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The stories I’m about to tell are examples of nearbound marketing executed marvelously. They stand as a testament to what's possible with nearbound marketing.
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A COMPLETE BREAKDOWN
El nearbound rey de dinosaur
A few days ago I was listening to Mac Reddin on The Transaction podcast with Matt Amundson and Craig Rosenberg.
The episode was incredible and I couldn’t stop taking notes.
Then, because I was so fired up, I shared the episode with Isaac Morehouse who I knew would appreciate Mac’s fiery take on go-to-market and the tactics he and his team used to create virality on LinkedIn.
The stories I’m about to tell are examples of nearbound marketing executed marvelously.
They stand as a testament to what’s possible with nearbound marketing.
I’ll start with their results.
Campaign one: Booth at Pavilion’s GTM 23 event in Nashville
Results: They had 190/750 attendees pre-register for a time slot to be at their booth and 4 hours after the event ended, the team and attendees were still at the booth.
Campaign two: Announced the new Commsor, the House of Authentic Connections
Results: They generated an estimated 1.2m total LinkedIn impressions in just 48 hours without spending a single dollar.
Most companies wish for results half as good as this.
So how did they do it?
Campaign one: Booth at Pavilion’s GTM 23 event in Nashville
The Commsor team is still startup scrappy which means sometimes they do things last-minute.
They bought a booth at Pavillion’s GTM ‘23 event in Nashville, but 3 weeks out they still hadn’t planned their approach to the booth.
Mac doesn’t like following normal playbooks.
He explains,
When I think about marketing ideas and our team thinks about marketing ideas, we tend to think from a vibe-first mentality.
We think first about “how are people going to feel about this”
I care about the numbers obviously because I’m trying to run a business, but the numbers aren’t where we start when we think about ideas.
He wants to do marketing that’s fun and exciting.
There’s tons of literature out there so everyone is following the same playbook.
Without realizing it, you’re just doing your own version of the same thing everyone else is doing.
The normal approach to booths at an event is something like this:
- Badge scan
- Demo on a screen
- Salespeople ready to pitch the product to passerbys
Mac and the Commsor team didn’t want to do that so they put their minds together and came up with a different idea.
What if we did a Hot Ones x Commsor-themed booth, asked people questions, and recorded the interactions? We can brand our own hot sauce and get people to sign up ahead of time to be a part of the “show."
Marketers who are committed to following the old playbooks would look at an idea like this and think:
- How are we going to know who came to our booth?
- How are we going to follow up or close deals?
- How are we going to measure the ROI of a show like this?
Mac cares about driving revenue but he thinks on a larger time horizon.
He thinks about the real relationships he and his team can build with their market. He thinks about the experiences he’s facilitating for the people in Commsor’s orbit.
When you build trust on a personal level, people want to work with you.
So while everyone else on the floor was competing with each other to get passersby to talk to them, Commsor’s “Hot Ones” show was an attraction that drew people to it.
In fact, the landing page they put up got 190/750 attendees pre-registered to go to the Commsor booth.
Imagine getting 190/750 people to commit to visiting you before the event even starts!
No one felt targeted and Commsor didn’t need to try to entice attendees to come to their booth with swag.
In true nearbound fashion, the show surrounded the event. There was buzz everywhere. People wanted to be a part of it.
Event attendees were so stoked to be a part of the show that 4 hours after the event ended, people were still lined up at the booth waiting for their turn.
Nearbound is about building trust over time. It thinks about the compounding effect of social capital.
So when the event ended, Commsor’s team wasn’t done with the people they met at the event.
The event was where they met people, brought people into their orbit, and began building trust.
After the event, they continued engaging attendees and planned to reach out again when each person’s episode was published.
Campaign two: Announce the new Commsor - the House of Authentic Connections
When they were planning on announcing the new Commsor, Mac and his team made a list of all of the people they had previously had interactions with.
A lot of our marketing is based off of building authentic connections with our market.
These people came from events like the Pavilion GTM event, social media, and more.
They had given so much to these people, that when they finally asked for help promoting this launch, everyone was excited to be a part of it.
They made promoting the launch super easy and gave individuals instructions, assets, and prompts to post about.
The result? An estimated 1.2 million impressions in less than 48 hours.
These results are incredible and only possible because Commsor lives and breathes nearbound, or go-to-network, as they call it.
I’m going to leave you with these final words from Mac,
99% of what go-to-market teams do is wrong or misguided today. That isn’t to say that that 99% doesn’t sometimes work, but we’ve confused working and good ideas.
Over the last 15 years, so much of marketing and sales has trended towards absolute measurement. That’s a bad idea. The human element has been taken out…
Right now everything in go-to-market is built on the assumption that outcomes are binary. For example, marketing and sales are built off of the assumption that it’s either a closed-won or a closed-lost deal.
In reality that’s not the way it works.
Our simplest thought was—how do we foster a network of people who give a crap about what we do. That’s customers, partners, friends, and fans…
Good marketing today is nearbound marketing.
So when I find companies and leaders doing it right, I pay attention. Huge shoutout to the Commsor team. You rock! Thanks for showing us how it’s done!
You’re all caught up.
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