The Creative Marketing Strategies That Launched These 3 Major Tech Startups

If you're a regular reader of the Ahrefs blog, then you'll know that we usually keep our focus pretty tightly on SEO.

But since the goal of SEO is to grow your business, we feel it's important that we take a step back and look at a broader set of marketing strategies and tactics every once in a while.

This time we're looking at three well known companies:

And the marketing strategies that got them their earliest successes.

Their methods were not directly SEO-focused. But each is a good example of how great marketing decisions can result in press coverage, referral traffic and organic links. Which of course leads to better rankings and search traffic.

Let's get started with the first business — Salesforce.

The SaaS industry has a reputation of being boring and “suited up.” But one of the earliest SaaS companies, Salesforce, was anything but boring. Especially when it came to marketing.

The key to their success was the fact that founder and CEO Marc Benioff would do anything and everything to get Salesforce's name out there.

Above all, Benioff had a knack for knowing what the media wanted to see.

In 1999, while there were protests against the World Trade Organization in cities like Seattle (the home of Salesforce competitor Microsoft), he staged a protest of his own — outside a Siebel user conference:

Benioff's protest was followed by a military-themed “End of Software” party. To get in, guests had to bring in a piece of “old software” to put in a set of “overflowing software trash bins.”

There were different themed areas at the party including “Software-Free Zones,” a “Prisoners of Software” area, and even a game area with a “Throw the Disk in the Toilet” game for anyone to play. The B52s played along with two other bands.

All in all, the event represented Salesforce's value proposition from top to bottom:

This huge party didn't just get San Francisco's tech scene excited. Tons of media outlets were already in town for the Siebel conference. Salesforce reached out to them and got the Wall Street Journal, Forbes and The New York Times all to attend the “End of Software” party. All of them wrote afterward about this brand-new startup willing to do anything to be noticed.

Business Insider, who also covered the event, referred to Salesforce as the “ant at [Siebel's] picnic.” Today, that ant has a market cap of nearly $50 billion.

Things didn't go so well for Benioff when he put up a controversial poster featuring the Dalai Lama. "There is no software on the path to enlightenment,” it read. The spiritual leader had been slated to speak at the Himalayan Foundation in San Francisco. He ended up publicly rejecting Benioff and his appropriation of his image.

No one will mind a little fun if you keep it corporate. But keep people's idols out of it.

By coincidence, Airbnb also got its start at a conference. The story goes something like this:

The plan worked, a company was born in the process.

As they wrote up their listing, the soon-to-be-founders discovered that Craigslist (the standard for apartment sublets at the time) was just not the best way. Craigslist was impersonal. Craigslist was already a little creepy. Their instincts told them to build something different.

What became known as the “eBay of space” started to grow. But its founders didn't lose sight of the fact that Craigslist was still the king. Craigslist was still where you went if you wanted to rent someone's house or offer your own up. They had to find some way to access that massive market of potential Airbnb users.

Sometime in 2010, Airbnb's explosive growth began in earnest.

It all started from a “re-envisioning” of the guidelines in Craigslist's terms of service. They hacked together an integration that let any listing on Airbnb be cross-posted to Craigslist. With its tens of thousands of users, it was a crucial market for the young startup:

With this technique, the Airbnb team short circuited the Law of Sh**ty Clickthroughs. In other words, the fact that “over time, all marketing strategies result in sh**ty clickthrough rates.”

The Law of Shitty Clickthroughs is why HotWired got a 78% click-through rate with the brand-new technique of banner ads in 1994. It's why Facebook only got a 0.05% clickthrough rate in 2011.

To make your marketing stand out, you either need to do something novel or you need to deliver real value to your audience. And that's what Airbnb did by giving their members access to a wider marketplace:

Airbnb emailed their users about cross-posting to Craigslist. They emailed Craigslist users about cross-posting to Airbnb.

In doing so, Airbnb could give something of value to both sides of the market. They were able to grow rapidly because of the additional exposure.

And because Airbnb was the first to truly take advantage of the Craigslist platform in this way, they got a huge novelty boost.

