How Apollo.io Grew to 3-5M Monthly Impressions through Community and Social Media Marketing
B2B Social Media Deep Dive: Apollo.io's Social Media + Community Strategy
Daniel Cmejla, former VP of Community at Apollo.io stated that “community marketing transformed this company in just 19 months.”
In less than two years, the company built an impressive Slack group of over 6,000 members with 8+ free events each month within the community. Within that same timespan, the brand grew their following on LinkedIn from 16,000 to 105,000 achieving organic impressions of 800K just from the company page. For a SaaS company, those numbers are already impressive on its own but the brand’s success is in how the company leverages community to drive the company's top-of-mind awareness and acquisition.
“Add in User Generated Content and evangelism? That number is 3-5 million organic impressions each month. 76% of all acquisition at Apollo.io was sourced through community and partnerships efforts during my time there” (Daniel Cmejla via LinkedIn).
At Assembly, we love when B2B companies do organic social well. Let’s dive into what Apollo.io does well on organic social media.
Reason #1 - Employee Advocacy & Acknowledgement
Apollo.io regularly features employees on the company’s LinkedIn account. There’s numerous reasons why this strategy is effective for social media and community building.
It builds trust and credibility by featuring real humans that are behind the brand rather than depending on corporate messaging. It also diversifies their content variety allowing employees to share their unique perspectives. Lastly, it also leverages an employee's own network and their network’s networks to get incredible reach on LinkedIn.
Internally, regularly highlighting employees and recognizing them for hard work can encourage employees to share their stories, building a content flywheel of brand advocacy. And when it’s done right, it can also be a powerful magnet for hiring talent. See this post here or this one.
We also love how they celebrate their employees who’ve done great work. In this post, they highlighted how “40+ epic humans at Apollo” got promoted and attached a link for candidates to join their growing team.
Reason #2 - Featuring the Apollo Sales Community + Value Driven Events
Apollo also features people from their sales community and value-driven events through their community. Such as how they launched a 4-Week Social Selling Challenge, a free live outbound review session, a cold calling live webinar, or even promoting their IRL (in-real-life) community meet-ups.
Another piece of content we love is when sales professionals take over the company page, and share valuable pieces of advice/insights they’ve learned in their career such as this post here.
Reason #3 - Memes & Humor
Enough said. If your brand can make funny content relating to your audience, that’s key. For Apollo, they share memes and funny videos relating to struggles that all professionals in sales experience. Take a look at some posts here:
We think all B2B brands on the come-up can learn from Apollo’s playbook. You don’t need to be unhinged or get insane virality, just create content FOR your customers and for what they want.
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