Demand Curve - The Growth Newsletter #095

The Growth Newsletter #095

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Welcome to the 730 founders and marketers who subscribed this week!

Happy Thanksgiving to all the Americans in the audience. May you enjoy turkey and football.

This week, we cover B2B lead hustling, birthday retargeting, mobile search UX, and AI writers.

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Together with Laika.

Building compliance from scratch is complex, time-consuming, and costly.

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In this guide, you’ll learn:

• What is SOC 2 compliance and why it matters for your startup
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Introducing: The Un-Ignorable Challenge 👑

We're completely re-imagining our popular Audience Building course. This time, in collaboration with buyer's psychology expert Katelyn Bourgoin.

Our last course empowered Amanda Natividad, Zain Kahn, Nathan Baugh, and many others to grow their audiences from 100 to 100,000+ in their first year.

Un-ignorable is a 21-day group challenge for marketers and founders. You’ll learn how to grow your audience by creating thumb-stoppingly good content. 

We won’t just tell you WHAT works. We’ll teach you WHY it works based on timeless psychology principles. And you’ll apply everything you learn with support from us and other smart marketers and founders.

The challenge starts on Jan 4, 2023.

Next Monday (Nov 28), we’re opening 50 early-bird spots for 50% off. 

Join the waitlist to be the first to hear when we go live.

1. Generate B2B leads with custom order proposals 

Insights from Neal O’Grady and Rob Fraser.

My friend, Rob, is the epitome of startup hustle. He translated his intensity from being a 5x Team Canada pro cyclist into bootstrapping a DTC brand called Outway.

At least once per week he custom designs socks for brands he loves. 

He then pings them publicly on Twitter with the design to prompt them to do a custom wholesale order for their team.

For example, here’s one he did for Canva:

It then led to the Canva team responding positively:

This tactic is an excellent way to:

1. Illustrate the value that the custom order provides. It makes it a lot more real.
2. Approach a brand without being annoying.
   
3. Get both employees and fans of the brand on board.
4. Get exposure in general, as engagement is quite high relative to his account size.
5. Get wholesale leads in the door.

2. Retarget customers with birthday wishes 🍰

Insight from Chris Walker.

Imagine it's your birthday and you're scrolling your Instagram feed (mine is mostly Aussie Shepherd videos). Suddenly you see a big image that says "Happy Birthday!"

It'd be a really delightful surprise. And as we said 2 weeks ago, delight leads to much greater customer loyalty. You're now more likely to buy from that brand in the future.

The tactic is: Run retargeting ads for people with upcoming birthdays.

Simply wish them a happy birthday in a creative way. You can offer something (e.g., “Your birthday’s coming up, here’s a coupon”), but you don’t need to.

The next time these prospects need your product, they’ll be more likely to choose you.

A warning: This is not a "performance" campaign. It's a brand-building campaign. It won’t drive tangible results overnight. In fact, ROI won’t be directly attributable.

However, this campaign will certainly build goodwill and customer rapport—which can lead to improved retention, repeat purchases, and brand affinity in the long run.

3. Add a fixed search bar to your mobile site 📱

Insight from AB Tasty and Smashing Magazine.

Mobile navigation is hard. Particularly on ecommerce shops with dozens of product categories spanning hundreds to thousands of products.

If it's not easy to find what you're looking for, you might bounce and never return again.

Therefore, try adding a fixed search bar to your mobile site.

An anchored search bar gives users an easy way to find what they're looking for.

Calvin Klein’s Hong Kong team tested this with great success.

They sell swimwear, underwear, and accessories to men, women, and children. It's dizzying.

A sticky search bar at the top of its homepage made it much easier for shoppers to find what they’re specifically looking for.

In fact, this change led to a 267% increase in search bar clicks and 19% jump in shoppers accessing the search results page versus simply having a search icon in the nav bar.

One word of caution in testing this function: try not to fill half their screen with sticky elements. Or else they won't be able to actually use the site.

4. Use AI to write content faster 🤖

Sponsored by AppSumo.

Let’s face it: consistently publishing SEO-friendly blog content is exhausting.

Want a tool that helps you write high-quality, long-form blog posts faster than ever? 

Bramework is an easy-to-use AI writer that helps bloggers, freelancers, and agencies save hours per blog post.

Grab AppSumo’s Black Friday Bramework deal (it’s a discount on top of the already discounted price!) until November 29th at noon CT. 

News and links

News you can use:

• TikTok released new audience insights tools. Head to the "Reporting" section of your Ads Manager to drill into age demographics and gender splits, category interests, interactions, and more. And as we teased last week, TikTok released their long-awaited Shop feature to select US merchants.
  
  

• Google just launched a slew of new features including AR shopping, a visual search feature for Google Maps called Live View, and a new way to discover local restaurants via Google Lens.
  
  

• LinkedIn came out with several new ad formats and marketing tools to support B2B brands' marketing efforts.

Newsletter we’re loving: Stacked Marketer

Marketers have a difficult job these days. Navigating constant changes with privacy, cookies, and software updates, as well as increasing ad costs and declining revenues. Luckily, help is at hand. 

Stacked Marketer is a daily newsletter packed with breaking news, useful advice, and insights for all major marketing channels. It's free and can be read while you drink your morning coffee.

Sign up now to get it.

Top new marketing jobs

If you're looking for a top growth role, check out the opportunities below from our job board.

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From @tomfishburne

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Who's Demand Curve?

We’re on a mission to help make it easier to start, build, and grow companies.

We think a lot of marketing content out there is outdated, fluffy, or scammy. We share high-quality, vetted, and actionable growth content as we learn it from the top 1% of marketers.

How we can help you grow:

• Read our free playbooks, blog articles, and teardowns—we break down the strategies and tactics that fast-growing startups use to grow.
• Enroll in the Growth Program, our marketing course that has helped 1,000+ founders get traction and scale revenue.
• Hire our agency, Bell Curve, and we'll grow your startup for you.

• Engage with our audience by sponsoring Demand Curve.

See you next week.

— Neal, Grace, Joyce, Dennis, and the DC team.

Neal O'Grady

Grace Parazzoli

Joyce Chou

Dennis Buckley