ActiveCampaignAt ActiveCampaign we were a pretty large organization, with customers that adored us, but nobody had heard of us. Everyone’s heard of HubSpot and Mailchimp, but we didn’t have that same notoriety. I remember sitting there thinking about the size of the company and going, this is crazy that we don’t have a footprint. I didn’t want it to just be me talking about us. I wanted our customers to talk about us.
So I set out to build an organic campaign that leveraged our best asset: our customers. I decided to forgo stale case studies that would take forever, and only get shared once in a while. I wanted a campaign that had the power to spread quickly and be where our buyers were already spending time, and that meant LinkedIn.
We refined the ask for customers down to one formula: a very specific ask, on a very specific day, with very specific things we’d do in return that were valuable to that person. None of them were monetary.
The ask became something like: this Friday, we’re asking some of our customers to explain why you made the decision to migrate over to ActiveCampaign and where you came from.
Then we figured out what our customers valued. Every archetype is a little different. Ours saw that ActiveCampaign had a big engine: a lot of attention, a high domain rank, a lot of traffic. They wanted to be prominent with us. So we used those assets. We built a wall on the website to feature them and gave them a space to promote themselves.
We also rallied the marketing team. A lot of our customers were marketers, so they had webinars and podcasts of their own. When a customer told me they had a new episode coming out Friday, I’d say, awesome, I’m going to share it in a room with 250 people.
One time a customer had 19 five-star reviews come in within an hour of their episode dropping.
Over a few months we created a real saturation effect, with more than 150 customers posting about us.
Larger companies look at different metrics than smaller ones, so we measured two things. The first was share of search. We wanted to be one of the top three vendors people thought of: HubSpot, Mailchimp, and then ActiveCampaign.
We regularly polled a group of 3,000+ people to test whether we were top of mind, and we saw about a 28% increase.
The second was positive mentions. I cared less about follower counts and more about how many people were saying good things about us. We went from maybe 10 positive mentions a month to more than 100 in a single month. That’s a 10x increase, and you could see it yourself by typing ActiveCampaign into the LinkedIn search bar.
Key metrics
- 150+ customers posted about ActiveCampaign on LinkedIn
- Positive mentions went from about 10 a month to 100+ in one month (10x)
- About 28% increase in share of search
- No paid incentives
