This week, we experienced a flurry of inside information being openly shared by some of the most successful and knowledgeable growth professionals in the industry at LAUNCH Scale 2015. Here’s a quick recap for those of you who couldn’t make it.

The Scene at Fort Mason

Between the food trucks, the demo pit, and the presentations, there wasn't a boring moment during the entire two-day event. The hyperactive demo pit was an early-stage startup’s dream. There were solutions for legal, HR, website visitor interaction, swag, video production, and marketing automation, to name a few. If your startup was struggling with growth before this event, you certainly would’ve had a full notebook of ideas and action items to implement when you meet back with your team.

Some of the re-occurring presentation themes included optimization testing, customer research, nailing your value proposition, and automating as much as you can. Many of the presentations, such as "Growth Tactics" by Adelyn Zhou focused on growth models that had been tested and proven to work for startups in the past. Without divulging into specifics, (we're not technically allowed to share details) her Viral Growth equation provides a framework to exponentially increase top of funnel leads through customer sharing. Think Dropbox -- and how more space was granted for referring friends.

Vishal Gurbaxani, a co-founder of Captiv8, provided his 25 most important social media tips for 2015. A couple of those tips focused on listening to your influencers and tracking trends through the use of IFTTT and Zapier. It’s much easier to get a pulse on the industry when you have an automated process that gathers relevant data. Like other speakers, one of Vishal’s tips focused on A/B testing copy, specifically video title, thumbnails, and descriptions, measuring the difference in CTR. I think we can all agree that marketing is not a one size fits all solution.  Everyone is constantly testing and optimizing for better results; it doesn’t look like that will change anytime soon.

Testing Qualitative Messaging

An interesting optimization tip came from Jared Fliesler of Matrix Partners. He suggested companies focus on testing the value proposition and customer-facing messaging. It's really important at the beginning of your growth period to understand what problem your product or service solves for the customer. Often times great products are built without solving any real problems. So when marketing comes up with a great tagline or value prop, ask them to come up with five more, so you can test what resonates the best with your customers.

Marketing Automation + Social Ads for B2B

Our CEO, Sahil Jain presented on the topic of Mastering Marketing Automation and provided great insights into how to move strangers into your sales funnel, and nurture them toward the path to conversion using a systematic marketing process. He shared great tips on prospecting, targeting specific users, and using Facebook's Custom Audiences and Twitter's Tailored Audiences to direct your paid advertisements to your known leads.

The key takeaway, make sure that the customer has a positive experience when they’re exposed to your content, regardless of where they are in your funnel. As an example, you may begin with promoting your evergreen content to attract new leads in a mailing list, and move them along the funnel by showing them deeper level content as they engage more with your brand. Sahil openly shared details on how we here at AdStage use these methods in our marketing efforts, providing tips that are a result of many years of testing.

LAUNCH will be releasing the video content of the presentations, but in the meantime, you are more than welcome to download Sahil's presentation from SlideShare. http://bit.ly/adstage-launch-2015