At the beginning of the year, we highlighted seven of our favorite B2B marketing campaigns of 2019. To follow up, we’re diving deeper into several of these exemplary efforts with behind-the-scenes insight from the folks who brought them to life.
Today, we’ll take a closer look at Gong.io, and the campaign that helped them spark massive social media engagement with their audience of sales pros while dramatically increasing the following for their LinkedIn Page.
Which customer insights helped guide decision-making for the Gong marketing team? And how might other B2B marketers adopt these techniques in their own ways?
B2B Marketing Campaign Spotlight: Holiday Book Giveaway by Gong.io
First, here’s an overview of the campaign and what it achieved:
Sales conversation intelligence platform Gong.io embraced the spirit of holiday giving through a contest that featured popular sales books as prizes. Recognizing the proven performance of short-form video content on LinkedIn, they used this approach to promote the giveaway, recording quick clips in which actual employees from Gong talk about the books and why they matter to sales pros. To maximize engagement with the contest, the company made it extremely easy for members to enter, prompting a simple one-word response in the comments on these posts.
This formula came together beautifully, helping the brand rapidly expand and solidify its community on the platform. Within 30 days of launching the giveaway, Gong saw an 85% relative increase in LinkedIn Page follower growth compared to the previous period, along with a 194% increase in likes, 108% increase in shares, and 6,893% increase in comments.
We asked Gabrielle Hughes, People Program Manager at Gong, about the planning behind this contest, and why she believes it turned out to be such a success. Thankfully, she was an open book (womp womp). Silly puns aside, here’s what she had to say about this seriously impressive campaign.
1) What were your primary objectives with this campaign, and how did it fit into your larger marketing strategy?
Our primary objective was to grow our LinkedIn following, in order to have a larger captive audience for future content and campaigns. This was a great way of gaining cost-effective exposure.
2) Which insights about your target audience helped inform your creative direction, tactics, and channels?
Gong's followers on LinkedIn are primarily in sales and revenue-driven roles, so we selected books that would not only help our followers with career growth but would be books they would actually want to read.
3) Giveaways and contests aren’t uncommon as a marketing tactic. What do you think made this one especially appealing and effective?
First, we produced casual, fun, short videos with high production quality. It was a complete series of 10 videos, one released every day for two weeks (except during the holidays and weekends). In the past, we asked for comments that required our followers to do more thinking, which resulted in a fair amount of comments but we were curious to see if asking for a no-brainer comment like "ME" would increase the number of comments. Finally, we switched up the format of our status updates based on recommendations from the LinkedIn team in this post.
4) For marketers that are interested in creating video content but still learning the ropes, can you share any insight from the process of recording your promotional clips for this campaign?
Always spend the extra money and "leave it to the professionals." If you don't have the budget for help from a video production company, invest in high-quality tools (cameras, mics, the newest iPhone, etc.) that will give you that professional look and feel.
5) What were the most important learnings from the campaign that you and your team will carry forward?
People love giveaways!
Our key to success was having these campaigns run at least 5-10 days, so that people will follow your Page and maintain high engagement with it. We replicated this campaign for a few others throughout 2019 (promoting our #celebrate conference, promoting our next holiday campaign "12 Days of Swagmas") and followers have since increased from 3.5k to well over 25k.
Give Your Audience the Goods in 2020
Whether it’s a giveaway, hyper-relevant insights, or simply irresistible content, B2B marketers benefit from delivering clear value to their audiences. As this campaign demonstrates, conveying that value up-front and making it easy for users to engage and participate can elevate your results in a major way.
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