If you have recently attended a wedding, birthday party or Bar Mitzvah, you likely have noticed how trendy the cupcake has become. Starting at $3 a cupcake, these confectionery delights are the craze of party goers and bakery shoppers. Search
Quora
and you will see reports that their fame gained traction after being offered at Magnolia Bakery and subsequently spotlighted on Sex and the City. Others feel their cuteness alone carried them to stardom.
4 Inbound Marketing Lessons from the Cupcake
1. Experiment with New Channels and Offers
The cupcake wouldn’t have gained its popularity if the first bakery hadn’t offered it to customers. They may have been selling dozens of regular cakes a day but little did they know they could be drawing in more customers by experimenting with the offering of cupcakes.
Marketing Takeaway:
You won’t know if it is going to work until you try it. If you are using
HubSpot’s software
, you can use tracking URL’s on any new
calls-to-action
you experiment with. What channels haven’t you experimented with yet –
YouTube
,
Twitter
,
email marketing
? How are you going to grow your reach if you don’t try new channels?
2. Diversify Your Content
One of the great things about cupcakes is they allow you to offer a variety of flavors to your guests. If you can’t entice someone with chocolate, perhaps a luscious lemon cupcake will get them to table.
Marketing Takeaway:
As suggested by Prashant Kaw in “
Are All Your Referral Eggs in One Basket
”, depending on one traffic source is really risky. It is important that you draw traffic in from a variety of sources. Connect with your target audience through a variety of channels. Don’t just offer them vanilla, use
social media
to share your content, answer questions on
LinkedIn
, and listen to what is being said on
Twitter
and
Facebook
. Your target audience likely has different preferences on how they access information, so publish videos to YouTube in addition to
blogging
, and try some targeted
email campaigns
that pull people to your site.
3. Be Concise
Cupcakes are cute, small and easy to eat. You don’t need a plate or fork to eat them and you aren’t stuck with left over cake for days after.
Marketing takeaway:
Get to the point quickly. Keep your page titles under 70 characters and your meta descriptions under 150 characters. When asking your visitors to
fill out forms
, don’t ask them to spend more time than necessary. The goal is to get visitors to learn about your products and take action.
4. Create a Strategy
While the end product is a tasty little cupcake, hard work and preparation goes into the end results. You can’t bake a cupcake if you don’t have flour, eggs, and sugar, and nobody wants to pay $3 for a burnt cupcake.
Marketing Takeaway:
To be successful, you have to have a strategy for how you will create and optimize your
remarkable content
.
Research keywords
that you are going to optimize for. Publish optimized blog entries frequently. The more you produce, the more search engines will trust your site and the higher you will
rank in SEO
.
What has the cupcake taught you about marketing?
Inbound Marketing Blog Feed
Fuwaye 4:14 PM on April 19, 2011
Love the article...that's the genius of HubSpot...can always find wisedom from something small and simple. Thank you for all your marketing tips! I would like to add/expand a few points: Creative: in addition to flavors, people can create/deco diff designs that are appealing.
Global: The small, cute thing even attracts to people from culturally not sweet/cake eater.
Diversity: people with gluten-free diet can have cupcakes made of rice and potato flour.
Everyone can play: even children can be a chef when comes to making/decorating cupcakes.
Kevin 4:43 PM on April 19, 2011
"don’t ask them to spend more time than necessary. The goal is to get visitors to learn about your products and take action.
"
After reading the above article I went away not knowing exactly what to think about the virtues preached by Hubspot relating to keeping things brief and not requesting an arm and a leg from your visitors for them just to attend a webinar for example.
To join in on one of Hubspot's Webinars would only require an email address for a link to log on at the designated time. Hubspot however has decided that requiring only an email address is too simple so an un-neccesarily long form is put between the prospect and the webinar.
99% of the webinar form which Hubspot uses is totally not needed every single time there is a webinar nor at any time else. All it takes is an email address plus maybe a username for this purpose.
This is a case of not practicing what you preach guys. Please look at these webinar forms.
