
- My Twitter Thread: https://twitter.com/Aazarshad/status/1434864249650630659
- My Newsletter: https://aazarshad.com/newsletter/
Ron Shah was kind enough to share his e-commerce business lessons (not very common). Here's what we've discussed:
1:52 - The beginning of MyObvi: How three friends wanted to build their own brand
8:41 - How they used scarcity and social proof to create FOMO
10:53 - Journey till 200K
13:35 - What changed at $1mn revenue
14:50 - What changed at $10mn revenue
15:49 - What they different from $10-30Mn revenue
17:01 - How do they build a community as an ecommerce company?
18:48 - Mental models to grow Instagram organic
21:04 - How everyone is a CEO at My Obvi
Key links
My newsletter to get 10 best learning from all these podcasts: https://aazarshad.com/newsletter/
Ron's Tweet thread on his business: https://twitter.com/obviceo/status/1509933638154133513
Check out Myobvi
Ash is a great follow to learn performance marketing: https://twitter.com/ashvinmelwani
Jon Macdonald shared his CRO stories and mental models to improve your conversion rates.
We discussed:
1:00 - Intro
1:20 - How his process is different from other CROs
5:36 - What is continual optimization?
7:54 - Why best practices are for beginners?
15:02 - Scientific method vs silver bullets
20:18 - Why should you stop marketing when someone becomes a lead?
24:06 - How to use email marketing the right way?
Key Links
- Jon MacDonald's website: https://jonmacdonald.com/
- The Good's website: https://thegood.com/
- Opting in to Optimization book
- My Twitter & LinkedIn
Alex Kracov, the marketer I admire, came to the pod to share his lessons and stories for building a marketing team.
Show notes:
1:36 - About Alex and his story of how he got in
4:15 - Keeping pace with a billion-dollar valuation company
5:44 - How do marketers in their career join a unicorn early
8:31 - How Alex was able to build a media company for HR people
12:23 - How to build a community that sticks
15:41 - Becoming a media company is overwhelming, how to do it right?
22:01 - How Alex grew to be a VP of Marketing (lessons)
27:18 - How to manage folks who have more experience than you?
29:32 - How to manage up?
34:02 - How did he come up with Dock
Key links
- Alex's blog
- Check out Dock for onboarding ANYONE
I'm sharing my 7-figure SEO playbook. Here are some topics I covered:
- Why SEO
- How to find the keywords that help you get high intent leads (ROI-Led Keywords)
- How to write content that ranks
- How to get backlinks (without spamming & begging for links)
- How to convert existing users to leads & customers from your blog
- How to distribute your content elegantly on social platforms
Key links:
- Webinar if want to watch
- Twitter Thread
- The Secret SEO Formula To Get Thousands of Free Leads for SaaS Companies in 2022
- The presentation
Reach out if you'd like me to recommend you some writers or agencies.
In this episode, we discussed how to launch product-led content.
Discussion timestamps:
2:17: How to think about job switching as a marketer
7:10 - How Amanda drove product-led content with Sparktoro
12:11 - The challenges with product-led content
16:39 - How to think about content when you are creating a category
26:36 - Her hot take on A/B testing
Links:
- Amanda's Twitter Account
- Sparktoro
- Marketing 201 Content Course
Supported by - Growth Mentor
What if you could tap into the experience of 340+ startup and marketing mentors?
Have 1-on-1 conversations about growth, marketing, and everything in between with the world's top 3% of startup and marketing mentors.
Use the code aazar15 and get an exclusive 15% discount for Growth Mentor listeners.
In this episode, we'll find out how Growth Mentor was able to grow a marketplace, which is usually hard.
We discussed:
1:38 - How did he come up with the idea?
3:39 - Why a marketplace, not a product?
3:57 - What's Growth Mentor's mission?
6:09 - Why do so many folks offer their time for free?
12:43 - How Foti found supply side
14:14 - Successful and unsuccessful growth initiatives
17:10 - How to launch programmatic SEO?
20:45 - How doing things that don't scale helped
Supported by - Growth Mentor
What if you could tap into the experience of 340+ startup and marketing mentors?
Have 1-on-1 conversations about growth, marketing, and everything in between with the world's top 3% of startup and marketing mentors.
Use the code aazar15 and get an exclusive 15% discount for Growth Mentor listeners.
Hey there!
This is my story about growing Twitter organic socials.
Very tactical and mental models based.
Please reach out on Twitter if you have any questions regarding this.
Key Links
- How To Take Over The World Podcast (Give it a listen)
- Follow Ben (his tweets are REALLY good)
Supported by - Growth Mentor
What if you could tap into the experience of 340+ startup and marketing mentors?
Have 1-on-1 conversations about growth, marketing, and everything in between with the world's top 3% of startup and marketing mentors.
Use the code aazar15 and get an exclusive 15% discount for Growth Mentor listeners.
In this episode, we discussed how Benjamin Wilson grew How to Take Over The World podcast from 18K to 100K downloads per episode.
Timestamps:
1:42 - Intro
4:38 - How did he grow the podcast initially
6:47 - The growth story
12:18 - How did he make his passion project so good?
14:40 - Storytelling mental models
19:14 - How to edit (pick the right moments?)
23:49 - More mental models on scriptwriting
28:11 - What did you learn from these greats?
Key Links
- How To Take Over The World Podcast (Give it a listen)
- Follow Ben (his tweets are REALLY good)
Supported by - Growth Mentor
What if you could tap into the experience of 340+ startup and marketing mentors?
Have 1-on-1 conversations about growth, marketing, and everything in between with the world's top 3% of startup and marketing mentors.
Use the code aazar15 and get an exclusive 15% discount for Growth Mentor listeners.
This is a mini-cast where we'll try to answer questions of folks in my audience from Growth Mentors.
Casey Hill recommends podcasting.
Casey's podcast course
Sample podcast pitch
Listen to what he says.
If people want more in-depth lessons on growth tactics they can opt into Casey's newsletter: https://growthcorner.ck.page/
Supported by - Growth Mentor
What if you could tap into the experience of 340+ startup and marketing mentors?
Have 1-on-1 conversations about growth, marketing, and everything in between with the world's top 3% of startup and marketing mentors.
Use the code aazar15 and get an exclusive 15% discount for Growth Mentor listeners.
This is a mini-cast where we'll try to answer the questions of folks in my audience.
Aditya Gaur asked this question. Hope this helps him and some of you too.
Please reach out to these mentors if you want to dive more:
Mentor Soundbite # 1 Nikki Elbaz:
Website: nikkielbaz.com
Newsletter: nikkielbaz.com/subscribe
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/nikki-elbaz
Twitter: twitter.com/nikkielbaz
Product (ecomm focus): nikkielbaz.com/email-playbooks
Mentor Soundbite # 2 - Parikshit Joshi
Supported by - Growth Mentor
What if you could tap into the experience of 340+ startup and marketing mentors?
