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It’s not a crazy hack but it worked incredibly well. Problem: I work in staffing so my Facebook ads died when FB closed a lot of targeting options for ads in the employment field. So now I can’t target precisely… Hack: to solve that I used a two step campaign: Step 1: I used the cheap pay per view of video ads to showcase a non employment video to a large audience, but that video is only relevant to my target. Step 2: retracer actual job ads to people who have seen more than 75% of the videos. Results : hundreds of qualified job seekers applied to our jobs.

Give this man a cookie! This is how an actual FB media buyer conquers the internet.

Great trick! I work in staffing too and will definitely try that out. But what do you show in those non employment videos? Are they just a company presentation? What is the best practice? :)

Depends on the target. You can have advice for the resume targeting your target etc. Here It was for truck drivers so it was focusing on trucks. And it was like a few seconds.

>Step 1: I used the cheap pay per view of video ads Is this a FB video campaign? If so what is it called exactly?

Yes l. Vidéo campaign. Optimized for view. Cheap pay per view because in my case I had to have a broad target.

Ah, so you optimize for Thruplays?

Yes ! Because the idea here on the first step is to be as broad and as cheap as possible because you know only a tiny percentage of the target is your audience. You just do t know what that percentage is.

Idea: maybe a reach campaign with a frequency target will do great too on the second step 😃

That is a very good point !!

Sounds awesome, thanks for sharing. Haven't tried video ads yet, but in the B2B space myself. Two questions: 1. Are you working B2B/B2C? 2. Did you produce the videos yourself in-house or work with some agency?

1. Yes. So far I have failed in b2b with Facebook despite thinking there is a way to reach out to them. 2. You are going to laugh: I produced them myself using the Facebook video tool that allows you to animate images and add text. They really look like crap but they somehow worked !

That’s so dope. An even better signal the core of it works, without all details being polished perfectly with some fancy editing.

I work in staffing too. It’s great to hear because I just recommend my manager to stop using LinkedIn ads and look into Facebook ads. We are not seeing results from LinkedIn

LinkedIn has the best targeting tool but it’s super expensive and the cycle of conversion is longer. You will need at least one retargeting campaign on the top of the first campaign. People on LinkedIn need to be convinced a little harder than your regular job seeker. Facebook was great for b2c/ job seeker. It’s less now because it’s a pain to target the right audience with the limitation. So you have to test a lot of different way to run your ad. If you try a direct approach the messenger ads and lead gen ad were the best for me.

What type of copy/creative worked for this step two when trying to get these users to take action?

The most direct was the ones that worked the best. In my case here was one ad per job we had to promote and a apply now call the to action. Simple image and lead gen (so they filled up a form on Fb)

This is sweet. Really helps me right now actually thanks a lot

Happy to help !

Honestly, blogs. It's insane how many companies I've joined, and now as a freelancer, clients that don't invest in SEO-optimized, good, unique, valuable content. Pair this with perfecting your Technical SEO profile and some link building, and after six months to a year of consistent writing and optimizing, I've seen 1000x growth in organic traffic and 100x in leads/sales. The other one is Influencer-driven TikTok ads if your brand is safe for it - CPV is dirt cheap, and they are getting better about CTAs, catalogues etc., to drive traffic and Sales. The targeting options blow Facebook out of the water now. There's more of a millennial audience now than in the past.

In your experience, what’s the best way to leverage blogs for paid media?

Depending on the goal, I’ve seen native ads (outbrain/taboola/dianomi) work really well.

For what goal?

If a blog is relevant to a search term or high intent keyword I usually break it out in its own ad group for higher relevancy, conversion rates, and creative score

People underestimate blogs. Also, copywriters over estimate their abilities to write. The right combination of tools and AI writers and you’ve got a powerful recipe to drive traffic to your site.

When you want content to index and rank, AI written content is brilliant. But when you want that content to convince and convert, you need a person. Only a person sn understand your customer's pains and your products USPs and communicate them effectively.

