How Gong and Glossier used social media to blitzscale their brands
Part 4 of Content Brand, a series on using content to ace your startup marketing
The conversation intelligence company Gong was founded in 2015, relative latecomers to the SaaS boom of the 2010s. But in just a few years, they had broken through the clutter in their category and were on their way to being the top player in the space.
Plus, they built an instantly recognisable brand. You cannot miss Gong, especially on social media, and especially if you are in sales. You’ve either read stuff from them or about them, that’s just how it is.
So how does a relatively boring company making software for sales people build a brand that helps it scale rapidly? Gong found a way, and it was social media.
Before we dive into that, though, there’s one important advantage Gong had that I have to point out. CEO Amit Bendov was CMO of Panaya, and VP of Marketing at ClickSoftware before he co-founded Gong. He is a marketer and knows how brands are built. I have written before about how having marketers on founding teams is a huge advantage. You’ll see that in action here.
The Gong team realised that everything was crowded in terms of SaaS. Keywords were expensive, SEO was all over the place. You still had to do these things, but what was the differentiation? Even social media was saturated.
Or was it? Was LinkedIn being used the right way?
Gong’s CMO Udi Ledergor has talked about what happened next on several podcasts. They had understood that their target audience was on LinkedIn, and none of their competitors were engaging them in a fun, human manner. So they set about doing just that.
Ross Simmonds says how, on his blog: "Gong understands that their audience wants opinions, techniques & data and that they’re spending time on LinkedIn."
Their LinkedIN content then basically wrote itself. The Gong team used their own data to give insights to sales teams, produced content that was aimed at helping sales people, and from time to time made jokes and memes that sales teams would immediately get.
They had cracked the code.
By now, Gong started sharing about 10-15 posts every week on LinkedIn. This is almost the same as the number of posts B2B companies do in a year. With volume, quality, and consistency, Gong had won LinkedIn.
One way to see how important LinkedIn had become to Gong was that till a few months back, the CTAs on their blogs said 'Follow us on LinkedIn'.
No newsletter, no request demos, LinkedIn follows. Genius.
Everyone knows the story of skincare brand Glossier.
How Emily Weiss’s beauty blog, called Into the Gloss, became important and influential enough to birth a billion dollar brand is the stuff of legend.
But social media is a big part of Glossier’s success too. Especially Instagram.
Why Instagram? Because Glossier’s customers are on Instagram, and there are conversations about makeup and beauty happening there already. And with Instagram’s community came something else Glossier could tap into: Influencers.
Glossier used influencers but also did something else, took smaller creators and made them big by throwing the brand’s weight behind them, thus creating their own ambassadors.
As Weiss has said herself, "At Glossier, something we’ve always stayed very true to, since pre-launch, day one, is that every single person is an influencer."
The authenticity of the brand on Instagram, plus the high engagement with replies and mentions means that Glossier has become a brand that a lot of customers engage with constantly. Add this to the content on Emily’s still hugely influential and widely read blog, and what you have is a perfect storm of content and social marketing.
What are the learnings here?
First, both of these companies knew well who their customers were, and more crucially, where they were hanging out. In Gong’s case, that was LinkedIn, and in Glossier’s case, that was Instagram.
Second, they used their customers themselves to make great content: Gong used their own data to produce insights, and Glossier made influencers out of their users.
Third, they weren’t afraid to take risks with their content. Using memes and gifs isn’t usually done in the B2B space, making ambassadors of normal people also isn’t usual. Glossier brought on little known Instagram accounts and transformed them into influencers. These risks were what made the brands stand out.
Can you do this for your brand? Try to answer the same three questions.
Where is my audience hanging out? Where are the decision makers/influencers spending their time online?
What unique data do I have that’s valuable to them? Who are the influencers (even in B2B) that I can tap?
What can I do that attracts attention/draws eyeballs? Is there something that has never been done in this domain before?
This can be the starting point for your social media to kick off your content brand.
Note to readers
Apologies for a dry April on The CMO Journal. I took a vacation after a while and returned tanned and tired. Though I had a couple of essays written and ready, I hadn’t polished them enough for your eyes. We’ll resume normal service now. There are a couple of things I’ve also been working on too, and May will be a happening month on the newsletter (and around it!).
Also, before I end, some news: The CMO Journal has, for the very first time, a sponsor, and that too a startup I have known and admired for a while.
I’m delighted that The CMO Journal is now brought to you by SocialPilot. SocialPilot is a social media management tool packed with an array of features that make social media management a breeze. From scheduling posts to analysing performance metrics, team collaboration, content curation, and more, SocialPilot has you covered.
I know the team well, they are from the Upekkha stable, and they are a great product and company. I’m happy to have them onboard as I keep writing for this community of marketers and startup founders. As I have always said, it’s because you read that I write.