Have 1-on-1 conversations about growth, marketing, and everything in between with the world's top 3% of startup and marketing mentors.
Use the code aazar15 and get an exclusive 15% discount for Growth Mentor listeners.
Ash Read grew his side hustle from zero to 100,000 visitors. I wanted to cover this story for side hustlers but you'll learn about SEO & content marketing. Specially, how to beat the big brands with high domain authority.
We discussed:
2:15 - Mental models for marketers from baseball
5:55 - Story behind LivingCozy
15:57 - How to outrank big brands
20:26 - What about boring listicles?
23:45 - The layering mental model (done is better than perfect)
29:23 - How to beat buffer in its own game
32:43 - What if Web3 takes over Google search?
35:53 - Metrics that make LivingCozy successful
Key Links
- Go from 0 to 100K pageviews a month with Webflow
- LivingCozy website
- Ash Read's Twitter
Supported by - Growth Mentor
What if you could tap into the experience of 340+ startup and marketing mentors?
Have 1-on-1 conversations about growth, marketing, and everything in between with the world's top 3% of startup and marketing mentors.
Use the code aazar15 and get an exclusive 15% discount for Growth Mentor listeners.
In this episode, we introduced "growth debates" as a new segment.
Marketers have struggled to choose either of them for growth. We wanted to give the full picture.
2:37 - Intros
5:09 - Why Vanessa loves thought leadership more than SEO
9:24 - Lusha's story about brand revamping and thought leadership
14:00 - George's client SEO story on ranking for growth
21:01 - Pros and cons of SEO
24:00 - Pros and cons of thought leadership
28:00 - Backlinks seem to be a useless process in SEO -- Listen to Geroge's take
31:05 - George's take on constantly fighting on ranking and content updating
34:48 - What about the long unnecessary articles that the visitors don't need for SEO?
38:41 - Vanessa's take on thought leadership could be a hit or miss.
42:59 - What about thought leadership not contributing to the revenue? (Vanessa's response)
45:04 - What's the right percentage to allocate thought leadership vs SEO as a content team?
52:44 - My take on the whole debate
Key Links
- Reach to Vanessa for her amazing thoughts
- Reach out George if you want help with SEO
- George's agency Minutia
- Check out Lusha.com (Vanessa's company)
Supported by - Growth Mentor
What if you could tap into the experience of 340+ startup and marketing mentors?
Have 1-on-1 conversations about growth, marketing, and everything in between with the world's top 3% of startup and marketing mentors.
Use the code aazar15 and get an exclusive 15% discount for Growth Mentor listeners.
In this episode, I chatted with Nelson Gilliat - the is the author of “The Death of the SDR: And the Birth of Buyer Centric Revenue”
We discussed:
1:51 - Nelson's background in B2B Sales & Marketing
3:30 - What are Predictable Revenue and the problems with it
6:05 - What about the outbound approach to reaching out to the right customer at the right time?
13:15 - How to approach Account-Based Marketing?
__
Links:
- “The Death of the SDR: And the Birth of Buyer Centric Revenue”
Supported by - Growth Mentor
What if you could tap into the experience of 340+ startup and marketing mentors?
Have 1-on-1 conversations about growth, marketing, and everything in between with the world's top 3% of startup and marketing mentors.
Use the codeaazar and get an exclusive 15% discount for Growth Mentor listeners.
In this episode, I asked Katelyn Bourgoin to share in-depth details regarding consumer psychology and triggers.
Here's what we've discussed:
1:44: Kate's startup experience and mistakes she wants you to avoid
11:07: Should copywriting be based on Jobs-To-Be-Done or benefit-led or outcome-led?
15:05 - Which 4 questions do you need to figure out buyer psychology & triggers?
21:31 - How I applied her 4 questions and my results
33:30 - How to ask questions that lead to insights
37:84 - Rapidfire round
Key links:
- There are only 4 questions you really need to answer to get started
- Reach out to Kate on Twitter (she is kinda very popular but responsive there)
- Clarity Calls Cheat Sheet (highly recommend to buy)
In this episode, I cover my story of how I grew Synthesis with Facebook Ads.
Important, I would not have been able to do without Badal's help.
This podcast is interesting because we cover A-Z of Facebook Ads which I feel like many people charge $2000-$3000 for it.
Some questions we also covered:
- How do you approach a Facebook campaign at the early stages?
- How many campaigns, ad sets, and creatives based Tofu, Mofu, and Bofu?
- What kind of ad objectives I should run on this?
- What are some powerful ad targeting ideas?
- How much budget an ad campaign should have?
- Common mistakes advertisers do
- How to reduce cost per acquisition?
- What metrics are important?
- What kind sof creatives work well?
- How to write a copy for an ad?
- How to structure a UTM campaign?
- How to scale a Facebook campaign?
- How to think about the landing pages?
- Best practices to prevent ad account to be blocked
- How much budget should I have to run Facebook ad campaign?
- What do you think about engaged shoppers or birthdays campaign?
- How to run holiday campaigns?
- What kind of ads grab attention on FB ads?
- How to analyze Facebook Ad Campaign?
- How long should you run an unprofitable ad?
- When should you use Campaign Budget Optimization?
- Key mental models for Facebook Ads
Key links:
- Check out the ads I ran here
- Connect with Badal on Twitter or LinkedIn
- Work with XLR Media
Hey! Amazing people,
Give this a listen and reach out to me at aazar@aazarshad.com or Twitter or LinkedIn
In this episode, we covered a short story about how Aggelos Mouzakitis turned one insight into a million-dollar campaign idea.
Links:
- Connect with Aggelos
- Check out Growth Sandwhich agency
In this episode, we dive into Steph Smith's growth marketing career lessons, mental models, and stories.
2:29 - How growth marketing & chess are very similar
5:58 - The whacky path to growth marketing but with the right mindset
9:33 - Key mental model learned with paid ads
17:25 - Generalist vs specialist debate
21:54 - Growth experiments with Trends newsletter
27:27 - How to be ahead with influencer marketing
32:53 - Copywriting mental model from Sam Parr
33:35 - Product-Led Growth experiment at Trends
41:21 - Side hustle mental models and lessons (how to do it right)
Key Links
- Stephsmith.io
- Doing Content Right
- Doing Time Right
- Sh*t You Don't Learn in School
In this episode, Steffen Hedebrandt - The CEO of DreamData.io shared his two big mistakes regarding revenue attribution you should never do.
We talked about:
2:35 - How attributing the device wrongly led to a growth fiasco
6:20 - How investing in SEO "seemed" like a bad idea but it worked.
13:03 - How to think about B2B attribution
16:41 - How Gorgias took advantage of DreamData to get $2Mn of additional revenue
19:27 - What's working for DreamData currently as B2B SaaS company?
