Summary
v2food is creating a version 2 of meat. Because we don't have a version 2 of Earth.
The mission is critical and needed the support to scale quickly to engage Australians and the rest of the world. V2 needed marketers with the experience to scale fast and engage consumers.
Here’s how Passionberry helped make it happen.
Our Roles
- Internal Marketing Resource
- CMO for Hire
- Digital Marketing Strategy
Challenge
The v2 team had an excellent Head of Marketing but was supported by just 3 recent graduates. Given Geoff's experience with the food industry, building marketing teams and executing quickly, Passionberry was asked to help build out the marketing function for this fast growing startup.
While we provided leadership and direction to the junior staff over the following months, our core focus was on developing the following:
- A clear Digital Strategy for both B2C and B2B target audiences
- A sales execution strategy for Foodservice channel
- Supporting the development of our Social Media Content Strategy
- Supporting the website redevelopment and SEO strategy
Insights
By using Geoff as our part-time CMO for Hire, the Head of Marketing not only had a sounding board to work with, he was able to share key projects to ensure they got the time and resources they needed.
From a training perspective, the junior marketers had a senior marketing resource to work with which had developed their skills quickly. In addition, by having that leadership they were able to develop processes that worked to help the team learn and become more efficient with their work over time. This ultimately lead to a stronger group of marketers who have graduated into key business roles but also the business could then bring in more senior marketing resource as sales grew.
Solution
When we work with clients like v2food, we make it clear what their senior marketer (in this case the Chief Growth Officer) will focus on and what we then execute on their behalf.
The simplest way to do this is that the CGO picked their top 3 projects to handle and then handed us the other 3 projects to manage. This would evolve over time as projects were completed, everyday challenges happened and their business grew over time.
Our focus (as a pseudo 2IC) was to help build out the customer support channels, the digital marketing channels and help build the strategy that would enable the Foodservice Sales team to scale and grow as we talked to hundreds of potential customers every month.
Over time, this expanded out to include the content strategy, building and executing the communities we were building with our target audiences and developing our paid and unpaid digital targeting systems.
Eventually, as the internal marketing team grew it enabled us to take more of a step back and support the senior marketers while also continuing to mentor and coach the younger marketers in the team. As v2food went global, we planned and executed a key market launch and helped deliver digital solutions to the international team. We enabled their growth without adding to their head count.
Finally, given the very close working relationship between v2, the design agency and the internal teams, Passionberry provided staff to work at the client office (and remotely) to help manage the overflow of marketing comms work that happens with startups scaling rapidly.
Results
Passionberry was able to decrease the load on the only senior Marketer by handling key business projects that needed to happen but weren’t at the very top of a long list.
This helped to drive v2food to #1 plant-based meat company in Australia and expand to 16 countries and counting. It also lead to the marketing team growing
Stats
Most of the results are confidential, but we are able to share the following:
+5
Helped build team from 4 people to 9 people
3x
Traffic to website jumped by 3x over 5 months
7x
Business Leads grew 7x & conversions met business target
over 10,000
Over 10,000 community signups
#1
v2 became Australia's #1 Plant Based Meat Company in just 6 months
Feedback
Geoff was a godsend. We'd been without a marketing leader in our business for 9 months and he stepped in at short notice and organised not just the marketing team but the entire business to achieve our key objectives. He also brought Passionberry experts in social media and data analytics to help complement the existing team.
Within 2 months the business saw a significant improvement in our key metrics leading to some of our best ever results and made sure this continued over the next few months while we found our long term CMO.
I would highly recommend Geoff and Passionberry to any startup needing a marketing leader to help scale their business.
Andrew May
Chief Growth Officer
v2food
