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0:00
Hey, everybody! We've been away for a while so extra long version today. At least according to this tool... This is a super nice share from Sophie, it allows us to see how long it will take to deliver a pitch, a speech, etc. based on how many words we've scripted. Problem is if like me you only write a few bullet points for what you're gonna say it's not super precise, but according to the tool this video is gonna take between 18 and 22 minutes.
0:20
And as usual you can download the list of tools and resources at the link below. Okay, let's keep going with Growth Insights!
0:30
Let's kick it off with some UX findings. Kind of shocking findings actually. This UX tooling survey shared by Stefan shows that two thirds of 7,000 interviewed experts on UX and design don't use monitoring tools for their products or web experiences. It's kind of scary, there's lots of sketching, lots of prototyping, but it means a majority of experts still don't gather data to back their decisions. Maybe they should start watching some Growth Insights episodes?
0:54
What do we mean with data gathering tools? For example Stefan has been testing this new app called Hawkeye. It allows you to do eye tracking on an iPhone X. It used to cost a lot of money to do this in a user testing lab. This tool is awesome and we've introduced them into our guerrilla and user testing training to empower people to do it themselves on a frequent basis. It's not 100% accurate, but a really great upgrade from screen recordings on mobile. If you're working with mobile
1:18
interfaces, which you probably are, you're gonna want to check this one out. But, if you don't like these tools and you're too lazy to gather the data you'll have to use heuristics or best practices. So on that note, here's one shared by Jean, it's a series of best practices across the different aspects of your site. From login, to signup, to pricing pages, even 404 and FAQ pages. But as always with any best practices related to UX, please take it with a pinch of salt and test it.
1:42
Once you're done with that head over to Webaud.it. It's also a checklist of things to remember for your website, but it's more focused on performance and formatting. Things like optimising your HTML, HTTP requests, accessibility and security. Points we very often forget. Check it out. Speaking of experiments and UX optimisation, here's one for your pricing pages. Thanks to Thomas for experimenting with tools like AfterPay, which allow to offer instalments on very small amounts.
2:07
This is similar to Affirm.com which Giulia talked about in her campaign teardown of Peloton bikes. By the way check out that video it's amazing. Experiments from our clients are showing really strong results when offering these type of delayed payment options on small basket amounts. Could be an experiment for you. Speaking of checkouts and buying online, thanks to Caterina for pointing out two months ago that on Instagram you can now find a product you love and buy it without leaving the app.
2:31
It's called Instagram checkout. Still on Instagram but organic now, we've been happily testing Apphi.com which was recommended by Luke and it allows you to automatically post to Instagram - videos or photos - to schedule them from your phone. It's fast and the UI is super intuitive and it's currently your favourite Instagram mobile scheduling tool. Still on the subject of social, moving from Instagram to Facebook check out one of our latest blog posts shared by Sophie on AI tools we approve
2:56
for automating your Facebook campaign. We share some gems in there like DataSine Pomegranate, AI Target, and MonkeyLearn. If it's relevant for you I'll let you go check out the article which explains how these tools work. Speaking of social we found this great visualisation on the rise and the demise of the main Western social media channels. This is great, you see the rise and the demise of Friendster, of Myspace, of Bebo. You see the long rise of Facebook and how it's going down again,
3:20
and who the current champions are. Still on the subject of large tech companies, do you want to understand how GAFAM makes their money? Understand their revenue sources in a matter of seconds? Well we found this amazing data visualisation. In it we learn that Apple relies very heavily on its phone sales. Amazon is increasingly diversified, they're probably the most hedged portfolio of these five. Alphabet is still very very very ad revenue driven
3:41
with some new bets starting to pop up. Microsoft is very diversified and Facebook is yet to find new sources of income and still heavily rely on their core platforms Facebook and Instagram. Still on the subject of big company data I fell in love with these company specific Sankey diagrams. You really see the power of data visualisation here. You can check out for example where Disney makes their revenue, where their costs are and what their net profits are.