21:51 - Rapidfire round
Key Links
- Connect with Steffen to learn B2B Revenue Attribution
- Check out DreamData
- How Gorgias transitioned from single-touch to data rich multi-touch attribution using Dreamdata
- Learn more about B2B Attribution: https://dreamdata.io/b2b-attribution,
In this episode, we cover an inspiring story of Truebill and its growth levers.
We discussed:
3:07 - The Truebill original story
5:25 - How did he think about differentiation?
7:13 - How Truebilll was on a death bed? How did he pull it off?
12:17 - What's the framework to grow a B2C business?
19:49 - What are the growth levers from 0-$100K, $100K to $1Mn, $1MN to $10Mn and $10Mn to $100Mn for Truebill?
23:17 - Why did not referral marketing work for Truebill?
27:19 - Favorite growth marketer?
28:10 - What's the worst piece of advice you ever got?
29:51 - What have you recently changed your mind about?
Key Links
- Yahya Mokhtarzada
- Check out Truebill
Please leave a review for the podcast if you are a regular listener.
Subscribe to the newsletter to get exclusive podcast notes and mindset-changing growth marketing mental models and stories in your inbox.
This report got us so many customers and leads.
I'm sharing these reports here:
- The State of SaaS Onboarding 2020
- The State of SaaS Onboarding 2021
For folks who are struggling with retention, do listen to my story of how I reduced churn.
Show notes:
- The blog about this story
- Product Adoption School
Hey folks!
This episode is only for listeners of my podcasts.
I don't promote these because it is special for you.
I share my story behind moving from sales-led to product-led.
Enjoy!
In this episode, I wanted to share Airtable's Product Market & Growth story.
We discussed:
3:19 - How did Zoelle figure out Airtable's use-cases?
4:21 - What was happening before finding PMF?
5:48 - How did they figure out early growth?
5:49 - What does reverse churn mean for Airtable?
11:20 - Why Airtable focused on customer success teams early on?
15:38 - Having so many use-cases and personas, how did you think about nailing it down?
17:48 - What were some acquisition strategies you focused on that gave a good ROI?
20:02 - How did you reach out cold to different enterprises?
22:09 - What is the framework that you learned from Airtable's PMF story?
24:46 - What were the early Aha and activation moments?
27:35 - How did you figure those moments out?
31:34 - Where some mistakes you made while achieving the PMF that others should not do?
Links:
- Zoelle's LinkedIn Profile (do let her know that I sent you)
- Twitter thread on Airtable's story
Please leave a review for the podcast if you are a regular listener.
Subscribe to the newsletter to get exclusive podcast notes and mindset-changing growth marketing mental models and stories in your inbox.
In this episode, we discuss Traffit's story. They added 36% / year additional growth just by focusing on negative churn (excluding new business revenue).
We discussed:
00:41 - Mick's background & about Traffit
02:18 - Mick's net negative churn story
06:05 - How did he ask for an upsell?
10:10 - How he incentivized the customer success team to upsell more?
14:15 - What are some metrics he moved?
16:06 - Who is his favorite growth marketer?
17:30 - What has he recently changed his mind about?
18:33 - What does he think about internal numbers and salary transparency?
Links:
- Mick's LinkedIn Post on Net Negative Churn
- How to Achieve Net Negative Churn for SaaS (the article Mick Mentioned)
- Mick's LinkedIn Profile
- Check out Traffit
Please leave a review for the podcast if you are a regular listener.
Subscribe to the newsletter to get exclusive podcast notes and mindset-changing growth marketing mental models and stories in your inbox.
In this episode, we’ll focus more on scaling content and fighting the giants.
1:22 - About Alfred Lua and his background in Marketing
3:07 - His opinion on being a fluid marketer
4:40 - How they grew from 1mn to 1.5mn organic pages views per month (the story)
11:00 - How to beat big publications like Hubspot on search?
13:44 - How do you really stand out in a newsletter as a company?
16:04 - How to look for business metrics while growing organic traffic for conversion?
19:12 - How to see the ROI on trendy blog posts?
25:54 - How much does branding play a role in business & content?
29:30 - My lessons and mental models from the podcast.
Key Links
- Alfred's website
- How Buffer Drive 1 Million+ Sessions Per Month with Evergreen Content and Social Media
- How Buffer Increased the Readership of Buffer’s Blog to Over 1.5 Million Visits
- Alfred's Twitter
Supported by Oribi.io - Oribi is a new Google analytics alternative for marketing teams. With Google Analytics, you still need to set it up, run a data studio and ask developers for help. Oribi automatically does that and tracks events without compromising on privacy. You can find attribution and user journey much more comfortably. I wrote a review about Oribi for you to further dive into it. Get 20% off with Oribi.io with the code "gms".
Please leave a review for the podcast if you are a regular listener.
Subscribe to the newsletter to get exclusive podcast notes and mindset-changing growth marketing mental models and stories in your inbox.
In this episode, we discuss Paid Social strategy of Oribi.io:
02:28 - How Iris founded 3 different SaaS ventures and how she came up with the idea of Oribi.
5:58 - My Questions around Oribi's capabilities as a Google Analytics alternative.
12:49 - The paid social strategy story
14:27 - Why she chose paid social although it is an expensive channel
16:29 - Iris' mental models to leverage paid social
23:38 - Did she struggle with the ads initially?
24:48 - What's the worst piece of advice she has ever got?
25:51 - What has she recently changed her mind about?
Links:
- Iris Shoor's LinkedIn Profile
- Try Oribi
- Oribi's Youtube Ad
Supported by Oribi.io - Oribi is a new Google analytics alternative for marketing teams. With Google Analytics, you still need to set it up, run a data studio and ask developers for help. Oribi automatically does that and tracks events without compromising on privacy. You can find attribution and user journey much more comfortably. I wrote a review about Oribi for you to further dive into it. Get 20% off with Oribi.io with the code "gms".
Please leave a review for the podcast if you are a regular listener.
Subscribe to the newsletter to get exclusive podcast notes and mindset-changing growth marketing mental models and stories in your inbox.
In this episode, we dived into Tanner Larsson’s ecommerce Kitchen Brand story.
He grew it from zero to 8-figures.
We discussed:
4:19 - Tanner’s background before e-commerce.
7:08 - His story how he faced different challenges to build a successful e-commerce store.
17:37 - What is revenue optimization in e-commerce?
24:13 - How to battle iOS14 changes?
29:58 - Who is Tanner’s favorite growth marketer?
30:31 - What’s the worst advice he ever got?
31:41 - What he has recently changed his mind about?
35:42 - What he said something to “why not” instead of why?
