Emily Kramer

🙃 We've wrestled back & forth with the balance between custom designs that designers & brand care about, versus the speed & scalability that product marketers & sales reps require to be effective... Although we're still figuring this out at AssetMule, we just took an additional step fwd while keeping this delicate balance in mind 👉🏾 👉🏾 👉🏾 🎉 Introducing Background Images! - You can now up-level your templates by replacing plain colored backgrounds with 🎨 custom background images!!! 🎨 Now all your designer has to do is create a beautiful background image, send it to you, & you're off to the races building sales assets on your own. If you’re a product marketer without design resources tasked with creating sales assets… Or a sales rep without a product marketer that needs to create your own sales assets… Or a founder without a sales or marketing team doing your own founder-led sales… This is just a small example of how we can help you do more with less Give assetmule.ai a test drive for FREE & let us know how we can make it better! #productmarketing #pmm #gtm #design #sales

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A marketing measurement perspective that I don't see represented often is that, for a substantial proportion of advertisers, last-click really is optimal. If a fairly new mobile app with low TAM penetration scales exclusively on Facebook, how much actionable insight is gained by introducing complex measurement machinery? While I'm certainly guilty of advocating it, the viewpoint that more sophisticated measurement infrastructure is always better strikes me as overly generalized. In certain contexts, orchestrating experiments or building, tuning, and deploying probabilistic models probably won't meaningfully impact advertising efficiency. And in those specific (again: not all!) contexts, with limited data and a homogenous (possibly, single-channel) channel mix, reducing interpretability and overhead might do more harm than good. Creating complexity where last-click may perform just as well as an ensemble of methodologies doesn't actually optimize the bias/variance tradeoff -- it may not reduce bias sufficiently to compensate for a large increase in variance.

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There's a new growth strategy on the block. And I'm dubbing it "The U-Haul Playbook." It's when a founder moves to where their target market lives. Not everyone can do this. Few should. But the real takeaway is in understanding why this matters. Customer discovery is the most important activity for a startup founder who is in pre-market phase, MVP phase, or seed stage. Spoiler alert: the importance never ends, but the tactics can change as you grow. I wrote a bit about this trend and how to think about customer discovery in my latest beehiiv for Five Four!

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Announcing Leland's $12M Series A led by Forerunner! Forerunner has an incredible track record of backing iconic consumer brands and marketplaces like Warby Parker, Chime, Glossier, Inc., ŌURA, Faire, Zola, The Expert, and others. We couldn't be more excited to welcome Eurie Kim to the board and partner with her and Forerunner to take Leland to the next level. Also participating in the round are GSV Ventures, inVest Ventures, and our early investors like FJ Labs, Contrary, Peterson Ventures, and GSBackers. We’re also proud that dozens of Leland coaches and customers participated, in addition to leading marketplace founders, operators, and angels from companies like Instacart, Handshake, LinkedIn, Pluralsight, Mercado Libre, and others. With this fresh capital and support, we're well positioned to accelerate our vision of unlocking human potential by making the world's expertise more accessible. In the past year alone, our coaches have helped hundreds of thousands of people in over 70 countries break into top schools or companies, develop new skills, prepare for interviews or tests, and pursue goals across dozens of unique categories. While a fundraise is never a destination, it certainly represents an opportunity to reflect on the progress we’ve made and thank the community who has helped us get this far. So, THANK YOU! We know the biggest opportunity is ahead of us, and we’re excited to be building a world-class team to go after it. If you want to join us, we're hiring. if you want to partner with us, shoot me a DM. And if you are interested in working with a coach or coaching the next generation, we'd love to have you in our community. Big thank you to Deborah Quazzo, Ben Capell, Kyle Harrison, Eric Tarczynski, Jason Bornstein, Lauri J. Moore, Karen Chi, Glenn Borok, Jeff Weinstein, Jose Marin, Jen Yang-Wong, Jason Chen, Taylor Jones, ilana stern, Aaron Skonnard, Gary Williams, Martin Rudigier, and the many others who have made this possible through your support! Here's to the next chapter of helping people reach their most ambitious goals. (TechCrunch coverage in comments)

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Launching ShowStop 🚀 Over the past six months, we've conducted hundreds of interviews and pilot tests with DTC brands, marketers, and SMB agencies. We've discovered that there's a super strong demand for managing and repurposing existing creative assets, like revisiting old footage (images or videos) to keep things fresh and trendy, rather than relying solely on net new AI video. In response, we're excited to introduce ShowStop—a dedicated MarTech SaaS designed to repurpose your best media into new, conversion-focused video ads automatically using AI. ShowStop generates multiple variations instantly, testing every element from the hook to the CTA, and puts creative control back in the hands of paid marketers. CreateIn will remain a separate innovation tool for AI video storytelling. We are soft launching ShowStop on Product Hunt today! Check it out at Product Hunt (https://lnkd.in/gSTkK-FX) and feel free to sign up for our waitlist at showstop.ai!