4:04
You also have this for Nike across the different geographical locations where they sell, and this beautiful one from Apple where you see the revenue, the total revenue, what the cost of goods sold are, how much they spend on R&D and what their actual net profit is. Still on the subject of Apple, you might have missed this one but it's quite important. It's relative to Apple and the world of paid ads. Apple has announced the next iteration of Intelligent Tracking Prevention
4:26
with iteration 2.1. It's called ITP 2.1. What does it mean? It's basically a system where implemented cookies can be erased after seven days. This has a huge impact on conversion tracking and retargeting which won't be as reliable after seven days or at least for the 15% of users who are currently using Apple phones. Thanks to Thomas reporting out that Criteo shares, it's an ad platform, a competitor of Google, lost 20% after this announcement.
4:50
And Jean shared this really interesting article that Apple is actually positioning itself around privacy. Okay, speaking about privacy, what am I being targeted for on AdWords? can I get some transparency there? Yes, I can. It's cool because it shows you how ads are personalised for you. What personal information you've added to your Google account or data from advertisers that partner with Google. This gives you more control and it shows you what's happening under the hood.
5:12
Speaking of Google ads, Google ads actually have a new look. Check out this article that explains it but basically if you pay enough, if you're in the top results, you get a little icon with your branding next to the top ads. Making it even more attractive to spend more on their platform. And hopefully, increase your conversions. This one was also super cool, you probably saw it running by one of your social media channels.
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Ferdinand shared 18 years of tech disruption in 60 seconds. You see how companies like Apple, Google and Amazon have conquered the top four spots from traditional brands from 2000 to 2018. Amazon shows crazy growth in those last few seconds. And as always you can find the source and the methodology in the links in the resource. We also found a similar visualisation for the top ten biggest cities in the world. It's fun stuff, check it out. These type of charts are really engaging,
5:56
we call them bar race charts, and they're sprawling like crazy on the Internet at the moment. Well thanks to Ferdinand for sharing this gem. This tool from Flourish studio allows you to super easily create race charts. You update your data, you tweak with the settings and you can create your own. And if you do please share yours in the comments. Okay, let's continue with the data avalanche! With one of the biggest avalanches of all. The report we look forward to each year is out.
6:19
It's called the Kleiner Perkins Report. It's 334 slides of gold. In it we learn that customer acquisition costs are rising in some saturated sectors. Images are increasingly the means by which people communicate. The number of interactive gamers worldwide grew 6% to 2.4 billion last year. Or healthcare is steadily becoming more digitised. This is a must read, please go through the report and see what's interesting for you.
6:40
And if that wasn't enough, thanks to Regan for sharing some great stats about internet usage. Still on data, but let's talk tools this time, let's talk LinkedIn analytics. Jean's an expert and is addicted to LinkedIn, we know. By the way, check out this video where he goes through LinkedIn profile optimisation tips. He got excited about ShieldApp.ai. It's a LinkedIn analytics platform. You can manage everything in one place with network and content engagement metrics.
7:04
If you're into LinkedIn have a look it's worth it, I use it, I love it. Speaking of LinkedIn, let's talk about LinkedIn ads. As usual the biggest blocker for you to run LinkedIn ads is cost - cost per click. We usually say that LinkedIn ads aren't worth it unless your customer lifetime value is €15,000 or more. Proof in point is this little piece of research we find the average CPC is 5.26 dollars compared to approximately 0.97 across
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the globe for Facebook. It's also a nice primer article as it runs you through all the different ad types possible depending on your goals. Okay let's do a few more things around LinkedIn. We've shared tools to view your competitors' or other companies' ads in the past. Well here's a new one. LinkedIn is also rolling out this feature. They seem to be A/B testing it so not everyone has access yet. And of course since it's LinkedIn ads, you'll see that most companies
7:48
just aren't running them. It's usually companies that have enterprise sales. Still on tools, we've talked about the Stackies before, which awards the best marketing tech stack each year. Definitely worth a look. Thanks to Ferdinand for sharing Segment's Growth Stacks of 2019. So this is what Segment believes are the best growth stacks from 2019, based on who's using what. It's organised by analytics raw data, email, advertising, mobile attribution, warehouses, live chat, etc etc.