Key Links
- Build Grow Scale Program
- Tanner's Twitter profile
Supported by Oribi.io - Oribi is a new Google analytics alternative for marketing teams. With Google Analytics, you still need to set it up, run a data studio and ask developers for help. Oribi automatically does that and tracks events without compromising on privacy. You can find attribution and user journey much more comfortably. I wrote a review about Oribi for you to further dive into it. Get 20% off with Oribi.io with the code "gms".
Please leave a review for the podcast if you are a regular listener.
Subscribe to the newsletter to get exclusive podcast notes and mindset-changing growth marketing mental models and stories in your inbox.
In this episode, Casey shares his story about Bonjoro & Design Pickle co-marketing initiative that delivered great results.
We talked about:
3:59 - Casey's background
5:00 - Why SaaS marketers should be doing more of such initiatives?
7:16 - Why this initiative worked?
9:58 - The story behind co-marketing initiatives
14:33 - What should you consider in a good partner?
18:05 - How success looks like when this is over?
19:21 - Why didn't you go with a webinar series?
22:51 - How would you convince a skeptical CEO listening to this podcast about such initiatives?
Key links
- Design Pickle & Bonjoro key story page
- Casey's LinkedIn
- Try Bonjoro for free
Supported by Oribi.io - Oribi is a new Google analytics alternative for marketing teams. With Google Analytics, you still need to set it up, run a data studio and ask developers for help. Oribi automatically does that and tracks events without compromising on privacy. You can find attribution and user journey much more comfortably. I wrote a review about Oribi for you to further dive into it. Get 20% off with Oribi.io with the code "gms".
Please leave a review for the podcast if you are a regular listener.
Subscribe to the newsletter to get exclusive podcast notes and mindset-changing growth marketing mental models and stories in your inbox.
On this show, Blake Imperl shared his frameworks and ideas to run an agency partnership.
More importantly, how he started his growth initiative with agencies without any brand.
We discussed:
3:34 - About Blake & his story
5:52 - Tone's story on running agency partnership
9:58 - How did Blake create an outbound plan?
13.53 - Why did he go for doing things that don't scale
15:07 - Blake's agency partnership framework
20:08 - What agencies really care about?
23:44 - What happens after signing a contract and showing a demo?
29:57 - I created a framework after listening to his content for agency partnership
Supported by Oribi.io - Oribi is a new Google analytics alternative for marketing teams. With Google Analytics, you still need to set it up, run a data studio and ask developers for help. Oribi automatically does that and tracks events without compromising on privacy. You can find attribution and user journey much more comfortably. I wrote a review about Oribi for you to further dive into it. Get 20% off with Oribi.io with the code "gms".
Links
- Blake's LinkedIn Profile
- Tone's website
- Blake mentioned the Delivery Value Course by Andrew Capland (I took it too, I highly recommend it)
Please leave a review for the podcast if you are a regular listener.
Subscribe to the newsletter to get exclusive podcast notes and mindset-changing growth marketing mental models and stories in your inbox.
In this episode, we'll answer this question and when does it make sense to create a category.
1:47 - The story about category creation.
7:35 - When it started making sense to create a category of "Customer Lifetime Value".
9:03 - What efforts Omniconvert is making to create a category.
14:54 - Three things you should remember when creating a category.
20:43 - My thoughts on category creation.
Links
- Connect with Juliana on LinkedIn (awesome account to follow)
- Check out Omniconvert
- Customer lifetime value course
Please leave a review for the podcast if you are a regular listener.
Subscribe to the newsletter to get exclusive podcast notes and mindset-changing growth marketing mental models and stories in your inbox.
Ali Abouelatta loves early-stage start-up scenes, so he thought about starting a newsletter - First1000
He shared his exact tactics to grow his newsletter in this article and we dived deeper into it.
We discussed:
1:36 - Story in the startup scene and how he started the newsletter.
9:35 - How to improve writing in general if you?
12:30 - How he got his first 10 subscribers
16:10 - His tactics on promoting the newsletter on Twitter & Slack
18:09 - From 1000 to 2000 subscribers, how referral marketing helped him?
21:04 - From 1000 to 10,000 subscribers, what worked and what didn't?
26:00 - People who are starting today, how should they think about starting a newsletter?
28:17 - What does "value" mean in terms of creating content?
30:54 - Rapid fire round
33:45 - My summary and 5 mental models from the conversation with him about newsletter writing and promotion
Key links
- Growing First 1000 (this newsletter) to 10k Subscribers
- Ali's Twitter handle
- His most popular tweet (I love his contrarian way of thinking)
Please leave a review for the podcast if you are a regular listener.
Subscribe to the newsletter to get exclusive podcast notes and mindset-changing growth marketing mental models and stories in your inbox.
In this episode, we learned how Arvid Kahl built his audience on Twitter and the frameworks that he shared in his book called The Embedded Entrepreneur.
We discussed:
02:26 - How Arvid started an entrepreneur and built his audience (the story)
19:32 - How he fights the impostor syndrome
23:08 - How to build empathy while building an audience
27:28 - His simple framework to be a trusted domain expert
33:52 - How he thinks about company audience building on Twitter
Key Links:
- Arvid’s Twitter Profile
- The Embedded Entrepreneur Book
- Zero to Sold Book
- Arvid’s Podcast
Please leave a review for the podcast if you are a regular listener.
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Does Thought Leadership Actually Convert?
In this episode, I talked to Animalz's Director of Marketing to share his thoughts on why do they ONLY do "thought leadership" content.
About Ryan: Ryan is the Director of Marketing at Animalz, an agency that provides high-end content marketing solutions to SaaS and tech companies.
Ryan shared:
2:13 - The story about how & why they went with thought leadership from the beginning
6:05 - What kind of thought leadership Animalz writes?
10:11 - What is his process of writing the content writing & ideation?
12:42 - How does Animalz engineer content virality?
15:36 - How do they convince clients to write about thought leadership content?
18:56 - How should you think about thought leadership content when you don't have personal experience?
19:24 - At what stage should you choose thought leadership and commodity SEO content?
21:46 - How to promote content without being too promotional?
24:13 - How to compete with amazing substack writers who sometimes do better jobs than we do?
Key links
- Ryan's Twitter Profile
- On thought leadership content
- Copycat content
- The idea farm
- The second-mover advantage
- Content maturity model
Please leave a review for the podcast if you are a regular listener.
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In this episode, we've discussed some new concepts in Influencer Marketing, and the story of Animal House Fitness influencer marketing strategies.
Topics that we have touched:
1:35 - The story behind growing Animal House Brand with influencer marketing.
7:40 - How do you find and track these influencers and their posts?
9:43 - How do you really genuine build relationships with influencers?
14:59 - How do you use influencers' content to grow further?
18:56 - What is whitelisting? And, how does it really work?
26:33 - Some folks have tried influencer marketing but it did not work for them - What would you tell them?
