Category: Tactics

5-Minute Whiteboards Marketing Psychology Tactics

5-Minute Whiteboard: Why You Can’t Just Crank Up Marketing to Get More Sales

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
CEO/Sales Leader: “Hey marketing team! We’re behind on our quarterly sales goals and only have 3 weeks left. Do some marketing why doncha?! Crank up them SQLs!“ Marketer: “Yeah, that’s not really how this discipline works. It’s a long lead cycle between awareness, branding, and conversion, and…“ CEO/Sales Leader: “Sorry exec team. Marketing underperformed and that’s why we didn’t meet…
Marketing Startups Tactics

How One Media Placement Led to 1,600 Customers — And How You Can Do It Too

Amanda NatividadBy Amanda Natividad
“But, customer acquisition isn’t how you measure the success of public relations.” I didn’t have formal PR or marketing training and still, I knew it was a ridiculous KPI. This was during my time at direct-to-consumer (DTC) healthy snack startup NatureBox. We were a series A startup, a lean team that needed to grow our business quickly. It just wasn’t…
5-Minute Whiteboards Marketing Product Tactics

How Do You Create a Great Marketing Strategy? | 5-Minute Whiteboard

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
This week, I’m going back to basics. Not because you need a refresher course, but because so many of us are frustrated in the weeds of marketing precisely because we can’t see the strategy forest for the tactical trees. I’ve written before about how too few marketers grasp the difference between strategy and tactics. If you’re struggling to get a…
Marketing Tactics

Your Burning Questions About Google Analytics 4 (GA4)

Amanda NatividadBy Amanda Natividad
Google Analytics 4 (GA4) officially launches July 1, 2023. If you’re here, it’s probably because you’re not quite ready for it. Fear not, friend! We’ll get you up to speed. We recently hosted a SparkToro Office Hours crash course with our friend Steve Lamar, GA4 expert and founder of ReallyGoodData. (Eagle-eyed readers will recall we partnered with Steve on our…
Marketing Tactics

Your New KPIs to Gauge Content Quality

Amanda NatividadBy Amanda Natividad
Rand hates the phrase “high-quality content.” Quality is entirely subjective. And because it’s subjective, it’s impossible to measure, let alone find agreed-upon standards. Here’s an example: Remember that Ted Lasso Season 2 episode, Beard After Hours? Rand thought it was art while Casey thought it was drivel. (I have the least helpful opinion here which is that I thought it…
Marketing Startups Tactics

How Being Customer-Led Can Double the Impact of Your Traffic

Amanda NatividadBy Amanda Natividad
This is a guest post by Georgiana Laudi and Claire Suellentrop of SaaS educational and growth consultancy Forget the Funnel. They are the co-authors of Forget the Funnel: A Customer-Led Approach for Predictable, Recurring Revenue. Customer acquisition in 2023 is not like customer acquisition in 2013. Why? The competition is much greater. We now have 16x the competitors we did…
Industry Marketing Psychology Tactics

“High Quality Content” is the Most Useless Phrase in Marketing; We Can Do Better

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
Did you watch the television program Ted Lasso? You probably did; it has the ubiquity of the 1980s’ The Golden Girls in an era of deeply fragmented viewership. I enjoyed the first season quite a bit, but after watching the second season, was so repulsed by the folksy, smarmy, saccharine shallowness that I stopped. Season 2 somehow made me feel…
Industry Marketing Psychology Tactics

Too Few Marketers Grasp the Difference Between Strategy vs. Tactics; We Need to Fix That

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
Look, I get it. For (at least) the first decade of my career, I, too, foolishly conflated strategy and tactics. I’d say things like: “we need to be strategic with our paid search spend,” or “let’s get tactical with the pricing tiers.” Did I sound smart? No. Did I *think* I sounded smart? Yeah, probably. Here’s the short version: Strategy…

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