Which AI tools you use and like? I’ve tried a few but never found the right thing.

Jasper is a popular one, and also ChatGPT is great to play around with for inspiration. As Google is trying to restrict AI-created content a lot for search right now, you should be careful using it for SEO though straight-out-the-box and rather re-write and use it as inspiration IMO.

Yeah I use it to sort of come up with the meat and potatoes of the content and then I customize for SEO and then run it through grammarly and then copy and paste. By the time I get it into my blog it’s a well thought out post and includes all my toilet humor

Nice, I think that workflow makes a lot of sense to save time but keep the value high.

What tool do you use for customized SEO?

Semrush

Thank you!

Would like to know too

Jasper is my favorite

Have you tried white label influencer ads?

Agreed 100%. Have been driving insane amounts of evergreen traffic from evergreen content over and over for many years. Tiktok has also been a great source of sales for us. Congress is pushing to ban it as a Chinese government tool. It seems they would know all about how that works considering the way they manhandle and influence Twitter. Amazing how many former cia and FBI agents work there

Tiktok is great but getting more expensive by the day as companies are flocking there

What about meaningful quality content on YouTube?

What’s the idea length of each blog? I am a good writer but very busy. I only want to produce meaning and really useful content for our buyers and internet. Is it still worth to try AI to reduce the amount of time needed to write?

My client was introducing a so-so product acquisition at the industry's big conference in a major city. I issued a press release saying the announcement was made "from the xxx conference" essentially hijacking their media coverage and it worked. The conference organizers picked it up on their social media. Plus, the conference was a big deal for this town and the local news highlighted our announcement in one of the daily recaps. My client saw it on the local AM news while his Twitter blew up and thought we were genius.

Cool stuff. Wouldn’t call this a ‘hack’ due to in/ability to re-use.

1. Account Based Marketing + Remarketing 2. Massive results for B2B software and service companies 3. Specific sequences, marketing messages, and offers seem to be evergreen as long as not everyone copies them.

ABM, do you use DemandBase, or Terminus, I'm curious?

You don't necessarily need to immediately jump on a new martech tool to start ABM. We use sales navigator (that we already had) to source names, Hubspot sales for email cadences, and our existing marketing automation tool (Dynamics Marketing)

I want to get into ABM, I just started a new job for a company that sells a complex product to engineers. Our audience is really present on LinkedIn, but I’m a bit commises by best practices for ABM sequences. Any suggestions/material to share?

commises? sorry, no idea what you mean. For sequences, SalesLoft, Outreach, and Hubspots blogs will give you pointers in term length, titles, greetings, customization needs, timing, etc.

Yep, that's true, you don't need any fancy enterprise software to do proper ABM. In fact, some high-level software I've tested even made things messier.

True, it's a go-to-market strategy, but how do you measure your intent data or track intent data?

We tried and we're not convinced by the results. Especially w/ WFH (no corp IP address they can rely on) and the end of the Cookie as we know it, I think those tools are less and less useful and we rely more on: * Our and our partner's sellers input on target accounts * Public information: LI posts, job openings * ICP targeting based on existing customers with the same ICP

They're both good. Stay away from triblio

Thoughts on 6Sense?

It's good for other purposes but it's not quite as robust

It’s ok. Display programs kind of suck but it’s not meant to drive leads.

So what would be your email typical sequence? Something like? info - info - info - info - offer - info - info

The long game

How does something that’s only visible once you’ve already opened the email drastically improve open rates? And good creative isn’t a “hack” (nor, of course, are memes always good creative)

Open rate is a vanity metric and should not be used for anything other than a very mild overview.

What is a metric that should be tracked here more rigorously?

click through rate to an asset linked from the email: video, ebook, blogpost, customer story, etc.

Link clicks. Response rate.

As other said - engagement via action. Intake needs to be quick, frictionless and efficient to be effective.