Key Links:
The Art of Scaling From 0 to $3 Million in Six Months
The Beginners’ Guide to Influencer Marketing in Ecommerce – Everything You Need To Know
In this episode, I'm sharing my personal story about How I failed with direct mail marketing, and how I would do it today (if I have to do it again).
Wins and loses is my new series sharing my personal growth marketing stories and lessons.
It's a short story and I hope you find the lessons learned interesting.
Show notes
- Munich Unicorn: Celonis 1500 letters stunt
- Buying the Ultimate Sales Letter Book to improve my copywriting
- The second episode on Direct Mail Marketing
- Sendwithscout
In this episode, we discussed the story of how Dopoll grew 800%.
1:20 - Status quo: What made Dopoll changes their strategy?
3:80 - How they started focusing on growth marketing?
7:32 - How they figured out their value proposition to position themselves better?
10:26 - How they found the activation sweet spot? Converting from 1% to 4% in freemium
15:56 - How they improved landing page conversion from 4% to 14%?
Links
- Dopoll's case study
- Follow Marc on Twitter
In this episode, we learn from Linda Zhang's career decisions as a PM, and a creator.
We've discussed:
2:53 -How she got an interview and then an offer from Instagram Reels?
5:37 - During an interview, what is a bad, good and great answer?
7:55 - Why did she reject such a lucrative offer?
13:57 - How she grew her newsletter early on?
16:38 - What's the secret to promoting content on Reddit?
21:10 - What advice she'd give to her earlier self when starting a newsletter?
22:56 - How she created her personal monopoly?
Check out her story in detail by reading these blog posts:
- I quit my tech job, here's what I learned
- How I negotiated $375K Facebook PM offer
- What it's really like as a new entrepreneur
- Product Toolkit
- Personal Monopoly Notes (David Perell)
In this episode, we've discussed Nick Jordan's SEO store one of his clients.
We're talking about the following topics:
1:40 - About Nick and why left sales
2:48 - His story of 0-479K organic visits from Do Not Pay (detailed case study below)
4:27 - How did he do it?
5:42 - What about the quality of the content while writing so much?
7:42 - Does domain authority matter to rank for organic visits?
8:56 - Isn't web traffic a vanity metric? How does he think about bringing qualifies leads?
13:49 - How does he think about freelancers vs in-house writers?
15:09 - How does think about non-native English writers?
17:10 - What if Google's algorithm changes and his strategy won't work?
19:03 - What does "providing value" means to rank on search?
20:03 - How does he think about ranking for competitive keywords?
23:30 - Does keyword difficulty matter?
24:48 - How does he think about writing for the future? Can his writers pull that off?
Key links:
- The #1 SEO Case Study of 2020
- Follow Nick on LinkedIn
- ContentDistribution
In this episode, I asked Nick Disabato to tell his story how helped an ecommerce store.
We've covered:
1:09 - Nick's experience in CRO & UX Research
2:04 - Backstory of Thigh Society's hunches to insights
4:54 - How did he decide which insights to pick?
9:08 - How did he decide to to pick the right customer for his research?
11:19 - Research sometimes leads to information overload - How to fix that challenge?
12:18 - Nick's golden framework to prioritze these insights to a good CRO initiative
14:03 - Rapid-fire round
Links
Thigh Society case study
Nick's Finding Clarity Podcast
Nick's Value-Based Design book
Jobs To Be Done Framework
Don't Make Me Think
In this episode, we've covered a lot of ground with Peep Laja, and his startup growth stories, mindset, and lessons.
We've discussed:
2:18 - How Peep moved from a software engineer to a leading CRO in the world.
04:05 - How did he land into making an e-learning platform from consulting?
05:52 - How Wynter's concept came into being?
11:16 - Why rebrand from Copytesting to Wynter.com? When does it really make sense?
23:59 - What's his playbook for brand building and category creation for Wynter?
32:37 - How should a not-so-popular and zero-email list founders think about growing his startup? Not everyone is Peep Laja.
39:49 - Who does he follow and admire?
42:40 - What he has recently changed his mind about?
Subscribe to this newsletter to get the podcast summary: https://aazarshad.com/
Links
- Peep's Twitter
- Win on messaging with Wynter
- Check out Wynter Games
In this episode, I asked Rob Fitzpatrick (The author of The Mom Test) about his framework to launch his books and software products.
We've covered:
1:31 - Rob's story about how he got into Y-combinator
6:15 - His framework to research for any product
7:08 - How he stumbled on helping a friend to share his notes and that lead to the book - Write Useful Book's
10:41 - Three lessons from his latest books (DEEPP framework). Desire - Effectiveness-Engagement - Polish & Professional
15:41 - How do you find out where exactly in the book people get bored to optimize it?
18:16 - How do you actually find out the audience for your book?
26:45 - Rapidfire questions:
- What's the worst advice he ever got?
- What he has recently changed his mind about?
- When did you last say 'Why not' to something?
Check out Write Useful Book Resources & Rob's Details:
- Pre-orders for immediate access and community
- Rob's Website
- His Youtube Channel and Rob's Twitter handle
This is the last episode of Product-Led Growth Series. We’ll cover the story of Matcha and Giovanni Hobbins.
We discussed:
1:35 - Why and How Match Moved from Sales-Led to Product Led Growth
5:44 - What were the key changes made for the Product-Led Growth model
8:00 - What metrics they started following?
10:51 - How did they deal with the free-loaders who never subscribe?
13:26 - Did they take advantage of the referral and vitality?
15:26 - What resources would Giovanni recommend for Product-Led Growth?
16:01 - My thoughts on Product-Led Growth and Why Userpilot is not 100% still not a freemium product.
Links:
Connect with Giovanni Hobbins and pick his brain on LinkedIn
Follow Product-Led Institute
Articles that helped me with Product-Led Growth:
Understanding Viral Growth in SaaS
The Three Rules of Freemium
My take on Product-Led Growth:
How to Run Sales in the Era of Product-Led Growth
The Pillars of Product-Led Customer Success
The Marketer’s Guide to Product-led Growth Marketing
In this episode, we're going to dive into PanaDoc's freemium launch during a pandemic.
Show notes & key topics we've discussed:
00:00 - 6 freemium tips from Claude Hopkins in his book Scientific Advertising.
02:34 - What is Product-Led Growth?
04:27 - How did PandaDoc launch their freemium and Why?
11:12 - How do you balance between freemium and free trial offering (if you have both)?
14:49 - How did you actually make sure that salespeople keep getting the leads in freemium?
16:29 - What happens if people downgrade because of freemium?
18:49 - What metric was moved by Product-Led Growth strategy i.e. freemium?
21:22 - Did they change lifecycle emails from free trial to freemium? How do you find a balance?
23:12 - How should you think about value metrics and pricing to not lose business while launching freemium?
25:57 - When is the right time to launch a freemium offering?
