How DemandMaven helped Motivo 3x MRR in 4 months

A story about getting the first 100 customers, tripling MRR, doubling site traffic, and building the marketing foundation.
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“Asia has an incredible ability to quickly learn a company’s vision and begin executing deliverables immediately. She has provided immense value to our Motivo team by diving deep into customer and industry research, and then using that data to create a strategic, step-by-step revenue-generating marketing plan.”
Rachel McCrickard

CEO & Founder, Motivo

Highlights

  • 3x MRR in 4 months
  • Doubled monthly website traffic (sessions)
  • Proved an acquisition model and CPL for B2C
  • Reduced onboarding time by 15 days
  • Launched self-service product model to existing customer base
  • Sourced and hired head of marketing

Services Provided

  • Go-to-market strategy
  • Customer journey mapping
  • Customer research & interviews
  • Campaign creation & management
  • Website, landing page, and email copywriting
  • Analytics implementation in Hubspot & Google Analytics
  • Hiring and sourcing marketing talent

The Company

The world needs more therapists

Motivo is the world’s first online clinical supervision platform for pre-licensed therapists. Motivo provides a marketplace for pre-licensed therapists to find clinical supervisors in their state, and complete their supervision requirements through a HIPAA-compliant platform.

Motivo is led by the fearless Rachel McCrickard, recently graduated from the TechStars Atlanta 2018 cohort, and is currently raising their seed round.

The Challenge

If we build it, they will come, right?

Strategically, Motivo is in a completely “blue ocean”. There isn’t a single product that does what Motivo does.

The competitive alternatives are painful — pre-licensed therapists either bite the bullet and drive several hours to meet their supervisor and pay high supervision rates, or they simply don’t get supervision.

No supervision means no licensure, and that means you can’t legally practice therapy in your state.

The biggest challenge for Motivo? The market was primed and ready for their pain-killing solution, but there wasn’t a clearly defined marketing playbook to scoop up the market.

The Motivo team was also inundated with information on how they should be growing.

“I was listening to all these soundbites on marketing, but what I really needed was a playbook. A real clear, ‘This is how we are going to approach marketing for Motivo.’ Before then, we did a lot of, ‘Let’s try this, let’s try this, let’s try this,’ with very little customer research into where our customers were going for their information and what they were looking for.”

On top of that, it became clear that the initial hunch of investing in branding wouldn’t yield the desired acquisition results.

“I used to think that ‘good branding’ equaled ‘marketing.’ If you just looked good, then people would come to you. And it didn’t work like that, obviously, because there wasn’t any sort of formula or playbook or approach to it. We would just put Instagram images out there or boost a Facebook post, and hoped that would bring in new customers.”

And like any fast-moving, early-stage startup, it was challenging for Rachel and the team to execute on the high-impact strategic partnerships that Motivo needed to grow.

After trying a sales outbound strategy, attending a few conferences, and investing in branding, Rachel decided it was time to change her go-to-market approach and implement a marketing strategy that was going to help Motivo grow.

The Solution

Doubling-down on customer behavior

Rachel wanted a formulaic approach to marketing and go-to-market for Motivo, and she found it in DemandMaven — a local consultancy specializing in helping early-stage startups define their growth strategy and take their product to market.

To help Motivo carve its marketing strategy, DemandMaven started with their tried-and-true customer discovery process.

By interviewing Motivo’s existing customers (pre-licensed therapists across the United States), a very clear behavioral pattern emerged in how customers found Motivo, how they found competitive alternatives, and what they barriers to entry they were facing.

After creating a customer journey map and defining a key persona for the perfect pre-licensed therapists, DemandMaven then recommended three more channels and campaigns to test based on the customer behavior.

It was clear that customers and prospects leveraged the same formula to find a solution for clinical supervision, and it was by searching for clinical supervisors with their specific licensure in their state.

DemandMaven recommended implementing landing pages for organic search, and leveraging paid search to test the effectiveness of the messaging.

Together, DemandMaven and Motivo built and executed against the campaigns to identify the most lucrative channels and digital marketing investments. Part of executing these campaigns was also properly configuring analytics and Hubspot for reporting marketing results — a critical piece of the puzzle.

The Result

Clear, sustainable growth

By the end of the engagement with DemandMaven, Motivo had an operating, revenue-generating marketing engine.

From October 2018 to April 2019, Motivo tripled their MRR and doubled their monthly traffic — primarily through organic search.

“To watch the numbers go up was just incredible. This is what we had been waiting for, you know? All of this work that you put into building the platform and trying to make it all happen so it works, and then it just kind of sits there waiting for people to actually use it.

“To start to see those numbers go up and people actually engaging with the platform that we took time to build, or resonating with an email that we sent out, that was really just very rewarding. It was also just very affirming.”

The campaigns DemandMaven designed and executed performed up to 2x better than any previous campaigns. Plus, Motivo was equipped with a cost per lead (CPL) and a buyback period — two metrics they can leverage to compare against other channels.

Plus, both the monthly website traffic and the customer pipeline doubled thanks to focusing efforts on scalable, intent-driven organic traffic to bottom-of-the-funnel landing pages.

Motivo was also equipped with marketing analytics and reporting through DemandMaven’s Hubspot reporting and automation configurations, and streamlined their qualification and onboarding process for new prospects and customers, shaving off 15 days to onboard new prospects.

Finally, and perhaps most proudly, DemandMaven helped Motivo source and hire their first rockstar head of marketing in Atlanta, GA — proving the need for a full-time marketing department.

“…There were actually people who didn’t know about us, came to learn about us because of something directly that DemandMaven did, and then became a customer. It was awesome. Asia has truly set us up for success.”
Rachel McCrickard

CEO & Founder, Motivo

Ready to get started?

This sh*t ain’t easy, but that’s exactly why we built DemandMaven. We’ll help you find your absolute best growth opportunities based on the “jobs” your customers are hiring the product for. Then, we’ll show you exactly what needs to happen to achieve your goals.