The Growth Union Launch Breakdown
All the things we did right and wrong
Everyone has probably heard of the term “Building in Public”. Where companies share everything from financials to salaries to the ins and outs of the product they are building. A brutally honest and transparent look at the company
But is anyone “Marketing in Public”? Is that even a thing?
I meet with marketers every week and one of the things I love most about it is getting an honest breakdowns of their marketing initiatives - what is working well and what is not.
There are just too many people out there who only share the good. So I decided I would share all the things I am doing from a marketing perspective, both the good and the bad, as I try and scale this agency.
With that the first breakdown I thought I would give is a rundown of how I launched Growth Union in December. In case you missed it - Growth Union is a new type of Marketing agency focused on working with early stage B2B SaaS Start-ups.
Here is the high level breakdown of how it went before we dig into each one:
Close to 1/2 Million impressions in 1 day on Linkedin.
The website CTA converted at almost 10%.
We got a ton of feedback from founders on how much our messaging resonated.
We also missed on a bunch of items that hurt the campaign.
Half a Million Eyeballs? Yep, That Happened!
The key to any successful launch across most channels is amplification. You want to try and get as many eyeballs on it as possible. I realized early on that isn’t possible if it is just me amplifying the message. So here is how I went about it:
Tapping my network:
Made a list of every friendly (ex co-workers, ex bosses, current clients, friends etc.) in my network that I thought would be willing to support me and sent them a message about a week out letting them know what I was launching.
I asked if they would be willing to help me promote it by either making a post of their own (even shared a template to make it easy) or if they would reshare and engage with mine.
If they responded yes - I added them to a calendar invite to remind them the day of. I made the time for 15 min after I planned on doing my initial post.
Activating those involved in Growth Union
I also asked everyone who is part of Growth Union to do a post of their own and also add it as a new position on their linkedin profile.
I provided them all with a post template they could use and a branded image to use with the new position announcement vs just using the generic one Linkedin provides.
The end result of everyone being activated around the same time? Over 1/2 Million impressions across all of our posts. Hundreds of comments and thousands of visitors to the site.
You know how everyone says copywriting is important?
They happen to be right. I am lucky enough to have what I consider to be the world’s best conversion copywriter as a very good friend - the one and only Eddie Shleyner of Very Good Copy. Eddie and I worked together at G2 - this guy can make any landing page print money - seriously you should hire him if you get the chance, but i digress.
We spent the Wednesday night before the launch going through the site and picking apart the copy, digging into what was the real hook for people and revamping the flow. We covered a lot but I think two biggest things Eddie helped me unlock:
Be bold: Sure we are an agency that helps start-ups scale faster. But isn’t that what every agency promises. What makes you different or better? Lean into that and call it out in a clear concise way.
Scarcity works: Scarcity is a powerful psychological trigger that can boost the persuasiveness of your copywriting. But it needs to be an honest claim or you lose all credibility. The reality is we are just getting started and can’t handle 20 clients out of the gate even if we wanted to. So we added * Limited Client Spaces Available * to all of our CTA’s.
The end result, was that of all the visitors we got to the site since the launch - 10.3% of them end up clicking on the CTA - “Book a Call”
Persona Research Pays Off
One of the reasons we were able to get the messaging to a great spot is I spent a ton of time talking to prospects before we went live. I talked to exactly 26 founders or marketing leaders about the concept of Growth Union before I wrote an ounce of copy or positioning.
In those calls I was able to unlock what they hated about working with most agencies, what they liked, what their ideal experience would be and what red flags did our model raise.
I used all of that information to build out our positioning, linkedin messages, sales decks and pitches etc. In fact - how I decided to lead with the message “Most Marketing agencies suck” for our Linkedin launch is because it was an exact quote from a founder I ran the idea by before launching.
And the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive from our possible buyers. So reminder to everyone - do what you want, and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter, and those who matter don't mind.
Especially if you get your messaging right.
I also dropped the ball
While as a whole the launch was overwhelmingly positive and drove a lot of interest, we got plenty of things screwed up as well. If I had to go back and change anything here is what it would be
Where's the Social Proof? Remember how I mentioned 10.3% of folks clicked on the button to book a call? Well for the first day only about 41% of them actually did that. The reason? I took people directly to a call booking page with 0 social proof or copy around it. I stopped selling and wrongly assumed people would already be completely bought in. Once I noticed this huge drop off I quickly embedded the book a call module onto an actual webpage with more copy around it - and it has now shot up to 63% completion rate.
Timing of the launch: We launched on December 11th - just 2 weeks out from Christmas. As a result - a lot of the folks who did want to speak to us ended up having to book calls for the start of Jan, as their schedule and time off couldn’t accommodate anything before the break. The interest and energy in these calls is a lot less than the ones of those I got booked right after the launch.
Tracking the activity: One of the things that became super painful the day of the launch is keeping up with the activity on social. Since I had so many people posting about it , all of those posts generated comments and interests and I had no system or approach for tracking or managing all of it. Looking back I wish I had either tagged in folks to help me manage it or set up more time for all the follow-ups post launch as I am sure I missed out on some opportunities as a result.
So, that's the scoop on the launch. Ups, downs, and all-around learning moments. Thanks for being a part of this journey. Can't wait to see where we head next!
Cheers,
Adam