Links
- Check out PandaDoc
- Connect with Tanya on LinkedIn
- Leave a review
Product-Led Growth Series # 2
In this episode, we dived into product growth and activation. User Activation is the key to growth. We talked about:
2:02 - What makes Matheus passionate about product growth?
3:08 - How is he always optimizing for user activation?
4:04 - What's the confusion around activation?
5:03 - How is he thinking about the sign-up flow optimization?
6:28 - Does adding social proof really help?
7:59 - How user research really helps with activation?
11:27 - How did product walkthroughs help?
12:44 - How should we really look into data while doing the user research?
17:24 - What's the difference between Product Growth & Product-Led Growth?
Key Lessons
- Product Growth is a discipline between product and marketing. It's like science and art together. That's why it's so interesting.
- To fix activation you can always find some low-hanging fruits like improving the sign-up flow and conversion/funnel optimization.
- People think you can fix activation and you're done. You're not done, activation is a continuous optimization of the funnel.
- To improve sign-up flow, you can add AuthO to reduce friction to login. You can always find more friction points tp improve the funnel conversion.
- Before asking questions in user research, try to look into the quantitative data. Find out the problems in the funnel.
- Product walkthroughs did help with user activation.
- Product Growth is a discipline and Product-led Growth is a Go-to-Market Strategy.
Links
- What's the Aha & Activation Moments?
- Connect with Matheus Mello
- Check ProductBoard's Activation, Sign Up, and Onboarding Flow
Product-Led Growth Series # 1
Before figuring out anything about your business. You need to figure who you are selling to, how are you different, and where do you stand in the market. And, that’s called positioning.
This podcast episode is a follow-up to Obviously Awesome book, April’s podcast appearances, and articles you’ll find on the internet.
In this episode, we’re covering the following topics:
3:02 — Why positioning is gaining importance?
7:02 — What is NOT positioning?
9:32 — What’s the difference between category creation and positioning? Is category creation absolutely necessary to win?
15:49 — What is conversational marketing? A Positioning or Category?
18:30 — Is cost-effective pricing or ease to use a differentiator?
22:21 — Which brands have nailed the positioning well?
33:56- How to use positioning in your sales calls?
35:57 — What’s the difference between strategic narrative and positioning?
41:13 - How Level Jump nailed its positioning to grow faster.
Links:
- A story about a failed start-up
- Level jump positioning
- April Dunford's website
- Obviously Awesome (her book)
- Reach out to April on Twitter for more
- A Quick Guide to Positioning
LinkedIn Ads & InMail are known for targeting a specific audience. Although, the LinkedIn Ads CPC is higher than other social media.
In this episode, we’ll learn from Aleksandra’s story about how & why she failed running a virtual summit paid campaign on LinkedIn. And, how she quickly adapted to drive growth.
Show Notes:
- 0:53 - Aleksandra Panyukhina background in event marketing
- 1:54 - The story about how she failed at LinkedIn Ads & Inmail
- 5:23 - Lessons from the campaign failure
- 12:31 - What works on LinkedIn right now?
- 14:59 - When should you start thinking about Event Marketing?
- 19:33 - Why Event Marketing works for SEMrush?
- 21:43 - What works with Event Marketing?
Connect with My Guest
- Reach out to Aleksandra on event marketing questions
Check full post here: https://aazarshad.com/podcasts/linkedin-ads-and-inmails-event-marketing-lessons/
Craig Zingerline (Head of Product) at Sandboxx was met with a challenge. That is COVID-19.
He had amazing Q1 growth in 2020.
Then, at some point, the business was about to die.
Revenues dropping. Cancellations.
They had all the challenges one could think of during COVID-19. You name it.
Then, they re-iterated their product and opened a new business line by solving an existing problem of their audience.
Result?
They started growing again.
Curious?
It's a long emotional story on how they helped military recruits to stay connected with their family when everything stopped working.
In this episode, we discussed:
- Why Craig hates growth hacking?
- How Craig fixed activation of upside when the users were not coming back?
- How to increase brand stickiness?
- Drive value instead of trying to make more money. Prioritize user experience
- How to NOT die during COVID but also expand new revenue
- How Craig tweaked his course with psychological principles to get 100K in revenue
Show notes:
2:06 - What are Craig's thoughts on Growth Hacking and Why he also does not approve of it.
4:56 - How Upside.com was able to increase activation with non-active users?
14:44 - How Craig found & diagnose the actual activation problem
18:38 - Craig's thought experiments for growth
20:33 - How Craig was able to save a dying business that was highly impacted by COVID
32:36 - How he was able to get 6-figure course revenue by applying psychological principles and tweaking a few things.
Links:
Craig's Growth University: https://growthminded.co/
Connect with Craig on LinkedIn
I’ve recently taken a course about Mental Models for Marketing from Corey Haines and it helped me become better at growth marketing.
There were some principles that needed more details and stories.
So, we decided to record an episode on that. We discussed:
- 2:01 - Corey's story in the marketing world
- 4:15 - What's the inversion principle? How did Corey use to at Baremetrics?
- 10:46 - What's Cobra Effect? How did Corey realize while trying to increase the activation metric?
- 17:17 - A key lesson learned while trying to increase activation
- 18:47 - Ockham's Razor & Overfitting story related to his landing page
- 25:25 - Favorite growth marketers according to Corey
- 25:52 - Worst advice Corey ever got?
There are 40+ Mental Models Corey has in his course. Check out 👉 Mental Models for Marketing
Key takeaways
- Use inversion to think otherwise. Other consequences. I use inversion for budget planning.
- Cobra effect — Align your marketing to customers, not the other way around
- Keep it simple silly - Ockham's razor
- It’s always okay to say that you don’t know and that you’ll figure it out.
- Instead of learning the next big hack, try to understand your customers and position yourself in their context
Links
Connect with Corey here: https://twitter.com/coreyhainesco
Check out his free newsletter here: https://swipefiles.co/
In this episode, we're going to learn from a product growth specialist.
We discussed:
- Why does your content team need to think like a product team?
- How does it benefit?
- Live case study on how to think
- What's a ProdPad way of thinking?
Follow -- ProdPad's Twitter account & Andrea's LinkedIn Profile to stay updated. I personally learn from Andrea's mindset and posts on my LinkedIn newsfeed.
This episode is all about insights I gathered from those growth marketing stories.
I've divided those insights into:
- Content Creation & Marketing
- Product Growth
- Promotion & Ads
Plus, Happy New Year :-)
In this episode, we covered Nelio’s story on how he won Facebook Ads despite a dead channel for his boss.
We talked about:
- Back story about how Nelio left corporate world and joined a startup like Careem.
- How’s Nelio’s company (Washmen) was struggling with Facebook Ads
- Why Facebook Ads were not working?
- How they kept Facebook ads quality score high for 8 months and became a case study for Facebook
- How understanding end-users helped him get ahead of the competition
What are some key learning
- Don’t believe your boss. Test the channel first.
