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Just Add Talent Launches In A Big Way

Guys. Just Add Talent just launched!
JAT Shield
JAT WordsIf you’ve been around our office lately you’ve likely heard many an Unbouncer talk about this pretty little project. Capes were a-flyin’, superhero mottos spoken and deadlines crushed. Three months in the making, we’re excited to bring agencies everywhere the Smart Marketer’s Agency Kit.

What exactly is Just Add Talent? And what’s the Smart Marketer’s Agency Kit, you ask? Let me lay it down for you.

What is Just Add Talent?

WHAT: We came up with the idea to offer agencies a toolkit of marketing software to kick some serious marketing campaign butt. The Smart Marketer’s Agency Kit includes discounts for each of the partners’ tools, and customers gain access to these discounts by signing up here.

Just Add Talent is the name of the campaign; the product is the Smart Marketer’s Agency Kit.

WHO: Unbounce partnered up with some pretty sweet companies to pull this thing off. These partners include:

Hootsuite Logo Freshbooks Logo Mailchimp Logo

WHERE: On the internet.

WHEN: We launched this project on September 2, 2014 in combination with the Just Add Talent Agency Superhero Contest (more on that below).

WHY: Because we identified that there were agencies who had super talented people but no harmonious set of marketing software to let them power through client campaigns (and that could save them time and money). Our goal, as partners, was to expose ourselves to a previously untapped market and increase our new trial starts while providing a group of people with valuable assets for their marketing campaigns.

We have the tools, and agencies have the people – all they need to do is Just Add Talent.

(See what we did there?)

It took a lot of blood, sweat and tears on everybody’s part to create this project from the ground up. If you want to know the nitty gritty, here’s some of what it required:

  • 4 partners
  • ~119 Basecamp tasks
  • 90 different graphic files/Google docs
  • 61 Basecamp discussions
  • 4 different RealtimeBoard project maps (revised at least 3 times)
  • 10 landing pages
  • 5 MailChimp autoresponders
  • ~2 emails from each partner
  • …and a whole lot of love

All in all, we’re glad this baby is birthed. We just want to show you a little about how we conceived it.

Art Direction

Our creative team really hauled some ass here. You have no idea how many hours of revisions these designers had to go through (or maybe you do know).

We started out with some of this:

Drawing Our Logos   Just Add Talent Logo Exploration

We did some more revising and ended up with this:

Just Add Talent Art Direction

And finally, we ended up with this awesome design:

Just Add Talent Final Landing Page Header

Our final logos and imagery are absolutely stunning (many thanks to Denis, Luis and Denise for putting all the pieces together).

All our landing pages, emails and various other creative pieces all use this colour scheme, logo and font.

Not only are there superheroes in agencies, but we’ve got some on our creative team here as well to help us launch this massive project with style.

Project Management Tools

Oh, baby. Did we ever project manage this project. Just Add Talent would not have launched when it did without tools like Basecamp and RealtimeBoard.

We use Basecamp to manage all our projects on a daily basis, but the Just Add Talent project board definitely had some extra love the last few months.

Here’s a screen cap of the board:

Basecamp Snapshot

We relied on Basecamp for this project in many ways. Members on the project commented on task threads, completed checkboxes, approved design files and rescheduled their dates in case of emergencies.

Basecamp kept all of our ~119 tasks sorted and assigned to the right team members.

There is no better feeling than checking off that task box. Try it now, it’s exhilarating.

We sorted our tasks by major aspects of the project: content, creative, social, marketing, partners and emails. This helped us visualize which team members have the biggest workload, or what portion of the project was going to be most time-intensive. (Creative and emails were clear winners in this case.)

Check out all the completed to-dos:

Basecamp Completed To-Dos Gif

Another awesome tool we used for the first time on this project was RealtimeBoard (heyoo!).

