To understand the importance of product-market fit, we must first discuss why most product ideas fail. Whether it be from a lack of market understanding, failure to listen to target customers, or, most common of all, lack of product individuality, startup teams continue to repeat the same mistakes. The startup ideas that survive are born from learning from the failures of others.

What does it mean to achieve product-market fit?

Product-market fit means creating a profitable product that keeps individual users coming back. Whether or not a product is able to encourage ongoing use is often an early indicator of long-term business success. It involves defining the product’s positioning and expressing the product’s value throughout the user journey in a way that solves a unique need for the end buyer persona(s). The product needs to solve this need quicker, easier, and better than any other competitors in the market to be worth investing in.

The conversation around how to achieve product-market fit is coming up more frequently and much sooner than ever before across industries. Increasing competition, changing consumer behavior, shorter attention spans, and rapid innovation cycles make reaching product-market fit increasingly important.

How do you find product-market fit?

Finding product-market fit means being strategic vs. all-encompassing in a brand’s approach to gaining users. This can be broken down into 3 segments:

1. Determine your target audience

For a product to scale, identifying the ideal customer means adopting a tactical, methodological approach to market research. Through this research, a brand must understand potential user needs, pain points, and preferences, along with user behavior. The goal is to determine who the core product is best suited for by analyzing gaps in the market and how the current product satisfies this market demand.

Uber understood the assignment when they took to breaking down their target audience into smaller, more manageable sectors. This granularity allowed them to customize the user experience based on each segment’s needs and preferences, establishing a stronger product-market fit. They focused on customer pain points, motivations, and buying behavior to increase product adoption. Think – Uber pets.

2. Test your product

Create a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) that addresses the needs of your identified target audience. Include enough features to gather feedback and insights without investing large amounts of development hours. Conduct user interviews, collect NPS surveys, and implement rapid experimentation on website marketing messaging, ad copy, and creative to test the usefulness of the product. The primary objective should be to determine what key benefits resonate with the identified target audience and to create a brand’s core value proposition. This is how a brand goes to market.

The key here is to include just enough features for the user to experience the product while keeping them coming back for more. It is important to maintain a level of exclusivity to encourage product upgrades and future monetization. Experiment with gamification to enhance user engagement and help guide the user through the product or service. By incorporating non-disruptive, interactive elements, marketers are able to tap into intrinsic motivations. Increased product usage is more likely to lead to increased retention.

3. Focus on creating an excellent user experience

Based on feedback, iterate and make improvements until each stage of the user journey reflects the voice of the target audience.

To get there, a user journey must be mapped to visualize all steps taken by a particular user to reach a specific end goal while focusing on key drop-off points where the user leaves the product. Drop-off points are areas of opportunity to keep a user engaged with the product. Collaborate through tools like Miro to visualize these journeys. A key differentiation here between a user journey map and a customer journey map, and with the former, we are interested in learning what it takes for a user to convert to a returning customer.

What happens when a user becomes a real customer? The first 30 days determine how likely a product will be able to retain each new customer it gains. To improve product stickiness and product adoption, the user onboarding experience should be focused on reducing time to value. This includes all of the interactions a user first has at the beginning of their customer journey. The biggest challenge brands face is a lack of product understanding. Check out our list of top B2B Saas Tools used to effectively communicate value to the right customer at the right time.

How do you determine if you’ve achieved product-market fit?

When a brand has successfully achieved product-market fit, it should be able to answer the following 3 questions:

Who was this product made for?

Successfully determining who a product is made for means identifying the cohorts of users that are most likely to benefit from the product. Start by conducting extensive customer research to understand the different types of personas that are potential customers. This data can come from many outlets, including surveys, interviews, focus groups, and analyzing market data.

Messaging app Slack’s product-led growth success journey began with nailing down their ideal user base, gathering as much feedback as possible, and constantly iterating on their product to boost user satisfaction. They unlocked what marketers refer to as the key to virality, or a growth loop, where their own users became their biggest advocates and acquired new users on behalf of the brand.

What needs does it solve?

Along with identifying target cohorts comes specifying the problems or needs the product will address. Identified needs should resonate with the target market. Every product recommendation that is developed thereafter should follow this problem-solution framework, where the users’ needs are the driving force.

Stripe is the perfect example of a product that was born out of personal frustration. Brothers Patrick and John Collison identified a common problem that was super simple to explain: why was it so difficult to accept payments on the web? The discovery of this need kickstarted what is now a $50B company. Few products spread this way, but Stripe won by making something customers needed to do very easy.

What makes this product unique?

