I launched a marketing campaign on my 9th day at Interview Mocha
And in four weeks, we have hundreds of new leads from a new channel
I joined Interview Mocha on March 5th. That was just last month, but it feels like last year. Everyone I know is ageing in a way I did not believe possible, and when you are new to a role, what’s going on is even more unnerving.
But you can’t sit around and mope. As a startup, we are uniquely advantaged, and disadvantaged: We can react quickly and nimbly relative to larger companies, but at the same time our smaller cashflows mean that we can be put under pressure real fast.
In this situation, I’m proud of how we responded: We were able to launch a new marketing campaign in a little over a week. I thought how we went about doing it would be interesting to read about.
Here goes.
We read the situation carefully
In early March, as the effects of the coronavirus started to spread around the world, freezing our economies and driving us indoors, HR departments found themselves in a unique situation. Though working from home has been relatively easy and adopt-able for most tech companies at short notice, hiring and onboarding remains difficult to take remote. But as companies started to see that this was inevitable, we posited that HR would try to start doing so, and very soon.
We asked ourselves what would genuinely help our target audience?
We tried to prepare something useful for HR professionals, something they could use immediately. The idea was that they could use a few resources/guidelines to start doing what they do from home. So put together a whitepaper on how to Hire-from-Home. Mine is still a small team, and there are no writers yet, so after a teammate helped me research, I wrote it myself and completed it over a weekend. We pushed it to design that week.
What you call something matters, and more than you think!
The naming was not an afterthought. We wanted to own the Hire-from-Home term, making it memorable for folks who saw the whitepaper, so they would think about Interview Mocha when they heard it again. If you see the term anywhere else, remember: We came up with it first!
We worked on follow-up content
We wanted to do more, and we put that in motion: an exhaustive how to upskill-from-home blog, and a checklist for recruiters who were hiring-from-home. But we didn’t want to be late, so we got the whitepaper up first, and updated the content later: The same link now leads to a whole Hire-from-Home kit, not just a whitepaper. This gives us content to announce again, and we can also send a follow up mail to folks who had downloaded the original whitepaper. Since they had already signalled intent for helpful content, giving them more would make sure our brand is remembered and recalled, adding another touchpoint for us.
What happened, and what next?
It worked brilliantly well! In a time such as this, we created something new for customers, and now have a set of 400+ folks (and counting) who we have helped, and who now know our brand. The next time we build a new/related feature, I’m going to send them a mail that we’ve built something for them: Perhaps they’d want to take a look?
And more often than not, they do want to take a look, and you’ve done it, the aim of all marketing: You have earned the right to have a conversation.