How I'd grow TeamOut

March 2, 2022

TeamOut helps managers find the right venue for their company retreats.

You can browse locations, pick one, and TeamOut will help you plan a great time with activities, food, etc.

But the first question I have is: how are they better than others?

This isn’t the first time I’m seeing this business model. A few other platforms do the same.

TeamOut needs a specific angle to persuade visitors to use them instead of more established companies.

The reasoning isn’t apparent when you open their website.

Are they more affordable? Do they have exclusive locations? What makes them different?

This needs to be crystal clear in the value proposition above the fold.

Pro tip: a good exercise for really nailing your value proposition is to try stating it in less than five words.

It might take a bit of practice to get there, but it’ll make people instantly “get” your product.

Before a manager commits to planning a retreat with TeamOut, they need to trust them.

The first step would be letting them play with the site, see locations, options, etc.

Right now, you can’t do that without giving your email address and scheduling a call first.

This isn’t an impulse buy - it requires multiple touchpoints.

I’d add video case studies showing the locations, documenting a real retreat, interviewing managers and participants, etc. 

This adds more trust than landing page copy alone.

They also need an About page with the company's story, its vision, and its founders.

This is a B2B product, and businesses want to know who they’re working with, especially when it comes to sensitive things like trips with multiple employees involved.

Instead of gating their tool for sales, they could offer an interesting lead magnet.

For example, a well-researched, in-depth guide to help managers plan the perfect retreat.

We know that word of mouth is the best form of marketing, but how can TeamOut incentivize it?

Workers on a retreat will take a lot of pics, but the problem is: no one who sees them will learn about TeamOut.

An idea might be to put a prominent, instagrammable sign near every location entry so people would naturally want to take a pic with it.

This could lead to a lot of exposure because people seeing the pics will google TeamOut.

TeamOut needs to fix their SEO before planning their content strategy.

They started with a .io domain and later moved to their .com, but they didn’t redirect the old to the new domain.

So now, they have duplicate content, and it halves their domain authority.

Doing a bit of keyword research, I noticed many queries like “corporate retreat [location name].”

So my first step would be to create a series of landing pages to target all the keywords with locations TeamOut covers.

Then, I’d double down on the blog to target informational keywords, starting with the ones that indicate intent.

People searching for them might not book a retreat right now, but they’re potential TeamOut customers.

TeamOut doesn’t really use social.

The first step to building an effective social media strategy is determining where your target audience spends most of their time.

Since this is a product targeting tech companies, they should focus on Twitter.

It might also make sense to try Twitter Ads.

Founders usually make the mistake of pushing the sale, but people don’t convert immediately in B2B.

TeamOut should use a long-term approach like promoting a lead magnet in exchange for email addresses.

Learn marketing from case studies

Every month I pick a new website and write a marketing case study explaining exactly how I’d grow it