Today we’re going to take some lessons from a unicorn.
Wait, wut?
Nah, we’re not talking about the mythical creature—we’re talking about startup unicorns. You know, the companies that have insane growth and come out of seemingly nowhere to dominate a market. Think of Uber, Airbnb, Snapchat, etc.
You might use one of those unicorns every day at work – Slack. It’s a communication platform for teams, and is one of the fastest growing B2B software companies ever.
Today’s Listen is an interview with Slack’s former CMO Bill Macaitis. Bill shares what happened behind the scenes at Slack to make their growth explode. You’re gonna wanna tune in ‘cause Bill is a marketing guru who does more than just spit out inspirational marketing quotes.
You can skip right to 6:19 for the start of the good stuff.
- (7:58) In his first 100 days, Bill focused on building a high-performance marketing ops team. He also started in-depth brand monitoring to get a baseline idea of where they were in the industry.
- (9:19) Bill started working on messaging by asking every single employee, “How do you describe Slack?”
- (10:17) Becoming a unicorn isn’t just about organic growth. They knew advertising was going to be essential to their growth so they went through an RFP process to find the right agency.
- (16:10) Word of mouth marketing comes from being a customer-centric company. And if you’re truly a customer-centric company, then every experience your customers and prospects have with your company needs to be exceptional – everything from marketing to sales, to onboarding, to customer support.
- (19:17) Being a completely customer-centric company will just about guarantee that people will be talking about you and referring you to their friends.
- (24:26) Some of Slack’s most successful brand campaigns and how they measured success. Here’s one of their most successful brand ads.
- (29:00) If you’re a small company with a limited budget, you can still run a brand campaign.
- (33:41) Podcasting was one of the most cost-effective content marketing strategies for Slack. Ads they were running for their podcasts were costing $0.07 per listen. Compared with $1-$2 per view for a video ad.
