Customer Story: Vapaus

About Vapaus

Vapaus offers a benefit bike service for employers. Through Vapaus:

Employees can get a quality bike at a lower price than on the market as well as a service package for maintenance.
Companies get to support their employees’ well-being and help them to lower their carbon footprint.

Vapaus’ ultimate goal is nothing less than to contribute to a global mobility revolution by providing sustainable mobility solutions that do not produce direct emissions. They want to benefit companies and employees—both at work and during their leisure time.

Our collaboration with Vapaus began in 2022, with monthly HubSpot support. Shortly after, we became their strategic marketing partner and our partnership extended to marketing and sales operations.

In the time, we have worked together, we’ve built a rock-solid marketing strategy, refocused Vapaus’ ideal customer profile, clarified their offering and messaging, and begun to work in agile sprints.

Services provided

Marketing & advertising strategy

ICP research, positioning, messaging

Content marketing

Marketing as a Service

Starting point

What Vapaus needed help with

Vapaus is a young and fast-growing company. For most of 2021, they had been building processes for marketing, sales, and customer support. There was no time to actually do marketing.
Vapaus had so many marketing needs that it had become difficult to see the forest from the trees. They wanted a partner who could help them identify and prioritize what needed to be done and work on what was crucial for the business now.
They were also looking for a partner who could suggest and deploy a wide variety of ideas and actions. In other words, they wanted a partner who could build a strategic marketing mindset into their entire marketing operations.

Why Vapaus chose Advance B2B

They enjoyed working with us on their HubSpot development – so it felt natural to expand our cooperation.
From the negotiation phase, Vapaus felt that we understood their business.
Vapaus liked that they got solutions and suggestions on how to build their marketing operation already in the offer they received from us. They felt confident in the expertise of our marketers.

Building the first marketing strategy

Vapaus had been moving so fast as a company that they did not have an updated written business strategy at the time our collaboration started.

Usually, we base our marketing strategy on the business strategy to ensure that marketing is aligned with the business.

Despite this situation, the strategy process went smoothly thanks to a couple of things:

Even though the business strategy was not written down, Vapaus’ management, marketing, and sales had a common understanding of their business, which allowed us to build a marketing strategy that was aligned with their goals.
Everyone at Vapaus was eager and committed to the strategy process, which was instrumental in getting things moving quickly from the start.

Influencing Vapaus' business strategy

Marketing and business strategy need to be aligned.

In most cases, the marketing strategy comes after the business strategy. In this scenario, and because the business strategy wasn't yet properly formalized, our marketing strategy helped to refine parts of Vapaus' business strategy.

The management team found new angles and ways of crystallizing their mission and vision as well as who their clients are.

That has not always been the case. As a young start-up, funding is crucial at this stage of its growth. There have been moments when balancing funding and investing in marketing has meant tough decisions. But making them has also been educational for the company.

Expanding the ICP

The ICP workshop and customer research made Vapaus realize that their target audience was too narrow.

As part of our marketing strategy process, we:

ran an ideal customer workshop,
interviewed Vapaus’ best customers,
aggregated the interview data into an in-depth ideal customer profile (ICP) to fuel our every move.

They focused on cyclists who are passionate about biking, ride all year round, and have the means and willingness to invest in expensive gear.

The research made them understand that there is a wider untapped potential: everyday cyclists who enjoy biking but who don’t need to be spandex-wearing triathlons.

Providing structure with agile sprints

Working in an agile model is not always easy to dive straight in.

In Vapaus’ case, the 4-week sprints have helped their growth team find a structure for their work, and they have adopted the sprint model in internal Growth work, too. Vapaus learned to:

Set realistic timeframes and deadlines.
Bring in other experts to work on a project and make sure that everyone is working towards a common goal.
Get buy-in and commitment from everyone involved in a project
Ensure that they prioritize and do the right things

Working as one team

As mentioned earlier, one of the reasons why Vapaus chose us as their partner was how well we worked together initially on HubSpot projects. This chemistry between us and the people at Vapaus has continued and even deepened along the way.

One of the secrets of working as a team comes from the fact that our clients get a team of marketers who all have their expertise and roles but are not tied by those roles. No matter the role, everyone in the team can voice their opinions and challenge the opinions of others.

“As the only marketer at Vapaus, I feel that AB2B is my team. They are a group of experts from whom I get support. I get deep expertise from them that I don’t have in-house.”

Top highlights so far

Since the strategy phase, we have been systematically working towards the goals set in the strategy. This work has included things like:

Improving SEO
Clarifying messaging
Creating conversion paths on the website
Building an email list and launching a newsletter
Raising awareness among employees

Vapaus

Strategic marketing and ICP (re)definition to grow in Finland