“Since it costs us $50 to acquire a new customer, I thought it made more sense to just send you a free product to try.”
Does it work?
From the owner:
“The cost of posting a can is $10. People get hooked and buy subscriptions. And the lifetime value of a subscriber is $3,000!”
Converting 1/300 “freebies to subscribers” means you’re profitable.
A strong brand has always been important. Long before the internet made marketing more measurable, brand marketing was all there was in marketing. Some people literally went through magazines and cut out press clippings. Data was sourced through surveys and focus groups. Not a bad idea, but not scalable either.
But today, we find ourselves in a stalemate. With only four scalable growth channels and consumer platform stagnation, three factors predict the success of a company: superior IP, more capital, or brand. In most cases, brand is the result of #1 and #2 and now it’s becoming an absolute must-have for success.
A strong brand strength can be a proxy for PMF and lead to significant market share gains. Every month only ~6K people search for “find a job” but 2.6M search for “indeed jobs” and 13M for “indeed” in the US.
Brand traffic is “free” and highly intentful. Google Search results prioritize strong brands even more in 2021, in part because Google wants to rank trustworthy sites higher to combat fake news and keep trust with customers themselves. Remember, Google’s market position is the direct result of how much searchers trust it.
Tesla spends almost nothing on Marketing and a lot on RnD. Brand is a moat you can build strong customer relationships and defenses on.
When looking at the search volumes for the keywords “macys” and “nordstrom” below, which one do you think has a higher chance of gaining market share over time?
In 2022, companies will invest more in building and monitoring stronger brands as a driver of higher ROAS (returns on ad spend), lower CAC (customer acquisition cost), and organic rankings.
Growth Memo: My SEO and Growth predictions for 2022
IndexNow provides many benefits. It allows webmasters to notify all search engines at once. It democratized indexing and leads to fewer resources needed by search engines to crawl the web.
Search Engines have been struggling with crawling for a while. Challenges include spam, javascript rendering, but also the increased use of nofollow tags, which is one of the reasons Google started treating nofollow more as a suggestion than a directive.
I don’t think web discovery through links is the best approach and expect more search engines to lean on webmasters to bring new content to them through APIs like IndexNow.
Kevin Indig, Growth Memo
Successful influencer partnerships are based on trust—not reach. They aren’t built on vanity metrics like follower counts. They’re focused on reaching their target audience with relevant content. By keeping this in mind, you’ll move beyond immediate short-term revenue gains and capitalize on all the other benefits the influencers, bloggers and micro-influencers have to offer.
Some common benefits include:
When you work with an influencer that truly believes in your brand and appreciates your product, the content that they create is gold.
It’s important to note which influencers are over-indexing with engagement. Those are the ones you want to do more with.
Brands that treat influencers as partners as opposed to paid marketing channels will see the value in their campaigns. To take this approach, brands need to work collaboratively and focus on long-term gains rather than short-term revenue.
Nik Sharma, Influencer Partnerships: How to Form Meaningful Partnerships with Influencers