Finding this kind of edge is like catnip for growing startups. Having a product “that people want” is not enough. Even having a small audience of fans is not enough. You need to find what Justin Jackson calls “the fastest engine possible” and hook your product up to it.

Surfing on a bigger platform's wave, as Airbnb did with Craigslist, is one of the best ways to do that — just remember that when it stops working you have to paddle out and catch another!

When you try to ride a competitor's wave and wipe out, we call it sharecropping. You rented out a plot of land that someone else owned, you tried to farm it for personal gain, and then the landlord decided to evict you.

That's exactly what happened to the YC-backed Zen99, which was formed to help freelancers figure out their taxes and find insurance.

Every user acquisition method the Zen99 team had tried failed. They finally decided that they should partner with a company with a huge presence in the tax space — Intuit — and try to grow that way.

Intuit processed hundreds of millions of tax returns every year, so riding that wave could be incredibly profitable.

Not long after, Intuit released QuickBooks - their own product that did exactly what Zen99 did. This made their partnership with Zen99 redundant.

Did Intuit just sign onto the partnership to learn what they could before turning around and building their own thing? Were there issues with the product? Doesn't matter, in the end—the partnership ending was the last straw, and soon Zen99 put out a blog post called “Why Zen99 Shut Down.”

The lesson to take away is that sharecropping like Zen99 and, to a lesser extent, Airbnb, can be very dangerous. If the larger platform you're using to get users to your product decides to pull the plug, you could be dead in the water.

Airbnb eventually did get shut out of Craigslist, but by then they'd already achieved a massive amount of growth using Craigslist's platform. Intuit never let things get that far.

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Before his company AdGrok was acquired by Twitter, Antonio Garcia-Martinez (author of the recent memoir Chaos Monkeys), was a physicist at Berkeley and a quant at Goldman Sachs.

But AdGrok's first entree into the startup world didn't come as a result of his team's qualifications or even their product — it came through Garcia-Martinez's writing on the AdGrok blog.

With the controversial and punchy “New York will always be a tech backwater, I don't care what Chris Dixon or Ron Conway or Paul Graham say,” AdGrok began its ascent.

Garnering 180+ comments on Hacker News and driving 30,000 unique visitors to the AdGrok site, the post was a massive success.

What made the post so relevant was that Hacker News, where the post was first submitted, was the domain of Y Combinator and its President and founder, Paul Graham. And Garcia-Martinez was attacking him head-on, explaining the “impossibility” of a true NYC startup scene by talking about the everyday social interactions he had in his life as a Goldman quant:

Garcia-Martinez, like Benioff, knew that the way to get attention was to punch up.

By taking on a well-known VC, he knew he could get exposure. But to really capitalize on that exposure it couldn't just be a controversial viewpoint he was taking — the content actually had to be good.

Fortunately for him, he was a good enough writer to make all those page views count.

So you wrote a piece you think is good and you want some help getting it on the front page of Hacker News.

That can work, but don't make the mistake that Groove made and rely only on the upvotes of your friends and your colleagues to be enough in getting it to the front page of Hacker News.

The truth is that you have to actually have an interesting article that people would want to talk about. And for that readers have to be able to disagree with your point of view.

But don't start talking religion or politics — create “strategic controversy,” an idea that Greg Ciotti illustrates by pointing to the very active internet debates over which way your toilet paper should hang off its roll.

You can find niche controversies like this everywhere:

You get the idea. These are topics that have been written about a lot, but for very good reason — they're debates and arguments that are never resolved.

If you have something compelling to say about a divisive topic, then people are going to pay attention.

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Let's be honest, most of our marketing work is pretty repetitive and tedious:

Moreover, the above-mentioned "conventional marketing strategies" are not as effective as we would like them to be - mainly because nearly exactly all of your competitors are doing pretty much the same stuff.

So wouldn't it make sense to step out of the box from time to time and apply some creativity to your marketing? Obviously audacity doesn't always work in your favour and it may as well backfire at you.

But do you think Marc Benioff would have managed to take Saleforce to $50 billion market cap without doing all these crazy things?

Let me know in the comments.