Mark Spera
More posts from Mark Spera
What do all companies, regardless of industry, say they want? Growth. Lighting-fast, continuous growth. The good news is you can quickly learn which growth marketing strategies work by studying other companies’ success and adapting it to your own business.
Most technophiles remember Dropbox’s referral program — the one that helped it grow 3,900% in 15 months. Its philosophy was simple: reward customers with free storage space for referring other customers. In 2008, it was an absolute revelation. A golden ticket.
In 2021, you’d be hard-pressed to find a company without a formal referral program. It’s a standard growth marketing trick. If you study other companies’ tactics, you’re going to be able to shortcut growth — it’s as simple as that.
The race to grow faster is more pressing than ever before. When you consider the speed with which venture capital funds need to return dollars to their investors and that consumer acquisition costs have increased by 55% over the last three years, forward-thinking entrepreneurs and growth marketers simply must make time to study their competition, learn best practices and apply them to their own business growth.
Of course, you should still run your own experiments, but it’s just more capital-efficient to emulate than to trial-and-error from scratch. Here are five companies with growth strategies worth emulating — including the most important lessons you can begin applying to your business today.
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1. Doing SEO right: Flo
SEO is going to spend this summer shaking in its boots. Google began rolling out a two-week core algorithm update on June 2, and it’s unleashing a page experience update through August. These updates usually come with significant volatility that makes organic Google rankings jump all over the place.
However, one clear winner of the 2021 SEO footrace is Flo, a women’s ovulation calendar, period tracker and pregnancy app. According to GrowthBar, a SEO tool I co-founded, Flo’s organic traffic has soared 192% over the past two months and it ranks on page one for some staggeringly competitive women’s health keywords.
If SEO is a strategy you’re pursuing, there are two key growth lessons to take away from Flo’s recent success.
1. Authority matters now more than ever. Healthcare websites fall into a category of sensitive sites that Google classifies as Your Money, Your Life (YMYL). Because of oodles of fake news and suspect web content, Google has rightfully raised its bar for expertise and factuality. Go to any one of Flo’s more than 1,000 blog posts (yes, content is still king) and you’ll see that nearly all of them are reviewed by gynecologists, primary care physicians or some other type of women’s health expert. Its site also has pages devoted to its writers and medical reviewers, content guidelines and peer-review specifications. Flo takes its information seriously. From the 2020 election to QAnon to vaccination side effects, Google is on high alert. Whatever your niche, you need to establish credibility to win Google searches.
2. UX/UI matters for SEO. This should make product managers and developers happy. You may be surprised to hear that solid features and site usability are not only good for users, but good for Google, too. That’s because Google is in the business of showing awesome content to people who use its search engine. If it didn’t, we might start our searches on Bing or DuckDuckGo instead. Flo has a delightful user interface and the site has helpful widgets that enable women to calculate their ovulation date and due date, plus a personalized product flow that helps women improve their health overall. My take is that readers stay on Flo for a long time because of the well-appointed UX features. Bounce rate and time-on-page are big ranking factors, so if you can keep users satisfied on your site, Google will reward you.
The lesson: In 2021, you need to create credible content and useful features to improve your organic keyword rankings.
2. Doing product-led growth right: Strava
Every Tuesday and Thursday morning, I get a text message from Strava as my fiancé leaves the house to run 5 miles. I don’t even have Strava, but I’m her safety contact in the app. In addition to enabling me to watch her 7:30 mile splits in awe, I can snooze for another 30 minutes knowing that I can locate her should something bad happen. While having a safety contact is a nice feature for users, it’s also a particularly nice way for Strava to introduce new people to the platform for free. Strava does product-led growth right.
Built by athletes, for athletes, Strava (Swedish for “strive”) gives its users a “deep dive” into the stats behind their activities and workouts. It’s an application that turns your smartphone into a sophisticated running and cycling computer by syncing with any power meters or recorders for any performance metric you want to look at.
It also doubles as a social network for other like-minded fitness lovers, where users can post their workouts, give advice and support one another. It then triples as a community hub where its customers can organize activities and events.
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You’re probably seeing a pattern here. Strava uses product features to drive customer growth in every sense, focusing on providing great experiences for customers at every touchpoint. And it’s done this successfully by focusing on its niche: helping independent athletes track their workouts.
When you focus narrowly, you become an expert in a field and people will associate your business with that service or product. When a customer or user has an association vector for your brand or service, your cost to acquire and reengage them is much lower. Pair that with a generous referral program, social sharing and gamification, and you have a marketing flywheel capable of making a huge company.
The lesson: Just like the famous Dropbox referral program, Strava is using its product and existing users to get the app into the hands of millions of customers.
