Cases nlgroeit
Listen first, then build: 500% more online conversion
nlgroeit helped scale-up entrepreneurs grow through peer-to-peer coaching. Research showed the audience wanted exactly that. Yet it didn’t show in their behaviour online: the website converted poorly.
Waterproofmedia was brought in because the flow wasn’t working. We were given ownership in a broad marketing role. Tweaking the website turned out not to be enough. Only when we brought the audience itself to the table did it become clear what was going wrong.
The numbers behind the approach
Conversion and brand
Social campaigns, 18 months
Brand reach was measured with social monitoring in Brand24. Campaign figures come from the per-channel report; LinkedIn reach is rounded in it. The campaigns targeted a small group: new scale-up entrepreneurs with more than €1 million in annual revenue.
From pizza sessions to one clear proposition
nlgroeit was a public-private startup within KVK, the Netherlands Chamber of Commerce, for entrepreneurs with annual revenue of €1 million or more and for fast growers. Its core product was peer-to-peer coaching: you learn from an entrepreneur who is a few steps ahead, for example one with 10 or 20 million more in annual revenue than you.
The brief was a well-oiled marketing machine. But tweaking the website didn’t help enough. So we brought entrepreneurs from the audience together over pizza and kept asking questions. What do they see in nlgroeit? What holds them back?
That produced the key insight. They saw the value of nlgroeit, but didn’t understand the offer. We showed many products side by side, including services from third parties, and the core got lost. We put peer-to-peer coaching at the centre and explained it better. The rest of the offer moved to a supporting role.
A flow for every stage and a dashboard for sales
We mapped the lead funnel along See, Think, Do. Website content was layered and linked to the stages in Pipedrive CRM. Leadfeeder recognised companies on the site and fed them into the CRM via Zapier. A copywriter gave all campaign content more shine.
Social campaigns on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn asked one question: are you a scale-up entrepreneur with more than €1 million in revenue? Knowledge posts also ran as retargeting. At events, a video loop with a QR code ran on screen. Anyone who signed up went straight into the CRM.
We built KPIs for every stage into a real-time Geckoboard dashboard, shown on a TV in the office. Sales could see every day what was happening in marketing, and the whole team had an overview of the pipeline.
What this case shows
Improving a website without understanding the audience is guesswork. At nlgroeit the problem wasn’t the buttons or the colours. It was the story: too much on offer side by side, and the core didn’t land.
A few evenings with pizza and good questions set the direction. After that we could build with purpose: one clear proposition, a flow for each stage and campaigns asking one sharp question of the right entrepreneur. The dashboard completed it. Marketing and sales looked at the same numbers, and nlgroeit could do far more with fewer people.
Sources: nlgroeit’s results presentation and the 18-month campaign report.