To survive is to compete, and to compete, a brand must make it painstakingly clear what makes its product better than its alternatives. A product’s specific competitive advantages should again tie back to the identified cohorts of users the product is designed for. Determine the value propositions most likely to resonate with the target customer and incorporate this marketing messaging across all website displays.

Take Notion, for example, who credits their rise to fame to foregoing what they thought they wanted to bring to the world, and instead paying attention to what the world needed from them. We mentioned earlier that the brands that survive are the ones that pay attention to the failures and lessons of others. We can learn from Notion that in order to successfully achieve product-market fit, brands must 1) identify a specific problem, 2) ensure this problem is relatable to those interested in the basic product, and 3) the problem needs to be extremely easy to explain.

If any of these questions remain unsolved, the product is still in the discovery phase.

Qualitative indicators for product-market fit include product advocacy, speed to purchase, and product reviews. How likely are individual customers to recommend the product to their family and friends? As mentioned at the beginning of this article, consumer behavior is constantly changing, and the world is constantly evolving; thus, achieving product-market fit is an ongoing effort for any successful brand or company.

How do we measure product-market fit?

Measuring product-market fit requires meeting at the intersection of science and creativity, but there are ways to assess whether a product has it or not:

1. Qualitative feedback: Ask the audience! Customer interviews, surveys, and collecting data via NPS scores are some of the best ways to gauge demand for a product. In addition, this is extremely valuable first-party data for a business to understand where and how a product needs to be improved. Keep in mind achieving product-market fit is an ongoing journey, making understanding how a product is solving the needs of its target audience vital for growth.
2. Quantitative metrics: Along with consumer insights, all product changes and enhancements should be data-backed to pinpoint areas with large drop-offs and high impact. Along with customer satisfaction metrics, startups must monitor churn rate, customer acquisition cost (CAC) vs. customer lifetime value (CLTV), usage metrics, and retention rates to determine the success of any product.
3. Market validation: The goal of any startup achieving product market fit should also be to unlock multiple self-sustaining growth loops, where customers are finding the product without heavy paid efforts, suggesting a stronger fit. Validate demand by determining how willing users are to refer your product to other users.
4. Competitor analysis: How is your product positioned against its competitors? Compare your product’s features, benefits, and user experience against alternatives to confirm your product is still the favorable pick.

Achieving product-market fit is a key milestone for the success and sustainability of any evolving startup. A product that fits the market indicates a genuine demand in the market and is engineered to succeed, meeting the needs of its customer base. Product market fit is the cornerstone that supports the growth and success of any business, along with reducing the risk of bringing a product to market.

The post The Step-by-Step Guide to Product-Market Fit for Startups appeared first on NoGood™: Growth Marketing Agency.

Sweetgreen falls into the category of companies that have successfully built a solid foundation of brand values and a strong mission — yet at the same time, the brand consistently iterates and taps into the latest solutions and strategies to scale and achieve sustainable growth. Balancing a community-driven, consistent, and impactful storyline with a growth strategy informed by experimentation and the latest solutions is no easy feat. Yet this exact combination of growth and brand ingredients makes Sweetgreen a brand capable of redefining a whole category.

Sweetgreen’s rise to success has not been without bumps — and stakeholder frustrations. During the Covid-19 pandemic, when many restaurants shut their doors, and long-standing eateries failed to keep up, Sweetgreen too experienced a dramatic drop in sales. Facing the time-old battle between staying connected to customers and unlocking growth, the industry’s only technical “unicorn” focused on intimacy at scale, owning their brand identity, and fostering community engagement.

Let’s dig deeper into each ingredient that created the perfect “Grow Your Brand” bowl for Sweetgreen.

Want to scale growth in the food industry? Check out our list of the top food marketing agencies.

Sweetgreen Marketing Strategy: Unlocking Intimacy At Scale

The concept of intimacy at scale can be broken down into two core components. The first is to go slow to speed up. It is tempting to expand as quickly as possible, but the most successful companies know what to focus on by first listening to their audience. In the context of Sweetgreen, the company focused on a few core brand values at a time and remained in the DC Metropolitan Area before expanding. They took their time experimenting with new ways to communicate their mission and ensure sustainable growth in potential target markets before laying down the blueprint.

The second is to embrace modularity. One of Sweetgreen’s earliest blunders was underestimating how fast the world changes. Companies must design products and experiences for the future and scale a flexible marketing strategy that is prepared for change. The versatility of the Sweetgreen marketing strategy allowed it to move forward with a complete rebrand at the height of Sweetgreen’s scaling and added more flavor to it. This is clearly depicted through their new retro-style emails, marketing collateral, and typography, along with their choice of partnerships.

