Growth Newsletter #036

Users who send direct messages (DMs) to your brand on Instagram are likely to be interested in your product—yet many brands don’t do enough to convert them.

Consider running ads directly to people who DM your brand:

1. In FB Business Manager, go to Accounts and click on “Instagram Accounts.” Select your Instagram business account.
2. Go to Audiences > Create Audience > Custom Audience. Select “Instagram Account” and “People who sent a message to your professional account” in the past 365 days. Call it “Instagram DMs” and click on “Create Audience.”
3. Create a campaign to target this audience.

Important: For best ad performance, study the questions that continuously pop up in your DMs. What do these users want from you? Design your ads with the value props that directly solve their problems.

New content can take months to surface on search engine results pages.

But you can repurpose your old content to accelerate the ranking of your new content. Here's how:

• Figure out if you have any existing content that ranks for the keywords you're targeting. You can Google search using this format [site:yoursitename dot com keyword] to find ranked pages.
• Then redirect (for outdated pieces of content) or interlink (for pieces that are still relevant) these URLs to your new piece. This will give it an authority boost—a sign that Google uses to increase your content’s ranking.
• If you don't have any relevant content for interlinking, use an SEO tool (like Ahrefs) to determine high-authority pages on your site. Link these pages to your new content where it fits.

Your new piece of content now has an internal linking profile with authority, which will help it to rank quicker, and better, on Google.

It's not just your customers who can refer—your best influencers can refer other influencers to your brand.

Once you find a great long-term influencer partner and you’re ready to scale up, it’s worth incentivizing your partner to activate other great influencers.

Here’s how to do it:

• Create a referral system for your long-term influencer to sign up other influencers.
• Give them a percentage of sales generated by the influencers they refer and activate.

They’ll be motivated to sign up other great influencers because they’re paid based on the performance of those influencers.

Now your long-term influencer partner isn’t just your advertiser—they’re incentivized to help you scale influencer marketing as an acquisition channel.