Marketing Stunts
This note is about marketing stunts that are used to gain visibility for a product or service. Related to marketing campaigns.
Use curiosity and vanity.
Make the entire product invite only, and not just for the beta period.
Use gamification.
Users must do something every week to keep their account from being deactivated forever.
Appear sincere and honest.
Let customers pick their own price, including free.
Appear playful. Works better for consumer products and services.
What if we went through and rewrote all the error message copywriting on our site using famous quotes from cult classic movies?
What if we gave away an upgrade to our product to anyone who pays to have Chinese food delivered to our office during lunch hours? And we tweeted about it every time it happened.
Use recurring campaigns. More about campaigns in marketing campaign notes.
What if we made our entire homepage an homage to the heroes of our industry on the 1st of every month, and we made it easy to share with friends?
Examples
Airbnb's craigslist Integration: Airbnb offered a way to post available rooms to craigslist in addition to Airbnb.
Instagram's Social Media Integration: You could post your pictures to Facebook and Twitter inside Instagram in addition to the Instagram itself.
Paypal Referral Bounty: Paypal paid $10 to each new customer and extra $10 to the customer who referred them. They kept offering this bounty up to tens of millions of users.
Dropbox Referral Bounty: Dropbox offers more space for each person you get into the service.
Hotmail Tagline: Each email sent with Hotmail would include a message "This email is sent with Hotmail. Get your free email at Hotmail.".
Mailbox Waiting List: Mailbox create compelling teaser video and showed how many users were before them in the waiting list to be invited to use the application.
Twitter Suggested Followers: Twitter suggests a set of high quality users for new users.
Pinterest Auto-follow: Pinterest accounts automatically follow a group of high quality users.
Mint.com Content Marketing: Mint focused on creating content for personal finance so they would have greater visibility on search engines.
Speakeasy Vodka: Hosted 50 small launch parties where they distributed their own Vodka brand.
Spotify Bait-and-switch: Spotify provided exceptionally good service and utilized bait-and-switch strategy in the background. But nobody cared as the service was so good.