Looking to grow your business? Here are 5 to-do's you can use to increase your customer count, according to Hubspot's CMO.

Pick 1, do them all, your call.

Let's dive in.

Better Conversion Rates

Chances are your current conversion rates are somewhere south of 100% (and if they're not, stop reading this and enjoy your success), which means they can be improved.

This is the best place to start since the changes happen on a platform you own and control. Plus, it means more customers without more traffic and any increases in traffic should scale this up.

Some places to start:

• Make sure your phone number is on your site
• Use a consistent message throughout the conversion journey
• Provide (way) more value than anyone else

Follow Up Faster

The best way to turn someone who is interested into a customer is to not let them lose interest.

This is what social users expect:

How can you respond faster?

• Automation (whether via autoresponders or AI)
• Better internal processes to incentivize more rapid responses

Customer Referral Program

Word-of-mouth always wins.

Turn your biggest fans into your best marketing and reward them for doing so.

(Assumes you've made something worth talking about in the first place, of course.)

Improve Net Promoter Score

What is net promoter score? It's that quick survey you've probably seen about how likely you are to tell a friend on a scale of 1-10. SaaS companies in particular love this metric.

I think it's a bit overhyped, but if it makes sense it can be useful data to have. Bonus points if you don't let people answer with 7, that's the cop-out answer on a 1-10 scale.

Beyond the specific tool used to collect/implement, listening to customer feedback is usually a good idea.

That doesn't mean you have to do everything they say, the customer is not always. But listening to what your customers say and how they say it can unlock insights to improve your experience, and create more customers.

All The Traffic!

You knew this one was coming. At some point, if you're still looking for growth, the only way is to get in front of more people.

But that doesn't mean you just start flooding every platform du jour with your brand.

Obsess about 1-2 core channels

Organic search and paid advertising are the classics. The first is for long term dividends, the second is for reach and sale.

If you have the capabilities, something like YouTube or a podcast could be a good channel for you. Content can create a moat via parasocial relationships. Similar to cultivating a community. These efforts are hard for other brands to duplicate and can create deeper relationships with your core fans. This also means these efforts are harder to make and maintain.

Don’t spread yourself too thin

Max out one or two channels that drive traffic and performance. Don't get distracted by new and shiny things or that one quick hack you saw in a headline, focus on your top channels and make sure they're finely tuned.

Once you've maxed those out you can think about other channels. Just make sure the new channels don't come at the expense of your top channels.

TL;DR:

5 ways you can get more customers (chances are there is at least 1 item on this list you aren't doing):

• Improve your conversion rates
• Respond faster
• Start a customer referral program
• Improve your net promoter score (/listen to customer feedback)
• Get more traffic

The person who tells the best story rules their corner of the world.

-James Clear

Brands are stories

More ads in more places, Microsoft is rolling out Conversational Ads in Chat.

First up:

Compare & Decide Ads pull all the relevant data of various car models into a succinct table so the user can easily evaluate different options based on the criteria they find most important.

Sounds like Wirecutter et al but as an ad placement directly in the search/chat results.

Interesting note from the announcement:

Our demographics data shows that Chat usage skews to young adults across all verticals

Update time!

Apple emergency updates fix 3 new zero-days exploited in attacks

I’ve been waiting for this:

Amazon brings generative AI to Alexa

I think once generative AI models and smart assistants are merged, we’ll view the previous iterations like we do old text-based dungeon crawler games.

Especially once we hit the SkyRim version of smart assistants.

ad copy:

American men are beginning to realize that it is ridiculous to buy good suits and then spoil the effect by wearing an ordinary, mass-produced shirt. Hence the growing popularity of Hathaway shirts, which are in a class by themselves.

Hathaway shirts wear infinitely longer—a matter of years. They make you look younger and more distinguished, because of the subtle way Hathaway cut collars. The whole shirt is tailored more generously, and is therefore more comfortable. The tails are longer, and stay in your trousers. The buttons are mother-of-pearl. Even the stitching has an ante-bellum elegance about it.

Above all, Hathaway make their shirts of remarkable fabrics, collected from the four corners of the earth—Viyella and Aertex from England, woolen taffeta from Scotland, Sea Island cotton from the West Indies, hand-woven madras from India, broadcloth from Manchester, linen batiste from Paris, hand-blocked silks from England, exclusive cottons from the best weavers in America. You will get a great deal of quiet satisfaction out of wearing shirts which are in such impeccable taste.

Hathaway shirts are made by a small company of dedicated craftsmen in the little town of Waterville, Maine, They have been at it, man and boy, for one hundred and twenty years.

At better stores everywhere, or write C. F. HATHAWAY, Waterville, Maine, for the name of your nearest store. In New York, telephone OX 7-5566. Prices from $5.95 to $20.00.

Obama’s speechwriter could be talking about marketing here:

The most important thing about speechwriting — besides being able to string sentences together — is having a sense of empathy. You have to understand your audience and try walking in their shoes. But there are limits to empathy, in terms of imagination… Speechwriters are never putting their own views into a speech.

(isn’t a speech a form of marketing?)

What do users want from your brand on social?

• Responsiveness
• Updates on new products / services
• Exclusive deals
• More authentic, non-promo content

Your social platforms are now your PR, loyalty, promo, and blog channels. (But please still have owned channels for these things too.)