As brands mature and standard operating procedures to streamline efficiencies occur, their unique voice and culture often get lost.

“There are all of these cautionary tales about startups or restaurants that grew massively, transforming into slow-moving corporate entities where quality takes a nosedive, products become more bland, customers are no longer at the center, and employees feel less involved and inspired” explains Sweetgreen founder Nathanial Ru. “We’ve been determined to avoid that.”

Sweetgreen Goes Viral

Ru illustrates how fast-growing companies must maintain intimacy with their customers, partners, and employees by putting customer-centric metrics at the forefront of business. It is common to think of metrics such as revenue or return-on-ad spend (ROAS) as key performance indicators (KPIs) for a company. To accurately measure a brand’s stickiness or the loyalty of its customers, companies must also measure metrics such as Net Promoter Score (NPS), frequency by channel, and churn over time. Sweetgreen understood the need to measure viral coefficiency. In other words, they made Sweetgreen go viral.

Meeting at the intersection of the latest tech and value-driven branding, Sweetgreen is the epitome of performance branding. Learn more about how the worlds of brand and performance marketing are merging here. Putting the brand first — and supporting it with the growth strategies necessary for scaling, which we will discuss shortly — ultimately triggered Sweetgreen’s viral growth. Customer emotions are the driving force behind brand virality. Brands seeking to evoke an emotional response know to find a core value proposition early on that continues to keep their audience engaged.

Take Sweetgreen’s social media presence, for example. Sweetgreen customers flock to Twitter to share their salad updates with the world, with no incentive other than their love for Sweetgreen. The company’s blend of brand equity and user-generated content continues to bolster Sweetgreen’s brand virality.

Transform your narratives, engage their audiences authentically, and boost your success.

New Brand Look, Same Core Values

Not long ago, Sweetgreen revealed a new identity with updated store signage and a revamped marketing strategy. The rebrand came at the height of the brand’s growth and took their devotion to building intimacy and customer relationships a step further. In other words, it didn’t just add more personality to the brand — it added a blend of nostalgia, earthly yet bright colors, and a sense of newness to a brand that so many already love.

You’ll notice their team members sporting brand-new uniforms in store. Further building on their mission to make fast food healthy, Sweetgreen focused on owning three core values: real ingredients, the natural cooking process, and the people behind the food. Taking inspiration from hand-painted vintage cookbooks paired with modern photography and earthy, vivid colors, Sweetgreen introduced a more variable, expressive brand voice that fully immerses Sweetgreen lovers into the world of food.

The company invested its efforts into translating its brand ethos through a brand-new logo, an updated menu design, and digital products. Check out their new logo below:

Along with the electric-green name comes a new background color appropriately named “kale,” true to Sweetgreen’s focus on real ingredients. You’ll notice these updated brand guidelines translated to team uniforms as well.

Through it all, Sweetgreen’s mission to build healthier communities by connecting people to real food works to educate and inspire future generations on the importance of good eating. Sweetgreen’s brand values are at the heart of the Sweetgreen marketing strategy. So much so that their “Our Mission” navigation bar option sits right next to “Our Menu” at the top of their website.

“We’re actually not even valued like a tech company. If you look at the valuation, it’s much more like a high-growth food company,” says co-founder and CEO of Sweetgreen, Jonathan Neman. “We leverage technology to build a better experience and make smarter decisions. And I think it is an accelerant to how we can grow and scale and build our model. However, at the core of what we do, we are a consumer brand.”

Sweetgreen Today: Leading The Sustainability Movement

Brands that spark conversations and lead cultural movements deserve attention. Pulled directly from their mission statement, Sweetgreen believes climate change is the defining challenge of our generation. Their plant-forward thinking comes across through a totally transparent supply chain and sourcing process as well as a rotating, seasonal menu. (Although, I am currently enjoying my favorite Sweetgreen Shroomami Bowl while writing this post, secretly hoping they never take it off the menu.)

Sweetgreen gives their menu extra thought by calculating the carbon footprint for each menu item from their specific suppliers. This data is used at every stage of the business, and directs menu changes as need be. Furthermore, Sweetgreen restaurants are physically constructed and optimized for a more sustainable future.

Impressively enough, the brand matched its mission with its margins. As their brand grew, so did their impact on the world.

Sweetgreen’s Community Of Local Suppliers

Sweetgreen not only works closely to source and strategize with their local suppliers to minimize their carbon footprint, but gives back to these same suppliers to form a community. They interact directly with each supplier to make sure their brand values and customer needs are being met. In fact, before the Sweetgreen leadership team decides where they want to open a new location, they identify and meet with local suppliers first. Sweetgreen’s marketing strategy relies on a transparent yet scalable supply chain. Deepening supplier relationships and demand forecasting help Sweetgreen overcome potential disruption.