3. Doing display advertising right: Madison Reed
The first display ad ran in 1994. That was an AT&T ad on HotWired.com that read, “Have you ever clicked your mouse right here?” That scroll-stopping, revolutionary ad had a 44% click-through rate. Why? Because it was so different from anything people had seen before.
Not much has changed in 27 years. Display advertising is still, first and foremost, about having irresistible creativity. Madison Reed, an online-first hair coloring delivery service, is killing it with Facebook/Instagram ads because of a huge trove of creative assets it tests and iterates on. Check out its Facebook ad library. It has well over 200 unique creative assets running today, from user-generated testimonials to stop-motion animation to product laydowns and image carousels. Some ads run to e-commerce pages and others to fun hair color quizzes, free video consults and other email-capturing features.
None of the ads are of insanely high quality or expensive to make. Many of the units are customer testimonial video selfies with text overlaid. But Madison Reed is thoughtful about them — each ad tells a story, and the story continues when the user clicks the ad and arrives at the corresponding landing page. Plus, it uses best practices: Subjects look into the camera, music plays in ads and color contrasts are sharp. Madison Reed’s team knows what many do not: Creativity matters most in display advertising. It’s worth investing time and money in.
It’s clearly all working. Madison Reed’s revenue continued to explode during the pandemic and is north of $100 million.
The lesson: If you want to succeed in display advertising, you need lots of creative iterations. When in doubt, use Facebook’s ad library for inspiration.
4. Doing PR right: Glassdoor
Plenty of VCs and other talking heads have said that companies serially underinvest in PR.
I agree. With a constant barrage of ads, clickbait and scams, people are skeptical of everything on the internet. One of the only channels that stands alone in its objectivity is the press. PR has the power to generate conversation about your business in digital communities and on interactive online platforms. And if you’re lucky enough to get press, you will get backlinks, social media mentions and some brand equity — all of which helps with visibility and efficiency of marketing efforts.
Whoever came up with Glassdoor’s series “Best Places to Work” deserves some sort of award. Reach out to me and let me buy you a beer. There are several ways to get PR going, but this example is one of my favorites.
Glassdoor is a company-review and job-search website. Its Best Places to Work campaign was born in 2009, when Glassdoor published the highest-rated companies in several cities in the U.S. People loved seeing the most loved employers in their city, so it got a lot of buzz. And employees of those winning companies were thrilled to share their accolade on social media for a little humblebrag — garnering even more clicks for the campaign.
What’s more is that there’s a lot of search volume for “best places to work in X city.” So not only does Glassdoor get tons of traffic from this campaign, but its webpages get a whole heap of backlinks, which translates to high organic rankings for keywords in and around “best places to work.”
Glassdoor continues to run the Best Places to Work campaign to this day. So not only is it a great campaign, it’s repeatable, making it a dream of a PR strategy.
The lesson: Tell a story with your business’ proprietary data. You’re the only one with this information, and that makes it valuable. Even better if you can align your PR with an SEO strategy.
5. Doing LinkedIn ads right: Wheel
Wheel is a B2B health tech company leading an industry that thrived during the pandemic: telehealth. Its business is designed to provide everything companies and clinicians need to deliver health care virtually. Talk about selling pickaxes to gold miners.
One of the ways Wheel has been able to grow so rapidly is by utilizing new marketing channels to target its very specific audience. One of the newer ad platforms that has been working for Wheel is LinkedIn Conversation Ads.
LinkedIn built out a new ad offering that takes its old InMail sponsored messages to the next level. LinkedIn Conversation Ads are basically a Drift chatbot in your LinkedIn messages. You can send messages to your specific target audience offering a piece of gated content, registration to an upcoming webinar or simply to ask if they’re willing to take a demo of your software. It offers the recipient a choose-your-own-adventure path forward, and you’re able to test multiple messages and offerings in one message.
If you’re a B2B marketer and you’re not using LinkedIn Conversation Ads, you’re really missing out. It’s the cheapest way to reach your target audience with ads (less than $1 per send with open rates over 50%) and is still new enough that people aren’t annoyed by them and haven’t tuned them out yet.
Wheel was one of the first companies to utilize LinkedIn Conversation Ads to its full potential, and it has the receipts: Wheel recently grew its business by 300% year over year and announced $50 million Series B.
The lesson: Always test new acquisition channels when given the opportunity to spend. You never know when you’re going to stumble upon a new, cost-effective way to grow your business.
Take the inspiration
I’m not saying you should go out and copy anyone verbatim. Often it doesn’t work anyway because of the nuances of businesses and the growth tactics that best support them. But I am saying that we can all learn a lot by studying the best of the best. With over 57 million marketers worldwide, there’s a lot of great information out there.
The world is constantly evolving and what worked for your business yesterday may not work today. The bigger the library of tactics at your disposal, the better off you’ll be. Keep learning and enjoy your growth journey!
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