Getting your marketing strategy right can be the difference between making your business a huge success or suffering a slow and painful death. Sometimes it can be hard to know where to start with your strategy and planning. There’s so much information out there and everyone seems to have a different approach.
If you need some inspiration for your next digital marketing or offline-marketing campaign or strategy then look no further. There are some great companies out there that know how to target the right prospects, get their message heard, and communicate their brand values and offers in a seamless way.
This article takes a look at 3 companies that are bringing their marketing A-game to the table and putting their competitors to shame.
1. Dollar Shave Club – From 1$ to $1B
Who said shaving had to be boring? Definitely not Michael Dublin, the founder of the Dollar Shave Club!
The Dollar Shave Club is responsible for one of the most viral marketing campaigns of recent years. If you haven’t yet seen their iconic launch video you can watch it here: Dollar Shave Club launch video.
Instead of doing what the traditional razor blade manufacturers like Gillette were doing (and have done for the last few decades), they decided right off the bat that they wanted to differentiate themselves. The way the ad is shot, the copy, and the tongue-in-cheek theme of the ad were enough to let people know that they were not the average shaving company.
Using dry humour and wit and with a real sense of self-confidence, the Dollar Shave Club made a launch video that made them instantly memorable – whilst also doing a great job of telling people who they were, exactly what they are all about, and why consumers should use them. They even managed to take a cheeky swipe at their competitors and the shaving industry’s trend of creating and selling over-engineered razors with features that nobody wants or needs, for prices that are too high.
When the video was launched it went viral and attracted an unexpected amount of traffic to the company website, causing their server to crash in the first hour. The server was soon back up and running, and the orders kept coming in – approx. 12,000 orders within the first 48 hours!
To date, the video has over 27 million views, and the company keeps going from strength to strength, having since launched in Australia, Canada and the UK. But their cheeky approach to marketing didn’t stop with the launch video. Throughout their rapid growth, they continued to post funny content such as “Do I really need to wash my hands after I pee?” and “Is it bad to pluck my nose hairs with my fingers?”
Their brilliant approach continued to attract the right attention, and their marketing campaigns have become legendary amongst marketers and consumers alike. The company has amassed over 3 million subscribers and in 2016 was acquired by Unilever for a cool $1 billion!
Takeaways:
- Don’t be afraid to break the mould and do something different
- Forget what your competitors are doing – break with tradition and create something new and fresh
- Even the most established of industries and markets can be disrupted when you think outside the box and are willing to take risks
- Humour and cheekiness can endear you to a lot of people if done right
- Good marketing can do wonders for you even if you don’t have the best product in the market
2. Slack – Using a killer marketing hook
Slack has become one of the most popular channel-based work messaging platforms, with over 3 million paid customers to date.
Slack allows you to instantly message your colleagues, share files, host video calls and make communication with your team a lot more easier and fun.
It has become the workflow platform of choice for 77% of Fortune 100 companies, boosts 8 million active users daily, and have become the fastest growing SaaS company of all time.
Their rise in popularity has not only come about due to the ease of their technology but most importantly their dedication to their customers and their marketing.
Initially Slack was able to generate huge interest simply with word-of-mouth marketing. The company’s founder, Stewart Butterfield, the guy behind the photo sharing app Flickr, used organic marketing to get the word about Slack out to some key figureheads in different companies.
By allowing these companies to have free trials of the software and then leveraging their positive reviews and testimonials on social media, they were able to persuade other companies to give it a try.
Another key aspect of their huge growth was their positioning and marketing hook. Stewart Butterfield wanted Slack to be known as the “email killer”. He knew how much people hate emails, especially for workplace communication, so he decided to leverage that and position Slack as a more efficient, easier, and fun alternative.
This marketing hook proved to be a great success, and many media outlets and publications wrote articles about how Stewart Butterfield was going to “kill company emails with Slack” and “replace emails at the office”.
This led to further exposure and more companies signing up to use the platform. But Slack doesn’t just focus on its software, the company have also launched a popular podcast, and uses its Facebook page and other social media channels to promote that.
They also created a brilliant TV ad which showed an office full of animated animals using the Slack platform to collaborate on a project to create a flying umbrella. The ad was different and unique, and it was able to effectively demonstrate the potential use value of Slack to teams and companies worldwide.
View the “Slack teams do amazing things” ad. The website URL displayed on the ad was displayed as “slack.com/animals” – and this generated a lot of curiosity among viewers who clicked through to find out where this link would take them.
Another big part of their overall digital strategy is their dedication to customer support. Slack has a support team of 18 people with 6 members of staff dedicated to Twitter alone, ensuring that they are offering support 24/7.
Takeaways:
- Never forget the importance of good ol’ word-of-mouth marketing
- Get your product into the hands of people of influence within your market
- Ask for positive reviews and testimonials
- Use a bit of creative marketing, coupled with curiosity to drive traffic to your website
- Having a great marketing hook can really make you stand out from the crowd
3. American Express (AmEx) – Creating an online community
American Express is a well known brand across the world, but that doesn’t mean they rest on their laurels! They are constantly trying to improve the way they communicate and interact with their customers.
They are fully invested in providing value to their customers and prospects. They understand that giving value upfront translates into trust, with translates into greater customer retention rates and an increase in customer acquisition.
AmEx understands their audience and one way they are able to provide value to their target market is via their “OpenForum” website, which was originally created with the goal of “helping small businesses succeed.”
AmEx invites industry experts and professionals from the business and finance sectors to create and share content that their audience finds useful. This has proven to be a huge success and has helped to create and foster an online community of AmEx users and prospective users. The content attracts a lot of traffic from the search engines due to SEO, and because the content is created for their target audience, it acts as a great way to attract new customers and get them into their sales funnel.
The forum has calls-to-action requesting visitors to “click here to apply for your AmEx card”, and also has useful features such as financial calculators and other features their target audience and existing customers find useful.
Takeaways:
- By leveraging the expertise of others, American Express has shown that it is possible to create value for your market without having to only rely on internal resources, or do all the work yourself.
- Create content that your target market finds useful and you’ll be able to keep attracting new customers in to your sales funnel
- Creating great content allows you to create and grow an online community of customers, prospects and brand advocates, which will have huge benefits on your customer acquisition and retention rates.
Summary
If you are stuck for marketing inspiration take a look at what other companies are doing. Try not to limit your research only to those companies in your niche or market – you will often find great examples and ideas from other industries and sectors not related to yours.
Don’t be afraid to try new things and break the mould. This can help to establish yourself and penetrate a saturated or mature market. Don’t forget about offline marketing channels. If your budget permits then investing in offline marketing channels can do wonders for you.
Television, print, and word-of-mouth are still just as valuable today as they’ve always been. The approach may be slightly different, so you will need to develop a good understanding of your target audience to know what they will respond well to.
Provide value up-front to your customers and target market. Like AmEx, this can help you to create a community of like-minded people and leads who you can nurture and usher into your sales funnel.
