At a recent Workshop Wednesday, Koby Conrad, Head of Growth at Oneleet and former Head of Growth at Rupa Health, shares the Top 6 growth channels that actually work. Rupa is a lab platform for doctors to order lab tests, and Koby took the company from $20M to hundreds of millions in equity and scaled Rupa’s user acquisition by 4000% in 3.5 years.
All users come from channels, be it organic, paid, or word-of-mouth. You can optimize these channels, as well as layer them, to drive meaningful growth. The channels include:
- Search
- Social
- Educational partnerships
- Conferences
- Influencers
- Outbound sales
Keep reading to learn how each channel can help you grow and the tactical steps to implement them for your company.
#1 Growth Channel: Search
For Rupa Health and many others, search is the largest channel for growth in human history. Rupa spends a lot of money on search. For example, if someone searches for a specific lab test like GI Map, Rupa displays that ad and comes up first.
The key learnings here are:
- Performance Max has gotten really good. Google has been working on its machine learning, and it’s working.
- Set your brand up as an exclusive so you’re not bidding on your own brand terms.
- Doctors and patients are searching for the same thing. In a B2B space, you can get strong overlap, so you want your product strategy to play into that so you aren’t throwing away demand.
If you’re spending millions on paid search, wouldn’t it be great to own all that traffic for free?
Rupa’s Search Strategy
Rupa’s catalog was great, but it was blocked off behind a login system, which isn’t good for search. They needed to build a user experience that allowed Google to index everything in it.
They had metadata available from around 35 lab companies, 3,000 tests, and maybe 10,000 biomarkers. So they decided to make a reference guide, like developer documentation, but for doctors. They used this metadata, enhanced it with AI, and had medical professionals edit it.
The result was that if you search for GI Map, Rupa shows up in paid ads but also shows up organically under the lab themselves. Doing this allowed Rupa to capture millions of dollars in paid traffic for free and organically.
Publish 150+ Articles Every Month
In addition to the reference guide, Rupa publishes 150+ articles a month. Most people aren’t publishing enough content. SEO is simple, but hard because all you need to do is write the best content in the world, and you have to do it at scale.
People usually take one of two routes.
- Go massive with low-quality content.
- Post really good stuff, but only a small amount of it.
To win, you have to do both. Everything you publish needs to be better than every other article that exists, and you have to do it at scale. How do you do this? The same way Rupa did the reference guide. Have people use AI to write the content, improve it using their expertise so it’s better than anything else, and layer in graphics and great design.
In the beginning, you’ll spend more on paid search. But paid doesn’t scale unless you’re also focusing on the organic version of that channel. Over time, you’ll be able to acquire more traffic at a better unit economic, and then paid starts to transition out.
Action Items for Search
- Publish more content. 95% of people listening probably aren’t publishing enough content. SEO is hard because you need to create something better than what exists in the world right now and do it at scale.
- You can take a targeted landing page approach combined with spray and pray. Do this by creating content focused on what you know is important by using valuable keywords in paid search, and then bring in experts to create mass content at scale.
- Cool things happen with programmatic SEO and AI. Take whatever database content you have, enhance it with AI, bring in graphics, and have humans edit on top. This is how you make great content at scale.
#2 Growth Channel: Social
At Rupa, they built social primarily for social proof. B2B is interesting because you might only have 100k doctors or a small number of people that are easy to display ads in front of, but those ads don’t scale forever.
Social media can play a vital role in building trust. It’ll enable you to leverage partnerships and bring in lighthouse users. Rupa’s very first partnerships were found through a paid ad. Without social proof, they wouldn’t have secured them.
What Works Organically on Social Media
Their YouTube strategy involved live classes like SaaStr’s Workshop Wednesday. They brought in a doctor and posted the video on YouTube. From there, they took the best content creators who came in through that and created premium versions of those calls.
Live classes on YouTube were a testing system to see what topics and speakers would perform well. They published 150 videos for YouTube before getting any traction, so you have to keep at it and make changes earlier. It’s a play you have to figure out over time. Thumbnails, hooks, and titles matter for YouTube, but 80% of YouTube is the topic.
For Twitter/X, you have to convince the CEO to start posting. It’s the highest ROI thing Rupa ever did for hiring. With that said, the brand page didn’t do well. You could post content identical to the CEO’s, and no one cared.
On social media, people follow people, not brands. If you’re doing a brand, personalize it and put a human behind it.
For Facebook, links work well in the comments rather than the body of the post. By switching links to comments, Rupa saw 10x more link traffic to the podcast and magazine articles.
Action Items for Social Media
- “Topic” on YouTube is important. Headlines and thumbnails are critical, but the topic is 80% of YouTube.
- Ditch the brand account and create followings that are people, founders, influencers, and humans.
- If you’re still on Facebook, drop links in the comments, not the body of the post.
#3 Growth Channel: Partnerships
Depending on your market, you can pay schools to teach about your brand. That’s what Rupa did. Doctors don’t actually learn much about lab tests in the medical space when going through an M.D. program. They learn through post-med school organizations.
Kalish Institute was Rupa’s first partnership, and they got it because their team was actively talking about Rupa and because of its social presence on Facebook. Rupa started paying these schools to integrate them into their curriculum, which was very effective.
There’s no better way to build credibility and usage than by getting people to teach you how to practice teaching people about your tooling. This is fairly applicable to a lot of companies, particularly in the B2B space where specialized knowledge is required.