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Decks are the biggest waste of time in Marketing.   I’d bet on an inverse correlation btw “pretty decks” and “client outcomes.”   The prettier the deck, the more fluff—the more being hidden.   We’ve won several clients b/c we didn’t send a deck…   Instead, we sent actionable recs in a Doc with a Loom.   We add screen caps where necessary.   But no “About Us,” “Why We’re Different,” etc.   Just clear actions to take to scale ads profitably.   No saying, all doing.   Whether you do it with us, yourself, or with someone else.   - Takes less time - Offers way more value - Differentiates us   A win-win-win.

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I’m opening some availability to help micro-stage brands out with brand direction, marketing strategy, creative direction, and product / IP design & strategy. (Contract, part-time, freelance, and advisory) • $250mm consumer investments generated in web3 through viral marketing strategies. • ROAS 14.6x in 3 months • Actively supported in 2x successful liquidation events in 10 months in Private Equity / Venture Capital. • 8k followers to 168k followers in 2 months. • lead designed many user-friendly SAAS products from ideation to launch & scale working in cohesion with senior developers. Started in creative direction turned cmo. Now I build businesses to sell. I build systems to replace myself. Efficiency is key, agile teams are stronger when leveraging AI appropriately. If you’re looking for a creative that has an aggressive understanding of business, my messages are open. Let’s scale some shit.

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How do you *really* know if podcast ads are bringing in net new customers? Sure, pixel attribution can capture 70% more podcast-attributed conversions.... But how many of those are truly incremental? Well, Podscale® partnered with Podscribe to find out... "For the large brands we work with, understanding the net-new impact of podcast ads has always been a challenge—especially when they’re spending big on other channels, too." - Natalie Kovac, CEO Podscale® Using Podscribe’s “always-on” incrementality testing, Podscale® was able to finally measure which podcast ad conversions were incremental. Meaning... They wouldn’t have converted without hearing the podcast ad. The Findings? INSANE!  ➡ 58% of conversions driven by podcast ads were incremental, meaning these customers were genuinely net new.  ➡ Up to 2.56x Incremental ROAS, securing over two and a half times return for every dollar spent on ads from net-new customers. ➡ Podcast ads drove a massive +$3.9 million in incremental revenue for some of the fastest-growing DTC brands. Want to see the full story? Check out the case study to learn how Podscale® and Podscribe made it happen → https://lnkd.in/g8_cp4v4 #podcastadvertising #incrementality #dtc #podscribe

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How do you do messaging for multiple ICPs? What do you do when one of these scenarios applies? · Expanding from one ICP to two (or more) · Needing to talk to several ICPs at once · Messaging when you're a multi-product company · Writing home page copy for multiple audiences Anthony Pierri 🎸and I are gonna talk about it for 60mis, and discuss what makes sense when. We'll share our overall thinking about the matter, but will mostly focus on audience Q&A. Come join us next Wed (June 12) to discuss this topic. Bring your questions. Free event. Registration link in the comments.

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3 years of pricing lessons at Equals condensed into one blog post. Since starting the company, we've tinkered a lot with pricing and packaging. It's one of the single most impactful levers early stage companies can pull. I think folks *don't* experiment with pricing enough, or take big enough bets when they do. We've tried free. We've tried completely sales led. We've tried not listing pricing on the site. Matt Hodges details all the plans we've had, why, and what we've learned in our latest installment on Wrap Text. https://lnkd.in/ecckEDba

