Collaboration between marketing and product with a user-first approach can result in amazing creations. With a growth mindset, we recently focused on ways to empower more businesses to leverage Elastic Grid so they can grow their bottom line.
Mentality shift: Portals and the Marketplace
Elastic Grid is comprised of different portals, of which brands control both access and content upload. This portal is for themselves or their resellers to leverage, just like stalls operating in the same Marketplace: Elastic Grid.
Our Marketing team also owns a portal to support our lead generation efforts and create campaigns. ‘Drinking our own champagne’ as our CEO, Cameron Avery refers to it. Just like any other client, the Marketing team can control access and content upload on that portal.
With this model in place, we were faced with a number of problems that prevented both user acquisition and retention:
– Lack of control: there was a technical barrier for brands and resellers to sign-up and access content.
– Missed opportunity: most users only had a singular portal view and no awareness of the breadth of the Elastic Grid ecosystem.
– Relying on brands to keep their ‘stall’ open on the Marketplace: if a brand decided to close and move on, the users on their portal would lose their access and have to follow.
When product and marketing work together
The epiphany came when writing up the next phase of our company growth. We wanted to increase our user base, while boosting software usage. A great way to achieve these goals would be to allow any prospect or reseller to at least get into the tool, even if they couldn’t access any brand available.
So, how could we get anyone to sign-up and use Elastic Grid?
We realized we had full control over one portal: the Marketing one. We could get anyone to request access to it, without compromising the other brands’ content, hence simplifying our sign-up process. So we cleaned and opened up the Elastic Grid portal for everyone to leverage as a starting point in the Elastic Grid ecosystem.
Behind the scenes, this involved changing the way we granted access to the Marketplace. Rather than accessing a singular portal, users would enter through the Elastic Grid portal we controlled. Our portal became the lobby everyone had to go through to access other brands on the Marketplace.
Creation of stationary and generic campaigns
Access was no longer a problem, but we had to figure out actions we could take to make the Elastic Grid portal valuable to all users. We decided to create a stack of generic campaigns – for anyone to leverage.
In an agile fashion, we tested the concept by first promoting this new content to users who already had access to the Elastic Grid portal. Seeing a great uptake in site registrations and leads generated, we were able to validate the idea and expand this content to all users and prospects.
Results
To assess the outcome of this initiative the success metrics we defined were:
– Amount of multi-brand users: increased from 9 to 14% of total user base.
– Amount of leads generated by generic campaigns: Elastic Grid became the second brand to generate the most leads on the platform.
4 months after launch, the ‘6 Tech Trends For 2017’ campaign not only became the Marketplace’s most popular campaign in terms of registrations, it also generated 13% of total leads during that period.
– Amount of new registrations to the Elastic Grid portal: The amount of new registrants has grown from 0 to 6% of total users, so far.
Not only the growth ideation was a success from a technical perspective – we now feature a ‘Get Started’ button on our website – the generic content we provide on a regular basis has allowed 100+ users to generate 2000+ leads across 21 countries. If reinforcing the product and marketing relationship leads to faster growth, it also benefits the user. And that’s good for everyone.
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