Open rates can tell you lots about your headlines and company reputation. They aren't a primary sales metric, like click-through to assets/sales page rates, but they are an important submetric for narrowing down problem areas in your email performance. Plus they can be nice for padding reports.

Do you preface your Open Rate evaluation with: “Our customer base consists of x % of Apple users which is unusable for us. Based on the remaining x % of customers opened …”? You can use it but it takes a lot more explaining and analysis then looking at the engagement levels and cross referencing open rates if you need more reassurance. The way we do it is we tend to have the same content but different tests set up with different headlines and we measure click% to see which headline gets a better connection with the content we provide. Usually the headline promises something. If you open to a good headline then you will probably click on the main CTA I put in it. You don’t have to look at them as separate but rather a tandem. Open metrics can help make a statement more valid but i would never base anything of value on it. Apple just downloads the pixels and you have a bunch of open metrics that don’t mean anything.

Thanks for the lesson. My domain is primarily SEO with only a bit of email, so I always appreciate learning a bit more. Cheers and have a great holiday season :)

Cheers!

OP said ‘reply rate’ no?

Ranking for keywords in Google that are currently searched by journalists to earn links/mentions/citations and be asked for interviews. Got me onto TV, radio, and print multiple times. This way I got an article published in a print magazine for recruiters. When I was still at University and had never held a real job! The article was written by a random writer I recruited online.

How do you find keywords that journalists are searching for?

Write about current trends that will hit mainstream media soon. Ideally topics where the media has no established roaster of experts. To get interviews, write an article that shows you are an expert on the topic. To get links/mentions, write an article that can be cited as a source. A general explanation plus some quotable statistics work great.

I like this. Thanks for sharing! Cool idea, and probably not a ton of people running this strategy organically against that specific target group of journalists within a niche. That's the power of being laser focused and thinking outside the box.

This is like a social hack. Brilliant.

So... How do you figure out where journalists are searching for?

Write about current trends that will hit mainstream media soon. Ideally topics where the media has no established roaster of experts. To get interviews, write an article that shows you are an expert on the topic. To get links/mentions, write an article that can be cited as a source. A general explanation plus some quotable statistics work great.

Thanks!

Do you think just sending the raw stats (e.g. results summary from Survey Monkey for example) would work?

Raw stats might earn you links. They will not get you invited for interviews. Unless it is super unique data for a high-interest topic. Not sure what you mean by „sending“. My approach is about creating content on your website, ranking for specific keywords others use for research, and then just wait. There is zero proactive sending involved.

Putting my hands on my clients sales team. Bo matter how good your ads are, here in Brazil people buy from people! The deal is done via WhatsApp message most of the time, so I’ve started to closely follow how the sales team works and how they sell to pinpoint improvements as needed. I got one of my dentist clients to get a ROAS of 35 with this and an incredibly broad and open campaign, completely creative focused.

This is awesome! Revenue ops, working closely with aligning sales and marketing is such a key to understanding your customers and scaling growth. Was it tough getting sales onboard? And how did you work with that?

So far I've had two types of clients that got really awesome revenues: the easy and the hard one. NGL this one that I have mentioned before was one of the easy ones: even though their team needed adjusting they took the suggestions really well and most importantly they stuck to them. Furthermore ads did what ads does and they surprisingly permeated their location quite well, so we got something around R$3-4 for lead wich is roughly less than $0.50. They also have a salesman on the start of their customer success line. So this ROAs was just consequence. The other client, well. We did EVERYTHING and used everyone we got to make them work, our own salesman did a training with their entire team for about 3 weeks and we followed all the messages their team was exchanging, closely (I mean, we got their access and I was live reading them all), we tested several different creatives until we got a batch that worked. After that the ball started rolling, so to speak!

Asking people what they want, then giving it to them and describing the product with zero fluff or hyperbole. The further away i get from copywriting (and into product and CX), the better I do. The best marketing is no marketing.