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As your go-to partner for growth marketing, Ideometry does it all. Animation and illustration, PPC campaigns and funnel optimization, front-end development and API integration—you name it, we’ve done it. For over ten years (dang, we’ve gotten old! 🎂 1️⃣0️⃣), we’ve had the pleasure of working with clients through a variety of engagement types. A perennial favorite among our team? Brand Activation Projects. For early-stage companies that have product-market fit (but lack a killer go-to-market strategy), these projects fuel growth through tailored and comprehensive branding, messaging, and digital marketing plans. Basically, you walk in with a vision and we bring it to life. Sounds too good to be true? Over the next few weeks, we’ll be sharing a bit about Ideometry’s approach to Brand Activation Projects (with plenty of examples along the way). To help us do that, we’ll be spinning Ideometry’s “Brand Activation Wheel”, which will highlight key areas that can help transform your brand’s impact.  With that said, voilà! Stay tuned to future posts where we take a spin and break down specific components in our Brand Activation Projects. Psst.. did we mention we got a new makeover? 💜 👏 To read more about our signature style and explore all the newest Ideometry case studies, head on over to our new and improved site: https://ideometry.com/ #IDSpotlight #GrowthMarketing #Brand #Agency #Startups #Design #Ideometry #Boston

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An average 251 news outlets picked up a given story distributed on Stacker's platform last month. But some brands absolutely dominated… Housing, nostalgia, tiktok and more - here's what outperformed for earned reach in June: 1. Tech Stories are dominating. It was one of the most frequently requested topics from publishing partners, and its interesting to find the intersection of tech and other things beating benchmarks. (e.g. tech and the election; tech and music industry; tech and nostalgia). Moreover, the story on how Tiktok is changing the music industry story is now up to 636 pickups since data was pulled. It is the 3rd most picked-up story in Stacker history. (well done, Collabstr) We're seeing a trend where stories related to telecom/phones are doing very well. Have cell phones been around so long they're now nostalgic? (Nostalgia always performs well.) In the top 10 we saw: - 4 charts that show how much the role of phones has changed in the last 60 years - The decline of pay phones in every state - 5 emerging trends that will change how you use your phone in 2024 2. Unrelated, but... the history behind all 63 national parks in the US ----> second highest readers for the month... last month we said that economical/local summer travel was trending, and... we didn't lie. Goes to show you can reach hundreds of thousands of readers covering anything from national parks to housing costs… the world’s your oyster. Give a follow for more trends on what's driving earned coverage based on the thousands of stories we help distribute each month for brands, or ask away for what you'd want to see from this data.

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Ever tried eating a good carbonara but drenched in last year's gatorade? I haven't, but the B2B SaaS website equivalent of that would look similar to this hero section from Levanta. So many well-intentioned bits: ✅ clear category ✅ clear ICP ✅ clear-ish outcome ✅ clear-ish next step ✅ multiple trust signals ✅ a half-hearted attempt at explaining the logistics ✅ good objection handling that doubles as a lead qualifier But all this goodness ended up being wrapped in: 👄 a random stock photo model ⭐ random unexplained stars 📊 random numbers and stats 🔬 1.337% of the product's UI kinda-sorta shown Design does matter, but not like that.

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Beware❗ — do NOT make this all too common goal-setting mistake... Brand founders of scaling DTC brands often feel tempted to pivot their goals when they don't seem to be working out. But here's the kicker: they're going about it all wrong. Let me clarify: well-crafted, clearly defined goals are sacred and should not be changed frequently. But do you know what SHOULD be changed frequently? The strategies you implement to achieve those goals! If you find yourself struggling to gain traction on some of your growing brand's goals, don't make any changes to them right away... Instead, get your team together for a brainstorming session on new and creative strategies you can implement to move your goals closer to the finish line. -- Did you find this post helpful? If so, consider resharing it and giving me Jon Blair a follow. #dtcbrands #scaleyourbusiness #founders

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PSA: Turn off your standard welcome offer popups during BFCM. No one wants to sign up for email to get an offer lower than what you already have on the site. Conversion rate *should* be higher during this time. Worry about getting the sale (and their marketing opt-in) at checkout. BONUS: If you’re a Klaviyo user, you can now schedule sign up forms to turn on/off on the days and times you want ✅

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Common sense and complexity in marketing measurement Yes, last-click attribution is suboptimal to other methods that consider and attempt to measure the contribution of all marketing efforts on commercial outcomes. Yes, last-click attribution introduces the risk that an advertiser invests money into a channel that does not deliver truly incremental outcomes. Yes, last-click attribution could result in analytics that wholly distort a business’ underlying marketing dynamics. But in certain circumstances, last-click attribution can be the best approach for measuring marketing outcomes.

