Launching a brand-new product is never easy.
For an unknown company, with a limited budget and a very niche product: environmentally-friendly picnic supplies. Definitely not easy!
This was exactly the challenge facing Berlin-based start-up Green Gatherings as they prepared to launch their very first range of products.
So who exactly is the company?
Founded during the Covid-19 pandemic, Green Gatherings was born from a desire to bring people together outdoors without harming the planet. The company’s range of bowls, plates and cups, all made from locally-sourced leaves, provide a sustainable alternative to the usual single-use plastics.
What was my solution?
The plan for the launch was to first focus on building awareness and trust. This was where content marketing came in! Through a highly targeted blog article, the aim was to capture the attention of our specific audience, gain their trust, and ultimately encourage sign-ups to the newsletter.
With leads successfully generated, an email marketing campaign would then deepen that relationship, with the final email containing a limited promo offer.
What was my role?
- Conducting in-depth market research to understand the industry and target market
- Developing two detailed buyer personas and selecting one to tailor the campaign to
- Publishing an engaging blog post that would educate, inform and generate leads
- Conducting keyword research and optimising content for search engines
- Producing an email course to deepen trust and promote the product launch
- Designing a product landing page to present the products, highlighting their benefits
- Setting up automated emails using Mailchimp to optimise the email campaign
- Tracking campaign performance using Google Analytics and analysing the results
- Presenting the results against the relevant KPIs to company stakeholders
What were the results?
✓ Successfully increased web traffic to the blog, achieving 60 views to the blog article against a company target of 20.
✓ Gathered 8 sign-ups to the company newsletter to help the company start building a loyal following and community.
✓ Consistently exceeded the open-rate target of 35% across all emails featured throughout the entire campaign.
What were the key learnings?
In this campaign, I learned how to conduct in-depth market research and how to inform a content strategy based on its results. In this case, the aim was to build trust, and this led me to focus on themes of credibility and transparency within the content. This has given me the skills to conduct similar research in the future and devise campaigns that draw from research to successfully target a particular audience.
I also managed to deepen my knowledge of managing content on WordPress; a tool I had had some experience with in the past. However, thanks to this campaign I was able to expand my skills and learn how to effectively apply principles from SEO; something which I found thoroughly enjoyable and look forward to replicating.
And if you were to do it again?
If I were to repeat the campaign, one thing I would do differently is to try to factor in an element of experimentation. I could have, for instance, launched the products using a series of posts (perhaps on a range of topics to see which performed best or produced greater engagement among the audience), to then inform the strategy for future product launches. In this sense, only using a single piece of content meant there was limited scope for experimentation and any deeper learning about the strategy’s effectiveness.
Want to learn more?
Have a read of the full case study below:
Lewis Blakey 