What can we learn from effective digital marketing campaigns?

I decided to look at 5 impressive and highly successful digital marketing campaigns to distill what it is that made them work. Turns out that all successful campaigns have a common theme at their core – focus on customer experience and providing solutions that the consumers genuinely need.

Yelp: While review sites were nothing new when Yelp was founded, the key lesson from Yelp’s marketing campaign was that it was able to form trust among a community. Reviewers are known people with legitimate profiles and are encouraged to develop a reputation and a following. Yelp reinforces the importance of building a trustworthy brand and community so that users actually believe/have faith in the published ratings. Without trust, the model falters.

JetBlue: The digital marketing for JetBlue is focused on speedy and reliable customer service. Rather than posting self-promotional material, JetBlue posts individual responses to consumers queries which is key to building customer confidence. The key is to balance self-promotion with content that the users actually benefit from.

Dollar Shave Club: The company created excitement for something as boring as shaving via its innovative launch video. The key to their strategy is standing out in people’s minds through their tongue in cheek humor. It is a testimonial to how well-executed content marketing can capture minds of people.

Zappos: The leader in online shoe commerce provides 365 day money guarantee, free shipping and exchange. The organic popularity it enjoys because of its appealing policies is the key to its success. Zappos strategy reinforces how while content marketing is critical, it does not replace the focus on what customers actually need. Online content marketing campaigns should strive to produce measurable results in proportion to the resources committed to them.

Slack: Slack marketing strategy again reinforces the focus on “selling a solution, not a product.” Slack prioritizes solving customer pain points, as can be seen by the fact that it responds to 8,000 help desk tickets and up to 10,000 tweets each month. Even their Twitter feed contains a bunch of 140-character #SlackTips. Once again, the secret sauce is focus on customer experience.