Loops’ “Launch Week” social campaign teardown

3 marketing takeaways for every B2B SaaS founder

Author

Tommy Clark
March 11, 2024

Hey!

Welcome to Social Files—your no-BS guide to generating demand for your B2B product using social & content.

To start, I have some exciting news to share. Compound (my agency) is hiring again! We are looking for a Content Writer to join our team. If you love LinkedIn & X content, this position might be for you.

Here’s the JD.

Now, I have a heater of a newsletter for SaaS marketers and founders today.

Let’s dive in.

🔎 DEEP DIVE

Loops’ “Launch Week” social campaign teardown

3 marketing takeaways for every B2B SaaS marketing team

2 weeks ago, I came across a social campaign I love from this startup called Loops.

It’s effective. It’s repeatable. And I think every B2B startup should consider doing some variation of it.

Today I’ll walk you through the campaign, why it works, and 3 takeaways that you can apply to your startup’s social media strategy immediately. Seriously. You can implement this tomorrow if you want.

Some background.

First, some context. Loops is a YC-backed email marketing platform for SaaS companies.

They do a great job of staying active on X. The company account has engaging content. Chris Frantz, the founder, also posts on social almost daily. I’ve been seeing him on my timeline more and more lately—so something is working.

Looking at follower growth data (from Social Blade), it appears that his account has been picking up momentum to start 2024.

Today I want to focus on one snippet of their social strategy that’s sneakily smart.

They recently ran this campaign on X they called ‘Launch Week.’

TLDR?

Every day for 5 days, they announced a new customer to the timeline. Simple enough. But it’s worth a deep dive to see why this campaign is so smart (and why you should consider stealing it).

Why ‘Launch Week’ works.

You’ll want to bookmark these three learnings from the Launch Week campaign style.

(1) Interplay between the company account and the founder account.

I talk a lot about the importance of founder-led content in 2024. But I also make it clear that company pages are not ‘dead.’ The best B2B social motions use both.

This campaign is an A+ example of that. Here’s how it looked in action:

→ The main post would get published from the company account.

→ Then the founder, Chris Frantz would quote-tweet to his profile, amplifying the post from the company account to more people.

Bonus tip: Chris would sometimes tag a member of the customer’s team. This increases the chance of distribution if that team member comments or reposts.

No surprise, his posts often outperformed—the Perplexity announcement got 36K impressions from the founder post and 10K from the company post.

But by using the QRT play they are able to get eyeballs on the company page (10K impressions from the company page ain’t bad). Win-win.

(2) Social proof wins. Organic social amplifies it at scale.

Loops’ Launch Week strategy included some massive logos, like Perplexity AI.

This motion works for a couple of reasons.

Tagging the customers (and their team when relevant) can increase distribution if the team engages. If you're running a similar campaign, I would recommend coordinating with the customer you’ll be highlighting and just asking them if they’ll repost. They’ll say yes most of the time.

The other reason why this is a no-brainer social strategy: social proof sells.

Decision makers buyer software want to know who else uses your product. Why do you think companies plaster customer logos on their site? Why do you think they invest so heavily into case studies?

Now, that social proof shouldn’t just collect dust on your “Case Studies’ page on-site. Social is a great way to amplify that social proof.

Social proof content has another beneficial quirk to it. It’s “bottom of funnel,” but it also tends to perform well on-platform. It’s one of the few types of salesy content that your social media audience will tolerate.

(3) The campaign is repeatable.

There was no massive video production. There was no overly-complex influencer campaign.

The campaign literally sharing a branded graphic from the company page with the customer logo and some simple copy.

The real hard part of this is acquiring notable customers. I don’t want to discount that at all.

This brings up a more pressing point about SaaS social strategy. A lot of times, social amplifies what exists in product. If you have happy customers you will have an easier time winning with content.

Loops is winning on this front. And as long as they continue to acquire new customers, they can run this content style on repeat. That’s a nice spot to be.

Your cheat sheet.

If you run a B2B SaaS, I think doing some variation of this would be a smart play.

If nothing else, just periodically announce new customers on social with a simple post to increase perceived social proof.

You just need 1 decision-maker to see that post to make the content worth it. Here’s how I’d run the motion.

Step 1: Look through your customer list and get approval to post on social from whatever customers you can. You’ll be surprised by how many customers are willing to participate. The only ones you my run into issues with are behemoths who have an internal legal team. Oh well. Worth asking.

Step 2: Establish a cadence for these announcements. You can do a sprint like Loops did with ‘Launch Week.’ Or you can post 1x per week. Or you can do a monthly customer highlight.

Rule of thumb: the more customers you have, the more frequent you should post about them. If you only have 5 customers right now, I’d lean towards 1-2x per month. If you have 50, well, just let ‘em fly.

Step 3: Position the posts as announcements, or some sort of ‘big deal.’ Here’s a dirty little social secret nobody else will tell you. You can position posts as announcements or milestones to your audience, even if they’re mundane to you. I love Loops’ Launch Week format as an example.

Step 4: Draft your post and create your visual assets. A couple notes here. One, use visuals—whether a video or a graphic. Two, draft a post from both your founder’s account and your company account. Three, tag team members from the customer in the copy. They’ll engage and amplify your post.

Step 5: Let it rip.

As you post, pay attention to if any customer announcements out-perform. You’ll want to highlight these customers more than once over the next 3-6 months.

Anyway, that’s all I’ve got today. Try this SaaS Social Snippet out in the next 1-2 weeks and keep me posted on how it goes.

I hope this piece ends up in your #marketing Slack channel.

PS: I have no affiliation with them, but if I was running a SaaS company, I’d check out Loops for email. Seems like a dope product.

🗃 FILE CABINET

Here’s my favorite marketing and business content I bookmarked this week, plus some I made.

Check these out.

BEFORE YOU GO…

As always, I appreciate you taking the time to read weekly. Means a lot.

If you want more from me on how to use social to scale an early- or growth-stage B2B company, check out this video:

Pretty much gave away the whole founder-led content playbook I use. My YouTube is filled with other stuff like that as well.

Talk soon,

Tommy Clark

PS: Here’s the house music mix I wrote today’s edition to. Enjoy 🙂