GTM strategies to reach $250M ARR at ActiveCampaign

Marketing Leader Casey Hill unpacks what worked and what didn’t

ActiveCampaign, the marketing automation SaaS company, has grown to $250 million ARR and more than 180,000 customers. The company was founded back in 2003 and quietly became an under-the-radar PLG juggernaut (that is, until they not-so-quietly raised a $240 million Series C in 2021.)

Casey Hill joined last July as Senior Growth Marketing Manager. He’s been building in public on LinkedIn, and is extremely generous with sharing what’s worked and what hasn’t. 

Casey and I unpacked his quarterly review of recent go-to-market strategies. Keep reading for ideas about quick wins and bigger swings to build more pipeline in 2024.

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1. LinkedIn ad experimentation

Grade: B

Running paid ads on LinkedIn is old news for B2B SaaS companies. These tend to be standard click-through ads – the ones you’ve probably noticed while doom scrolling.

But Casey’s team has been experimenting with new types of LinkedIn ads in the hopes of unlocking a better return. Specifically, they’ve tested promoted posts i.e. thought leadership ads. “Instead of an ad being pushed to someone, now an ad could be something that’s actually valuable,” Casey hypothesized.

The click-through rates (CTRs) have been “off the charts,” he said. A recent one drove more than 1,000 clicks from 15,000 impressions in a single day (7% CTR).

How they did it:

1. Generate the social posts: ActiveCampaign identified 30 internal team members and encouraged them to post thought leadership content on LinkedIn. This wasn’t company-specific content; it was industry-oriented content around topics like marketing automation or email deliverability. (They also rallied 150 customers to post about ActiveCampaign; more on that later.)

2. Promote the posts on LinkedIn: They look at the best performing posts and promote them as thought leader ads. LinkedIn allows users to do this for employees; for non-employees, it’s allowed only if the post meets certain requirements. For customers or partners they just need to add the company under work history and set it to active. Usually this looks like adding ActiveCampaign Partner or ActiveCampaign Ambassador.

3. Assess the impact: Casey’s team aims for digital ads to have a <12 month CAC payback period, which means they’re cash neutral within a year’s time. Thus far they’re seeing those results – Casey indicated a ~1.5x return on ad spend (ROAS).

Marketing attribution on social media is always a challenge; for LinkedIn, it’s especially challenging (part of the dreaded “dark social” attribution problem). Casey recommends HockeyStack for attribution, which provides data for paid as well as organic social media efforts. Through HockeyStack, Casey learned that his personal LinkedIn posts contribute around $30,000 in new ARR each month.

HockeyStack’s process is called marketing mix modeling. While they don’t know with 100% certainty whether a customer saw a LinkedIn organic post before purchasing, they are able to run correlation analysis that factors in multiple methods (ex: change in impressions, change in other variables like business ad spend) that correspond in new ARR.

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2. Voice of the customer campaign

Grade: B

Casey hypothesized that his team could activate ActiveCampaign’s large customer base (~180,000 customers) to share their stories on social media and from their own profiles.

He started by looking at the highest advocate customers based on internal NPS surveys. He initially had an “open ask” to these customers with no give whatsoever (you can read Casey’s email outreach below). This attracted about 15-20 people to post about ActiveCampaign, Casey recalled. 

From there he started to refine and scale the campaigns to have a bigger impact. His learnings:

• The more specific the ask, the better. This applies to both the topic as well as the day. For example, this Friday we’re going to do X and we’d love your help.

• Consider what you can offer the customer in return. Casey was careful about not going into a pay-to-play model. But he could offer for ActiveCampaign’s internal team to amplify those customer posts and engage with their assets in a reciprocal way (“pay-it-forward”).

• Systematize the ask around key inflection points in the customer journey. If folks are happy after onboarding, just left a positive review or just expanded their account, these are great fits for outreach. 

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3. Industry-specific content hubs

Grade: B+