Because half of Unbounce’s marketing crew is in Montreal, explaining complex projects to our remote team was at times kind of clunky – it often involved us using an actual whiteboard in-house and taking a crappy picture of it:

Crappy Whiteboard Photo

This would then slow down our team briefing project because we’d need to explain what the squiggly handwriting and poorly drawn stick men meant to everyone. Then we’d have to send the photo via email, get feedback all willy-nilly and repeat the drawing process all over again.

Then we found RealtimeBoard and the heavens opened up.

RealtimeBoard does exactly what we need: make the whiteboard process happen online and share that screen in real time with other team members (and without getting ink all over our hands).

We used the app to build out our complex maps (user flow, data flow and social flow) and share them with our team and partners. This made it way easier to get our point across through diagrams.

Take a look below and tell me that would have been easier done with a physical whiteboard and a smartphone (it wouldn’t have).

Just Add Talent - User & Data Flow with RealtimeBoard

The Contest

After we organized our tasks, drew out our project maps and started building the main landing pages for Just Add Talent, we headed on to part two of the campaign: the Just Add Talent Agency Superhero Contest!

The marketing team put together a contest that calls for agencies to nominate a superhero marketer in their office. Along with a year free of all our tools, the winner takes home superhero bragging rights.

To up the ante, we decided to mail a few select agencies a superhero cape, mask and a comic-book-style insert describing the contest itself.

Here’s what we ended up with:


Superhero Agency Goodies

Strutta Contest

Mike Wearing Cape

Chelsea Wearing JAT Cape and Mask

Our sweet swag is a hit around the office and we’re hoping it will be a hit with the agencies we sent it to as well.

Oh! And to power up our contest landing page, we used Strutta to host our social promotion.

You can check out the contest landing page here.

The 10 Landing Pages

Now pictured below are just a few of many landing pages we had to create for the Just Add Talent campaign. As stated, we had 10 in total – whoa, right? Why did we need so many? Here’s a breakout:

  1. There was one main page with all 4 offers from the partners;
  2. Then, one page for each of the partners excluding their own offers, in case they wanted to email their customers (totalling another 4 pages);
  3. One page for each of the partners’ redemption processes (aka, where you actually get your offer). This was another 4 pages;
  4. Finally, the one contest page.

Let’s do the math, shall we?

1 main page + 4 partner pages without their own offers + 4 redemption landing pages + 1 contest page = 10 landing pages

That’s a lot of landing pages for one campaign, but all of them necessary to achieve our marketing goals. Plus, who doesn’t love making landing pages anyway? :)

Now… time for the big reveal. Drum roll please!

Check out these sick landing pages:

Campaign page

justaddtalent

Contest page

justaddtalentcontest

 

Lessons learned

Here are some lessons we learned during this project:

  • RealtimeBoard is a great tool for communicating complicated project mapping. We’d definitely recommend it to other marketers looking for a shared, digital whiteboard experience!
  • No matter how many dates you assign to tasks and hope that they’ll stay the same – they won’t. Plan for unexpected changes and build “buffer time” into your project timeline.
  • Working with other like-minded companies is awesome. Our partners were an absolute pleasure to work with and we would definitely do this again! Many thanks to MailChimp, Hootsuite and FreshBooks for making this happen so smoothly!
  • Nothing gets done without teamwork. Everyone who helped build this project put many hours into it and deserve the highest of praises. Thanks go out to our AMAZING creative team, customer success gurus, product aficionados and dev team – y’all are da bomb.

Amen

It’s a bird… it’s a plane… it’s Just Add Talent

We’re really excited about Just Add Talent and how it came together.

Of course, we don’t have results yet, but we’ll post an update in a few months when we do.

We’re so pumped that this has launched and we look forward to adding other potential partners in the future to expand the Smart Marketer’s Agency Kit.

If the Smart Marketer’s Agency Kit is for you, check us out at here and follow the superhero conversation on Twitter with the hashtag (#JustAddTalent).

Bye for now, superheroes.

Chelsea Scholz
Marketing Project Manager