Strategic Partnerships: Game, Set, Eat Like A Pro

Along with Sweetgreen’s rebrand came their first-ever athletic partnership with professional tennis player Naomi Osaka. The well-timed national campaign gained traction at the start of the US open, which took place from Aug. 30 to Sept. 12, 2021. This approach included bringing awareness to the importance of wellness through digital ads and out-of-home (OOH) advertising in the ecosystem best versed for this type of signage, New York City. Lets not forget the custom-curated Naomi Osaka Bowl.

Their ad copy engages the average Sweetgreen consumer base as well as a new audience of Gen-Z fans. Sweetgreen users who purchased the Naomi Osaka Bowl, specifically via the Sweetgreen app (for pick up or delivery) won a chance to watch her compete at the US open. I’ll get to Sweetgreen’s heavy focus on their mobile app in a moment. Watch the full ad here.

Other notable partnerships include Sweetgreen’s head-turning decision to enter the esports arena. The brand recognized how to infiltrate the Millennial and Gen Z traffic early on by cross-promoting with major YouTube gaming celebrity, Valkyrae. The key takeaway here is the opportunity for brands to reach a new audience by understanding where their target communities interact and engage. Learn how to get in on the conversation by reading up on the top growth marketing trends to follow in 2024.

Sweetgreen quickly matured to be a publicly traded company valued at $5.5 billion when it began trading in November of 2021.

Sweetgreen Is First To Go Mobile-First

Sweetgreen thinks like a tech company, designing food culture for a digital age. Parallel to many areas of the Sweetgreen marketing strategy, the company was an early mover as one of the first to release an app in its space. Their app has come a long way since then, to a fully customized in-app experience that feels almost like you are inside your local Sweetgreen store when placing an order.

“Navigating through dropdowns or grids of standard menu options is tedious, and we wanted to reduce the cognitive load of ordering food online. We incorporated everything from dietary restrictions to order history to create the most customized experience possible. It could be adjusting the heaviness of the dressing, specifying if you want the salad mixed, or using the ‘save to favorites’ button so you can quickly re-order your custom creations,” says Sweetgreen co-founder Nathaniel Ru. “Eventually this will evolve to using this data to present you with a completely personalized, curated menu based off your preferences, more similar to Spotify than a salad chain” Ru continued as the brand plans for the future.

The brand boasted a 178% increase in digital orders through its app during the Covid-19 pandemic. Every feature of the app is designed with the needs of their loyal fanbase as the driving force. It was a frictionless transition from seamless, contactless ordering to incorporating the beloved rewards program. Sweetgreen continues to push use of their mobile app through their paid marketing efforts on Instagram and Facebook.

To encourage even more users to order through the app, Sweetgreen doubled down on their approach by debuting an online-only, “Eat Like A Chef” menu. Inspiring failed DIYers and air fryer connoisseurs to finally live out their dreams through a menu crafted with go-to menu items from several renowned chefs with years of experience mastering the craft. The new “Collections” platform puts choice at the hands of the Sweetgreen user and makes it a personalized experience from prep to pack. Sweetgreen kept their focus on community, with 100% of proceeds from this new collection being donated to the Independent Restaurant Coalition for one day only to help save local restaurants impacted by Covid-19.

Sweetgreen Joins The Rise Of Subscription Commerce

Subscription commerce is growing at an exponential rate with no sign of slowing down. In 2022, 15% of online buyers have signed up for one or more subscription services, according to a study conducted by McKinsey & Company. Ultimately, the subscription economy is a way for brands to create a source of recurring revenue while also creating “forever customers.” It’s a win-win strategy. On the consumer side of things, subscription businesses often drive greater value at a lesser price and come with increased convenience.

Sweetgreen wants in on the action and is testing a $ 10-a-month subscription membership program where users get $3 off on all orders throughout that month. Introducing Sweetpass, the latest effort in the Sweetgreen marketing strategy to drive customer loyalty.

Those who have been following the brand for some time may remember Sweetgreen’s initial loyalty program, launched over five years ago, that rewarded customers with $9 in credit for every $99 spent in-store or on the app. This price point was too high, and Sweetgreen customers were not able to feel the immediate impact of savings.

“We sunsetted that program because it was more of a one-size-fits-all approach. We wanted to iterate our loyalty program to understand better what customers want and what the future of loyalty looks like,” explained Daniel Shlossman, senior vice president of digital and growth.

