How Slack Does Marketing

In this clip, we're going to talk about how Slack does marketing. But before we do, don't forget to hit the subscribe button and the bell button if you're coming from YouTube, if you join Clips on growing faster. So business or personally, you're going to grow faster. So Slack, look, they went public recently and, um, they are the workforce kind of workplace collaboration app and we use Slack, we love it. And so let's do a dive into how they go about with their marketing. We're going to go through 5 different areas. So SEO, CRO, paid media, content, and general marketing, which is where I kind of Um, we'll bucket things into. First things first, when it comes to general marketing, I look at design. I actually consider, I think design and marketing go hand in hand. I think design's done really well. The app itself has done really well too. Um, you know, being able to kind of, it's very simple, right? They just focus on, you know, what they do well. And then there's a demo that you can go through too. So I like that. And I do like the fact that they have the customer stories on the homepage too. So, you know, these are big companies, Intuit, Lyft, Shopify, Everlane. These are how people use Slack. And also they have this report here on the state of work. So When it comes to content marketing, I like looking at these reports because they take time to do. So the state of work, you know, uh, all these metrics in here, key takeaways, you know, global pulse. It's very well designed. It's interactive. Um, you know, 86% have a clear understanding of their company strategy and it's, it's, it's a long form piece and you can tell they probably spent 5 figures to get this thing done. Right. And then also at the bottom here, there's, there's more kind of articles, um, on collaboration. And how things work because that's what they're focused on. They're focused on collaboration in terms of kind of getting started. I think in general marketing, um, I think it's a good start. And then let's take a look at, um, look, there's eBooks and reports. So let's take a look at that as well. So there's a bunch of eBooks in here. They're all well designed, you know, Working in Slack, Slack Essentials, Enterprise Grid. Um, there's a lot of resources from a content perspective to help people get around. And it also helps when it comes to ranking, uh, from an SEO perspective. Look, look at this, by the way, You can see they have a section on video conferencing, uh, knowledge management. These are keywords that people search for when it comes to SEO. So that's good too. And especially how to collaborate better, you know, using Slack or not using Slack. Um, and then the site is very minimalistic. Um, and I like that. So that's a starting point. I'm not going to give it a general marketing rating quite yet. I do want to look at, um, how they're doing things from an SEO perspective too. We've pulled up Slack in an SEO tool called Ahrefs. We can see that they rank for 300,000 keywords, um, and they have about, you know, 78,000 referring domains, which is, which means 78,000 links going to their site. Now their domain rating is very high. It's scored on a scale of 1 to 100. They're at 91 and their traffic value is $7.3 million, meaning they'd be paying Google $7.3 million per month if they were paying for that traffic. So they're doing a pretty good job when it comes to SEO. And what I like looking at too is, you know, how are they trending over time? It looks like they're pretty flat this year in terms of SEO traffic. So that's one thing I look at too. And they're pretty flat. They've grown a little bit this year, but they're pretty flat when it comes to the number of organic keywords that they rank for. And then also traffic value, they're pretty flat too. Now the other thing I want to look at too is top pages. So what are the top pages that they rank for? A lot of it's branding, right? So, you know, we talked about this in the past, but the people that know how to build, the companies that know how to build a brand, they have an edge because a lot of people are going to keep, they're going to keep typing in that brand query. And a lot of people are going to keep clicking on that result and more people are going to link to that because Slack is a, it's a freemium product. So freemium means it's very easy to link to. People are talking about it all the time, right? So you start to naturally get all these links coming to the site. And so link building is taken care of. And what happens there when you have a strong domain authority like what they have is whatever you publish, um, provided you're on topic and Google can see that, you're going to start to rank really well, um, for, for certain things. So you can see here a lot of, a lot, a lot of this stuff has Slack in it, you know, Slack this, Slack that. And also, you know, look, when they publish something random like Outlook calendar, they rank number six for it. Even though Outlook is a Microsoft product, Outlook calendar they rank gets 19,000 searches a month. That's the effect of having a strong domain authority. So when it comes to like a domain authority link perspective, they're very strong over there. What I would say though is when you look at their website, they you know they publish a lot of reports. I think that's great too. Let's take a look at their blog. Let's take a look at the frequency of how often they're they're publishing content. We can also take a look at Ahrefs too to just get an idea of Content Explorer, right? So, you know, they have a lot of tips around how they do things, workforce kind of transformation, productivity, all these things over here. Let's take a look at this one. So this was published in July, so a while back. And let's go back and then let's go up over here. Uh, how Slack helps deliver a culinary work, um, culinary experience. This is more of a case study. So they're publishing pretty frequently. So their content team's good. Their blog, from a content perspective is done really well because look at this, the design of it, the font, the typography, the also the custom images too, and the way it's just very clean, right? And then also in here there is a Slack tip where you can basically go deeper into the product, right? And sign up for it and then, you know, get started with Slack, right? So there's a call to action. So that's really good. And then here's some additional posts. So from a design perspective, look, they're really, really, really strong. Um, so I do want to take a look at the content explorer section. So in Ahrefs there's a content explorer section. We can take a look at how Slack is doing things and then, um, oh wow, look at that. So we can see over time in the last, let's do like the last 12 months. Okay. So we look at the last 12 months, check this out. You can see at the very end over here towards August and July, they published a lot more content. They're increasing their frequency. So they're getting a lot more aggressive with the amount of content and the new content that they're publishing, this is like 300 to 400 new pieces, right? So I do want to come back to Slack in a second because I do want to talk about something else that they have. But in general, they're publishing a lot of new content, but they're not updating, they're not refreshing the content that they have already. So you can see there's, there's a little like little sliver of a dark blue in this bar in August. And the light blue one just means they're publishing a lot of new content. And