The social cost of bad online marketing

1. The social cost of bad online marketing

Trends

Marketers “took the Internet, one of the most wonderful and profound inventions of all time, and polluted it with advertising and turned it into a way to sell stuff.” Worse yet, we’re using it to create ads that look so much like content that we’ll soon lose the ability to tell the difference.

By the time that “great content” marketing model appears — if it appears — we’ll be so accustomed to lousy content, colonized social media feeds, and overflowing inboxes that we won’t remember what good, well-curated content even looks like.

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2. How we got from $0 to $75,000 MRR with zero marketing budget

Growth

An excellent post and step-by-step instructions on how Scentbird used YouTube influencer marketing to build their initial business traction.

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3. A crash course in SaaS COGS, Gross Margin, LTV, and CAC

Data informed

A great guide to the fundamental metrics that drive SaaS buisnesses.

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4. With new roadblocks for digital news sites, what happens next?

Trends

The new digital news companies bumping into a wall:

• BuzzFeed missed its revenue target by 32%

• Mashable is going through a massive layoff after failing to sell

• Yahoo is trying to sell

• And there's a long list of cutbacks — at The Huffington Post, at Gawker, at Al Jazeera, at International Business Times, and at Salon among others.

Also read Media websites battle faltering ad revenue and traffic and Escaping the digital media ‘crap trap’.

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5. A/B testing and split url testing (VWO, Optimizely, Google Analytics)

Data informed

A pretty comprehensive guide and excellent primer.

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6. Everything the tech world says about marketing is wrong

Marketing

To become better marketers, those in the tech startup world need to skip the latest redundant blog post on “inbound marketing” or “content marketing” and read a Marketing 101 textbook.

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7. We tested 48 Facebook ads to bust 6 marketing myths

Data informed

By optimising for CPC the sketchdeck group were able to debunk or validate various common Facebook advertising heuristics.

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8. Ecommerce investment trends and success indicators

Ecommerce

The top quartile of ecommerce companies have:

• 9X revenue

• 2X orders buy year 1 end

• 2.5X customer base after year 3 than Q2.

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9. The scientific marketing strategy behind exponential growth

Growth

How to achieve exponential growth in your online business with a quant-based marketing strategy.

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10. Chameleon

Tool of the week

Better user onboarding. Use Chameleon to build product tours for your web app without writing code.

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