The intersection of SEO and Real Marketing. Four take aways from Grasshopper
I’ve been an entrepreneur my entire life. I started a landscaping company in high school and over 15 years’ time my team and I grew that business to over 100 people. Recently, I navigated the exit of that company and have since started GreenPal which is descried as “Uber for lawn mowing.”
Transitioning into a digital entrepreneur has been an enriching experience for me while learning the disciplines I need to build and distribute a new product. My role on our team is one of the CMO. Basically, it’s my job to make sure enough consumers are showing up to the front door to use our product.
Very quickly I am having to learn the different facets of digital marketing such as SEO, paid acquisition, CRO, email marketing, and also offline channels such as direct mail. While gaining a basic competency in these different disciplines I have observed how much they overlap, and how well executed campaigns can deliver results to each of them simultaneously.
While taking a course on SEO link building techniques from Point Blank SEO, I learned about Grasshopper’s marketing campaign back in 2009. Grasshopper is a virtual phone system for entrepreneurs, at that time having re-brandied, they created a well thought out and coordinated campaign. To get the word out about their new brand, they sent via FedEx chocolate covered grasshoppers to 5,000 influential bloggers, reporters, CEO’s, entrepreneurs, and celebrities.
The success of the campaign was tremendous. Overnight a sensational buzz was created about their phone system product. Bloggers wrote about it, influencers tweeted, reporters talked about it on TV, and even a few of them eat the grasshoppers on the air. Grasshopper has since published a case study detailing all of the metrics resulting from their well-executed plan.
While learning about Grasshopper’s campaign in the link building course I was amazed that they were able to attract 100’s of invaluable links from press mentions and also from some of the most influential bloggers out there. Every SEO knows that these authority boosting links are the most valuable to get and are almost impossible to acquire through deliberate means. However, when I read over Grasshopper’s official case study and published data, no mention was made as to how many links they built as a result of the campaign. It’s almost like the links were an afterthought or side benefit. This serves as an example of how real company stuff (RCS) naturally builds stronger, more valuable links better than any other deliberate means available.
I can imagine in larger organizations marketing functions such as SEO, Social, Content, and paid channels are silo’d . I believe as marketers we can learn from well executed cross discipline campaigns like this one and observe how they benefit every facet of both digital and analog marketing. Even 5 years later, Grasshopper is still reaping SEO rewards from the 2009 campaign, as those valuable links still in place have established their authoritative domain, thus affording them high rankings for their competitive industry’s search keywords and phrases.
It’s amazing how this real world, guerilla marketing style, campaign not only got people talking about their product, but it also delivered a substantial benefit to their SEO strategy.
Surmising Grasshopper’s campaign; four take aways “jump” out:
Zoom out: Coordinate a campaign that will benefit the whole business
Be unique, be different: Think outside the box and craft a campaign that taps into a human sense such as curiosity
Be ready: Do not conduct a large scale potentially impactful campaign until you have to the product to back it up, and service the surge of interest
Plan everything: Spend 10 hours sharping your ax and 1 hour chopping down the tree.
So as marketers, we should consider zooming out of our area of focus and craft initiatives that can create a lift in all parts of our business and marketing efforts. Hugely successful campaigns such as this one are within our reach if we think outside the box, plan, and execute.
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