so that could be user-generated pages, that could be, uh, you know, company pages, for example. We don't know what that is exactly, But we can just see like what's going on here and you know, we can see that they're publishing in different languages too. So that's good. And you know, they're putting it, um, they're putting it in different kinds of subfolders. So that's good. Um, you can see there's like a Japanese media kit as well. So in general, when it comes to like publishing, I think they're kind of missing the boat when it comes to like refreshing content. So that's from an SEO and content perspective. So that's something to keep in mind. Slack is creating a lot of content kind of centered around Um, it's kind of centered around like, here's how you can use like Slack better. And there's like some case studies here and there. I don't see a lot of tips in terms of like helpful, you know, how can they generate more top of the funnel traffic where, um, they're supporting people that might become their customers. Um, so thinking about it from that perspective, um, there could be other types of content that they could be publishing because right now they're just very focused on collaboration stories. There's a lot of reports and things like that, but I would say probably can take it a step up and look at how HubSpot does things. HubSpot will write about random things like blockchain. How does blockchain make any sense? Well, somebody that's reading about blockchain, they might become interested in a CRM later. The whole idea behind that is, you know, what do your customers need to be successful? Even if you're getting started with blockchain, you're probably going to need a CRM to become successful, right? With Slack, you know, what kind of content can you create to really take advantage of that domain authority? You know, create different types of content. In addition to what you have already, which is really strong. I think it's more kind of, you know, middle of the funnel to bottom of the funnel type of actions, um, and see where you can go from there because you already have a freemium product that you can lead with. Um, if you're Slack and, um, you know, you can go the distance with that because it's a very linkable asset, um, with what you're doing. So now let's take a look at, um, they do have a section over here, um, on like there's a resources section and they have webinars too, which I think is great. So great from a content perspective. The state of work report is also good too. So I would say from a content perspective, I think they're probably doing like an 18 out of 20. That's the rating that I would give them just because I think they can do more. They have a lot of the stuff covered, but I think with that strong of domain authority, like they can do, there's more types of content they can publish and I just think they're going to have a lot more traffic coming in. So from an SEO perspective, I think they're taking care of there too. I'd rate them 18 out of 20 just because they have a great freemium product. They're leading with the product. Look, they've got a strong brand too. Freemium product, that's going to get a lot of links. Uh, the type of the level of the content that they create around the reports, that's going to attract a lot of links too. So they're doing really well from an SEO perspective, 18 out of 20. Now what I would say too, from a conversion standpoint, um, CRO standpoint, they're doing pretty well. You know, my question would be, you know, what other types of landing pages do they have for different types of industries? So, you know, resources over here, resources library. Um, you know, they have a section for enterprise solutions over here. Great. They do have stuff for engineering, sales, IT, marketing, customer support, human resources, project management. So I think they're pretty good there because they know to optimize for the types of market segments over here. The headline's not that good to me. I think it can be optimized. I think if you could personalize it a little bit, look at the IP address that these B2B companies are coming from because you're trying to sell to enterprise, personalize it. I think using a CDP, customer data platform like hull.io, you can enrich the people that are coming into your website. And then you, let's say Coca-Cola is visiting your website. You can basically enrich that IP address, find 4 people from their marketing team as an example, or their sales team, and then automatically put them into an outreach sequence. So it's basically automatic ABM that you can be doing. Um, I think chat might be helpful too, but maybe you don't want to slow down your website, but having chat in here serving those people, collecting those leads, I think there's, that's a missed opportunity when it comes to, um, what Slack is doing. So I think from a CRO perspective, I'd probably give it a 17 out of 20. The last thing I want to look at here is how they're going about with their ads. So you can see here, um, in terms of ad spending, they're not spending a lot of money on ads. The question is why? They probably don't need to spend a lot of money on ads because Slack is such a good freemium product out there. So their whole thing is, you know, getting people in, landing, you know, landing people and letting the, um, letting all the accounts spread virally in an organization. So one person might sign up for Slack and then a couple of other people start signing up and it starts to spread virally. So that, that's how it works for them. That's how, you know, they can convince people to start using it. It's, it's, it's a free thing to do. Um, now what I would say here is, look, you don't see much money being spent here from an advertising perspective. Um, you can see like here, sure, they have a couple of ads here and there. Um, now the question is, where can they be spending money if they're targeting the enterprise? Where can they be spending money? Can they be spending money on LinkedIn? Is there any way they can be spending money on— cause I have seen TV ads with Slack. Can they be spending money on podcasts? This tool Adbeat doesn't show that, But where can they be spending the money, the, you know, all the money that they have right now to invest further into growth? And what I would say is there are a lot of opportunities. I think there's a lot of affluent people listening to podcasts, especially like, you know, um, you know, you talk about collaboration, you talk about the workplace. There's a lot of podcasts out there where you can, where you can, where you can sponsor them. And then what I would also say too is taking a look at, um, LinkedIn. LinkedIn has a lot of possibilities that you can do where you can target with the video. You can retarget people to the amount of traffic that you're getting to your site, all these different pages. You can be retargeting people with different types of ads. When it comes to retargeting, retargeting on Google, Facebook, YouTube, it just makes sense, especially if people are getting further down your funnel. From a paid media perspective, I'd probably give them a 14 out of 20. I think general marketing, I would give them an 18. So their score over here is 85 out of 100. So I would give Slack an 85 out of 100 in this teardown. Let me know what you think in the comments. What do you— do you disagree with me? Do you agree? Do you like Slack as a tool? And don't forget to check out the next video if you're watching it. 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