Demand Curve - The Growth Newsletter #114

The Growth Newsletter #114

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Hello everyone!

This weekend, we were all bombarded by clever April Fools' campaigns. Did any of them legitimately trick you, or at least make you laugh? Would love to see them if so.

In this issue, we cover the Pixar storytelling framework, getting quoted, and 5 metrics for brand performance.

As always, if you don’t find this valuable, you can unsubscribe at the bottom of this email.

–Neal

Together with impact.com

In 2023, people trust people, not brands.

As a result, influencers have become one of the best channels to drive conversions and deepen relationships with your audience.

IF you’re doing it right. 

Like all paid marketing, it's really easy to waste money if you don't do it right.

Check out impact.com's “Managing 4 Types of Influencers” ebook. They take you through the ins and outs of:

• The four categories of influencers
• How to scale campaigns with micro-influencers
• The best ways to manage each type of influencer

Download the ebook here

Want to get in front of founders/marketers? Here's what you need to know (booking into May).

1. Use the Pixar storytelling framework

Insight from Tyler Fyfe.

The team at Pixar uses a simple framework to help develop their story lines:

Once upon a time, ___________________. Every day, ___________________. Until one day, ___________________. Because of that, ___________________. Because of that, ___________________. Until finally, ___________________.

Let's use our Un-ignorable Challenge as an example:

1. Once upon a time, Alice, a founder of a creative agency, was on top of the world.
2. Every day, she'd do sales calls for inbound leads and crush her client work.
3. Until one day, a recession hit and cut inbound leads by 2/3rds.
4. Because of that, she needed to increase leads, or else she'd have to lay off staff.
5. Because of that, Alice started posting on LinkedIn and Twitter. Most of her posts flopped—but a few did well and brought in leads, but she had a tough time running a business and creating good content consistently.
6. Until finally, she joined the Un-ignorable Challenge to learn how to systematically create content that resonates with her audience.

The result: She's increased lead volume and humanized her brand by becoming the face of her agency. She's made interesting and valuable friendships and partnerships.

This framework explains the value of your product. It helps you think through the exact person you're helping and problem you're solving.

Try it out for your brand!

And if this story resonates with you, enrollment is open for the Un-Ignorable Challenge!

From April 6th to May 5th, buyer's psychology expert Katelyn Bourgoin and I will be teaching founders and creators how to build an audience of future buyers. And how to get into a publishing habit and stick to it. 

Enroll today. Enrollment closes tomorrow at midnight Pacific Time.

2. How to get quoted in top publications

Insight from Nothing Held Back.

Links from high-authority domains continue to be a positive signal to Google. So getting a quote and link back to your site in a Reuters article can have a positive impact on your SEO.

A good way to get quotes and links used to be HARO, the marketplace where reporters get questions answered in exchange for quotes. Unfortunately, HARO has become inundated with spammy link builders.

So reporters often turn to other channels (like Twitter & LinkedIn) to gather quotes.

Here's a strategy to connect with reporters directly (and for free):

1. Create a list of journalists. Study the top publications in your niche, and check out their employees' portfolios on LinkedIn. 
2. Send personalized messages to them. Ask a question, or give a compliment related to a recent article. Do not pitch your expertise. The goal is to start a conversation. 
   1. Either DM them on Twitter/LinkedIn or email them. (If their email addresses aren't public, you can try using tools like Hunter or Voila Norbert to find them.)
3. If they respond (some won't), send a reply that:

   1. Thanks them for their time.

   2. Gives a brief summary of who you are and your qualifications. Things that make you seem like a baller.

   3. Mentions that you’d love to act as a source for future articles if that would be helpful. Include your phone number and email address.

4. Be responsive. Reporters need to publish things quickly, so you'll need to act fast if they follow up.

This strategy requires some sweat equity—but it is free. You can also hire a VA to do the manual parts.

3. 5 metrics to track brand performance

Insight from Grace (DC). Chart from The Long and the Short of It via Thinking Unstuck.

Most startups ignore branding. It keeps getting punted because, frankly, other things seem more important.

Things like: quick-win ad campaigns and social posts. Things you can point at and say, "Look at all the clicks/views this got."

The problem with that thinking is that, while you might get short-term sales activation, without a brand strategy, you’ll miss out on long-term sales growth.

Besides thinking brand strategy isn’t urgent, people put it off because they think it's not attributable.

That’s the performance-marketing mentality: If I can’t measure it, I don’t need it.

Yes, brand is harder to measure than email open rates and sales. But there are metrics you can use to gauge the success of your brand strategy.

Here are five that we think are solid indicators of brand performance:

• Branded keyword search volume: If, before doing any brand work, you had ~100/month Google searches for your brand name, and all of a sudden you've got 1000s, then your brand work is paying off.
• Organic social mentions: If people are shouting you out or recommending you, that's a pretty good sign that you're building brand awareness.
• Click-through rates: An improvement in CTRs could mean that people are already more familiar with your brand—and more likely to click through on an ad by you.
• Sales timeline (for B2B): If people are already aware of your company when they come to you, you should have a tighter sales cycle from first contact to close.
• Conversion rates: As your brand builds trust and affinity, it'll be easier to convert more of the people who come across your products.

Track those five metrics for clearer brand attribution. And if you can improve those, you'll improve your CAC and CPA as well ;)

News and links

News you can use:

• Google has announced the launch of their Ads Transparency Center, where you can look up an advertiser to see the ads they’ve run, the regions they’ve run them in, when, and in what formats. While the purpose of this tool is to give users a clearer picture of who’s advertising to them, a bonus outcome for marketers is a new space for competitor research and campaign brainstorming.
• Microsoft confirmed that they’re “exploring new opportunities” for Bing ad experiences—including in-chat—which could mean an additional high-leverage channel for marketers to pursue. The Bing team is also considering ways to drive traffic and revenue for publishers, such as ad-revenue sharing options for “partners whose content contributed to the chat response.”
• There’s just so much happening with Twitter lately, including confusion around verified accounts, the release of their algo for tweet-ranking on GitHub, and … a new logo?

AI tool we recommend: Content at Scale

AI has already completely revolutionized how we create content. But honestly, ChatGPT is not good at long-form content.

With Content at Scale, in just five minutes, you can generate high-quality, engaging, research-backed 2,500-word-plus articles.

Their AI immediately crawls Google and parses all the top-ranking content. It then uses this to create entire long-form SEO blog posts in a few minutes. An experienced writer can generate and edit up to 10 long-form pieces of content in just one day.

Try it out →

*Sponsored by Content at Scale

Top new marketing jobs

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

Something fun

From @0xgaut

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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 share high-quality, vetted, and actionable growth content as we learn it from the top 1% of marketers. We democratize senior growth knowledge.

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.

• Check out our Sprints: short video courses that are laser-focused on a topic in growth.

• Want to build an audience of buyers? Join the waitlist for the Un-Ignorable Challenge.

• Are you a funded startup looking to grow? Our agency, Bell Curve, can be your strategic growth partner.

• Get your brand in front of our audience by sponsoring this newsletter.

See you next week.

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

Neal O'Grady

Grace Parazzoli

Joyce Chou

Dennis Buckley