Marketing Plan 11:42 PM on April 20, 2011
This is pretty fantastic. I've got a couple additional lessons:
i) Make them pretty - Cupcakes are very just as much eye candy as they are tongue candy.
ii) Offer in multiple sizes - a bakers dozen, singles, etc. For content, offer tl;dr; summaries, offer bullets, offer as RSS, etc.
iii) Make it easy to give. - The paper under it makes it portable. Allow people to share you content easily by having images and headlines that will look good when shared on Facebook or Twitter.
That's all I've got for now.
~ Melvin Ram
Pippi Hepburn 5:09 PM on April 26, 2011
Nice post. I thought it would be trite and boring. It was concise, and sensible. Thanks for the sensible advice in a simple explanation.
www.pippihepburn.com
Amievoltaire 6:23 PM on April 26, 2011
Enticing, entertaining and simple analogy :<) Thank you
laura 6:37 PM on April 26, 2011
last lesson...cupcakes are on their way out, so moral of the story, keep your eye on the prize and be ready shift focus to a completely new product when the newness of this very trendy product fizzles out as it has with cupcakes.
FrostingGallery 7:20 PM on April 26, 2011
Awesome article Rachel! Please check out FrostingGallery.etsy.com if you would like to add a little pizzazz to your cupcakes! FrostingGallery provides Artistic and Edible Frosting Decals that merge with the icing on your cupcakes...They customize the decals with children's names, images, and business logos! Again awesome article!
Lyne 7:41 PM on April 26, 2011
Love this article because it had just opened up a channel in my brain to start using more channels to market! Thanks a lot!
Noir the Texas Tabby 8:41 PM on April 26, 2011
I am a cat. Good to read this. Gotta know these things. My human doesn't-she prefers to eat cupcakes instead of workin' on my business plan! What does she think I do when she's away--nap? Can use these tips. They make sense. A cat musta been the one write them. :)
Peanut 9:09 PM on April 26, 2011
Thanks for the tips! I love cupcakes and now they will always symbolize great marketing strategies as well! Thanks again for being such a great learning community
GiftCakeDesign 9:32 PM on April 26, 2011
Great post with interesting action items. Thanks for sharing! giftcakedesign.etsy.com
Anita Oates 11:06 PM on April 26, 2011
Short and sweet. Thank you!
Colleen Peck 12:43 AM on April 27, 2011
Great article! Check out my CounterFitCakes.etsy.com
Great cakes that last forever. No Calories!!
Ruby Tombstone 4:05 AM on April 27, 2011
Thanks for the post. Just one issue - the "research keywords" link in item 4 doesn't lead to sites that can help you research keywords by using your site link. The first leads you to Yahoo paid advertising, and the second is another Yahoo-based keywords tool, completely disconnected from your site. Not great tools.
Diane Costanza 10:32 AM on April 27, 2011
I can totally relate to this and like having something so simple and familiar to learn from!
Hilary 10:17 PM on April 27, 2011
Great article--I can completely relate to "cupcake marketing" in this way: during economic hard times, people want to feel happy and comforted. My business tagline is "making you smile since the late 20th century" which draws people in with a friendly wink. Cupcakes make me smile--and from a marketing perspective, it makes perfect sense why cupcake businesses are hot-- it's an affordable glimpse of better times to come.
Sigal Friedlich - Zakai 3:57 AM on April 28, 2011
Love the analogy...I'm craving for a cupcake now...
Thanks for this short and plain post!
judy 6:15 AM on April 28, 2011
Cupcakes ARE out, pies are in. Keep your eyes and ears open. But I do love the marketing takeaways! Thanks for the tips.
Heather 9:54 PM on April 28, 2011
Thanks for the inspiration to try new things with marketing; information is relevant to many fields. Thank you!
coloursandtextures 1:01 PM on April 29, 2011
Food for thought.
Kim Brooks 7:27 AM on May 02, 2011
Love that this article is written from the point of view of a cupcake for sale - great way to think about my products from a different view point!