Objectives

Launch With GS is Goldman Sachs’ $500 million investment strategy grounded in the belief that diverse teams drive strong returns. Through Launch With GS, Goldman Sachs (GS) aims to increase access to capital, facilitate connections and provide resources for women, Black, Latinx and other diverse entrepreneurs and investors.

In Q1 of 2020, GS opened applications for its first ever Launch With GS Black and Latinx Entrepreneur Cohort - an eight-week virtual experience designed to provide high-touch access and resources to a select group of U.S. based Black and Latinx founders to fast-track their companies’ growth and build relationships with investors and industry experts.

The objective of the media plan and creative campaign detailed in the sections below was to drive traffic to the Cohort landing page and ultimately applications.

Strategy and Execution

We leveraged a channel mix of direct display partnerships, newsletters, and paid social media to drive traffic to the application page for the Launch With GS Black and Latinx Entrepreneur Cohort. Our partnerships and newsletter insertions with minority-led publications allowed us to hone in on our target audience within contextually-relevant environments, while paid posts on LinkedIn helped extend our reach and increase our presence across our priority markets.

The variety of on-site and in-newsletter banner and text placements with partners like Urban Geekz, The Plug, Blavity, H-Code, Axios and Latin Biz Today enabled us to optimize into the top-performing tactics and creative assets during the flight in order to maximize traffic to the application page.

To supplement those channels, our social media strategy prioritized LinkedIn in order to benefit from its strong contextual relevance, job title targeting capabilities, and ability to focus on priority markets. Organic posts spanned LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook during the 6 week campaign.

All media efforts drove to a new landing page on GS.com that highlighted Cohort details, eligibility requirements, key dates, and multiple callouts to apply.

Results

• During our paid media campaign (3/2 – 4/17), newsletters, display media, and paid social drove 11.5K visits to the Cohort landing page, accounting for 50% of traffic to the page during that time period.
  • Newsletters were a top performer, driving 5.6k+ visits–more traffic than any other channel
• Our paid social campaign on LinkedIn drove 139.5K impressions and 857 clicks
• There were 269 mentions of #LaunchWithGS or “Launch With GS” on Twitter, with a potential reach of 1.6M, including notable influencers such as Jill Rowley (Investor/Advisor, 41.3k followers), Susan Lyne (General Partner and Co-founder of BBG Ventures, 29.7k followers), and Jewel Burks Solomon (head of Google for Startups US, 15.2k followers). Collectively, 8 #LaunchWithGS posts from @GoldmanSachs drove 221.5k impressions and 2.5k total engagements.
• We also tapped into the communication channels of the Cohort’s strategic partners Cooley LLC, Carta, and Red Antler–all companies deeply committed to empowering diverse entrepreneurs. Outreach efforts drove over 400 applications for the Cohort. Once selected, we provided each founder with a social media toolkit, resulting in further amplification.

Media