All eyes are on Sweetpass as the company graduates out of the pilot phase to gauge and understand the impact of subscription services on driving high usage within the food space.

Takeaway

Sweetgreen took the world by storm with their experimentation-first Sweetgreen marketing strategy. Sweetgreen keeps it simple by focusing on intimacy at scale, their core brand values and playing an active role in the community. Businesses can take a leaf out of their playbook to analyze how to unlock growth while staying true to brand values. Sweetgreen founders worked with the team at COLLINS, a San Francisco and New York-based strategy and design consultancy, to bring their rebranding to life.

Ready to bring your brand’s growth marketing strategy to the next level?

The post Sweetgreen Marketing Strategy: Uncovering Key Ingredients Behind Growth appeared first on NoGood™: Growth Marketing Agency.

Beneath all of this drama, you may be asking yourself: “As an advertiser, should I advertise on Twitter”? The short answer is: yes.

But don’t worry, we won’t leave you hanging. That’s why we created the Complete Twitter Ads Guide with Best Practices for 2024, which will answer any questions you may have about advertising on Twitter, as well as provide a framework to get started on the platform, the right way.

Why advertise on Twitter?

Every journalist, marketing guru, and enthusiast alike lives on Twitter as it is the ultimate social media platform for user engagement and deep insights. People on Twitter are curious and want to stay informed about the best service offerings, the latest news, and the top findings — this is where brands should leverage Twitter. But before you start spending precious advertising dollars on Twitter, you’ll probably want to know what’s in it for you

1. Real Time Content

Twitter serves as a centralized source for instantaneous, concurrent updates. Ever been on Twitter during the Super Bowl? Updates come faster from game attendees using Twitter than the announcers on your TV.

2. It’s Economical

While the cost of advertising on Twitter will depend on a variety of factors like audience, ad quality, and your advertising goals, the average CPC on Twitter is generally cheaper than other platforms, and generally cheaper for social media platforms over Google or Bing, which are search engines. The only exception for paid social is LinkedIn, which is known to have generally high CPCs based on audience.

3. Active, Not Inactive Users

One of the biggest challenges in paid media is to increase engagement with your content. Compared to other social media platforms, users spend 26% more time viewing ads on Twitter. The bottom line is that, on Twitter, users are not only active, but they are engaged.

4. Targeting Capabilities

As an advertiser, you are constantly looking to define your audience. Identifying every attribute and behavior of your audience is crucial for getting your ads in front of the right users. Twitter provides advertisers with a wide range of targeting capabilities, such as:

• Conversation
• Movies & Television
• Device (iOS, Android, Desktop)
• Location
• Age
• Gender
• Follower look-alikes

Whether you’re new to advertising or a marketing veteran, the features of Twitter advertising provide a distinctive set of capabilities tailored to those looking to unlock accelerated company growth.

Twitter has made it clear that its platform is not only robust, but it is unique. The platform has a strong set of differentiators that set it apart from any other platform. But with this level of individuality comes a level of confusion around the technicalities of the platform.

There are a lot of nuances within Twitter’s platform, but as an advertiser, you are probably wondering how to create your first ad.

How Twitter Ads Work

Twitter does a great job naturally integrating ads into their organic content. Typically they are targeted so well that users think they are viewing content from an account they already follow. For example, fantasy sports app DraftKings found high-profile success in 2021 by hyper-targeting sports fans through Twitter ads based on interest and search intent. With the return of the NBA and NFL, DraftKings was able to tap directly into the budding sports conversations on Twitter and drive traffic directly to their app.

Here are the different types of Twitter ads to help grow your business:

Promoted Ads

Previously known as Promoted Tweets, Promoted Ads are the most familiar ad format for Twitter advertisers. They appear just like regular Tweets, and can be interacted with in the same way (replied to, liked, retweeted). The only difference is the small “promoted” label that appears in the lower left-hand corner. Promoted Ads provide a strong set of advantages to advertisers, ranging from placements across every corner of Twitter’s platform, to the frequency of ads that are shown to users (hint: Twitter regulates how often your ads are shown to users so the user doesn’t have a bad experience with your ads).

Take a look at this example from Nissan. Nissan utilized the robust capabilities of Twitter Promoted Ads, such as hashtags and videos, to create stellar visual content.

Follower Ads

Previously called Promoted Accounts, Follower Ads are a useful way for advertisers to get their brand in front of users who may not be familiar with their business offering. If you’re concerned with how established your brand is with your target audience, testing Follower Ads may be a great option for increasing brand awareness and engagement amongst your audience. Additionally, Twitter places Follower Ads in several locations across the platform, such as your timeline, the “Who to follow” section, and follower search results.

