How we took over LinkedIn without spending a single $

Want to see an example of Go to Network in action? Look no further than our launch of Commsor 2.0 last week. If you missed the action, check out our launch video here.

👀 At a glance

• Last week we announced the new Commsor - the House of Authentic Connections, and we activated our network by getting over 100 colleagues, friends, customers and fans to share stories about our product, our team, and what networking means to them.

• We didn’t spend a single dollar. No one was paid to post about us.

• These posts lead to an estimated 900k to 1.2m total LinkedIn impressions in just 48 hours.

• This activation was not something that happened overnight, but rather the result of months of work from our team and our entire approach to growing Commsor.

• Total cost? $0

💡 The idea

How do you tell the world about what you’ve been working on for 9 months in a way that represents the very concept you’re building around - authentic connections?

You do it authentically of course!

Over the last 6 months we’ve connected and built relationships with a lot of people in our space. When it came time to launch, the idea was simple - lets activate as many of these people as possible to help amplify and share our message.

It’s people-first, and a great example of showing rather than telling the world what we’re all about.

👷‍♂️ The execution

This was, honestly, a sort of last minute idea and execution. We’d been putting off launching for months because we didn’t feel like we were ready (spoiler alert, you’re never ready).

The final plan only came together two weeks before the big day.

We broke the launch down into three pieces - pre-launch, launch day, and post launch.

Pre-Launch

Our goal was to have a few days leading up to launch to build hype, to tease that something was coming. To achieve this we:

• Planned out and shot videos for our pre-launch and launch day. Video is so so so much more impactful than just written.

• Did a 6 day countdown on the Commsor LinkedIn, by changing our profile pic to a number each day and pairing it with a post that was about that number. Melissa ordering four matcha lattes, or me opening a pizza with a three on it for example.

• Asked a few close friends of Commsor to add “PS I hear something big is coming from Commsor on 1.25.2024 #YouHerdItHere” at the end of their regularly scheduled posts.

• Had each of our team members make a post about what networking and relationships meant to them while also teasing the launch date.

• Sent out a Google doc to 150 customers, friends, community members etc with details on how they could help us on launch day, including ideas for posts + other small fun things (like adding a 🦕 to their name)

It’s worth noting that about half of these were people who’d received hoodies from us over the last few months so you could argue there was a cost there, but they weren’t done as part of the launch or with the launch in mind.

Make sure you’re subscribed so you don’t miss the next issue, all about the purple hoodies.

Launch Day

The big day was here, and whether we were ready or not, it was happening!

Originally we’d planned to go live at 12pm ET, but with so many people posting alongside us, it was inevitable that some people would pull the trigger early. Around 10:15am ET posts started hitting and we made the decision to get our official launch video out early.

Once that was live, it basically became a game of notification whack-a-mole.

I don’t think anyone on our team has ever read so many posts, replied to so many comments, or fielded so many messages in one day before. Shoutout to Ben who was manning the official Commsor account and getting everyone as involved as possible!

One fun thing we did on launch day was a viewing party for our launch video. We asked Katie Penner to share the registration link a few days in advance as if she was hosting it instead of us.

Over 50 people showed up to watch the reveal of the House of Authentic Connections with us, and then hung around for about 30 minutes as we shared more about the story, field questions, etc.

📈 The outcome

Launches are tricky. You want it to be this big day where all the numbers go up and to the right, but often they’re more like starting lines.

That being said, everything went way way better than we’d hoped for. Over 100 people posted about our launch (we’re genuinely still finding ones we missed!) and we got an estimated 900k - 1.2 MILLION impressions across LinkedIn.

The really crazy thing though? The breakdown of where those impressions came from.

Commsor’s company post - 14,893 impressions
Team members posts - 32,109 impressions
Everything else? From our network and community.

It’s a great reminder that, as a whole, people don’t really care what companies have to say. They care what people have to say about those companies. If we’d just shared the news ourselves, we’d maybe have reached 100k impressions total.

We didn’t just get impressions though:

• Added 750 followers to the Commsor LinkedIn page

• 1,098 sign ups to our two products - Bronto and Matcha

• Booked 37 qualified team demos for Bronto

• Hundreds of DMs and messages asking to learn more

And as I write this those numbers are still going up. The launch started the ball rolling, and we have no plans on it stopping any time soon.

The things that can’t be measured are objectively more important for us as an early stage startup.

The amount of positive brand awareness, goodwill, and brand affinity that was created by this launch will have huge impact on us in the coming months as we continue building, executing on other campaigns, etc.

Could we have just paid people or bought ads to get the same numbers? Sure, probably. But paid content wouldn’t have the potential of long lasting impact like this launch has.

Ads stop working once you stop feeding money into the system. An engaged network doesn’t. In fact it compounds as you build.

🌟 Why it worked

This is only possible because our teams approach to marketing, sales and growth.

Curious why people Alex showed up and played a part in the launch? He explains it better than I could in this comment.

Go to Network isn’t about tooling. It isn’t even about sales (at least not directly). It’s about a mindset and an approach thats baked in the understanding that growth should not be binary closed-won or closed-lost (as most GTM teams operate on atm).

If you truly and authentically put value out into the world, you’ll create connections, friends, and yes, also sales.

The actual impact of the launch itself stemmed from the sheer fact that if you were connected to just a handful of the people talking about Commsor that day, it was impossible to avoid seeing us, the color purple, and dinosaurs all over your feed.

In a world where marketing is increasingly a competition for attention, being unavoidable for one specific moment in time can be incredibly powerful.

😅 What we could have improved

The launch was certainly impactful, but there’s definitely a few things we could have done better.

• The messaging around our products is far from perfect. We had quite a few people still questing what exactly we do.
  Totally fair criticism, but also nothing is ever perfect, and the only way to really learn and improve is to put things out there and iterate!

• We put so much work into the pre-launch and launch, but could have done more to continue the momentum over the post-launch week.

  There were some plans originally, but I think the team spent so much energy on pre-launch and the day of that we sort of let ourselves stumble in the days after.

• There were some big names in our network that, transparently, we hadn’t asked for help because I figured they would say no.

  On launch day quite a few of them were actually almost offended that we hadn’t asked!

Launches are starting lines, not finishes. They aren’t magical silver bullets that will solve your problems over night. But it still feels so incredible to finally be able to be more public about all the incredible work our team is doing!

Ultimately, our goal was to make a splash, and really show people the power of Go to Network.

Did we achieve our goal? What do you think we could have done better?

P.S. - Make sure you send some love to Katrine, Ben, Rayna, Gerhard, Melissa and the rest of the Commsor team for all the hard work they put into this!

🦕 New from Commsor

Well if you read this whole post and are still confused as to whats new from Commsor, we launched the House of Authentic Connections alongside both our products, Bronto and Matcha!

Have a weird marketing idea you think we should try? Maybe an idea you pitched your team and they decided no way? We want to hear it (and maybe give it a go). Just hit reply and share!