Pasta, meet wall. If it sticks, it’s cooked.
This is how we found some of our biggest growth channels in 2024.
Although not completely random, I’ve learned there is so much merit (and fun) to running growth experiments in a company you truly believe in.
I wrote about the interview series we started at MyFBAPrep as an experiment in authentic, AI-proof (for now) content. It was successful fuel for our content engine, and the repurposed content pieces that came from every interview recording performed well enough that we began running live interviews as well that viewers had to register for.
Today, I’m here to give you a recap of a few other growth experiments at MyFBAPrep.
How I picked our noodles: Deciding which experiments to run
Running growth experiments helped us find which channels were worth investing in, and which weren’t. However, it was still important to pick the right channel, focus, and methods to test.
To gather my list of “noodles,” I looked at our strengths and weaknesses, targeting each with a different type of experiment.
Training experiments
I pinpointed the big weaknesses on our team to dive into. There were certain channels that I couldn’t be sure weren’t working for us because of the channel or our execution/level of knowledge.
Example:
- Social media – We haven’t been able to execute social media well enough to generate leads, but this could be mostly due to the lack of time we had to invest in it, and skill we had to leverage it well.
- Paid digital – I’m all-in on organic acquisition, and always have been. Anytime a client had a paid strategy, it was run by my counterpart, rather than myself.
- Community – We also didn’t have any existing community strategy. I was testing the channel out by posting a few (hopefully helpful) comments on relevant subreddits that mostly fell on deaf ears.
For these weaknesses, I launched into training experiments. These are experiments where I would bring in an expert to set up, strategize, optimize, and refine our channels while teaching us the reasoning and procedures behind their decisions. These experiments lasted a few months, and at the end the team would be equipped enough to:
- Determine whether or not the experiment was a success, and if we wanted to continue investing in the initiative
- Know whether to outsource, hire an expert in-house, or hire someone to train
- Be able to train someone to do it for us, either as a contractor or in-house
Testing experiments
These experiements related to areas we were already strong in, where we wanted to test different ways to create, distribute, or manage our existing resources.
Example:
- Content – We have a strong content arm that regularly produces engaging content in different mediums.
- Newsletter – Our newsletter is a powerful nurture channel, from which we recieved 5 leads just this past week (Oct 10-15).
- Partnerships – We have a large partner database that we regularly do co-marketing with, including guest blogs, newsletter spotlights, social media swaps, and events.
After identifying what we’re good at, I looked at different ways to leverage or approach those areas. For example, since we had a great newsletter we decided to test newsletter sponsorships to grow our list. These experiments were designed to:
- Better leverage our strengths to multiply the results
- Improve or optimize the channels that were already working well for us
- Enhance our understanding and ability within our core competencies
A few experiments from 2024 and what we learned
Testing: Interview series
The goal of this experiment was to create unique, interesting content that we could repurpose into different mediums for different channels to engage our audience. You can read about how this went below.
Conclusion: This has been great for getting BOFU content that converts, and we will continue to run pre-recorded interviews and repurpose the content for multiple channels in 2025.
Testing: Sponsoring newsletters
Since our newsletter was performing well for brand recognition and leads, we decided to look into ways to grow our subscribers. We considered webinars, asking our partners to share it, and having our outbound email service add it as a CTA to their outreach.
In the end, we decided to test out a few newsletter sponsorships, because:
- A newsletter reaches the type of audience that is interested in newsletters
- When speaking with customers, many of them mentioned staying updated with industry newsletters
- It would give us some control over how we presented/positioned our newsletter (since it would be a paid placement)
We tried one popular industry newsletter that had a moderate reach (35k subscribers) and one broader newsletter that had a further reach (65k subscribers). We got 17 clicks from the former and 15 clicks from the latter in the first few days after send. In total, we received 15 new subscribers in the two weeks following.
Interestingly, we saw a bump in contact form submissions following the initiative, starting the week we sponsored the newsletters. The red line below shows when our sponsored newsletters started going out.
Conclusion: Newsletter sponsorships are good for driving brand traffic and leads, not necessarily a CTA to sign up for our newsletter. We paused in 2024 and decided to place a dedicated effort behind sponsoring newsletters (and potentially podcasts) in 2025.
Training: SEO
MyFBAPrep has a powerful content arm that runs like a well-oiled machine. In order to better distribute the content (blogs, webpages, videos, etc.) we worked so hard on, we knew we had to invest more in SEO.
June of this year, we brought on an SEO consultant who was able to evaluate our technical and on-page SEO, and help us get up to speed with accessability. We met regularly to go over the initial report, worked together on the fixes alongside our web developer, and I was able to learn how to evaluate what a well-optimized website looked like. We went over the basics, such as Core Web Vitals, to deeper dives into tools like Semrush.
Our content has been on a steady upswing since I started with MyFBAPrep, and it was important to ensure it was easily discovered and consumed.
We also work to stay on top of accessibility!
Conclusion: Organic search brings in quality leads and traffic, building on years of effort into content creation, and providing compounding returns. Today, we continue to invest in our technical and on-page SEO to ensure we don’t have any keyword gaps and our website passes all the performance and accessability checks.
Testing: Custom machinery webpage
In every client conversation and interview, I hear over and over again that our white glove service is what sets MyFBAPrep apart. I’ve heard praise for our account managers, and appreciation for the leadership to be willing to customize each logistics setup to cater specifically and specially to the client, rather than trying to fit their processes into a box. No pun intended.
In an effort to show rather than tell the world how invested we are in customer success, I build a webpage featuring different FBA prep machinery that we’ve acquired and utilize on behalf of clients.
