Driving leads for a B2B SaaS calendar tool

Have you ever wished that WWDC, the Oscars, the Dune III premiere date, or the next lunar eclipse date was already in your calendar?

If you’re a marketing professional, you know all too well that keeping up with these dates is tiring. But the last thing you want to do is miss a post opportunity.

Enter Forekast, the calendar of the internet. Forekast ensures that you always know which events are going to be trending, hosting thousands of events on its website and syncing top events directly into its user's calendars.

What an idea.

The call to adventure

Forekast’s main marketing tool is its newsletter, a Monday morning rundown of the week’s top events. The team knew that growing sales began with growing subscribers.

The Weekly Forekast newsletter is the perfect introduction to Forekast, giving people a taste of what they can expect with a full subscription.

At $10/month, it’s not breaking the bank, and with a two-week free trial, e-mail subscribers turn into paid subscribers at a higher than average industry rate.

Outlining our goals

It was pretty straightforward. The goal was to increase subscribers to Forekast’s weekly newsletter. After a few presentations and idea sessions, we landed on a creative campaign that truly captured the spirit of Forekast and its top events.

The winning idea

In early November 2023, we pitched a campaign that would capture the attention of social media professionals (Forekast’s target audience) at the end of the year.

Without question, running a campaign at the end of the year has its pros and cons.

One side of this double-edged sword is the simple fact that the internet is a bit quieter at this time of year. Social media professionals are wrapping up their campaigns, putting posts into scheduling tools, and taking a much-earned break over the holiday season.

But the other side of that coin (or sword, if we're sticking with that analogy) is, well, the same. The internet is quieter. There’s less competition, fewer campaigns targeting social media professionals, and more space to make some noise.

The team liked the idea of an end of year campaign, something like a Spotify Wrapped for Forekast.

Which is how we landed on a 2023 Rewind.

Forekast’s 2023 Trend Rewind

We first scoured Forekast’s analytics to find out which events of 2023 were the most popular on Forekast. We narrowed the list down to 30 events, and put together a poll to be shared with the Forekast community. We asked users to vote on which events stole the most headlines in 2023.

Some questions included:

• What person was in the headlines the most this year?
• What movie was talked about the most on your social channels?
• What TV show trended the most on your timeline?
• What book drew the most attention on your timeline this year?
• What live event drew the most attention on your timeline this year?

By the way, the top responses to the questions above were: Taylor Swift, Barbie, The Last of Us, Spare by Prince Harry, and the Super Bowl.

We created a campaign and sent the survey out to 10,000 Forekast community members. After receiving nearly 2,000 responses, we tallied the results and built a custom website to showcase our findings.

The report

We secured 2023rewind.com, and began building a website to showcase our report. We designed the site in Figma and built a custom website in Webflow that highlighted the 15 most upvoted events of the year.

Each event received its own web page, with a custom cover that could be shared on social media for maximum exposure. Throughout the website, we included calls-to-action, making it extremely easy for site visitors to subscribe to the Forekast newsletter.

Custom animations and interactions

To keep users engaged, and to make sure they kept scrolling, we added plenty of custom animations and interactions to the website. Cards fly in from left to right as you scroll through the webpage, buttons change color as you hover over them, the menu has a full-page dropdown animation, and there’s a moving scroll-bar at the bottom of the page.

We also included a downloadable infographic featuring all of the events, an About Page, and a simple contact form for potential advertisers. The 2023 Rewind website managed to secure two new advertisers for the Forekast newsletter, adding to the success of our campaign.

We strategized, designed, and launched this campaign in less than 3 weeks.

Here’s the final web design our team developed using Webflow.

Side note: A little more information on why we use Webflow here at Something Great.

Launching the creative campaign

On November 29, we launched the 2023 Rewind. A newsletter announcement coupled with a digital PR blitz helped kick things off. We reached out to local social media influencers, digital publications, and introduced the report in multiple online forums and Slack Groups.

The results

December ended up being the busiest month in Forekast’s history. We garnered plenty of news coverage from major publications like Yahoo Finance and the National Post, social mentions from large communities like Internet is Beautiful, and tens of thousands of site visitors to our campaign, driving over 2,500 new e-mail subscribers to the Forekast Newsletter, and several hundred new paid signups for Forekast’s calendar toolkit.

The campaign was a huge success, so much so that we quickly pushed out a 2024 preview to capitalize on our traction.

Takeaways

As the seasons changed and we rolled into 2024, it was easy to see that jumping on a seasonal idea had its benefits and was worth the risk.

While the content may not be evergreen, the idea itself is. Forekast will continue to provide readers an end of the year report in the years to come, driving more subscribers to the newsletter and more paid users overall.

This campaign ended up being relatively low-cost for the results we drove, making it a great way to cap off a stellar year at Something Great.

Ready to get Something Great’s brand & content studio working for your company? Let’s start a conversation.