Brex spent $300k on San Francisco billboards for three months and saw dramatic results: prospects mentioned the ads when contacted, and recruiting improved. The company found that offline marketing outpaced its growth targets, even though measuring ROI on unconventional channels was hard.
Chapters
We scaled faster than we thought we would. I think, you know, we had a very aggressive plan.
They did have a very aggressive plan.
Yeah, and I think we did like 2x what we thought we were gonna do. So it scaled really, really fast, and I think, you know, if I want to talk a little bit about the things we did for that was one, we went where I other people weren't going, and we went bold. So one of the things that a lot of people know us for is the billboard campaign in San Francisco. We basically bought a shit ton of billboards in San Francisco, and a lot of people recognized us from that. And when we did that, honestly, I wish I could say, hey, our team was this marketing genius and knew what was going to happen, but it was basically for awareness and recruiting and stuff like that. We thought it was a good investment. But turns out that a lot of our niche, our market is in San Francisco, and what people do when they go buy offline media is that they want to buy like one billboard. A lot of people are engineers and they're like, "Oh, I'm going to buy one billboard. I'm going to try to measure that, and then I'm going to measure that. I'm going to go and scale it up." They're stuck in this mentality of like you have to put $1 and get out $3, and I think what we did is we took a little bit of a bold move and said, "We're just going to buy all that we can." we actually got a really good discount. We paid like $300,000 for 3 months of like a lot of billboards.
And I think I want to pause there because a lot of people don't expect that, right?
Yeah.
When you see billboards, you immediately think outdoor advertisement is the most expensive channel advertisement a startup could use.
Yeah, no, it's not that expensive, especially if you buy a lot of them. It gets— becomes cheaper.
Yeah.
And the thing about billboards is you have to buy a lot of them to work because, you know, marketing is about repetition, is about, you know, awareness and people hearing about you many times. It's really hard to attribute, but a lot of times when we went to do outbound and we reach out to a customer and we talk to them, they're like, "Oh, I saw your billboard already." We had actually a higher response rate on outbound emails because we did this billboard campaign. That was super powerful. Like that, we had a lot of other things that we try to think a little bit outside of the box. Outside of the box is, outside of Google and Facebook, honestly. So we did podcasts, we did all these things that started helping a lot. That is not the traditional thing, and the thing is, it was hard to measure. We put a lot of effort to measure the ROI, and the effort we put on that paid off because we could use these more different channels.
Yeah, and I think what helped also in Drexel's case in particular was the niche target market. Like, you were so specific that this is for startups.
