Thread by @timsoulo

9 "interesting" marketing stunts that we did at @ahrefs

Let's face it, most of digital marketing is rather "unexciting:"

- Create "SEO content" & grow traffic
- Run ads on BOFU keywords
- Retarget visitors with FB ads
- Build an email list & setup automation
- Optimise your landing pages
- Start a community
- etc

🥱

I'm not the most creative marketer on the planet, but I'm always looking for ways to break this routine and do something outside of that box.

So here's a list of 9 "interesting" marketing stunts that we've carried out at Ahrefs in the past few years:

#1 Coffee cups for #BrightonSEO

TBH I wanted to design a more straightforward ad. But our CEO @botsbreeder insisted that it should be this way.

And he was right!

Based on the tweets & feedback during the conference, our coffee cups were a big hit:

https://twitter.com/timsoulo/status/1172423501887635456

#2 Bi-annual /r/BigSEO thread

Shortly after joining Ahrefs I needed to quickly gauge what the industry thought of us.

So I posted on Reddit asking for feedback.

2 years later I remembered that thread & posted it again on the same day.

Then again in 2 more years.

And again.

Every such thread creates a TON of engagement in the r/BigSEO community.

There's a lot of criticism obviously, but this gives us a unique opportunity to publicly address it (as well as get a better understanding of our market).

...& it definitely creates exposure for us.

#3 A branded blog widget

Since we care a lot about the performance metrics of our content, we thought it would be cool to display them in the sidebar of each article.

That gave our content some social proof & promoted our Content Explorer tool at the same time.

Quite a few people suggested that we should actually take it a step further and develop a public plugin for Wordpress that other people could display on their websites.

Well... We're thinking about that ;)

#4 Homepage copy revamp experiment

We needed to refresh our homepage & we decided to turn that into an interesting experiment.

I hired 3 professional copywriting agencies and asked them to work independently on their version of our new homepage.

Total spend: $33,115

Once our new homepage was published, I collated everything I learned from working with 3 agencies into a YT video:



Which is now the most popular one on my channel.

Many people loved the new homepage. Others not so much.

Some even made fun of us for spending $33,115 on our homepage copy.

In any case, we gave the marketing community a cool case study to discuss and argue about.

And this brought quite a bit of visibility for our brand.

#5 Product launch countdown

When preparing to launch our free "Ahrefs Webmaster Tools" product, we wanted to attract as much attention as possible to it.

So we started posting cryptic teaser tweets with countdown numbers on them:

https://twitter.com/ahrefs/status/1306532003815198720

Our followers seemed to enjoy guessing what it is that Ahrefs is about to launch.

And every subsequent countdown tweet was creating more and more engagement:

https://twitter.com/ahrefs/status/1307970588389052416

So when we finally announced AWT the launch went extremely well.

A lot of people were looking forward to this announcement and therefore engaged with it on Twitter.

I actually wrote a dedicated thread with more details about this launch here:

https://twitter.com/timsoulo/status/1321351698942623744

#6 Competitor comparison page (with a twist)

I've seen some Twitter discussions on whether it is ethical to create competitor comparison pages.

Marketers often cherry-pick the parts which make their product look better, making those pages super biased.

We care about marketing ethics, so we didn't want to create such a page at Ahrefs.

But then we noticed that whenever there's some sort of "best SEO tool" poll on social media, Ahrefs almost always wins (by a large margin).

This seemed like perfect content for a "VS" page.

We also figured that instead of creating a biased side-by-side feature comparison we can just list some of the coolest features that are UNIQUE to our product.

And this is how our ahrefs.com/vs page was born.

It focuses on our product, instead of our competitors.

And this page ended up ranking pretty well for all the "comparison" type search queries:

#7 A fun swag giveaway

Giveaways are not particularly original per se. And swag is a pretty common "marketing tool" as well.

But somehow the swag giveaway we did with @mattdiggityseo in his "Affiliate SEO Mastermind" FB group was quite a big hit.

500+ entries is no joke!

All credit for this "marketing stunt" goes to Matt though.

He made it super fun and engaging with his hilarious entry rules :)

#8 A selfie battle

This one is my personal favourite by far!!

Myself & @jasonhennessey had an epic "selfie battle," where we would post a photo that contains a physical representation of the opponents previous photo in it.

Lots of people from our industry were following this battle and having a good laugh. :)

I was about to launch a website for it and ping the press (inspired by @iamrofe's dating billboard), but the pandemic hit and our battle grinded to a halt 😭

(it's still Jason's turn btw)

#9 The best marketing stunt of all

As you can tell by the nature of these marketing "stunts," not all of them will bring a direct business value (especially the selfie battle).

So I wanted to end my list with an extremely effective marketing stunt with the highest possible ROI.

And that is:

IMPROVE YOUR PRODUCT!

"Marketing" is not just "promotion & advertising."

Study your market & create feedback loops between the market & your product team.

This will help make every product release an "interesting marketing stunt" that would generate lots of buzz.

That's it.

I have many more creative marketing ideas in my backlog, which I hope to try someday.

But there's also an "Opportunity Cost."

The "boring fundamentals" will often bring much more value than most creative stunts.

So look for a healthy balance of both you must.