When your target persona already hangs out somewhere, don’t build an audience. Borrow one.
At Rocketium, our target audience was marketers from consumer internet companies. Instead of building our own audience from scratch, we decided to tap into an existing marketing community, Growth Folks (I knew Ayush and was part of some of their events, which helped). They had trust, reach, and a built-in audience that mirrored our ICP.
We had the product story and expertise, and partnering up felt like the obvious move.
The game plan
We co-hosted a three-part workshop series on Acquisition, Conversion, and Retention. But we didn’t want to do the usual webinar snoozefest. Each session was designed to be tactical and hands-on, the kind where people actually take notes, not just nod along on mute.
All three workshops lived on a single landing page, letting attendees self-select topics they cared about most. This made the user journey frictionless and allowed us to segment intent clearly. That one decision gave us clean intent signals to personalize every downstream campaign.
First Move: Use Speakers as the Hook
The first unlock was simple: nobody shows up just because a brand wants attention. They show up for people.
So step one was getting three strong practitioners as speakers, one each for:
- Acquisition: Rubi Gupta, AVP Marketing and Growth, Spinny
- Conversion: Raghav Shukla, Growth & Product, UrbanCompany
- Retention: Yatin Garg, Director of Growth, Cashkaro.com
These speakers did three things for us:
- Made the event instantly credible inside the community.
- Anchored each workshop to a real-world lens, not a theory class.
- Helped pull the right kind of attendees, serious marketers.
Only once this lineup was locked did we move to demand. Most people do this backwards.
The Format: Workshops, Not Webinars
We called the series Growth Shops, a play on workshops but built around growth experiments. Each session focused on one pillar of growth. The idea was simple: bring together practitioners who had actually run experiments in these areas and have them break down what worked, what failed, and why. The theme of running more growth experiments tied everything together and made it feel more like a marketer’s lab than a webinar series.
Each session was tactical and hands-on, with no boring decks or monologues. It was more about how you actually do this in real life. Speakers showed real experiments, playbooks, and numbers instead of buzzwords.
If demand got people in, the format kept them there.
The Distribution Playbook
We didn’t rely on a single post and hope. We built a simple, scrappy distribution stack across four levers.
- Social
We treated each workshop like a small launch.
- Announcements from Rocketium and Growth Folks
- Speaker-led posts on why the topic mattered, what they would cover, and who should join
- Short, punchy copy focused on outcomes: If you own activation metrics, this is for you
- Clear calls to action driving to one central landing page
- Community
Growth Folks was not just a logo placement. We leaned into their channels.
- Targeted posts inside the community
- Moderators vouching for the format and speakers
- Direct messages and curated invites to sub-groups where it made sense
- Website and Owned Real Estate
At Rocketium, this was not treated as a side activity.
- We added a homepage banner for the series
- One consolidated landing page hosted all three workshops
This single-page setup was important. It gave a full view of the series across acquisition, conversion, and retention, while letting people choose individual sessions or sign up for all.
- Employees as a Distribution Channel
We quietly turned the team into promoters.
- Shared internal mailers with ready-to-use blurbs and links
- Founders, PMs, CSMs, and marketers promoted the sessions through their own networks
- Relevant customers and prospects got personal nudges such as, This session might be useful for your team
Everything was conversational and natural, never spammy. The result was a layered, credible push instead of a one-dimensional promotion.
Post-Event Engine: Where It Turned Into Pipeline
We didn't stop at thanking people for attending. That was just the beginning.
We used registration and attendance behavior as the foundation for segmentation.
If someone attended the Acquisition workshop:
- They entered an acquisition-focused sequence
- They received case studies, growth experiments, and examples of how Rocketium fit into acquisition workflows
- SDRs stayed in the same lane, talking about acquisition metrics, tools, and use cases
If someone chose Conversion:
- They got content on experimentation, personalization, and landing page optimization
- Rocketium was positioned as the creative and experimentation layer
If someone chose Retention:
- They received stories around lifecycle marketing, engagement, and repeat behavior
Every follow-up reinforced the same message:
We know what you care about and here is something useful in that exact direction, and here is how we can help if and when it makes sense.
This logic stayed consistent across every channel, from email sequences to SDR outreach and account prioritization.
Content Afterlife: Don’t Let a Good Campaign Die Once
We treated the workshops as content assets, not one-time events.
Each session became a blog recap with key insights.
Session recordings were chopped into clips for LinkedIn and community shares.
These assets fed into nurture flows, sales decks, and future touchpoints.
Even people who didn’t attend live could still enter the story later through content that didn’t feel like an ad.
Key takeaway: You don’t always need big budgets to run events that convert. What you need is clarity on:
- Who your audience really is
- Which communities already have their trust
- What format keeps them engaged
- How to personalize the post-event journey
When those four align, even a small campaign can punch way above its weight.
What started as a small community collaboration ended up pulling in a thousand marketers and some solid leads, all without burning a hole in our budget.