8:13
What I love about this is that it's a ranking of usage so you can see which tools are the most used. Speaking of tools, here's a cool one from Sophie... It's GMass's link checker. It's an HTML link checker for email campaigns. So basically before you send an email campaign out that has links, you copy/paste your email in here and it shows you everything you're linking to, also with a preview. This will avoid you making mistakes on your email campaigns. Good stuff good find.
8:37
Okay, let's switch gears a bit. Are you creating landing pages or personas or do you need avatars? Ganvatar.com is pretty sweet. The faces are generated by AI and you can move the cursors left or right to make the faces more or less female, male, old, young, happy, unhappy... and no, none of these people exist for real. Okay, now let's take these to the next level. This reminded me of this tweet by Dmitry Ulyanov where only a few shots of a face allow you to make
9:01
a face speak. The use of these deep fakes is gonna be very interesting in the next elections like in this video. With the speed of current news cycles and echo chambers it's gonna be hard to separate fake from reality. Especially when it serves your opinion and you don't even want your opinion to be changed. On lighter note, but with similar technology, here's what the Mona Lisa would have looked like when speaking. Okay, still an image recognition, check this one out.
9:23
Using generative adversarial networks with just a few clicks, NVIDIA unveiled a stunning image creator able to sketch images that are nearly photorealistic based on very very simple sketches. This is like MS Paint for the AI age. Still on creepy AI applications, thanks to Matias for sharing this one. It's Google Duplex demos. It's pretty creepy and super effective. Google duplex, if you remember, is that assistant on the
9:47
phone that can reserve bookings for you. The New York Times did a bunch of tests and this is what they found. For the full story check out the article in the links. Still on machine learning, but simpler this time, thanks to Thomas for sharing Genderize.io which you can implement or already test at this URL. You can test easy names like David or Louise... or harder ones like Blair or Ezra or Morgan. Maybe this can be helpful if you have a list of names but you don't have the genders associated.
10:11
Now here's some other forms of predictive machine learning. We're excited about Daan sharing this update. It's the MadKudu and Intercom integration. Basically it helps you remove waste on who you chat with by only chatting with traffic that is statistically more likely to be converting or a high CLTV customer. So it predicts who's gonna convert based on historical data and the chat pops up only for those people. Alright let's continue with lead gen. Giulia started testing ConvertFlow.com
10:36
which is a library of forms, pop-ups, landing pages, sticky bars, and surveys for lead generation. Looks pretty slick so far. The pricing is affordable, let's see how it stacks up against Sumo.com. More on lead generation, this one shared by Mitch. It's called Shapr.co. Shapr is basically a networking app with a UI that kind of looks like Tinder and it gives you a personalised daily dose of inspiring people to meet. But apparently it's also lead gen gold. It's working
11:00
well for a bunch of us. It allows you to reach out to relevant prospects and since we're always looking for high quality but cheap channels, you might want to check this one out before it gets saturated. I'm not sure it's relevant for every country though so test it out. Speaking of still soon-to-be saturated channels, thanks to Thomas for sharing that you can now target keywords on Quora. And that's very interesting for us because it's a very interest-based platform.
11:21
Now, still on lead generation, once they land on your website, if your product is complex, we've talked about this before, sometimes you need to prove the ROI of the product or the service. you're selling. And you can do that with calculators, allow somebody to calculate the return on investment of your product for them. Thanks to Giulia for sharing this page. It's a cool ROI calculator tool with a few numbers asked.
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It's a good example of a company doing this. It takes you step-by-step, asks you some questions and it shows you the return on investment if you use their service. This is also a form of what we call engineered marketing - small tools to increase conversions. We've shared a bunch of these templates in the past, specifically from the website Outgrow. Here are a few more templates from Involve.me. There's templates for quizzes, for surveys, for calculators, for
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promotion... and we especially like this last one which is a bunch of personality tests, as they would allow you to gather psychographic data about your customers to serve them better. Still on calculators, Ferdinand shared Omnicalculator which has ROI calculators and much much more. You've got calculators for construction, for conversions, for ecology, for food, for health, for statistics, for sports... Bookmark it and thank us later.
