Six quick practises learned from growth hacking to boost any demand-generation operation

Ville Murtojärvi, Head of digital marketing & creative content at ID Luxus (BBN Finland), shares how their agency is lucky enough to do both growth marketing and more traditional demand generation marketing. That gives them a great chance to pilfer best practices and break silos in both worlds.


Some practices that we have adopted from the growth-marketing side are a must for any modern demand gen operation that wants to streamline and make everything a little bit more data-driven. Here’s a list of my favourite tactics, along with some handy online tools.

 

1 . Experiments

Optimizing part of the campaign with a quick, planned, and recorded experiment – this can be as simple as changing the text in a CTA, testing AI-assisted content creation, or tyring out a new channel with an MVP test. The important thing is that it’s planned, measured, and can be declared a Win or a Fail once the experiment concludes. The best thing is that you don’t necessarily have to come up with the experiment yourself. There are hundreds of them already detailed in communities if you need inspiration, for example, GrowthList.

2. Validating your buyer personas to improve targeting

We are never going to go back to just using whatever targeting options a platform gives us, or simply choosing a channel based on its own targeting parameters. Not when we can so easily get online data to filter the channel mix, targeting options and even the type of content that will resonate with a certain audience on a given topic. Platforms like Audiense are super helpful there. You can even get data from real people’s behavioural patterns to use in your psycho-profiles without interviews or surveys or any of that time-consuming old-school methodology. Here’s how – first find the real-life examples of your personas with RecruitEm and then check them with Crystal. Remember to show your clients their profiles. It’s always a good conversation starter.

 

3. Warming up audiences in their preferred channels with ad funnels

This started out as an experiment for us – using ad funnels throughout the whole top funnel. It has now become a standard part of our new demand-generation operations. The length of the funnel depends on the available budget, the practice is great for improving lead quality, too. When they have shown interest and engaged before you even offer them the gated content, you know they are more ready to commit.

Also, LinkedIn recently provided the ability to create new audiences from those who have engaged with still-image ads as well as videos. This means there is more variety in funnel creation now too, as it doesn’t have to always start with a video.

 

4. Comparing against competitors

It’s good to get clarity on the marketing landscape before planning your own or your client’s actions. Gain some insight into what channels work for them. Use tools such as SEMrush, SimilarWeb, and FB Ad library to begin, and here’s a tip for LinkedIn – see all your competitor’s ads by navigating to their page, and then click the Posts/Ads tab. You can get some nice insights in under an hour by using the various tools.

 

5. Testing your content with online audiences.

Before you go live, it is worth asking what audiences think of your content. Doing so is quick, easy and doesn’t even cost much. There are preference tests, design surveys, first-click tests and other ways to get feedback on images, videos and audio. UsabilityHub is my favourite place to test any idea’s comprehensibility – with a 5-second test asking a simple question about it – fail the test and you know for sure that your idea needs honing.

And finally…

6. creating content with AI assistance

Equipped with deep learning algorithms, AI is getting to be very helpful in many hands-on aspects, immediately usable in, for example, text creation (which has been a possibility for some time now) but now also in audio and video editing.

I asked CopyAI, an AI tool, for help with this blog post and it gave me the topic and the name. Try it yourself if you suffer from writer’s block. In theory, it could have written the whole blog, but that feature was still very lacking, so I had to sweat a little and do the job myself. I also used AI to analyse my headline and got a score of 71 out of 100 – above average was the verdict. I got suggestions on how to improve, like limiting my passive language or adding a brand, but chose not to use them. Instead, I am passing the link to you so you can read more about it here and test your own: Headline Analyzer.

The audio and video editing bits are where it gets truly interesting: had I chosen to do this post as a Vlog or a Podcast instead of a blog post, I could have done quite a few things with AI – starting with a quick AI-assisted transcription of the recording into a written post and then, if I noticed any mistakes in the script, fixing my spoken words on the recording by editing the transcript, and then letting the deep fake algorithm do the editing. This is essentially doing editing by typing up what needs to be changed. That could have been done for example with a software called Descript. Worth taking a look!

I hope you find these helpful in your demand gen operations. I can’t wait to see what we can do in 2023!

 

About the author

Ville has worked in the B2B sector as an Art Director for over a decade. He excels at digital marketing and is fluent in marketing automation. Ville puts great effort into making sure he fully understands the client’s business and uses his unique insight to help his team build compelling creative concepts for the digital space.

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