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Vertically-niche-focused marketing agencies can market and sell much more efficiently than the rest. On the Metrics & Chill podcast, I've interviewed a number of marketing agency owners who are focused on a market niche. One of the latest is Andi Graham, Managing Partner at Big Sea. They "empower mission-based organizations to amplify their purpose through impactful storytelling." During our podcast we compared her agency's own sales & marketing performance against a benchmark of 130+ other HubSpot partners. (Access the data here: https://lnkd.in/epN-QaHn) As I said on the podcast, with a relatively small team of 18 people, they are "punching above their weight class." As you can see on the video below, one area where they are outperforming is with their landing page submissions. When I asked her why she thinks they are doing so well vs the rest of the group, she revealed that she had one specific campaign that takes them about a month to execute that generates a large portion of their leads for the year. Yes, the YEAR!!! While I guess other agencies (who are not fully focused on working with non-profits) could duplicate it, this campaign works really well for them because they are. The best part? It's brilliant in its simplicity. What's the campaign? Every year they give away $30k worth of marketing services to one lucky mission-based organization. Why does this work for them? They get loads of non-profits completing the application form. They also get applicants all year round by simply changing the landing page call-to-action to say, "Notify me when applications open for next year." Plus, they have a blog post that ranks well in Google which lists out marketing grants available to non profits. Of course, they feature their own at the top. Add in what I would consider a modest, but purposeful effort towards marketing each month, they can nurture some of the rest of those applicants into paying clients. ----- For the last 9 months, I sorta stopped pushing my agency owner friends to go niche. When we developed our free course (https://lnkd.in/eGH_8qpR) that teaches professional services firms how to market and sell more effectively using KPI and business process benchmark data, we even went so far as to simply lay out the pros and cons of running a benchmark study for a niche vs a broader group of companies, instead of suggesting that everyone should build a niche one. Even though I wanted to push agencies to build a niche group, I was tired of people fighting us on it. But, then over the last few months, I've seen more agencies niche further. We've also observed that when niche agencies launch a benchmark study with our free benchmark software (https://lnkd.in/efK_5xKf), they're more successful. So, I'm back on this bandwagon again. PPS. You can hear the full podcast episode here: https://lnkd.in/e-TUEtNj PPPS. Big ups to Hatch (hatch.fm) on the podcast production.

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If you've been told, "You can't get better than 1:1 ROAS in Meta," you're being lied to. Here's the mistake we see too many DTC brands (or agencies working with brands) make: ➝ Running highest volume awareness campaigns to boost metrics ➝ Not getting efficient conversions and direct business impact ➝ Blaming the "algorithm" and not running enough creative We refuse to make that mistake — you need a fundamentally different process for fundamentally different results. Here's how we operate at Kynship: 1. Using financial forecasting to set benchmarks If you don't know first order profitability (based on unit economics), how can you expect to run profitable ads? This is where most agencies mess up, not digging into your numbers and creating an accurate forecast based on profitable CPA targets. 2. Collect and source as much creative as possible Anything you have in Google Drives, Dropbox folders, ad accounts, etc. is creative leverage. In most cases, we also supplement existing creative with influencer seeding to generate a large volume of native, organic content to be leveraged in ads. 3. Leverage high volume against cost controls Remember our forecasting and profitable CPA targets? We're setting those as benchmarks in your Meta ads, then pushing as much creative as we can to unlock potential winners. By using cost controls, anything Meta spends against will be profitable, meeting your target ROAS (whether it's 1:1, 2:1, 3:1, etc.). Any questions about our performance marketing approach? Let me know 🤝 

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There are certain agencies I consistently hear terrible things about. There are certain agencies I consistently help brands move away from. Still -- I don't think those agencies are 'bad' agencies. They are bad for those clients though. Better for others, presumably. And, even "the best agency in the world" to some of their clients, too. I don't want to work with them. And I wouldn't recommend them. But, the point is this. Finding an agency is easy. Finding the right agency is hard. Agencies should be more selective in who they take on. Agencies should be more graceful when they lose clients. Agencies should stay in their proverbial lane. Brands should communicate their needs better. Brands should be more transparent with their agencies. Brands should invest more into their agencies. *not necessarily $$. Good agencies exist. Bad agencies exist. Great agencies exist. Good to you, may be bad to another. Great is the goal. Ya just gotta find them. ..ya may have to kiss a few frogs first, too.

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