Suomen Yrittäjät wanted to try some new tactics in their B2B marketing in the end of 2017.  

With a fixed budget and timeframe, our goal was to acquire as many new, under 40-year old members as possible. We identified a need to clarify the key value propositions that Suomen Yrittäjät offers entrepreneurs in Finland. To do more value-based marketing, it was understood that we have to define key entrepreneur personas and their entrepreneur's journeys to highlight the value Suomen Yrittäjät can offer.

So, we dived into the real pains, gains and customer jobs of entrepreneurs using various service design tactics.

After getting to know the Suomen Yrittäjät’s target entrepreneur persona’s pains and gains and clarifying their value proposition, it was time to start the experimental B2B marketing. We decided that Growth Hacking – which consists of rapid iterations, continuous learning and improvements via feedback cycles, cross-functional teams of marketers, developers and designers – would be the perfect approach for this case. So we brought together a team of experts from Suomen Yrittäjät and Columbia Road to be the first ever growth hacking team at Suomen Yrittäjät.

After just two weeks of growth hacking we learned that this is the most efficient (considering time & cost) and customer-driven way to drive digital growth. It was a straightforward approach to take the Entrepreneur Journey Map findings (basically post-its) from our workshop wall straight to our first experimental campaigns to be implement the very next day in our growth hacking project room.

Defining entrepreneurs’ personas and journey maps

From a strategic point-of-view the project’s outcome were the entrepreneur journey map visualisations of four key Suomen Yrittäjät personas. The personas were used to communicate – at each stage of the membership process – any one potential member’s critical drivers for becoming a new member through digital channels.

Numeric growth of new members and member “leads” from digital channels

During the growth hacking period

• We launched three new inbound campaigns containing a lead process which brings about 100 new marketing qualified leads weekly.
• We did value-based awareness display and re-targeting marketing actions and generated 45% more growth in new member registrations through digital marketing.

New growth marketing culture to Suomen Yrittäjät

Now Suomen Yrittäjät makes their marketing decisions based on analytical findings from their websites. To continue on this path of growth Suomen Yrittäjät decided to recruit an internal digital marketing growth hacker.