Sponsoring Schools Is Expensive
Sponsoring schools costs anywhere from $5,000 to a half a million dollars, so Rupa decided to build their own school. You can see the recurring theme of deploying money into these channels, getting tired of spending money there, and building it better for yourself.
They started a university where they brought in industry experts, but they also had 6-week programs that created actual usage. At Rupa, you’d spend $400 on these 6-week boot camps and get a free lab test to order on yourself and learn how to use and implement that test.
It’s a profitable strategy that taught Rupa’s target customers how to sell what Rupa offers. Koby calls this negative CAC, where you make money through your acquisition efforts.
Action Items for Partnerships
- You’re probably missing key partnerships beyond major influencers. It could be schools, co-marketing with integrated products, licensing or credential organizations, etc.
- Tech companies are afraid of service businesses, but in the context of growth marketing, you shouldn’t be afraid of a service business on top of your tech product that drives acquisition.
- Look at product usage and determine good directions to build partnerships. What integrates into the product, what are users asking for, and what can you build on top of your core product?
#4 Growth Channel: Conferences
Rupa goes to about 20 conferences a year. In the photo, they had on shiny space suits. Why? Because people come up to you and ask why you’re wearing a space suit. Imagine seeing these people in the stuffiest medical conferences full of suits and ties. There’s Rupa blasting music and dancing in space suits.
If you’re going to show up, be visually disruptive. Don’t blend into the chaos of the conference hall. That’s rule number one of conferences. Let’s look at four more rules.
Rule #2: It’s not about just showing up, but how you show up. The smallest booth in the back doesn’t make a great statement about your brand. Show up as the headliner for the highest ROI.
Rule #3: Make sure you understand where ROI will come from. There’s more than just closing immediate deals. It may be partnerships or other ways to grow your business.
Rule #4: The most profitable perks usually aren’t on the menu. So many conferences give you a media kit. But have you asked if they’ll send a dedicated email about you? They might say no at first because they don’t do that, but you can be their number-one headliner and sponsor. Those emails are sometimes more valuable than showing up to the conference.
Rule #5: Don’t give away business cards. Give away swag that needs to be carried and brought home. Rupa gave out teddy bears dressed in a Rupa astronaut costume, and the conference floor was flooded with them.
Action Items for Conferences
- Email is king for conferences. Getting a dedicated email sometimes works better than showing up in person for the event.
- The best perks of conferences usually aren’t in the media kit. It could be speaking opportunities, dedicated email sends, or convincing someone to share the contact list.
- It’s not about just showing up but how you show up. Showing up as the headliner doesn’t mean you’re in front of more people. It means the strength of the impression is much stronger, resulting in higher ROI.
- Bonus tip: Lanyard sponsorships are one of the highest ROI things you can do, especially if you’re a no-name brand showing up for the first time.
#5 Growth Channel: Influencers
For Rupa and businesses like it, influencers are important. Doctors learn from doctors, so having an influencer doctor talk about you is like magic if you’re in the medical space. People could ignore a cited study if a celebrity doctor with a million followers says something different.
This is true in the consumer world as well. For the last three years, Rupa sponsored almost every single Hyman podcast episode at $5,000 per episode. After spending so much money, they built their own influencer program and hired Dr. Carrie Jones. She built the Root Cause Medicine podcast, a top 10 medical podcast, but she was also too big of a brand and left.
The next time, they found someone with a much smaller brand that was still A+ so they could own it more easily.
Finally, attribution tracking is really hard with podcasts, especially with influencers. You can ask users how they heard about you, but you have to make a strategic guess in the dark. Hyman was the number one source of how people heard about Rupa, but they could only show attribution for about half of them.
Action Items for Influencers
- There’s likely a huge 80/20 in your industry by going to the biggest influencers in the space.
- If you’re dropping major money on influencers, build your own version so you’re not tied to them forever.
- Attribution isn’t real. Regarding podcasts, you have to go with your gut and ask people how they heard about you. Direct attribution is probably, at best, 50% accurate, and true ROI will be much higher than you can see.
#6 Growth Channel: Outbound Sales
Outbound was the last thing Rupa scaled. Why?
- If you’re hiring people to do sales and you mess up, you have to start firing people. That’s never fun. If you mess up on Facebook or Google ads, you just turn down the budget.
- People who don’t know who you are are less likely to prioritize listening to you. Outbound becomes more impactful when you layer in the other growth channels.
You can see Rupa’s introduction script below for a tactical approach to outbound. By saying, “I’m your Rupa lab rep,” you speak the language the doctors already use with other reps.
When you get even more specific, you start pattern-matching, and you’ll get more access through gatekeepers because you’re adding legitimacy to why you’re calling. Rupa waited to do outbound and built a huge amount of brand love first.
Action Items for Outbound Sales
- Email is an important part of outbound, but make sure you’re cold-calling.
- Separate cold-calling from the inbound function. Hunting for new business is a different motion than converting incoming leads.
- Outbounding doesn’t live in isolation. Layer in marketing and blend the ROI/ budget so it isn’t 100% given to outbound.
- Outbounding sucks, so pay this team well.
Key Takeaways
- All users come from channels. Solving for channel is one of the biggest moments of inflection in a companies life post-building the product and finding product market fit.
- Experiment with paid to see what’s effective, but don’t rely on paid for the rest of your life. Double down on organic versions of whatever is converting for you on the paid side.
- Once you identify major channels, build your product and features around those major channels. Don’t just separate marketing and sales from product. Think about the product strategy and roadmap and how they play in with your major channels.
