SAM Labs: Customer Showcase & UGC

Summary:

After 2 months searching for existing demand, I realized there wasn't enough of it to sustain the business. So we needed to create it. This was a multi-pronged endeavor, and this page illustrates a key component - showcasing customers and starting a user generated content (UGC) flywheel.

This strategy reflects three marketing principles I subscribe to:

The best sales people are your customers.
The one 'channel' to rule them all is WOM.
The lowest friction way to sell a product is to see it in action, delivering value.

The customer focused marketing play at SAM Labs was a way I could win against larger market incumbents. Ultimately, I believe before a potential customer can make a purchase decision, they must imagine what life would be like as a customer. Then they're able to assess if the imagined life is worth the cost to get it.

My job as a marketer is to help customers accurately imagine the future and show them how to get there, should they choose to.

World Economic Forum Partnership

I garnered a partnership with the World Economic Forum (WEF) to promote our product and mission.
WEF created the above video, posted it on their website and social channels, emailed subscribers, and gave us content/logo permissions.
This was executed at no marginal cost to SAM Labs.
Within the week, our Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook followers increased by 257%.
Branded organic search increased by 71% YoY and 56% MoM.
Inbound demo requests and trial sign ups increased 114% YoY, 38% MoM.

Content was quickly re-purposed into organic and paid social, distributed to a wide audience of education affinity users on all social channels. The paid campaigns turned into our first 'evergreen' outbound asset.

Creators Competition

To jumpstart UGC, engage current customers, and provide unexpected value (surprises have asymmetrical returns), my team created a global competition.

The archive can be found here: Creators Competition Showcase

The competition included 236 project submissions from 13 countries over a 3 week period.

It ran while many schools were shutdown due to COVID lockdowns, giving students and teachers a creative outlet to learn in a difficult time.

It provided a tangible product usage benefit current and future customers referenced when assessing their STEM product portfolio.

And of course, it generated fantastic user content that inspired current and future customers.

User Generated Content

At the conclusion of the competition, we kicked off two processes to keep the UGC fire burning.

Launching the 'Project Showcase', a weekly selection of a student project submitted to us by a teacher.
An invite only forum of our most engaged customers, where we would collect product suggestions, example projects, testimonials, op-eds, etc.

These paired with our social presence and customer engagement led to a consistent and palpable flow of UGC, where there was none before.

Weekly Project Showcase

UGC Submissions

This was a multi-purpose program, as noted above. There are a few less obvious wins I'll make note of here:

Revenue from existing customers expanded from 18% of total in 2020 to 41% of total in 2021.
Save time and $s by not having to outsource visual content creation.
Powerful form of social proof (authentic, specific, shows usage).
These social posts made for excellent ads and started with the organic engagement.
Excellent mechanism to stay connected to customers as a Marketing team.
Turned our customers and their students into the heroes.
Garnered space on customer's owned media channels (social, website), huge authority signal upside in channel.