Same As We’ve Always Done

It’s not about the platforms or the tactics (or the snake oil).

It’s about meeting the customer:

• where they are
• with a story that resonates
• while putting them at the center
• and sharing the energy you’re made of

In an effort to scale what customers love about your brand using the reach of digital.

Related

🤖 What AI Thinks About AI

I asked an AI to tell me about AI, presented that to a client, and then got on my soapbox. Plus, some other robots stuff that happened recently.

CuriousMarketers.ClubKyle Mensing

I Call My Shot: Post-AI Trends

4 trends I think AI will be rocket fuel for, including changes to search, social, computing paradigms, and the almighty algorithms.

CuriousMarketers.ClubKyle Mensing

How to write good marketing messaging:

Write marketing copy, newsletters, emails, and messages as if to a sister, a best friend, or your mom/dad. And not for a state of the union or to a supreme court judge.

Act like you have a personality and the message was written by and for a human.

(That link also has a nice bit on identifying market gaps.)

False proxies — Akimbo: A Podcast from Seth Godin — Overcast

Overcast

I love this question (paraphrased from the link above):

Is it a good use of marketing to come up with good ways to sell socks or shirts or notebooks or shoes or is that not the best use of people's time? Is there a modern equivalent for past marketing strategies that engendered a sense of belonging?

For 3 reasons:

1. It gets deep
2. It focuses on serving the customer
3. I'm a Seth stan

I love the direction of the answer as well:

12 year old girls don't have a sock problem, they have a belonging problem. They have a culture problem. A problem of status and affiliation.

"Wanna see my socks," is a reasonably inexpensive way for a girl to indulge her desire to be part of something—maybe to one up a friend, have a conversation about fashion—for not a lot of money.

Lots of things in marketing exist not to do what it looks like they do, but to solve our emotional problems.

Not all of us are going to change the world or save lives. The rest of us might just be able to put a smile on someone's face. Produce something with a reduced set of side effects, that has effects that we can point to and say 'I made that.'

Marketing has its place. Not when it manipulates people or hustles them or hypes something. It has its place when it brings tension to the table in service of better.

Are you selling socks or are you selling solutions? (And no, this isn't just about socks.)

From Social Media Today: 3 Important Social Media Trends of Note for 2023

Hot = LinkedIn

Not = X (Twitter)

Still Hot = Instagram

Are your videos thumb stopping?

Do they have the right hooks?

To find out, calculate the hook rate.

Solve for X

How do you pick a video length?

The easiest answer is that you go with what each platform gives you.

The current standard set by the Interactive Advertising Bureau is 2 seconds (I think this used to be 3 seconds), which makes it a common metric across platforms.

Meta reports on 2 second views (or at least has columns for it), 3 seconds, and ThruPlays—which are views up to 15 seconds (either entire video or 15 seconds if longer). You can optimize for 2 second views or 15 second thruplays.

TikTok reports on 2 second views and 6 second focused views. You optimize for focused views.

Pinterest reports on 2 second and 3 second video views. Bidding based on 2 second views.

LinkedIn reports on 2 second views. Or a click. Whichever comes first.

Google / YouTube counts a view as a duration up to 30 seconds depending on the length of the video. Anything shorter than 30 seconds counts a full play as a view. Clicking the video ad also counts as a view. And viewability is based on 1-2 second views depending on type. Honestly, a bit messy.

I do wish 5 second views was an easy-to-pull metric as this is the cutoff frequently cited by these platforms. Most best practices talk about what you need to include in the first 5 seconds. But they didn't ask me what should be in the reporting view, so oh well.

What's Good?

Every decision maker's favorite question and every analyst's least favorite.

The short answer: it depends!

The best approach would be to develop an internal baseline and then start keeping an eye out for outliers, good and bad.

But let’s say ~25%. Because that’s a nice round number that falls in line with this benchmark analysis.

Get Hooked Up

As with most metrics, hook rate is useless in a vacuum.

Here are a few use cases I can think of to incorporate hook rate into your strategic analytics toolbox:

• Compare hook rates across platforms to identify high performers and those that may need different creative to succeed.
• Compare videos within a platform to see what hooks viewers the most and adjust your (platform-specific) creative strategy accordingly.
• Monitor hook rate for each video over time to determine when effectiveness is waning and creative fatigue may be setting in.
• Determine if there is a correlation between hook rate and business goal performance.
• For A/B testing, of course.

To Review

Hook rate is the number of video views of a certain length divided by the number of impressions that video delivered.

As an example, a client's Meta account has a video with 6,902 3-second views so far this month on 15,970 impressions.

6,902 / 15,970 = 43% hook rate

Go forth and measure!

Syllabus:

• Benchmarking Facebook Video Ad Hook Rates
• What is a Hook Rate? (I find the written explanation of the formula sub-par in this, but it includes more platforms and context if you’re interested.)
• Google: Overview of Viewability and Active View

There is an expression in Japanese that says that someone who makes things of poor quality is in fact worse than a thief because he doesn’t make things that will last or provide true satisfaction. Athief at least redistributes the wealth of a society.

-Andrew Juniper

The core of good marketing is a providing more value than the customer expects. This is built on a quality product or service.

If the quality is missing, the value doesn’t exist, and everything else is a lie.