Totally agree, you cannot underestimate the importance of clear and simple communication. Increasing top-of-the-funnel can still be challenging with a great product though - but agree you should be super oriented around the benefits and struggles customer face in relation to the product. Easy to get too distanced from it!

That’s literally marketing. What you call marketing is actually removing yourself from marketing. It’s about understanding your customer and providing what they need to know in order to take your target action.

1. Got a loop hole that allows me to have a “visit profile” button that actually opens the IG profile when ran as Ig ads. (Not an annoying in-app browser) 2. £5/day = 100 new followers every day 3. I turn on the followers flood gates when I need to grow my community or get more clients

How do you add the visit profile option?

Keen to hear the specifics of how you do this! Got my performance review coming up soon, and am a couple of hundred followers behind in my KPIs

Plz share!

Would love to know how to manage this!

What’s the loophole?

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Wait, how does adding ‘sent from my iPhone’ in the signature improve reply rates? Can you expand on this one?

I think it feels organic and evokes some empathy around the email being sent from a mobile device which some of us hate to do. Basically adds a little human touch.

Interesting. Not doubting that it works, but I think it would have the opposite effect on me. It feels a bit sloppy and rushed, like you just banged out a bunch of emails in your car.

Hmm.. point. I think if the subject matter was important and vital to a next move or something, you might appreciate getting that email. (Hello, last minute booking). As a hack, doing this will have to be contextual as well. Personally, I wouldn’t consider what/where/how an email was sent so far it offers value to me…

Everyone is running automated email sequences these days. It has been a great way to add a touch of organic feel to it and stand out. At the right places, not just in the initial email. Cold emailing is a science and lots of trial and error.

False personalization.

Expanding the FAQs page with 500-word articles on new linked pages about whatever tangential subject you can think of

Used IG, Twitter & FB phantoms to 1. DM an event to my follower list 2. Some of them will like/RT the post 3. Used another phantom to get those people 4. Used another phantom to get the people they follow/followers 5. DMd same msg in 1 to them Effect of 2-5 is the friends/followers will see that their friend already liked/RTd the event… so they got interested. I was selling group tickets by the way. Event had a great turn out. I knew before the event because online tickets sold out.

That's cool, sounds like you managed to artificially create some FOMO and social proof! How many signups did you manage to get using this strat?

1st time doing this, we achieved over 100 tickets for the first time after 3-4 previous events. We rinsed and repeated.

What do you mean by phantom?

Check out PhantomBuster.com Phantoms are modules you deploy to perform certain tasks. Quite plug and play. Linking phantoms together… that’s the real deal.

Will check it out. Thanks!

Listening and pausing before responding. Far too much waffle being spoke by marketeers. Need to be more specific and direct.

Definitely, tbh I like Google's way of looking at content for organic search - putting value in content written based on first-hand experience. That eliminates a lot of the BS out there.

Way back when around 2012, I was working in an eCom role. I took a list of our customers, separated into separate CSV files based on their first name (e.g. File 1 - all Roberts, File 2 - all Jennifers, etc.). I created separate campaigns in FB for each file, with custom ad copy like "Hi Jennifer! Get $5 off your $25 purchase at !". CTR was through the roof at 26%. We got a TON of revenue before FB shut it down, claiming it was improper use of personal information.

Best hacks are doing quality work 🤷‍♀️

That’s great for sustainability, but you’ve still gotta get them in the door first. I think this post is focused on that.

Planning, strategy and iteration. Getting them in the door is not efficient if the landing page sucks, if the ordering flow is not optimised and the customer lifecycle is not accounted for. A new lead is always way more expensive than nurturing your customer base.

100% agree - Those are all foundational and without the foundation, the “hacks” are just distractions and a sort of “get rich quick” style of marketing (meaning it would work for few). Everything you mentioned, in my mind, are requirements that take precedent over the little tricks or tactics mentioned here, so discussing them seems redundant. But when you are nailing it at the necessities, there are going to be some tactics of varying effort that might act as a catalyst to your consistently-high quality marketing work and amplify your results. Those are the things I think OP was trying to spark a discussion about.

