The Growth Note #02



Welcome back to The Growth Note, the growth marketing newsletter from your friends at Tuff!

Whether you were grilling up large quantities of hotdogs at the lake this past weekend (hi, it’s me) or just catching a much-needed breather, we’re glad you’re taking a moment out of your four-day week to follow along.

In this edition, we’re serving up the only template you need for your paid media planning, the types of B2B videos that make for (actually) engaging content, and our best practices for successfully navigating a site migration. Also, we’re covering how a pretty substantial leak of Google API documentation set the SEO world into a frenzy—but more on that below.

Let’s get to it!

– Spencer at Tuff

P.S.: Our first newsletter landed in the inboxes of nearly 1000 loyal subscribers, and a bunch of you even read it. (!) If you dig our content, don’t forget to forward to a like-minded marketer near you. And as always, if useful growth tips aren’t your thing, we keep the unsubscribe link handy.

Insights from the blog

A paid media forecasting template for your troubles?

The first step in anything always feels a little unnerving. It’s no different for startups and scaleups rolling out new paid media campaigns.
Get it right, and you’ve got a repeatable land-and-expand strategy that reaches your target audience and brings them into your orbit. But get it wrong, and you’re (at worst) taking some of your finite marketing budget and lighting it on fire. No bueno.

In the spirit of getting it right, here are our tips for rolling out a paid media campaign—whether you’re doing it for the first time or deciding where to focus your budget.

Start with clear goals

Before diving into paid advertising of any kind, you’ve got to have a solid understanding of your campaign’s goals. You’ll also want to set up proper tracking — this ensures paid media gets the credit when those sweet conversions start rolling in.

Before you worry, this doesn’t have to be overly complicated. Paid campaign goals are often reflective of business models more than anything else. For example, an Ecommerce startup is probably going to be looking at increasing revenue and return on ad spend, or ROAS. While B2B SaaS startups are going to be more concerned with generating qualified leads for the sales team.

Set up your media plan

With your goals in hand, it’s time to start crafting your paid media plan. Your choices here fall into two larger buckets: PPC channels and social ads channels. You can reference the tables below for an idea of which channels are going to best help you reach your campaign goals.

Use our media planning template to forecast your potential results

Even with a channel mix you feel good about, it can be tough knowing how to allocate budget properly to meet your goals. The good news? We’ve got a paid media template you can use to crunch the numbers and forecast your way to success.

Hop in the sheet and adjust spending, CPC, and CVR to estimate how your campaigns might perform in various scenarios. If this isn’t your first rodeo, keep in mind this spreadsheet is good for more than just campaign set-up—there’s even a tab we use for later-stage optimizations like audience prioritization.

It’s a distillation of the hard-earned wisdom we’ve gained crafting paid media plans for hundreds of startups. And in case you’re a learn-by-watching type marketer, our Head of Paid Media, Chris, recorded a video showing you how to best leverage these resources.

For more tips on calculating paid media spend for your forays into all things paid media, check out the full blog.

Four types of B2B video content that actually work (and why)

Ah, video marketing—the channel we all secretly know we should be doing more of (but aren’t).

Part of the reason for that hesitation? We consume tons of video content online, but we don’t know the types of videos that move the needle in a business context—especially in B2B, where long and complicated sales cycles reign supreme. Further complicating things is the fact video just feels more complicated to run with than those ultimate-guide style blogs we’ve all been making for years.

When the VP of marketing asks how we plan to make video content work in Q3. Credit: Brooks Otterlake/@i_zzzzzz on X/Twitter

But the good news is video marketing doesn’t need emmy-nominnee level production to succeed. At Tuff, we’ve found that engaging and authentic videos—not just slickly produced ones—are your golden ticket to standing out and building stronger connections with your audience, especially in B2B.

If you’re considering adding video content to your growth marketing repertoire, here are four types of videos you can create to get started.

