Reflection – Learning Launches

Challenge

I am the Growth officer for a new startup I joined, which is in the early stage of it’s growth which lot of  potential to grow further. My team comprises of 4 members primarily tasked with the marketing efforts  of the company. We are currently facing a challenge where we are experiencing a low conversion rate  for one of our product lines, primarily led by lower number of leads when compared to the other  products in our line-up. Continuous marketing efforts have been made across different social media  channels with little to no results, ending up with a considerable marketing spend with no ROI. Using  design thinking we will try to assess why our marketing campaigns are not working.

Selection

After going through the design thinking process from the start we decided to apply the learning launch  tool according to Paul Zimmermann’s lecture from week 4. We felt this was an ideal tool for our marketing  department which gives us the platform to perform rapid experiments with regards to our marketing  campaigns and re-iterate according to the results obtained.

Application

As a starting point we decided to evaluate if the messaging and visuals we used on our social media  channels had any impact on driving sales for the product. This would be our first learning launch. We  chose one specific message on convenience of our product couple with visuals of customer testimonial  quotes. This would test our assumption that customer validation in social media visuals had a significant  impact on sales. As a second learning launch, we decided to evaluate a new social media channel  Instagram that we had never used before. Would it be worth it spending more money on Instagram and  what sort of stories should we be telling. This would test our hypothesis that our target market used  Instagram more that they used facebook.

We felt these 2 learning launches will give us sufficient insights to tweak our marketing campaigns to  deliver higher conversions and sales.

Insight

Wrt our first learning launch the expected results were more or less in line with our initial assumption  that convenience of using our product was a more valued feature than all the other features of our  product. Also, we learnt that customer validation from actual customers added a lot of weight to our  social media posts. These key learning could be used for our next learning launch.

Wrt to our second learning launch, the results were different to what we expected. We saw the same  number of leads from our Instagram post as the same image when posted on FB. This would be valuable  learning when designing our next launch to determine if each social media channel required a different  approach.

Approach

As mentioned before, what I would do differently using the same tool is to use different visuals for  different social media channels to determine effectiveness. I would run parallel experiments and  compare results. I would also use the tool storytelling to engage my audience better using short video

clips on different channels. All insights gained during the 1st two learning launches would be applied  here, mainly that “convenience” should be the primary message during storytelling. We are confident  that by doing more learning launches we will gain more insights and fine tune our marketing strategies  on a large scale.

