Rachel Hepworth, Head of Growth Marketing at Slack
Feb 14, 2019
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In this podcast, Rachel Hepworth, Head of Growth Marketing at Slack, shares insights on measuring customer acquisition, lead prioritization, and maintaining brand integrity. She discusses the evolution of growth marketing at Slack, the success in performance marketing, team acquisition strategies, and balancing brand building with growth tactics. She also explores book influence, onboarding experiences, and marketing mistakes in startups.
Adopting a team-based approach in measuring customer acquisition for growth at Slack.
Emphasizing the importance of maintaining brand integrity while pursuing aggressive growth tactics at Slack.
Deep dives
Rachel Hepworth's Experience and Growth Journey at Slack
Rachel Hepworth, the Head of Growth Marketing at Slack, shared insights on driving growth at Slack. She pivoted the way Slack measured customer acquisition, focusing on work teams rather than all team creations. Hepworth emphasized building a sophisticated lead prioritization model for sales and safeguarding the brand while pursuing growth tactics.
Performance Marketing at Slack
Slack initially relied heavily on virality for growth, but in 2016, they looked towards growth marketing to target enterprise customers. Performance marketing played a significant role, with a focus on multi-touch attribution, data quality, and scalability. Building a robust performance marketing team and emphasizing demand generation were key strategies.
Team Expansion and Prioritization at Slack
Slack expanded its sales team significantly, leading to a reevaluation of team prioritization models. Leveraging data on team activity levels, company size, and industry, Slack aimed at identifying high-potential teams for targeting. The focus shifted towards product-qualified leads and empowering the sales team with data-driven insights.
Brand Safeguarding and Growth Strategy at Slack
Maintaining a strong brand identity while driving growth initiatives was crucial at Slack. The team acknowledged the potential impact of growth tactics on brand perception and focused on customer education, website enhancement, and leveraging partnerships for growth. Striking a balance between rapid experimentation and brand integrity remained a core focus for Slack's growth strategy.
Startup growth is on our minds, so this week, we're bringing back a popular episode from our archives: our interview with Rachel Hepworth who leads growth marketing at Slack. Her team oversees the full marketing funnel, from demand generation to product marketing, customer activation, expansion and monetization. And many of the strategies she shared are ones that apply directly to any startup looking to scale.