Explainer videos

If you’re marketing a relatively complicated product or service, explainer videos are great for laying out your core value props in a digestible format.

They’re also easily crafted using stock images and videos, making them relatively low-lift for teams looking to test the waters without filming a ton of The Office style B-roll.

Here’s an example we recently produced for a client.

Testimonial or Case Study Videos

Social proof is absolutely crucial for B2B. With decisions often hinging on referrals or thorough research, it’s key to have that backing.

When we’re targeting specific audiences further down the funnel in our campaigns, we lean heavily on social proof and case study videos to encourage action.

Check out this recent example of a short-form social proof video we used in B2B campaigns on LinkedIn.

Animated videos

When it comes to animated videos, nailing that attention-grabbing hook in the first few seconds is crucial.

These short-form videos, like explainers and testimonials, can really shine on your website and in LinkedIn and YouTube campaigns. Check out this recent animated video we did for a B2B brand—it nails all the key creative elements and has been a real winner for us in campaigns.

User-generated videos

UGC—it’s not just for ecom anymore.

People connect with faces, so showcasing them in your content builds a deeper connection. That’s why UGC is such a hit—it works wonders in B2B, just like it does in D2C setups.

Check out this B2B example we created for use in paid media campaigns.

For more on all things video content for B2B, be sure to check out our full guide.

Successfully navigate a site migration (without scaring your SEO team)

The mere mention of a site migration is usually enough to raise the blood pressure of everyone on your SEO team.

Why? Because when done wrong, a migration can throw all the hard work you’ve been investing into ranking your content in search engines like Google right out the ol’ window.

But whether you’re migrating to a new domain, a new CMS, or just revisiting the architecture of your existing site, you can follow these best practices to minimize the risk to your organic performance metrics.

Conduct a comprehensive technical SEO audit before migration

Assess your current SEO landscape to identify strengths and weaknesses. This audit should guide the migration strategy to avoid losing any SEO equity. If you’re in need of some inspiration to get started, our technical SEO audit template is a great place to start.

Develop a detailed content migration plan

Ensure all valuable content is accurately migrated to the new site. This plan should prevent any loss of content that could affect your site’s information hierarchy and keyword rankings.

Implement server-side 301 redirects for all old URLs

This is crucial for transferring the existing SEO value to the new URLs and for providing a seamless user experience by redirecting visitors to the appropriate content on the new site.

Update your sitemap and resubmit it to search engines

Quickly updating and resubmitting the sitemap helps search engines discover and index the new structure more efficiently.

Monitor performance closely post-migration

Use tools like Google Analytics and Search Console to monitor the site’s performance. Quick identification and resolution of issues like traffic drops or page errors can prevent long-term negative impacts.

Our SEO team recently carried out a brand and domain migration with multiple CMS migrations for Gympass, a website with 500,000+ pages—so if you’re looking for guidance on a migration of your own, you can read all about the process here.

Growth marketing news to watch

Google’s API documentation leak is validating SEOs’ talking points

A recent leak of Google API documentation, originally shared with SparkToro co-founder Rand Fishkin, contained notable revelations as to the inner machinations of

Google’s proprietary search ranking algorithms.

At the heart of the controversy? Many of the 2,500+ ranking features disclosed in the leak include elements that Google have sought to downplay or discredit in recent years, including the importance of links and clicks, as well as the existence of a “sandbox” for newly created domains.

Search Engine Land is already calling it potentially one of the “biggest stories in the history of SEO and Google Search.” And it’s galvanized industry SEOs like iPullRank’s Mike King (he collaborated with Fishkin to break the story), who’ve long singled out Google’s attempts to misdirect SEOs publishing research on search ranking features.

Meanwhile, in the SERPs…

Yeah, we’re gonna need a voucher for this one. Source: @johndcook on Twitter/X.

Looking for more growth content?

Check out case studies, guides, and more resources for all things growth on our site.

Cheers,

Spencer Cappelli, Senior Content Strategist

Tuff Growth