📰 26 Marketing Jokes to Tell at Your Next Meeting

What do you call a landing page with a high bounce rate?

TikTok Can Do More Than Drive Brand Awareness For starters, I wanted to know whether Destainville truly believes TikTok is a viable platform for generating leads. Because plenty of platforms are fantastic for brand awareness, but less powerful for lead-generation.

Fortunately, Destainville told me plenty of TikTok's audience currently uses the platform to connect with new businesses and discover new products. In fact, Millennial TikTok users are 1.7X more likely to discover/shop products from creators they follow (vs. non-TikTok users).

As he puts it, “Generating leads on Tiktok is an opportunity for businesses to drive that interaction with their new customers in a way that's really getting to the point where they can create that conversation, synchronize contacts and information from the user, and then engage in that conversation and drive to the sale.”

I‘ll admit — I've seen the power of B2C advertising on TikTok: Just last week I purchased a much-raved about face sunscreen after seeing videos about it popping up all over TikTok.

Ultimately, TikTok is a full-funnel advertising platform with built-in analytics tools to enable marketers to observe metrics like views, likes, comments, unique visitors, engagement, and reach.

Once the minimum viable product (MVP) was ready, Jonathon started to promote ESM. Since Elena had a growing customer list of photographers, Jonathon started by emailing them.

He also ran Facebook ads and included a referral program that incentivized ESM users to share it with friends and colleagues. Jonathon said, “I built a referral program into the ESM that would allow users to refer our platform to people they knew, and in return, they would get money.”

Although ESM was now a profitable business, Jonathon knew he had to continue improving it. One of the most important actions he took was creating a feedback tool so ESM users could share suggestions and constructive criticism. “Your users’ feedback is soooo important,” Jonathon said, “and I wanted the users of the ESM to know that they were heard.”

The feedback Jonathon gathered from users helped him to continually improve the product over the next few years as he gained coding experience.

ESM users also provided feedback on the product’s pricing. Many of them told Jonathon the price was too low, so he increased it to $15 per month and then eventually $29 per month (which was still cheaper than his competitors).

When I first started with cold outreach, I was overwhelmed by the sheer volume of tasks: sourcing contacts, drafting personalized emails, massaging data for contact files, orchestrating mail automation campaigns, AND ensuring they didn't end up in spam. Over time, I experimented with various tools, each with its pros and cons. In this post I'll describe the tools I've tried and the stack I'm currently using and introduce an open-source tool that I've built that we are now using for email delivery.

What's something immediately valuable I should know right now?

User generated content (UGC) is far and away performing better universally for almost everyone with a reasonably successful store. Although you could spend a tonne on professional video ads, don't. People are regularly disappointed by how much better UGC performs, since they spend so much more on that professional stuff. The more native to the platform you're using, the more likely it will be a successful ad.

When it comes to Facebook and Instagram, this means trying to get videos from people that have purchased your product before. You can repurpose all of your reviews (or Instagram influencer videos if you have any) for your ads, with permission of course.

Fundamentally, UGC works at all stages of the funnel.

Tweak your positioning to expand a more established category Sometimes startups have a great customer and product, but aren’t framing it in a way that resonates with their target audience. The Ironclad team learned a valuable early lesson here.

“We started out as an AI legal assistant. Our website and all of our messaging was around that. But 100% of the time I had to explain what an AI legal assistant was,” co-founder Jason Boehmig says. “We had a mailto:[email protected] email on our site, and we didn't get a lot of email, but I would still check it. And one day I got a message that said, ‘Hello, are you a CLM?’ It was just a one-liner. I was so close to hitting archive, but I looked at the domain and it was from someone at a publicly traded company. But what was a CLM?” he says.

Turns out it’s an AI legal assistant Contract Lifecycle Management platform that helps enterprise companies create and manage their legal contracts. “It's this old school software category. But by that definition, yes, we were a CLM. So of course I wrote back, ‘Yes, we are definitely a CLM, we would love to come demo our CLM for you,’” says Boehmig.

“But we realized that while we were really great at creating contracts, we hadn't put a lot of thought into how you deal with contracts afterward, which is the other half of contract lifecycle management. That functionality is called a repository in the CLM lexicon,” he says. “And so we had set up this demo with the legal team from this publicly traded company, and I turned to my co-founder Cai, and said, ‘By the way, we have three hours to build a repository.’ We took the train from San Francisco to San Jose and he built the first version of a repository, which we demoed live at the end of the train ride,” says Boehmig.

“This customer was in a CLM evaluation cycle that had 12 other CLMs solutions in it, but they loved the demo. So we went and actually built the full product, and we won, beating out all of these other CLMs. And after that, of course, we changed our messaging. We got serious about building CLM functionality and that's our flagship product to this day.”

Sometimes you’ve just got to build it and see what happens, following the lead of that one customer who helps you define the space that you're in. It was only by listening to a kind of random customer interaction that we stumbled upon the right positioning for Ironclad.