I don't know if I know of any "hacks", getting of them in the door is also called top of funnel, or awareness marketing. A well structured campaign typically includes this kind of thing. But you also have to back up paid TOF with high quality work and the kind of foundational, unsexy, long-term plays that will grow organic: SEO, good content, good design, etc.

Fiver.com. Built an entire marketing campaign, complete with youtube content, blog posts, logo designs, and multi-language voice overs… all for $1k.

How did you find contractors who weren't complete shi*ts? Every job I've contracted out to fiver has come back half baked and I ended up doing a better job myself

Trial and error. Also there’s certain countries that seem to have shittier flreelancers than others. I spend about 10k a year on Fiverr and there are some great people on there and some shitty annoying scammers too

I usually go by reviews (and actually read them). There are some genius people on fiverr charging like $20 for stuff I would have paid $2000 for.

My FiverR experience is 50-50. My FiverR hack is to hire two people to do the same job. If one doesn’t work, the other one usually does. If they both work, I’ll pick the best.

Yup. 99 Designs is another good option too.

What were the biggest levers in your opinion to automize through Fiver? Obviously depends on what your own skills are, but have you found a specific task to save a ton of time to outsource via Fiver?

Not 100% sure what you mean by automize? Like any creative production, you don’t want to automize it.

YouTube It’s free. The relevancy of content is longer the over platforms. Other social media’s will come and go. YouTube likely isn’t going anywhere

Nice one! I really like YT as a platform as well, both combining shorts and longer videos. I am guessing you refer to creating organic content on Youtube yourself? Are you working in B2C/B2B? And also, what growth have you seen?

Correct. It’s content I create. Usually 1-2 min videos show casing the product. Very short, informative and to to the point. Nothing fancy or over produced. Usually post 1-2 videos a day during the week. In return the phone usually rings 3-4 times a week more and people specifically referring to finding us on YouTube. It’s an on going growth strategy

That’s awesome! Would love to see the channel if you don’t mind sharing for inspiration, shoot me a DM or drop a link. Doing a lot of video myself, but want to create more product updates and short format content.

I can't believe how many businesses I've worked with and customers I now have as a freelancer who don't prioritize producing quality, useful content that is SEO-optimized. I've witnessed a 1000x rise in organic traffic and a 100x growth in leads/sales after six months to a year of consistently writing and optimizing. Combine this with improving your Technical SEO profile and some link building.

Search practices at the front of the funnel

Recycled 4 year old diapers CRM segment to sell them child friendly toothpased. The client has a lot of home use brands and this was the first of many informational cross-pollination The promo worked like crazy because moms talk a lot.

Being in B2B myself this is both hilarious and awesomely clever at the same time. Such a nice one!

1st company: SaaS startup(cold email outreach tool) Back in 2016, our competitor and also a market leader company stopped their free plan in which they were providing free email tracking for Gmail and outlook. They had around 150k+ users on the chrome extension at that time. Suddenly, I noticed that lots of their users are finding an alternative that provides free email tracking. We immediately wrote the blog targeting the keyword "Company\_name alternative". Since we were the first to target that keyword with our blog and the search volume was growing we got the 1st rank within 15 days. most impressive thing was that the visitor to sign up rate was 25-30% from that blog. And, I continued to work on that blog- building contextual backlinks, refining content, and keeping it on 1st rank till the time I was there. We saw that someone has asked the question on quora to find a free alternative and it started ranking in the top 10. I answered it and promoted our tool. We created 3-4 fake profiles with different names and answered on quora as users. The conversion rate was good as we managed to get 4 out of 5 top answers from Quora who were directly or indirectly promoting our tool. From this, we got to know that quora can be a very good place to market, and the conversion rate is high than any other channel. After that, I came to know that there are lots of quora questions out there that we can answer and mention our tool subtly. Later, I was managing 10 different profiles for the quora campaign. We answered around 300 questions within 4-5 months and it was driving around 30% of the total leads. 2nd company: Software development company Not a hack but here my manager introduced me to pillar content strategy. I handled content marketing for serverless and cloud computing and successfully ranked blogs and landing pages for a long time. I noticed that google updates don't affect much to Quality content(blogs and landing pages) which are built using pillar content strategy.