Creating a Follower Ad may be confusing, so we decided to create this step-by-step process on how to create your first Follower Campaign:

• Step 1: Log into your Twitter Ads account.
• Step 2: Create a campaign. This button will be located in the right corner of your Ads Manager.
• Step 3: Choose your campaign objective. If you’d like to create a Follower Ad, choose “Followers” from the selection of campaign objectives.
• Step 4: Navigate to the “Details” tab, and name your campaign, choose your funding source, and set campaign dates & budget.
• Step 5: Create your ad group. When creating your ad group, you may be wondering what the difference is between a campaign and an ad group. There are several differences between campaigns and ad groups, but at their core, campaigns provide the structural framework and strategic direction, while ad groups offer tactical control and detailed targeting through keywords and audiences within that framework.
• Step 6: Select your bid type. There are two options to select for your campaign’s bid type:-
  • 1 Target Cost: You can choose a bid that you’d like to pay for each follow. Your followers campaign will optimize towards that cost, and acquire followers at or around it.
  • 2 Automatic Bid: Your ads will be optimized to get the best results as possible at the lowest price.
• Step 7: Select the audience that you’d like your ads to show for. If you haven’t built your first audience yet, you can do so by:
  • 1. Navigate to Audience Manager by selecting “Audiences” under the “tools” menu.
  • 2. Click “Create audience”
• Step 8: Choose your ads.
• Step 9: Review and launch your campaign!

Trend Takeover

Trend Takeover Ads allow your brand to be positioned at the forefront of everything trending in the Explore tab. The Explore tab condenses the top trending topics in the moment into one tab, which allows Trend Takeover Ads to be a part of everything happening that’s interesting. Some noteworthy features of Trend Takeover Ads are:

• Immersive video creative
• 24-hour placement
• Exorbitant advertising cost (around $200,000 per day)

Take a look at this Trend Takeover example below:

Clearly, there’s no missing this ad from Disney Plus. Trend Takeover ads command the attention of all users who come across them, and generate a game-changing level of brand awareness in return.

Leveraging AI for Twitter Ads

In the past year, while the changes happening at Twitter have occupied a vast majority of the headlines in the media, there is one topic that consistently wins that #1 spot: AI.

AI has brought more change to our technological landscape in the past year than any other technological invention, even the Supercomputer. Tasks that took days, and sometimes even weeks to complete, are now available in seconds due to Generative AI. Generative AI impacts countless digital sectors, including advertising, which is seen through the evolution of advertising careers, content, and platforms.

While the swift changes that Generative AI has brought to the world may seem scary, AI can be used to your advantage when building out your advertising strategy. Here are some ways to incorporate AI into your everyday practice that we recommend:

1. Generating Creative Content

It’s tough to consistently come up with creative, original content pieces that are engaging to your audience. That’s what a Content Specialist is for! If you don’t have a Content Specialist handy, or if you’re a Content Specialist who’s just looking for new content ideas, AI tools like ChatGPT and Bard are two readily available tools that can provide a fresh, new take on your existing content strategy.

2. Campaign Optimization

Amongst AI’s many capabilities is its ability to optimize campaigns for you. AI can not only provide in-depth campaign insights by scraping your existing campaign data, but it can automate processes like bid adjustments or targeting based on performance data. Additionally, AI can provide suggestions to new advertisers who are unfamiliar with campaign optimization with basic techniques to use right from the start.

3. Hyper-Personalization

AI can tailor content to each user based on their interests and past behaviors, which can lead to higher engagement and conversion rates. Additionally, AI can conduct comprehensive competitor analyses and determine what ads resonate best with competitors whose audiences resemble yours.

4. Automated Bidding and Ad Placement

Managing your bids and placements on a daily basis can be a grueling, laborious task. Luckily for you, AI has the ability to automate the bidding process for ad spaces, and optimize your placements to ensure that your ads are placed at the best times and positions in-platform. Automating your Bids and Ad Placements will give you time back to spend on the tasks that AI isn’t capable of handling yet.

Twitter has quickly evolved from a popular communication medium to a way for brands to speak directly to their users in real-time. The social media giant makes it easier than ever for brands to identify and capture their ideal audience. The targeting and user relevance that Twitter provides businesses with is unrivaled. Stay ahead of the competition and speak with our Twitter experts to understand how to incorporate Twitter into your ultimate marketing strategy.

The post Complete Twitter Ads Guide with Best Practices for 2024 appeared first on NoGood™: Growth Marketing Agency.

