It’s time for end of the quarter reflection. Here at Tuff, we love the transition from one quarter to the next.

It’s a chance to zoom out and take a higher level view of how we’ve been doing on Tuff’s internal goals as well as how we’re performing for clients. We always try to go into the quarter with an integrated plan for our clients and intention on how campaigns, landing pages, emails and more will all work together.

The end of quarter reflection is a chance for us to take a step back and learn from the past few months. And, use those learnings to plan for the next.

We’ll cover:

• Best Reads
• Best Performing Facebook ads
• Best of PPC
• Best Tuff Growth Experiment
• Best Tools
• Best Opinion
• Best Voices on Twitter
• Best Emoji
• Best Spotify Playlist

We also find we get more out of our learnings if we share them with others. So, with Q1 behind us, here’s the best of 2019 at Tuff…so far!

Best Reads

“If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” — Isaac Newton.

We spend a lot of time reading about growth and learning from the experiments of others. We’re so grateful for the transparency of other agencies and marketers so we always try to publish learnings from our own experiements as well. Here’re the articles we kept coming back to this quarter:

Retargeting: What is it and how can you use it effectively
When done well, retargeting is an incredibly powerful tool for acquisition and getting the best ROI. We love retargeting and how the team at Bell Curve breaks down retargeting with an easy to understand and easy to apply approach.

The true impact of conversion rate optimization and why it matters to you
We see conversion rate optimizations as plugging the holes of a leaky bucket. By taking the time to discover and fix the holes, you’re going to be more efficient and get the most out of your paid acquisition efforts. In Grace’s words “An uplift of even a 1 percent improvement by channel, device, visitor type at each step of the site journey blend to unveil huge uplifts in both sales and revenue.”

How we Increased Traffic by 1034% in One Week by improving Existing Content (Case Study)
Right off the bat, that stat is jaw dropping. We love this resource because it rings true to something we’ve learned about growth marketing: it’s not always about reinventing the wheel. Sometimes, you’ll get the biggest bang for your buck by making improvements to what you already have spent time and resource on.

ToFu, MoFu & BoFu: Serving Up The Right Content for Lead Nurturing
Not a vegetarian recipe. We like this breakdown and awareness of user intent and treating parts of the sales funnel differently. For automating distribution of your lead nurturing content, we recommend Yet Another Mail Merge.

The 30-Minute PPC Audit Anyone Can Do
Okay, we snuck in one of our own articles. As the quarter wraps up, we take the time to look back at each of our clients PPC campaigns and learn what worked and what didn’t. If you’re running PPC or paid social campaigns, we highly recommend taking a look back to make small, sustainable improvements based on your learnings.

Best Performing Facebook ads

#1

• Type of Ad: Facebook Messenger Campaign
• Audience: Website Retargeting
• Messages: 34
• Cost Per Message: $3.14

#2

• Type of Ad: Instagram Story – Giveaway
• Audience: Watch Enthusiasts
• Clicks: 5,731
• CPC: $0.12
• Conversion Rate: 40%

#3

• Type of Ad: Retargeting
• Audience: Lookalike + Healthy Lifestyles, excluding current customers
• Clicks: 3, 149
• CPC: $0.79

Best of PPC

From January through March we ran 467 PPC campaigns for our clients. Looking back, these campaigns contributed to:

• $1,012,765 managed
• 1,106,538 clicks
• 8,670 leads

Best Tools

Adios.ai
Their description: Adiós brings your emails into your inbox just 3 times a day, so you can get sh*t done.
Our breakdown: Are you tied to your inbox? Or, find yourself context switching when you’re trying to deep dive into an account or campaign? Ellen has been using Adios this quarter to eliminate multi-tasking.

Workflowy
Their description: WorkFlowy is a single document that can contain infinite documents inside it. It’s a more powerful, easier way to organize all the information in your life.
Our breakdown: You might notice a theme here with productivity. By using a fractal document format, Workflowy lets you zoom in or out on a topic. You can choose if you want to go deep on a topic or stay at the surface level.

Mixmax
Their description: Gmail-based productivity app for customer-facing teams.
Our breakdown: We’re loving Mixmax for a number of reasons. As we mentioned above in the ‘Best Tuff Growth Experiment’ we’ve been trying our hand out at cold email outreach. Mixmax helps us understand our open and clickthrough rate and refine our copy. It also connects to our calendar and makes it easy for potential clients to schedule a meeting with us directly from the email we send them.

Best Opinion

We love Mayur’s message here: growth isn’t a hack. This is something we talk about quite a lot internally and try our best to instill in our clients. There is no secret for skyrocketing overnight growth.

It doesn’t exist.

A little controversial, perhaps, coming from a growth team. But, we’re sick and tired of the myth that you can flip a few switches and instantly acquire thousands of new users.

Scaling growth is hard. You need to find the right team who can deliver what is needed on a business level. Not, just churn out as many ads as possible. Not ‘hack’.

At Tuff, we reflect that in our pricing. It’s common for agencies to bill on a percentage of ad spend. The problem with this is that it leads to prioritizing spend first instead of focusing on ROI.

Same with hourly rates, they weigh massively in favor of the agency to spend as much time on a project as they can.

We believe the future of growth teams is in being value drivers, rather than service providers. So, we price differently – not hourly, not a percentage of spend. We price on brainpower, a monthly agreement based on our level of partnership.

The most important thing to us is to increase your ROI so we’ll quickly kill an experiment if we’re not seeing the results we want.

Best Voices on Twitter

Asia Matos:
I help #SaaS companies & #startup founders with #marketing & #growth. CEO & Founder of DemandMaven. Previously at two 10x startups. GIF game strong 💪

Alfred Lua:
Product marketer @buffer @bufferanalyze | 🏊🏻🚴🏻🏃🏻

Jennifer Kim:
All things Talent, building better startups, & future of work. Ex-Head of People/early employee @Lever, now planning next chapter ✨

Katelyn Bourgoin:
3X founder turned growth geek. Seen in @Forbes, @Inc, @CTV & more. I help product teams figure out who their best customers are and what triggers them to buy 👓

Best Emoji

✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨

Our team turned to the ‘sparkles’ emoji more than once or twice this quarter. With spring on it’s way, this emoji helped us invoke a bright and shiny feeling in our Facebook ad copy and beyond.

Best Spotify Playlist

We’ve been loving the ‘Loved by Ellen‘ playlist the past few weeks. Not to be confused with Ellen from Tuff, curated by Ellen DeGeneres.

What’s on your ‘Best of’ list?

What’s on your ‘best of’ list for your end of quarter reflection? Before diving head first into Q2, we strongly recommend taking a few minutes to look back at your metrics and learnings from Q1. What makes the list? And, just as importantly, what doesn’t?

If you’re looking to add a decreased cost per acquisition to your end of quarter reflection in Q2, give us a shout. We’d love to get to know you, your company, your goals, and schedule a free growth strategy session with our team.

Mary Jantsch

Mary is a growth marketer at Tuff. She specializes in Customer Experience, Email Strategy, Copywriting and Chat. She also runs on coffee and peanut butter pretzels.