Our first-ever Growth Hacking Bootcamp for food entrepreneurs recap
As our first event in the soon-to-be launched Food Innovation Hub, we brought together two great digital marketing experts: Aggelos Mouzakits from the growth hacking lab Growth Sandwich, and Guy Routledge who runs Sapling Digital, a digital marketing consultancy for the food industry. Tailored to food entrepreneurs we try to make these sessions as interactive as possible to ensure each entrepreneur in the room can share their own challenges when it comes to digital marketing.
The event kicked off with Forwad Fooding’s Founder and CEO, Alessio D’Antino. He presented our activities and shared our take on building a more collaborative food industry, in which corporates and startups leverage each other’s complementary skill sets and highlighted one of our company’s ethos “Meaningful innovation starts with collaboration”
The first keynote speaker, Aggelos Mouzakits, gave a mind-blowing lecture on Growth Hacking, defined as ‘the theory of experimentation and prioritizing our ideas, implementing them in the lean possible way’. He then clarified the concept by covering some of the key tools and metrics to unlock online growth, such as personalized messages using Linkedin Helper, making a viral machine with Messenger Bot, using quiz or questionnaires to create lead magnets, developing ads to gain social proof, just to name a few.
He emphasized that “content is the king of organic acquisition” and showed the following creative process by which every entrepreneur goes through at some point in their journey.
Next on the stage was Guy Routledge, who reinforced the idea that email marketing is still one of the best tools for building long-term relationships with your clients. He talked us through the three different ways of doing email marketing their respective advantages and challenges
- Weekly/monthly newsletter: often sent to all subscribers and require a minimal setup, the newsletters help to keep your audience in the loop
- Autoresponder series: good for welcoming subscribers to your list, you can tailor the experience and introduce them to different channels or brands. The series also brings back work that was previously done, guaranteeing that people receive all messages, independently of the moment they joined
- Transactional emails: records of a transaction, such as signing up, changing a password, placing an order. These aren’t really considered email marketing but an opportunity to reinforce your brand tone and style
He then shared with the group his top six tips to deliver the right message to the right audience at the right time. These included personalization tags, using customers’ segmentation, write to a single person and sticking to a schedule. He left us with one key message: “Your emails should not be all about you — Your emails should be all about your customers”
The presentations ended with an interesting Q&A session, in which every participant asked relevant questions on how to unlock growth for their own business and both Aggelos and Guy gave ad hoc pieces of advice. The evening was wrapped up with networking drinks; founders from different companies discussed the challenges they were facing and shared some good words of wisdom with other fellow entrepreneurs.
To learn more about Forward Fooding and our next events and Bootcamps click here