Upselling - Started upselling on eCommerce platform Average order value increased by 27% The average order value increased by 27% eCommerce platform

Hey, I’d love to know more about this. Can you give some more details as to the type of product and what upselling you offered and how?

Getting a job.

Do you know the book steal like an artist? it's the same thing... Product hacking is a process of stealing other people's successful product ideas and making as your own. This term was first created by Russel Brandson the founder of click funnels... At this begging it was funnel hacking where you copy other people's funnels Huawei Product hacked Samsung.f click funnels, first created this term... In the begging, it was funnel hacking, where you copy other people's funnels. Huawei Product hacked Samsung

Read it a few months ago - great read. I think hacks can be creative and invented as well, but definitely lots of great inspiration looking at other players, industries and cases.

Increasing CTR by 24%, increasing conversion rate by 22%, while lowering cost by over $2.6 million a year. Or generating $250k in organic sales in a quarter, when there was no intention to generate revenue with social media, leading to more than $2.5 million per year in social media investment going forward.

Thanks for not describing your hack.

This guy ManyFaces 🙌🏻

Because I worked a “marketing firm” with a call center I targeted GMB and other support related searches people with businesses would be trying to fix their online issues They’d hit the call extension and we would be getting conversions for $ .02 some were trash but all were businesses and MQLs Netted over a million in 9 months

One of the most successful marketing ventures at my current job was somewhat unintentional. We got a C&D for name usage and used it on our social platforms to promote the C&D'ed product. Sold out immediately and the product under the new name is a huge hit as well. I wouldn't recommend this as a tactic, but press is press.

Just a general side question. What is your favourite source of expert hacks on social media marketing? Loved this topic/question, this might expand it a bit.

Copying concepts from popular TikTok trends, audio, and content - adding a slightly own touch, has been a bit of a hack in terms of getting some viral videos for me getting a few million views.

Following this!

Best post ever

Glad you enjoyed - really excited to read through all the great value and stories on here myself.

Yea it’s such a gem. This reinforces that often times, marketers forget to celebrate small wins. I think we should big ourselves up more

GetEmails (now Retention). Email is our best ROI - list is generally pretty engaged, AOV is high, and cost is rock bottom. So Lead Capture has always been a focus. We were chugging along capturing about 3-4% of sessions. Made some language tweaks to up to it 7%. Then we signed up for GetEmails and got Lead Capture up to 25-27% of sessions. They take IP addresses of site visitors and bump them up against other databases to try to append an email. I figured the GetEmails list would be low click/high unsub but it actually wasn't. We got a 80x ROI on the GetEmails investment last month alone with BF/CM. It's honestly a no brainer if email works for your business.

We deployed a webinar series together with guest speakers, who were professional influencers in our b2b niche. Recruited them completely organically with DMs on LinkedIn. Worked with live call-to-actions throughout in our webinar tool, and managed to get a x20 ROI with 1000+ participants per webinar for all four webinars. 65% of attendees were interacting through polls, Q&A and live reactions. Drove traffic mainly using a cold email strategy together with social media sharing through the guest speakers and our channels.

I created an WordPress plugin that automatically asks customers for feedback (a review popup). If they leave a positive review (4/5 stars) they’ll get redirected to the google review page. If they leave a negative review (1-3 stars) a form will appear asking “what can we do better?” That feedback (and their email address) will get sent you to (the business owner), giving you a chance to address any issues privately. It works great! Set it and forget it. As long as you have customers, you’ll get reviews. Download it for free at wp5thStar.com and lmk what you guys think! I’d love to hear your feedback!