- Start with ad ad creative and copy first approach i.e. Brand-driven growth.
- If you want to win at any kind of marketing. Understand your customers and find those insights to get ahead of your competition
- Creativity > Number crunching
Links:
- Nelio’s LinkedIn profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nelioleone/
- The Facebook Ads Case Study
- Check out his website if you're looking to double down on paid ads: https://www.urbanmonks.io/
If you're looking to make a great brand & (podcasting) content that resonates with your audience. This podcast is for you.
Jay Acunzo is my mentor. He actually taught many of us how to create a stellar podcast.
We've discussed:
- What's his professional mission?
- Why he moved away from a well-paid Google job to pursue content marketing?
- How did he have his epiphany over time?
- How content creation should be actually done?
- Why Head of Content At Hubspot was still done good enough?
- How Jay's VC podcast considered as good as the A16z podcast?
- How to find podcast ROI?
- How a SaaS brand should have podcast creation?
- What's smug clarity and why should we avoid it?
- We did a case study live on - What should be Userpilot's (my company) podcast premise?
- How I start growth marketing stories, and how Jay help me?
- Worst advice Jay ever had?
Jay's content you should DEFINITELY read if you're planning to start a podcast:
- Check out Jay's workshop
- Jay's on-demand course
Must Read Jay's Blogs
- The Experience Spectrum (a framework for understanding how others experience our shows, so we can avoid creating commodities and focus on making proprietary experiences)
- The Style Spectrum (a framework for understanding how our own personal involvement in the experience can radically effect it, and how to be proactive about that)
- The Fortress of Favoritism (a framework on how to be someone's favorite podcast)
Show Notes
- Jay's favorite book on podcasting: Out on the wire
- Jay's favorite show maker: Anthony Bourdain
- Jay's favorite marketer: Andrew David
This is rather a touching story of Niels Zee. How he stood out as a growth marketer during a job application process.
In this episode, you'll hear Niels speaking about:
- How pandemic hit and he lost his job
- How he created demand for himself
- How he got 33 interviews and 8 offers
This is a short-story led podcast format.
If you like this episode, please leave a review so others can find it too.
Links
You can connect with him on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/niels-zee/
Check out the website he promoted: https://nielszee.com/
His story on LinkedIn:
- When he got the job offer
- How he appeared as a authority in growth marketing
- His first touching post when he lost his job
This is an emotional underdog story of Aaron Krall. He shared his story about how he felt like cheating while growing his business without any paid marketing.
We’ve discussed:
✔️ How Aaron left college and his job to start a business.
✔️ How he kept failing and never wanted to be an entrepreneur AGAIN.
✔️ How he kept growing without any paid channels.
✔️ Why he thinks this channel works well.
✔️ How you can leverage this channel and ideas.
✔️ Live case study with this channel.
Show notes:
1:07 - Who is Aaron and How does he help SaaS companies with growth.
1:56 - Aaron's emotional story of failures to find traction for his business.
6:27 - How he started with SEO and Facebooks to deliver results.
11:40 - How he found partner marketing is ultimate channel and how he nurtures them.
14:40 - How Aaron would build relationship with Segment (advice to me & Userpilot)
22: 58 - How Aaron will solve a VOIP SaaS Startup's traction problem with partner marketing & development
Links:
- Aaron's Website
- Aaron's Facebook Group
- Russel Brunson his favorite growth marketer
- His favorite book by Dana Dericks - Dream 100
Find us on Twitter/LinkedIn
- Aaron's LinkedIn & Twitter
My profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aazarshad/
-Twitter my profile & growth marketing stories
We've discussed:
✔️ How Ayat got into CRO?
✔️ How she launched a SaaS in a Crowded SaaS Space
✔️ 5 key lessons she's learned in her 14 years career
Show notes:
Her product:Figpii
- The book she recommended: The Education of An Idealist
-Ayat's profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ayatshukairy/
- Her agency: https://www.invespcro.com/
In this episode, we discussed when is the friction good and how to find that out.
We recently wrote this on Userpilot's blog, so I'm sharing it here:
A friction-based flow is one that will make it harder for the user to complete the signup process in exchange for more value-added later on. For example, booking a demo that goes to your sales pipeline first is also counted as friction-based. On the other hand, a frictionless flow will make it much easier to complete the signup process hoping that the UI is good enough to demonstrate the value of the app on its own.
I also discussed advantages and disadvantages of both in our podcast or you can simply read this blog.
We covered:
- What is friction? - 00:54 - 00:60
- What are the advantages & disadvantages of frictionless & friction-based flows? 00:61 to 3:21
- Max's challenge with having a frictionless flow for Ottonova - 3:25 to 5:21
- How he found out after making it friction-based & How did he found out that it would work? 5:22 to 7:43
- What were some best practices & inspiration he followed? - 7:44 to 10:40
Resources:
- Connect with Max - Maximilian Rast
- 2 Ways to Design Your Next Signup Flow [Examples & Best Practices]
- Why Adding Friction to Your Onboarding Funnel Can Actually be Good Idea [Case Study]
- Why We Love Drift’s Signup Flow & Onboarding
- How to Improve User Activation Rate
- Breaking Down The Perfect Sign Up Flow
In this episode, we’ve had fun and light conversation regarding Marketingexamples.com
He recently had a good success with making great content on marketing. His newsletter has 37K+ marketers & his twitter has 72K+ followers.
We’ve talked about:
- How Harry started Marketing Examples. The story behind it.
- Why & How his content is getting viral?
- How he finds good content?
- What means “better” and “selective” when choosing a content piece?
- How to do it better?
- How to get viral on twitter?
My key learning from this episode is how Harry thinks about his content. This episode is pure gold for content marketers.
You can find Harry’s content here:
- Marketingexamples.com
- https://twitter.com/GoodMarketingHQ
If you like this episode, tweet at GoodMarketingHQ about this.
Should you build on data or gut?
In this episode, we’re going to dive deeper in to this question with Robert’s growth marketing story.
We talked about:
- How did he go with his intuition?
- Did he look into data?
- Was it a feature request?
- What kind of decisions should be on intuition or data?
- How to know - what you’re building is going in a right direction?
- Lessons learned
Show notes
- When to Rely on Data and When to Trust Your Gut
- Bannersnack Carousel Feature
- Bannersnack Instagram Carousel Feature
Rand Fishkin has been my favorite marketer. When I read the book Lost & Founder, I wanted to ask so many follow-up questions. This podcast is all about that.
In reality, his book was the starting point of why I thought GH is BS.
However, these are behind the scene stories that you might not know. So, I thought I should share with you.
We discussed:
- Why Growth is BS? Why Rand Fishkin is also against it?
- Story regarding search engine ranking factors that got Moz SO much attention.
