Growthpep

Introduce your business and what you do there.

We belong to the marketing sector of an international organization. I’m an assistant manager that makes all of the company’s marketing decisions.

What challenge were you trying to address with Growthpep?

They’ve helped us with our performance marketing, social media marketing, and ROI-based campaigns.

What was the scope of their involvement?

To buttress our performance marketing campaigns, Growthpep produces social media content for outlets like Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. We provide them with a general idea of the products we’re looking to promote. Then, their team manages our ROI-based campaigns through generating ad content.  

They’ve given us advice—expressed in a detailed outline—on how to take good photographs for our social media. While this service wasn’t included in their scope of work, they’ve been helpful enough to give us guidance in this area.

What is the team composition?

Sharon (Content Writer, Growthpep) is our account manager and main contact. I believe there are four people involved, and the team includes a graphic designer.  

How did you come to work with Growthpep?

We interviewed a number of local, Mumbai-based agencies. We were specifically looking for a company that had experience in performance-based marketing. Growthpep responded to our tender on LinkedIn, and since they’d worked with brands that we’d seen grow, we knew that they would do a good job. Their team was also helpful and friendly, so we chose them over the 15 other companies.   

How much have you invested with them?

We pay them around $1500 a month for their services.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with them in March 2019, and they provide ongoing work for us. We have them on a retainer.

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

While I can’t disclose any specific numbers, they’ve achieved the results that they promised. We were supposed to increase our web exposure by 150%, and this was accomplished in as short as three months. The quality of their work is great, and their team is experienced. They’ve aided our expansion by helping us make the best decisions for our growth.

How did Growthpep perform from a project management standpoint?

Sharon, who only came on board three months ago, is very easygoing. The rest of the team has also been great to work with.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Growthpep has really taken ownership of their work; they’ve adopted our brand as their own, and this goes back to why we chose them. They don't mind going beyond the outlined scope of their work to provide the best service for us. Their flexibility has really helped us, a fairly new company, grow in the right ways.

Are there any areas they could improve?

We don’t have any major complaints. Their graphic capabilities could see some improvement, but they’re getting better every day.  

Do you have any advice for future clients of theirs?

Clients should go ahead and work with them. They will become a partner, not just a vendor. They’ll really help you expand your brand.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the founder of a startup called Athlos, and we’re an active apparel brand based in Bombay, India. 

What challenge were you trying to address with Growthpep?

We went to Growthpep for help with digital marketing.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Growthpep helped us with our initial advertising efforts, setting up targets and reaching out and getting paid user acquisitions. We didn’t know much about social marketing at the time but had pretty good visual branding elements. Growthpep understood that and started positioning our brand among our competition.

We were initially targeting runners and people who go to the gym and do yoga. Growthpep helped us identify that target segment and built an initial email list. We gave them an aggressive target because we were in the startup stage and didn’t have a lot of spending power. Most of the ads we were running were conversion-based as we focused more on getting sales than on branding ads. Growthpep adjusted to that accordingly.

What is the team composition?

We only worked with Saajan (Founder, Growthpep) and one of his assistants. He decided the target markets and we gave him a bit of freedom on budgeting as long as we were getting a favorable ROI. Our creative director worked with him to determine whether we were creating visual fatigue or if we needed to change our targeting, and so on.

How did you come to work with Growthpep?

I believe Saajan had been following us for a while on Twitter, interacting with us purely as a customer. I think it was around that time that I saw on his profile that he was doing digital marketing as a freelancer. I was handling most of the digital marketing at that time, spending a good 2–3 hours a day on Facebook marketing. That wasn’t scalable since I was also in charge of operations and finance. We started looking for providers, and he happened to be there.

How much have you invested with them?

We gave him an initial budget of around 100,000 INR (approximately $1,147 USD) and we asked him to scale it up. At that time, we had revenues of around 300,000 INR (approximately $4,252 USD) per month and he helped us scale it up to 700,000–800,000 INR (approximately $9,922–$11,340 USD).

We worked based on targets, and we allowed him to scale up the budget as long as we had a 3.5–4.5 times return. He scaled down the budget during the months that our sales went going down, and scaled it up in months where he thought he could get us a good ROI without landing us in a negative cash flow situation.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with Growthpep in mid-2016. We first got in touch with Saajan in June or July of that year and we got him on board around September when we had fewer budget constrictions.

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

The quality of the work was good. We come from data-driven backgrounds, so we weren’t able to understand some of the reasons for the marketing decisions but we found that Saajan was pretty good at explaining certain things. For example, if he was asking us to change the creative visuals on our static ads every 8–10 days, it was to reduce visual fatigue or due to other factors. This was in the earlier days of Facebook marketing as well. Overall, Growthpep multiplied our revenue by 3–3.5 times across their journey with us.

How did Growthpep perform from a project management standpoint?

I come from an engineering background and my co-founder comes from a design background, so we didn’t know much about branding or marketing. Growthpep helped us bridge our lack of knowledge and made the effort to explain why we should run certain campaigns.

For example, if we wanted to do sales conversions, visual subjects matter more than a branded marketing ad. In branding, we don’t focus as much on conversions as we do on positioning the brand in the minds of the users. We were always learning with Growthpep, and they focused on not just throwing money at the problem but on actually optimizing the project.

What did you find most impressive about them?

They understand design language. Most creative agencies, despite being creative agencies, don’t understand what a designer would want. Someone in charge of design on the client-side isn’t going to understand marketing algorithms, so they won’t know why they need to deliver new ads every 8–10 days. Facebook has also changed a lot, so the algorithms we were working with aren’t the same right now.

I think that Growthpep knows how to work with creative directors and understands clients and brands that come from design-driven branding. Agencies are more about numbers, but Growthpep understood things more from a branding perspective.

Are there any areas they could improve?

We experienced a learning curve during the first two weeks, after which we set up a list of things we’d need from them every two weeks, every month, and so on. One of the things we could’ve asked from them early on was to have a more data-driven approach. They were working with multiple clients and not everyone looked at marketing the same way. I think it’s imperative to make a note during the first 2–3 weeks on how to communicate and coordinate with Growthpep. The onus is also on us to identify what type of performance data we want, either on single ads or whole campaigns. If we can identify what we really need, it will help both us and them. 

Do you have any advice for future clients of theirs?

Clients should identify their key metrics and get Growthpep to start delivering reports. We were in a bootstrapped phase in the early days and needed to know exactly what return we’d be getting on our spend, but a well-funded company might not care as much about the return on a particular ad. The best way to gauge an agency is through the metrics set by the clients.