Recruiting a customer panel through a PLG expansion strategy

The Chief Revenue Officer asked me to lead a customer expansion initiative to test the product-led growth model. I enlisted the help of the marketing department designers to create a word-of-mouth campaign that got traction on Linkedin. We then identified and built a list of our most engaged customers for marketing or product research purposes, our first product champions.

TL’DR

• Officevibe, an HR-Tech app, aimed for a 4.9% expansion rate.
• I proposed creating an award for Officevibe’s best managers to leverage pride, encouraging them to share their success on LinkedIn and join our LinkedIn champions group.

Could we increase customer expansion?

In 2021, Officevibe needed to boost customer expansion for its business model to be sustainable. Previous attempts, such as a referral gift card, failed to make an impact.

As part of the strategy team, I was tasked by the Chief Revenue Officer to sponsor an initiative addressing this challenge. Although I’m a product designer, not a marketer, I facilitated an ideation session with the Inbound team’s creatives. They had an unexecuted word-of-mouth idea targeting top managers of the HR product, which was initially deemed too much effort.

Recognizing the power of positive emotions, I formulated a strategy to motivate managers to share their success.

I created a one-pager detailing the campaign strategy, aiming for 250 customer posts on LinkedIn.

Hypothesis: Could the pride of a high Officevibe engagement score drive managers to share on social media?

If not, it was likely that the bottom-up model would never be sustainable for us.

I reached out to the data and analytics team, and they provided me with the best managers according to our metrics. These managers were the top 2% of the best managed teams (highest engagement score).

We drafted an email communication to congratulate them, and invite them to post a “Officevibe Best Managed Team – Spring 2021” badge on Linkedin. The Spring edition was so that if the campaign was a success, we could re-use the strategy later.

The marketing team wanted to offer an opt-in to be features in Officevibe communications by sending us how they use Officevibe, what value they get from it, and photos. Marketing could then create additional content about the Award and tag some of the them with the info they would have shared with us.

Because of the limited time we had (2 weeks), I decided to scope out that idea, and instead offer managers to join a private ambassadors Linkedin group.

Once the managers would be members of the group, Product could invite them to user testing sessions, interviews, etc. The effort on the managers would be minimal, and at the time Officevibe didn’t have access to a customer group.

We created visual assets with our new brand.

📨

Subject: You are in the top 2% of Officevibe Managers

Congratulations <First Name>,

The data is in, and you are an exceptional manager! Your team's engagement score is in the top 2% of all Officevibe teams (78k teams). That's something to be proud of, and that's why you earned the Best Managed Teams Award!

Share your award badge on Linkedin, and make sure to celebrate with your team members. We bet they are amazing too.

Feel free to use this message and hashtag in your post!

I'm very proud to say that our team has placed amongst Officevibe's Spring 2021 Best Managed Teams Award. Congratulations, team! 👏 #officevibebestteams

CTA: Share my award

Congrats again! The Officevibe Team

Managers could easily post the award on their Linkedin page with a pre-populated badge and copy. The tags were used for tracking. The post linked to a landing page for Officevibe.

Here is the final experience:

Follow up email

The marketing department was amazed

3 weeks later:

When comparing time periods, most of our GA channels had a decline for sign up goals, except social (growth of 160% in signed up goal for the past 3 weeks). I can confidently attribute this impact in (big) part to the to the best managed teams initiative. Growth was not the case before the initiative was launched. Our reach wasn't there-- For example, all our metrics went up (new visitors, impressions, custom button clicks) with all the engagement the initiative brought. The engagement woke up the LinkedIn algorithm to present what we share to more people. We had engaging content waiting for them, more people saw it, so it carried away for the next weeks. “

There were many Linkedin posts by managers, and many tagged their teams and superiors. The badge was also used as a recruitment tactic for managers, making Linkedin sharing a win-win.

My only disappointment was that the tracking did not work and we were not able to retrieve the number of Linkedin posts.

Product was excited with their new champions too

From now on, we had 102 highly engaged product ambassadors Product could reach out to. In the subsequent years, we often leveraged the group for customer feedback and to recruit interviewees.