Tiffany Dasilva has been in digital marketing for over 10 years (20 years if you count the rst time she ever “SEO’d” a website). She started her career in SEO. After that, she moved to SEM, Social Media Advertising, Content Marketing, and then eventually CRO. Her expertise lies in SEM mostly.
In the 2nd issue of ScaleUp Magazine, Tiffany talked about her experience working as a growth hacker.
- Tell us about your background and work you have been doing.
I’ve been in digital marketing for over 10 years (20 years if you count the first time I ever “SEO’d” a website) I started my career in SEO. After that, I moved to SEM, Social Media Advertising, Content Marketing, and then eventually CRO. I would say my expertise lies in SEM mostly..
- You have been a growth hacker and helping companies grow. How would you define growth hacking?
Growth Hacking for me is a bit different than the “growth hacking” you hear about when it comes to early stage startups. For me, I tend to come into companies a few years in, right after they’ve received a couple rounds of funding. At this point we start looking at all the activity that’s been going on since the start, cut the things that don’t work and focus on the things that do in order to scale. My job becomes to look at every stage in the funnel and find the best ways to move the needle whether its through acquisition, activation, retention, revenue or referral.
- Give us some examples of growth hacking done by you.
I tend to hack away (no pun intended) on PPC campaigns. People tend to think that having a lot of keywords are the best way you make sure to get every last conversion. I like to focus only the keywords that convert consistently (even if it’s only 1-2) and then spend my time making the landing pages better in order to enhance the user experience, but also to increase quality score (making each lead cheaper). I’ve done this quite a few times, but in one case I was able to increase leads year over year 50-100% while dropping the cost conversion from $175 when we started down to $50 today.
In an SEO example for the same company, we took all the companies major services and broke them out by location. We created backend landing pages that were indexable by Google but not in the navigation. We made sure the pages weren’t duplicate. We increased organic traffic by 200%. As soon as organic traffic started to roll in, we made sure that we were constantly testing and tweaking those pages to ensure the best conversion rate possible. Even though it took a few months before Google indexed those pages and we started showing up on the first page, we were able to use this as a longer term strategy while the other PPC campaigns were doing their magic in the short term.
When thinking of growth hacking strategies – break them up. What areas can you focus on for short term benefits and what areas can you focus on for longer term? People tend to think of growth hacking as what can we do NOW, but I try to focus on both.. I mean, 3-6 months flies by in a startup – you want to be prepared.
Read the complete interview for free in the ScaleUp Magazine Issue 2