- Growth marketing flywheel story that’s not related to SEO.
- What’s a good content?
- Can your article actually be discoverable on Google if it’s so good? Do you still need backlinks to it?
- What’s Sparktoro’s Go-to-Market Strategy and flywheel?
Show Notes:
- Rand’s Book: https://sparktoro.com/book
- Emily Vice’s Story: https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2019/10/how-emily-weiss-grew-glossier-from-millennial-catnip-to-billion-dollar-juggernaut
- Search Engine Ranking Factors: https://sparktoro.com/blog/resources/google-ranking-factors-2019/
- My research (passion project): https://userpilot.com/saas-product-onboarding/
In this episode, Alice (CMO at Cognism) & I discussed:
- Why Growth Hacking is BS?
- What is good growth marketing?
- What is pain-point SEO?
- How I think about pain-point SEO?
- What are some low effort and high impact tactics that marketers aren't doing right now?
- What metrics we should follow as a growth marketer?
Connect with Alice De Courcy on LinkedIn
In this episode, we discussed a growth marketing failure story. We keep glorifying success, but we need to learn from hard lessons.
Although, Marta had two great 10X content but she still failed to make two of these initiative successful.
We discussed:
- She launched two 10X content: Business Proposal Guide & Buffer Marketing Report
- How did she come up with the idea?
- What was the goal?
- What were the results?
- What was the key learning from this 10X content launch?
- How would she do it if she has to do it again?
Connect with Marta on LinkedIn or Book a Growth Mentor Call with Her to learn from her checklist if you're launching something soon.
In this episode, we’ve discussed:
- How Nadya grew Venngage’s blog in the early days?
- What mistakes she did during that time?
- How Nadya thinks about SEO after having such a great domain authority of Venngage?
- What kind of content frameworks can always give you that edge to drive more traffic & conversions?
- What if the keywords are driving wrong traffic to you?
- How can you get ahead of your competitor on search engine?
- How she boosted her website domain authority by using creativity? (The most fun part)
Show notes:
- Check out: https://venngage.com/ and https://thisisnadya.com/
- Nadya’s blog that talked about in the blog: SEO Content Framework and Nadya's Framework
- The book she recommended: Creativity Ink
- Sara Cooper as her favorite growth marketer - although, she is a comedian, find out why in the episode (I love her tweets too)
In this episode, we've discussed how Max used his own platform to convert more users. Obviously, eating your own dog food means using your own product to improve the product. But to improve marketing and sales, that was a new concept for me too.
In this episode, we've discussed:
- Pop's SEO strategy & Content
- Paid Marketing
- How using his own app helped to convert more?
- Should there be more friction on the landing page?
- How to think different?
Max admires:
- Ferdinand Goetzen as a Growth Marketer
- Hates asking folks who push unsubscribe to re-subscribe (more in the podcast)
- Loved Indistractable by Nir Eyal
True story: Learn how influencer marketing helped SimScale get qualified leads of 3 months within 3 days. These leads also cost 15x cheaper.
Not only that but it also increased search appearance for SimScale 247%
What did we discuss in the episode:
- How Agata took 80% of marketing ad spend to search
- How she took risks to do things in SaaS that others don't do (influencer marketing)
- Her growth experiments that helped the company grow faster
..and much more.
If you like this episode, please don't forget to let me know. That's how I keep going.
or leave itunes review.
This story is all about how as a growth marketers we struggle to convince our team to choose between Build vs Buy decision. How we can overcome this?
We covered:
- When should we go with external vendors?
- How to convince our team?
- How to find ROI?
- How to set a goal that pushes you as a growth marketer to do a better job?
This is the first story. Agata had another growth marketer story. We'll chat about it in the next episode (it's related to influencer marketing).
So, stay tuned. If you like this episode, please don't forget to give itunes review.
Personalization is big buzzword for growth marketers. Most folks use it for account-based marketing. This episode not here to teach you about "how to do personalization".
This episode is all about how Ian Naylor (What-a-guy) found personalization as an effective CAC reducing strategy and how he built a business on it, and gave it to others.
You can find the resources here: https://aazarshad.com/podcasts/growing-fast-reducing-cac-with-personalization/
For feedback and help, reach out at aazar@aazarshad.com
Are you struggling to convert website visitors or in-app users to more paid ones?
Or you're unable to retain when the users sign-up.
Andrew Capland shared his growth stories and gave us lessons that product growth folks should apply in practically.
We've talked about:
- Sign-up flow
- Product experiments
- Pricing experiments
- User onboarding experiences
and much more.
Andrew is former Head of Growth at Wisita and now he's driving growth for Postscript.
Tools we've talked about:
- Userpilot
- Fullstory
- VWO
Resources for you:
- Andrew loves coaching growth folks, reach out here:https://deliveringvalue.co/coaching
- Hooked
In this episode, we'll uncover the growth stories related to webinars.
- How Thinkific & ConvertKit took advantage of webinars as their primary channel?
- How to double down on webinars?
- Step-by-step playbook of webinars
- How to apply bullseye framework to your webinars & other growth channel
If you like this episode, please do subscribe to my podcast or by email here: https://app.popt.in/landing/75248bbde77be
I'd love to your feedback at aazar@aazarshad.com.
If you need help with growth marketing, please feel free to reach out.
In this podcast, we’re going to understand:
- Is direct mail marketing effective for you?
- Is it good for B2B?
- How to delight your customers prospects?
- What are the benefits of direct mail marketing?
- How to track and measure the direct mail campaign?
- When should you do it?
- How to become a better marketer?
..and much more.
Listen to this podcast, and I’d love to know if it helped you to think different.
Reach out at aazar@aazarshad.com. I'd love to hear from you. I need to improve this podcast for you.
I've failed many times on Facebook to promote my idea/concept/product.
I was always curious - how folks are growing their business from Facebook groups organically?
In this episode, we try to cover Lazar's story on organic growth marketing on Facebook groups.
Lazar has cracked Facebook, and you'll find inspiration to do it right once you listen to the episode.
You can find Lazar & Glorify information below:
Lazar: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lazapavlovic/
Glorify: https://www.glorifyapp.com/
Here's glorify's Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/glorifyapp/
Hey, hello, and hi there! I'm Aazar Ali Shad, and I'm a Head of Growth at Userpilot.
I've been a 2 times founder, and now a growth marketer.
This podcast is about sustainable growth marketing stories, where we go on a journey to explore how growth marketers are moving their business needle and to get inspired.
On the show, we'll deconstruct several growth marketing stories, and learn how growth marketers think. Often time, it's not the tips or hacks, it's how these folks think.
This show is about getting inspired from these growth marketers.
Every week we’ll focus on one inspiring story that will tickle your creative neurons to find inspiration for your own work.
This is Growth Marketing Stories.
Subscribe for the show if you think growth marketing is a mindset, not copy pasting.