Amazon converts 6x higher than the top ten retail sites in the United States. Businesses of all sizes thrive on Amazon. In fact, the main takeaway from this ultimate guide to success on Amazon should be that Amazon is a conversion machine. Whereas Google profits when users click an ad, Amazon profits when customers convert. For this reason, Amazon’s A9 algorithm is tailored such that the primary focus is conversions. Amazon customers are typically low-funnel shoppers. Customers will often first do all their research on Google, but then come to Amazon when it is time to actually make their purchase. As Amazon customers are ready to convert, it is more important than ever before for brands to be on Amazon and to show up first through Amazon Advertising.

Get Started with Selling on Amazon

Once a brand has been approved to sell on Amazon, it will be given access to Amazon Seller Central. Brands can list items, manage inventory, track orders, and start advertising all through Amazon Seller Central. The initial setup will also include setting up a company bank account and tax information, assigning shipping templates, and applying for Amazon’s brand registry when applicable.

Sellers have the option to manually list items on Amazon, or to use one of the many category-specific inventory feeds that Amazon provides to mass upload multiple items at the same time. While listing items, keep in mind that Amazon’s version of an SKU is called an ASIN, or an Amazon Standard Identification Number. For every SKU you upload to Amazon, it will automatically be assigned a unique ASIN.

It is important to note that Amazon prioritizes showing variety for their search queries. New listings and variations tend to show up high organically in search rankings, so it is a good best practice to streamline adding new items. Think of implementing bundles or different pack sizes to introduce additional variations if your company is limited with SKUs.

FBA vs. FBM

One of the early decisions an e-commerce brand looking to sell on Amazon will need to make is whether they plan to sell as Fulfilled By Amazon (FBA), or as Fulfilled By Merchant (FBM). The biggest difference between these two fulfillment methods is that with FBA, the seller ships inventory to Amazon’s warehouse, and Amazon is responsible for the picking, packing, and shipping of all orders. With FBM, the seller themselves is responsible for all shipping-related functions. Sellers looking to focus strictly on strategy may lean closer to FBA, whereas sellers who need more control over their inventory might choose FBM. There are benefits to both methods and this decision typically depends on individual business needs.

Types of Amazon Advertising

When it comes to selling on Amazon, the name of the game is to take up all of the real estate. For all major relevant keywords, brands should aim to be the obvious choice by optimizing their listings to show up first and show up often. In order to be successful on Amazon, it is crucial to have a strong Amazon advertising strategy. A well-tuned Amazon advertising strategy should increase organic Amazon rankings as well. Take advantage of Amazon’s arsenal of advertising formats and targeting options to achieve the greatest ROI on Amazon.

Sponsored Products

Sponsored Product ads are a pay-per-click (PPC) solution that helps drive traffic directly your product pages. Similar to Google Ads, sellers can select the listings they want to advertise and can toggle between a variety of different targeting options to increase sales and visibility. Sponsored Product ads are by far the most popular ad format seen on Amazon. Be sure to familiarize yourself with Amazon’s reporting functions to be able to measure the impact of your Sponsored Product campaigns.

While setting up Sponsored Product ads, advertisers can choose between manual and automatic keyword targeting options:

Automatic Targeting

Automatic targeting is a great option for new sellers and experienced sellers alike. For those who are new to Amazon’s Marketplace, Automatic Targeting allows sellers to get started with advertising without necessarily knowing exactly what keywords they need to bid on. Automatic Targeting is also a proven method to optimize existing Amazon advertising strategies. Mine through the search terms gathered by Amazon through Automatic Targeting campaigns to harvest new, high-intent keywords when setting up Manual Targeting campaigns.

Manual Targeting

Amazon’s Manual Targeting campaigns follow a classic keyword bidding structure offering broad, phrase, and exact keyword matches. Amazon sellers can choose the listings they would like to advertise and set up corresponding keywords to bid on. For sellers who already know what keywords they need to bid on, Manual Targeting is a great option.

Product Targeting

The third option for advertisers to increase their ROAS on Amazon is to implement Product Targeting. Unlike keyword targeting, advertisers have the option to target products on Amazon directly. Sellers can target competing product, complimentary product, or their own products. This gives sellers the unique opportunity to convert customers at the lowest stage of the funnel. Additionally, brands who advertise on their own listings are actively preventing other brands from taking up that same real estate. Keep in mind that in order to set up Product Targeting campaigns, you will need to know the ASINs you are looking to target. Think of product targeting like all out warfare.