12:24
Now back to the lead generation and converting people who have landed on your website or your product. Another way to convert them is through live chat. Now we love AnyLeads, it's our favourite tool to generate long lists of leads and prospects. Thanks to Quentin for sharing the fact that they've launched a chatbot themselves, and it's probably the cheapest one out there. And speaking of chatting, check out Whatsmany.com which was shared by Thomas.
12:44
It allows you to send personal Whatsapp messages in bulk so you can see it as a Twilio or an Intercom for Whatsapp. Okay, still on automation but for spreadsheets this time. Here's an add-on for spreadsheets that allows you to manage spreadsheet data, consolidate or distribute data from any Google Sheet, Excel and CSV. They've got beautiful spreadsheet templates, check out this one on OKRs for example, and they allow you to build workflow
13:07
connections which are automations between these different spreadsheets. If you use a lot of spreadsheets and you're into automation go and investigate this tool. Speaking of spreadsheets, did you know that Google Drive has integrated translations into their sheets? Thanks to Jean for sharing this fact and this is what the formula looks like to run these translations. Okay, speaking of translations, let's talk content. Thanks to Tess for sharing this really cool tool,
13:27
it's called Jumprope.com and it allows you to super rapidly create how-to videos and export them to YouTube or to Instagram. Here's another share from Ferdinand. Still on videos, it's called Rocketium.com. It allows you to create small videos really really fast. Now we shared a lot of these tools in the past. What's different with this one is that they have a white label solution. So if you have a user-generated content website, you can embed this tool onto
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your website to make sure your users create more engaging videos. You're basically turning all of your users into video creators. Still on content but more on written content now, thanks to Giulia for sharing this amazingly in-depth study by Backlinko on content best practices. In it we learned things like the fact that long-form content tends to get an average of 77% more backlinks than short articles; 1.3% of articles generates 75% of all social shares;
14:14
and question headlines with a question mark tend to get 23.3% more social shares. If you're into content read the whole study. Speaking of SEO and content I really like this LinkedIn share that says that it doesn't take a genius to understand how SEO has changed just look at results on Google. And he breaks down paid campaigns, featured snippets, the knowledge graph and the fact that oftentimes the first organic results on desktop is very very low.
14:34
Still on SEO thanks to Adriana for sharing this one. Now we don't usually share tools that we haven't tested yet but we're pretty excited about this one because it removes a lot of pain in theory. SEO Watchdog allows you to monitor your website before an SEO catastrophe happens. Content checks, robots and sitemap checks, domain and SSL checks, you can sign up for the beta now. I'm still waiting for my invitation, we'll update you once we get a chance to test it.
14:56
Speaking of Google but more quirky and fun stuff now, Here's a really nice article with a bunch of tips of stuff you might not know you could do with Google. For example, did you know you could flip a coin or roll a die by typing this command into the search bar? Bonus tip, you can also ask Google to spin a dreidel. Did you know that if you type "spinner" into Google and then you switch the toggle at the top to "number" you can then create a wheel with anywhere from 2 to 20 numbers and click
15:17
it to spin it to land on a random number. This is also a really nice one for designers. Searching for "color picker" will pull up a simple tool that lets you select a color and find its HEX code, RGB value, CMYK value and more. Small side note, really cool tool shared by Jean... It's called Get CSS Scan, and that's exactly what it does, you can pull out the CSS just by scanning over an element on a website. Speaking of googling, I've been googling a lot on corporate innovation recently.
