How We Scaled Bonjoro Through Unpaid Growth Levers

When it comes to marketing, you typically have three levers broadly speaking:?Earned media?(PR, Content Collaborations, Webinars, podcasts etc.),?Paid Media?(Facebook ads, Google Ads, niche-specific ad buy) and?Branding/Owned Media?(this is your companies blog, how you talk with customers, product marketing bits, the impression about the type of company you are etc.). For the purposes of not having this article be 10,000 words, I will focus here on just the earned media side.

When you start out, I always recommend companies focus heavily on the earned media lever. It’s free and you can get some pretty remarkable results with it. For the past year, I have been focused on this growth channel for?Bonjoro and our traffic and PQLs (Platform Qualified Leads) are up by over 130%. Here are specific things you can do:

Podcasts:?Getting an appearance on a podcast is a great way to get your product, service or story in front of more people. When I first started trying to get my CEO or CMO booked on podcasts, it was a struggle. I had a few personal connections and after those 3 or 4 got booked, I struggled for weeks to find a good outreach approach. Then I cracked it and now, after just a few months, our team has been on more than 100 podcasts (I even started jumping in for appearances as my CEO and CMO were so booked out!). So here is what I did:

1. Search a topic around your industry. Say you’re a SaaS company, you might start by just searching “SaaS” in to?Listen Notes: The best podcast search engine.?The key with Listen Notes is it gives you an email contact for everyone listed there! This is super important as pitching people on Linkedin with only 300 characters is hard (what I used to do before I found out about Listen Notes).
2. Focus on your intro. I used to focus way too much on volume and my outreaches weren’t authentic or helpful. I was copy and pasting pitches by industry and hoping for a breakthrough that never happened. I quickly learned my lesson and instead I started listening to the podcasts, at least a few episodes every single time before I reached out and then I would have specific things to talk about. And I could better understand their audience and how we might fit in. Sometimes after listening I wouldn’t pitch them because I would realize it wasn’t a good fit. I went from 40–50 pitches in a day to 2–3 and yet I was getting 50%+ positive responses to move forward with the latter approach! Plus I was actually learning things from all these podcasts too! Quality over quantity.
3. Focus on your value to them. Just like any cold outreach, why do they care? Highlight how the topic is specifically valuable to their audience. And don’t be afraid to chip in a few dollars to promote their episode with your team. I have strengthened a lot of relationships by showing I am willing to promote on our end as well and putting my money where my mouth is.

PR Outreach:?We went from getting a few backlinks a month to getting a dozen a week from quality sources like Forbes, Inc., Entrepreneur etc.. Here is how I did it. We started by using the free site?HARO? and everyday writing responses in the business category. HARO basically takes journalist requests and then you (the company) have to pitch them to have your contribution included and they will provide you a backlink if they like your insight. An email goes out three times a day and the journalist requests look like this (with more info when you click into them):

I would try and submit a thorough and well-thought-out response to any topics I had expertise in. My recommendation is to use bullet points and be concise as they often might use 10 different authors' quotes and they are looking for “quotable” takeaways. We pitched and got accepted to do a piece with Forbes about?Bonjoro and 5G once and the results were amazing. Currently, that article has 237,065 views!!! To date we have gotten I would guess close to 500 backlinks from HARO.

Google News: I started reaching out to relevant authors of written content that I found via Google News. Here is what I would do. I would go to Google and type in a topic relevant to my product, like “Personalized email”. Our platform does Personalized video emails so I figure that if an author is writing on the topic of the value of personalization, there might be an opportunity for collaboration. Then I would click on the “News” tab as shown in the screenshot below. From here I would just click into articles, friend the author on Linkedin, and ask if they were interested in the topic of personalized video emails.

That strategy has netted me probably well over a hundred great articles, with every format under the sun from them interviewing me, to them asking questions and writing the piece, to them asking me to write a pitch or outline, and then they would fill it in.

Webinars:?Another great earned media outlet is webinars. Our team uses?Demio to run them and we talk about video funnels, increasing CLTV, increasing brand loyalty, unique strategies for using personal video emails, and on and on.

Here is an example of one that drove amazing traffic for us:?Video Funnel Mastery with Bonjoro

I think the key here is a couple of fold.

First, recognize that when you first start recording them you might have a very small audience. We are blessed by having a very engaged email list that we invite to things like this, but even if we weren’t, if the webinars are of great quality, they will grow over time. This is a long-tail thing, so make great content and you can leverage it for months or years to come. Another thing I highly recommend with webinars is to invite quality guests when applicable. It’s a great way to get your content in front of more people and we are guests on other people's webinars all the time. Influencer or integration partner webinars have been a phenomenal growth lever for us.

Next, make them actionable. I find that the best webinars deliver a specific way to do certain things. Include a guide or tangible takeaway that reduces friction for whatever process they are looking to do.

Finally, don’t make them JUST A SALES PITCH. This part is so key. So many webinars are just sales pitches and it's exhausting and customers tune out and leave.

When we create content around personal video and optimizations, we do it because we love the power of relationship building. We love helping brands make a unique footprint. People could take our tips and tricks and use other video software and it would still apply. Make sure your listeners are walking away with wisdom, even if they don’t work with you.