Welcome to a new issue of Zero to Marketing.

Every month I pick a new startup and write a short case study explaining exactly how I’d grow it.

Let's dive in.
Serra is a tool that helps recruiters discover the best candidates.

Its AI connects to a company’s applicant tracking system (ATS) or external sources like LinkedIn to find and rank top candidates based on specific criteria and predicted job performance.

It does this by processing natural conversational sentences.
Serra works for both inbound (finding qualified applicants) and outbound (identifying potential candidates)
I love the copy they're using for their headline.

Describing Serra as a "search engine for recruiters" immediately helps me understand the product.

To make this even better they should add a visual because our brains process images much faster than text.

I definitely don’t love the CTAs.

The first button should be a badge. Why would you want to send people away after all the effort you've put into getting them to land on your site?

The second button could be more specific. Is there a free plan? A free trial? Not knowing this adds unnecessary friction.
Asking visitors to choose between visiting Product Hunt or looking at a calendar to book a demo isn’t ideal for maximizing conversions
If you keep scrolling you’ll see a great visual that should definitely be moved up to the hero section.

People want to see the product in action before committing to book a demo so it would be even better if they could turn it into a short video.
A quick 30-second video that shows how the product works would definitely help visitors feel more confident that Serra is a product they might be interested in.
For a newly launched product staying as close to your target audience as possible is crucial at the beginning.

For Serra this means being very active in online communities where recruiters hang out.

A smart way to introduce them to the product without being too salesy could be to do a giveaway offering community members a free month of access.
In these communities they should also keep an eye on relevant posts where it would make sense to mention their product
The one-month free pass offer could also serve as a retargeting strategy for visitors who didn’t take action.

I’d run the campaign on LinkedIn since this isn’t prospecting and CPM shouldn’t be too high.

Measuring the results could also serve as a soft test for potentially introducing a free trial in the future.
Currently the only way they have to stay in touch with people who visited the site but didn’t book a demo is email, but I doubt many people are signing up since there’s no clear indication of what they'd be subscribing to
LinkedIn is definitely the platform where they should focus all their efforts as it’s where their target audience is active all day long.

What they’re currently doing is leveraging their personal founder profiles to create content around Serra.

This makes sense because they sell to startups so tapping into their network could be a great way to get the ball rolling.

To make it even more effective they could take their best-performing posts about Serra and allocate some advertising budget behind them to push them to their connections.
LinkedIn allows companies to run ads using their leaders’ personal profiles and it can be very effective because data shows these ads receive on average 3x the engagement of traditional page ads
To make their founder-led social media strategy even more effective, I’d focus on three aspects:

- Frequency: to reach more people, their posting and engagement activity should be daily rather than weekly 

- Content: a core pillar of their social media activity should be original opinions and perspectives on the recruiting industry

- Connections: use private messages not to sell but to build relationships with other influential people in their niche
Their posts get good engagement which is a sign that LinkedIn is a channel worth doubling down on
Serra isn’t doing anything for search at the moment.

One might think that’s the right call since it’s a new product that didn’t exist before and people aren’t specifically searching for something like it.

And while that’s true I think it’s a missed opportunity.

Digging deeper you’ll see that there are searches for high-intent keywords that would be a perfect match for Serra.
Serra definitely needs to start creating content to intercept these searchers even if that means writing listicles that mention other tools
One thing they could do when they have enough users is aggregate anonymized data to create job reports and pitch them to major publications.

There are different angles they could explore such as search trends, emerging professions, etc.

This type of newsworthy content could be the perfect linkable asset to grow their domain authority and it’s something they need to do if they want a chance of ranking on the first page of Google.
Indeed did something similar last year using their proprietary data and that single report got linked to from over 100 major websites
Nothing would probably push a recruiter to try the tool more than seeing another recruiter praise how it improved their workflow.

So Serra should plan an influencer campaign that combined with organic efforts and ads creates a surround effect on LinkedIn, making it impossible for their target audience to not be exposed to the brand.

The first step should be conducting deep audience research to identify the most influential voices on the platform and reach out to explore potential collaborations.
KPIs when selecting potential partners should be both quantitative (e.g. checking the average engagement to followers ratio) and qualitative (e.g. analyzing whether the engagers have real and relevant profiles)
That's it for today.

See you next month with a new case study.

Andrea
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