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Innovation is basically like a series of bets that you place. It's a game of risk and reward, and like in any probability game, there's risks of false positive - betting on something that actually doesn't work out - or false negatives - not betting on something when it actually would have worked out. In that vein we've shared this one in the past called Gcemetery.co. Thanks to Peter for sharing an even better version of this
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called killedbygoogle.com, where you see a long list of Google's false positives. Things they thought would work out and they ended up killing because it wasn't generating extra revenue or it wasn't interesting from a strategic point of view. Now what about false negatives, things that you should have invested in but you didn't. Is there a list for that? BVP does just that. In a modest sort of way they show some of the huge deals that they passed on. Like Airbnb, Apple, Atlassian, eBay, FedEx,
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PayPal or Kayak. Which just goes to show, you you never really know what's gonna work. Speaking of innovation, we think Amazon's one of the best innovators in the world, and thanks to Luke Johnson for sharing this slide deck. It gives you a look inside Amazon. The most interesting learning was to work from the customer backwards. So for example in launching a new product you should actually start with the press release, start with the end. Then you work on the FAQ, the
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documentation. And then, only then, should you start building the features, start building the actual products. It's like mixing service design with the realities of distribution. And one of the things that sets Amazon apart is they're fast, agile, two-pizza rule way of working. Small, agile autonomous teams. Thanks to Regan for sharing a really nice article about fake agile since that term gets tossed around so much. It has some really nice indicators on what agile actually isn't,
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what it actually is and how you can spot BS agile. And by the way thanks to Roeland for sharing this one. The US Department of Defense actually circulated a memo about this to detect agile BS. It's a decision tree, maybe run it on your organisation to see are we actually running agile or not. Speaking of spotting BS, we've recently launched a new traineeship around data scientists. It's a traineeship to build business-savvy data scientists.
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And it's a difficult process because we receive hundreds of applications and we need to find who are the right people who should join the traineeship. We met this cool tool along the way, it's called Caliper.ai. So if you're recruiting for data-oriented jobs or for data scientists this tool allows you as a recruiter to evaluate practical AI and data science skills through little challenges. Okay, great. Now to wrap it up we're gonna do a waterfall of
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tools and resources it's gonna be kind of random but some interesting stuff in there. this one's really sweet it's called Screenspace.io/mockup and it allows you to create photo-real 3D mock-ups from a bunch of popular devices. Takes a couple of seconds, it's pretty cheap and it looks really really sweet. This one's super slick, thanks to Jean for sharing Designmodo.com. it's design bootstrap templates with a drag-and-drop interface. It's a lot of fun check out and play with their demo here.
18:15
Did you know that Twitter has open sourced their emojis? So now all of their emojis are open source and you can use them on your projects. Thanks to Sofie for this one, it's a random name generator. They tend to be pretty bad but this one's actually okay. Let us know if you have a better one. Let's say I want to create a new waze for parking, and I want to make sure that the domain name is available. This tool does all of that: creates the name and checks if it's available.
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Speaking of random stuff generators here's a random meme generator, it's quite hilarious. Thanks to Jean for sharing this one it's called the AI Meme. It reminds us of that random motivational quote generator we shared a while back. And so here are some of our favourite random memes. Thanks to Thomas for sharing Growthjobs.io which is exactly what the name says it's a jobs list for growth jobs. This one's really funny, you know how we're always reducing the size of links,
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making them really short. This one does exactly the opposite. Thanks to Ferdinand for sharing the make-my-link-longer tool which does just that, it makes your link longer. Thanks to Giulia for sharing this cool little map. It's called the Startups Map and it's powered by Dealroom. This map allows you to see startups around you. Here you see the city of Amsterdam and I wish every city would have something similar.
19:15
Did you know we've actually had success with reaching out companies within our vicinity? Like "hey, we're neighbours, we should meet". Maybe that's one experiment for you too. This one's also really interesting shared by Aidan. It's like Delivering Happiness book but as a service. It helps you with customer happiness. It's a service that allows to send sorry notes, send physical gifts and messages automatically when customers are let down. It's a great pain to solve
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because everybody has that pain of disappointing customers and you can see some of their use cases on their website. And to finish it off here's a share by Mirella. If you're interested in social media this is a really nice snippet of information delivered every week. In 20 seconds I can get all of the latest social news. It's powered by WeAreSocial.com and I try to scan it every week in 30 seconds. As always you know where the links are
19:56
download the resources, please comment with what your favourite tool or resource was and we'll see you pretty soon!
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