Sponsored Brands

Amazon sellers can set up sponsored brand ads that lead customers to individual product pages, or to a page on their Amazon Storefront. Sponsored Brand ads are designed to drive brand awareness through banner ads shown at the top of Amazon search results with custom headlines. This is your chance to highlight your brand’s competitive advantage and display examples of your product selection. Sponsored Brand ads are shown on both desktop and mobile. It is important to note that sponsored brand ads are only available to sellers enrolled in Amazon Brand Registry.

Sponsored Display

Amazon’s display advertising options allow sellers to reach customers on and off Amazon. Sponsored Display ads on Amazon are a cost-per-click (CPC) solution where advertisers set their daily bid and budget. These dynamically generated ads are served to audiences that are created based on Amazon shopping interest and buyer history. On average, advertisers who implement Sponsored Display ads on Amazon see up to 82% of their sales driven by new-to-brand customers. Remember to experiment with all advertising options on Amazon to find what works best for your brands.

Amazon Storefront

Sellers can create their very own Amazon Storefront, or a unique web store landing page, complete with their own URL, branding, and product selection. It is important to keep in mind the role of performance marketing in a digital first advertising world. Each brand’s values, reputation and trustworthiness should be exemplified by the Amazon Storefront. Setup your own multi-page store to inspire customer loyalty and feature your product portfolio. Designing an Amazon Storefront requires no coding experience and the interface to do so is extremely user-friendly. Choose from a selection of predesigned templates, upload images and organize your landing pages to showcase your top listings. Be sure to keep your Amazon Storefront up-to-date with new, in stock products and to update based on seasonality.

Check out our tailored list of the most impressive Amazon Storefronts here:

Biossance

Biossance does a great job both incorporating video into their Amazon Storefront as well as leveraging influencer lifestyle images to boost brand credibility.

Sonos

We’re all ears while leader in home entertainment Sonos takes advantage of the Amazon Storefront to tell the story behind their brand and highlight their unique value proposition.

HIPPEAS

HIPPEAS stands out by incorporating dynamic Amazon Storefront templates to showcase active listings relevant to the customers search history. Focus on designing a conversion-first storefront by including product listings with the add to cart option directly on the homepage.

Top 10 Tips To Be Successful On Amazon

1. Images & Videos: Every product listing should have at least 3 high-quality images and 1 product video.
2. New Listing Strategy: Work with your marketing experts to strategize how to streamline adding new item variations ideally via a product feed.
3. Keyword Optimization: Be resourceful with your keyword use in listing titles, bullet points, search terms, and item descriptions.
4. Amazon Brand Registry: For brand owners, applying for Amazon Brand Registry is a crucial step to be able to set up Sponsored Brand ads, Sponsored Display ads, and the Amazon Storefront.
5. A+ Content: Formerly known as Enhanced Brand Content. This feature is also only available to brand owners but is a great way to boost rankings in Amazon’s A9 algorithm and to showcase additional product benefits. 
6. Amazon Advertising: Understand your goals and diversify your Amazon Advertising strategy to achieve the greatest ROI on Amazon. 
7. Metrics: Pay attention to your order defect rate, cancellation rate, and delivery metrics to ensure your seller account is above expected performance targets required to sell on Amazon.
8. Prime: Once a fulfillment method has been decided upon, work with your marketing experts to understand how to apply for the prime badge.  
9. Be Resilient: Amazon is constantly introducing new advertising features and tools and it is our job as brand owners to stay ahead of these changes. Be curious and refer back to the seller forums to understand the impact of planned changes.
10. Reviews: Gather and engage with both product and seller reviews. Leverage feedback and celebrate the positive reviews!

Amazon Custom

Brands that specialize in selling personalized products of all kinds have the unique opportunity to sell on Amazon through Amazon Custom. Think embroidered t-shirts, engraved trophies, or any type of custom gift. Customers have the ability to choose their customization options and enter their custom text directly on Amazon for the seller to process. Keep in mind Amazon’s strict delivery speed requirements when deciding if it makes sense to sell your custom product on Amazon. Also, an Amazon Custom seller must choose FBM as their fulfillment method and conduct all personalization in-house. On the item setup side, a seller should upload their listings as usual with the additional step of uploading a customizations feed.

Conclusion

Amazon is projected to remain a growth leader as they continue to accelerate into the digital marketing space in 2022. Amazon is a conversion machine that capitalizes on a purchase-ready audience. As a shopping hub that is more in tune with customer behavior than any other platform, Amazon provides unparalleled insight and enormous advertising opportunities for brands of all sizes. Need help getting started? Reach out to our team of Amazon Specialists to discuss your Amazon Advertising goals and how to increase sales.

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