'Try absolutely everything. You'll know marketing doesn't work when you haven't moved the needle'

MY KEY LEARNING is to try absolutely everything. It’s a case of try everything once – you may fail and that is fine, but at least you can mark it off as something that didn’t work

You could also be very lucky and find something that did work well for you. You have to experiment and you have to be open to trying new ways of marketing because it’s something that’s constantly evolving.

It’s not working if you haven’t moved the needle. In marketing, our job is to drive traffic to the Teamwork website and get people to sign up for our products. If we’re running campaigns that haven’t done that, then we don’t do those again. It’s as basic as that.

We review our figures constantly. Midway through the month you’re going to know if something is not working.

Facebook ads are one thing that haven’t worked very well for us in terms of getting people to sign up. We were spending money on it and we just weren’t getting the return on it. We still use Facebook, but more for brand awareness.

What does work is our referral program – it happens to be one of our biggest drivers of revenue at the moment.

If you have an agency as a customer, then they’re working with a lot of clients and they’re introducing those clients to our tools. If that customer stays with us for a year, then the referrer gets 25% of that first year’s revenue.

It’s a great scheme and it’s worked well for us. This was something the founders came up with right at the start. They were confident that the referral scheme would work for them and that 25% was a decent figure to give in return for getting a referral.

Embrace failure

We really embrace failure. It’s very open. We have built an internal chat and messaging app, and we use it all the time. Within that app we have a room called ‘fails’. If we made a mess of something we say it in there.

It’s not a case of leaving yourself open to criticism, it’s about learning from the experience. I’ve actually put something in there recently! When you openly acknowledge a fail it makes it easier to learn from it and move on.

It doesn’t matter how good you are, if you don’t have the company’s best interest at heart you’re not going to fit in at Teamwork – and you’ll know that yourself from the start.

We’re all striving for the same thing, we’re a company that’s scaling fast, you have to accept that things won’t always be perfect, you’ll fail sometimes but you’ll also have some big wins that will make you feel like you’ve really contributed.

Nobody has all the right answers, we’re always learning. We only have one motto: Don’t be a dick!

Leanne King is marketing lead at Teamwork.com. She will share a panel digital marketing at FutureScope on May 10 with Circle’s Marieke Flament, Intercom’s John Collins, Phorest’s Connor Keppel and DMI’s Anthony Quigley.

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