We use this page often when it comes to partner communications, writer briefs, and outbound comms to showcase how far we go for customers. The page has been visited consistently since publish, often by direct visit (followed by referrals, then organic search).
Conclusion: Although not part of our SEO strategy, this page gets visits from organic search in addition to referrals and direct traffic. This tells us that there is consistent interest as long as we can get the page in front of people.
Testing: Location pages
Originally, we had one page for our warehouse network that featured a map of the different countries we had warehouse nodes. We decided to test out adding pages for specific warehouse locations, starting with California, Texas, Florida, and New Jersey.
These were just launched earlier this month, so we only have roughly two weeks of data. However, the pages have already begun ranking for some of our target keywords. Here are the early keyword rankings and results of our NJ location page.
Conclusion: We will continue to observe the performance of these keywords before deciding to add further location pages.
Update: One of our location pages has made it to the top growing three growing pages in Google Search Console.
Training: LinkedIn thought leadership
Coming as no surprise to anyone in B2B, LinkedIn was one of our stronger channels for outreach. However, we weren’t using it as well as we could, in particular sharing more interactive content like videos, and leveraging our co-founder’s profile.
We started testing this channel with two things; MyFBAPrep interview clips on our company LinkedIn, and thought leadership posts on our founder’s LinkedIn.
I determined which topics and titles to write about based on:
- Requests from leadership
- Customer conversations
- Top clicked blogs on Google Search Console
- Longest time on page according to GA4
I wrote the initial draft, which was then refined by our co-founder and PR lead before posting to LinkedIn.
Our company page:
I started posting more thoughtfully on our company page in January, but there have been ebbs and flows in how much time I devoted to the channel. Starting this month, I’m bringing on an industry veteran to manage our social profiles, with a focus on LinkedIn, to see how much further she can take us.
When it comes to our founder profile, I can only say anecdotally that I’ve heard we got good results in the form of more successful outreach and inbound leads and queries. Our new social media contractor will also take over the thought leadership efforts, as she has prior experience and “knows how the sausage is made.” One of the goals in her contract is to train our internal team on how to generate more leads from social.
Conclusion: This channel shows promise, but needs a little more investment. I ended up bringing on a social media manager who has had 10+ years in the eCommerce industry to strengthen this initative in 2025.
Testing: Community (Reddit)
This should ideally have been a training experiment in building up a community then running ads with a trusted profile, but I ended up contributing to subreddits myself. Then when I decided to see what the UI was like, it was surprisingly easy to get up and running.
I plan to run a few different tests to see which ads perform the best, then reallocate our budget to whichever is doing the best.
Eventually, we’ll figure out which audience filters perform best, and I’ll be able to set up a campaign then add different ads under it.
Update: Results are in! Here’s a deep dive.
Training: Paid digital (LinkedIn, search: Google and Bing)
Since paid acquisition is not a strength of mine, I wanted to work with an expert who could explain the strategy behind these channels.
I started my search by looking for referrals across Slack communities I’m part of and from colleagues I had workes with in the past.
After a few interviews I narrowed our choices down to the following:
1) Consultant, business owner
- 3,000/month + 3000 min ad spend
- 4 weeks
- 1 x 1 hr meeting per week
- 1 channel = Search (Google/Bing)
2) Agency, working with the paid media director
- 1,000/month + 4,000 recommended ad spend
- 3 months minimum
- 3 x 1 hr meetings per month
- 2 channels = LinkedIn + Search (Google)
3) Consultant, freelance
- 2,500/month + 3000 recommended ad spend
- 5-6 weeks
- 1 x 1 hr meeting per week
- 1 channel = Search (Google)
In the end, we decied to go with the agency option. It was not the most affordable option, but their monthly rate was competitive and they had the advantage of having a LinkedIn expert in addition to search. I like that their team had other LinkedIn campaigns to learn from (from other clients) and one of the agency’s core value’s is “teachers at heart.”
This is in progress, and I will update once the results are in!
Mid-test update: One thing I noticed is that because an agency has multiple supporting roles, I didn’t get a teacher who knew the set-up of GA4 as it related to Google ads. This didn’t affect us launching the ads, but would affect our tracking, and is a good reason to go with a solo-operator trainer who has done it all.
I decided to complete the LinkedIn + Google training found a solid foundation, and then bring on a specialist consultant in 2025 who will start off with Meta, since that channel gives the fastest feedback and we have a limited budget. I will continue to run LinkedIn tests while we set up Meta. I haven’t decided whether we will pursue Google ads just yet.
Testing: Live events with registrations
I had a lot of success with webinars with a previous client, which is why I was willing to guest on partner webinars despite knowing today’s audiences are fatigued. The first event I did was attended live by a grand total of three people, but the recording gave us some good content to work with. The partner has been good with referring leads over (and vice versa) as well.
Conclusion: I’ll continue to join live partner events in 2025, but will focus more on post-event strategy and using the recorded assets rather than relying on a live audience and large registration list. These events may also be viewed as fostering partner relationships, from which we received excellent leads and referrals from being on partner pages and in their newsletters.
What’s next?
My next focus is deciding what course, certification, or training I should do next. I try to learn something new every other quarter, and have neglected those learning goals so far this year. If you have any suggestions, let me know, or see which courses I’ve done in the past.
It’s been a fun year so far, and I’m looking forward to our Q4 experiments.
P.S. I’ll update this post at the end of the year with the results from our paid digital, Reddit, and event experiments.
Published: October 16, 2024
Updated: December 2, 2024