A Real Case Study

If you’ve been following our social media lately, you already know we’ve been publicly dissecting what wasn’t working at FutureLab. First we said we wanted to hack marketing, then we decided to dramatically kill our social media (screenshot of the post), After hosting a funeral, we made a little teaser about the marketing crisis we’ve been having and then we are confessing what mistakes we made and what questions we did NOT asked while creating content.  

This newsletter is the part where we tell you more about what was the thought process behind that decision. And the importance of dissecting what is happening if you feel yourself struggling. 

First: what we found in the autopsy

We did a full breakdown of why our old marketing was dead. Not slow. Not struggling. Dead. And for the first time, we’re showing the actual numbers.

Between January and April this year, we ran Facebook ads, Google ads, boosted posts, tested campaigns in California, New Zealand, Australia. Here’s what happened:

Facebook Ads: 120,800 impressions. 6,338 clicks. $516 spent. Zero conversions. Zero

Google Ads: $3,378 spent. The healthcare campaigns in California — the ones we thought were our big bet — generated exactly 0 conversions at $33–$44 per click.

Facebook organic reach: Of our 47,704 total impressions, only 507 came from people who found us naturally. The rest was paid. We were essentially renting attention and getting nothing back for it.

Instagram: 152 followers. Engagement trending down every month since January.

The irony is that the numbers look busy. Lots of impressions, lots of clicks, multiple campaigns running across multiple markets. It looked like we were doing a lot. We weren’t. We were spending money to reach people who had no reason to care, with content that gave them no reason to stay.

That’s the autopsy. We boosted, spent and reached people. Nobody came back. And instead of asking why, we just… kept boosting.

That’s what had to change.

• We had no real target audience. “Businesses that need marketing” is not an audience, that’s basically everyone. We were posting to the void and wondering why the void wasn’t responding.
• We were performing a version of FutureLab that didn’t exist. We don’t have a gigantic team of 200 people, more like 12 in two different countries, a whiteboard in the office, and a very overworked Slack channel. We were trying to perform something that wasn’t us. It showed.
• We were posting to post. The calendar said Thursday. So we posted on Thursday. Didn’t matter that we had nothing to say.
• We disappeared. Twice. And came back both times, acting as if nothing had happened.

So here’s what we’re actually building: honest marketing

The new FutureLab strategy has one rule before anything else: if it isn’t honest, it doesn’t go out.

That sounds simple, but it’s not. Being honest in marketing means admitting when something isn’t working before you have a fix. It means showing the process before you have results. It means writing a newsletter like this one, where we tell you we’re still figuring it out, instead of waiting until we have a polished success story.

There are three pillars we’re building around:

Stories, not announcements. Every piece of content connects to a narrative thread. Right now that thread is: we tried, failed, burned it, and are rebuilding in public. Eventually, it becomes the proof that the strategy worked. But we’re not skipping to the end, to show you a shiny product.Instead we question ourselves to create content and marketing that actually represents us and connects to people. 

Education through our own failures. The things that weren’t working for us are probably the same things not working for your business. So when we post an autopsy, we’re not just confessing,  we’re handing you a checklist.

FutureLab as client zero. We’re running our new strategy on ourselves first. If we’re not willing to use our own methods, why would you hire us to use them with your brand?

The cold email experiment (and yes, it’s been a mess)

Alongside the social rebrand, we’ve been testing cold outreach. And we want to be upfront about this: it is still work in progress/ trust the process type of thing.

We’ve sent several rounds of emails to potential clients. The open rates are all over the place. Some versions get read, but most don’t get a reply. We’ve been trying to figure out which subject lines work, which intros feel like a person and which feel like a template, which CTAs don’t feel like pressure.

We don’t have the answer yet. What we do know is that most cold emails fail because they lead with the sender. “Hi, I’m [Name] from [Company], we do X, Y and Z.” Nobody cares. Not yet. The ones that do slightly better are the ones that lead with something the reader already knows is true about their situation.

We’re also in the middle of redesigning the system to track emails themselves, trying AI and see if it works for us or create something brand new. We’re still testing and we’ll share the results here when we have something worth sharing.

Why we’re telling you this

Because that’s the whole point. The old FutureLab would have waited until the cold email campaign had a good case study to show. We would have packaged it up, called it a strategy, and posted a carousel with percentages. We would be too caught up in the work to actually reflect if it was working or not. 

The new FutureLab is telling you it’s messy while it’s messy, because that actually might be more useful to you.

If you’re also trying to figure out cold outreach, or you’re in the middle of rethinking your content, or you’ve also posted to the void and heard nothing back: same. Let’s figure it out.

What’s coming next month

We’re moving into what we’re calling FutureLab Revised Arc Narrative and running the new approach on ourselves, documenting what works and what doesn’t, and sharing it here.

The next newsletter will have the first real data. Open rates, what changed, what we stopped doing.

If you want to compare notes on any of this: cold email formats, content strategy, what’s working in your niche, just reply. We actually read these.

Talk soon, 

-FutureLab Digital Team
Inventing the future with friends.