Every business wants
free positive publicity
, but getting people to talk about your company and product for free isn't easy.
Dropbox
, a cloud storage company, has been able to grow from a software startup with fewer than 100,000 users to more than 4 million users in fewer than two years. All of this by spending no money on advertising and having no prior marketing experience. In such a crowded market place, how did they do it?
The lessons below were summarized from this great presentation on
Dropbox's
growth and
word-of-mouth
success.
5 Reasons for Dropbox's
Word-of-Mouth Marketing
Success
Can you apply any of these lessons to your business? Have you/will you?1. Have an Amazing Product -- When Dropbox launched, its market was already highly competitive with dozens of cloud storage companies battling for users. The company realized, however, through looking at comments in forums and reading blogs, that users weren't really satisfied with competitor products. These other products didn't work all of the time and would create file errors. In others words, users couldn't rely on these solutions. Dropbox decided to make a simple file storage application that worked. Customers talk about great products, so the first step in word-of-mouth marketing success is to have a product worth talking about.
2. Build Your Community Before You Even Have a Product -- Don't make the mistake that you need to have a fully launched and market-ready product before you can get people to talk about it. Dropbox tested landing pages and a private beta program as an effort to generate interest in the product and begin to build a community while the product was still in the development process. Letting users into the process early helped to provide a sense of ownership while it gave the company valuable feedback needed to make the product better.
3. Question Best Practices -- Dropbox's public launch plan looked like other product launch plans. They had planned to use some pay-per-click advertising, launch at an industry conference and hire a public relations firm. That all sounds pretty smart right? It didn't work for them. The cost of customer acquisition was too high because the keywords they were bidding on were too expensive. Basically, the traditional ways to launch and market a company weren't allowing Dropbox to scale its growth. Still, they realized they were still growing despite the fact that these efforts weren't working. This growth was due to word-of-mouth buzz about their product. Their next logical step was thinking, "How do we get people to talk about our product even more?"
4. Encourage Word-of-Mouth -- People were already talking about Dropbox, but to ramp up the conversation, the company started a referral program that offered customers incentives to recommend the application to others. This one simple change permanently increased new users by 60%. Additionally, Dropbox made changes to their product that made it easier for users to share their love for Dropbox with others. For example, they offered the feature of shared folders, which allows one folder of documents to be shared with multiple users, subsequently encouraging users to invite others to share access to folders.
5. Understand What Is Working -- To learn all of these lessons, Dropbox needed clear data to understand what was working and what wasn't. The company prioritized analytics within the company so that it could have the data it needed to make the right marketing and product development investments. To understand how to people are talking about your company, it is important to have the systems in place to see how new users are discovering your business. -- To learn all of these lessons, Dropbox needed clear data to understand what was working and what wasn't. The company prioritized analytics within the company so that it could have the data it needed to make the right marketing and product development investments. To understand how to people are talking about your company, it is important to have the systems in place to see how new users are discovering your business.
Photo Credit: Scootie
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Inbound Marketing Blog Feed
Stan DeVaughn 5:00 PM on May 11, 2010
Take note that the viral effect works only when your product is intrinsically infectious. In other words, Your value proposition is compelling ONLY to the extent that buyers perceive in it a benefit greater than the pricetag plus the adoption costs. Clever viral campaigns can't compensate for the absence of real value.
Reena Kapoor 5:24 PM on May 11, 2010
Good post. The problem with what ends up being called "Best Practices" is that it's just a litany of what everyone else does - regardless of context and that's the problem. One needs to sit back and consider the context of your new product launch, what category are you in, how mature is the market, who are you seeking to attract and how do these people listen/decide/buy --and then come up with what will work; versus blindly copying what worked for a different product in a different category in a different universe...
John White 6:40 PM on May 11, 2010
This is interesting. I think that Dropbox's native app implementation is a huge step backwards. I spent an afternoon dealing with it last month to get a 4GB file a client had sent me, only to realize that I could have forgone the app completely and done everything through the browser. If that's your idea of "an amazing product," then I don't know what to tell you.
They must have killer marketing to overcome such clunky execution.
stone88 1:01 AM on May 12, 2010
Thanks for the e-book.
Melissa 2:35 PM on May 13, 2010
I'll echo the first poster; the campaign worked because the product is great. I've been a cheerleader for Dropbox for one year. Four computers with differing files from four areas of my life - and all accessible via iPhone. All easily sent (haven't had the loading problem mentioned). When you have several unpaid cheerleaders, you touch thousands without lifting a finger.
Dianna Huff 10:45 AM on May 16, 2010
What I like about this case study is that Dropbox asked a really simple but profound question: "If traditional marketing efforts are failing, why are we still growing?"
Many companies / marketers only look at the failure and try to fix it versus looking at the success and trying to increase it.
Someone wrote a post about asking "What is working?" with regard to getting women in third-world countries to cook more nutritious food -- or something like that. Using this information, they were able to effect real change from village to village where others had completely failed.