How Beehive Uses ‘Drop Marketing’ To Create Buzz

Foreign.

Welcome to this week's episode of Marketing.

It's the Gray.

Kieran and I are taking a we think well deserved break. But don't worry, we have something special planned and lined up for you. We're diving into the archives and bringing you one of our favorite episodes. Whether you're a new listener or a longtime fan, this is definitely one you, you won't want to miss. Let's get into today's show.

I literally am thinking exactly about this topic today, Drop marketing and how you blitz a certain demographic and segment of your audience for a certain specific sprint and then move on.

To me, it's a no brainer.

Yeah, it's a no brainer because.

Yeah, go ahead.

Can you teach, can you teach me about it then? Because this is much easier. I was going to get on, I was going to start clawding my way through it today. So I, if you don't mind.

Yes.

While you're here, just ahead and give us the five minute summary, please.

So, so, so I'm going to tell you how like Beehive did it, but, but I'm also going to abstract it to like, what is the process that they do and I'll even share like how I'm doing it at Storyard with our business. So just, just as a random example, Beehive recently dropped audio newsletters, right? That was their most recent drop that you could listen to your newsletter. You could just embed an audio version in your newsletter. And so basically here's how I think about the drop marketing process, which by the way, going back to like just lags. The hilarious thing is like drop marketing literally started. It's been around forever. Literally, like music drops have been around forever. It started with fashion and streetwear in Japan. Supreme. Like, this is not new, but the, so what I know is like Tyler started doing this because Beehive did not have a lot of features in the early days. And so a lot of people wouldn't sign up for their product because they're like, you don't have 80% of the features we need. And so his only way of building confidence that they would have the feature soon is show that they're delivering unbelievable product velocity. So people are like, oh wow, maybe Beehive will have this feature in the next three months. So to me, the step, the first step is like you define your product roadmap. I know at Beehive it's 90 days in advance, which means every two weeks for the next three months they know exactly what product feature they are going to be introducing to their audience. Then basically the second step that I know they go through is you prep the team internally. So basically every, everyone who needs to be trained on how to deliver the product and a great customer experience in that product is trained before the external launch. Then you move to step three. And to me, this is like the meat and potatoes of it, which is like you have to establish your drop calendar. And there are a few things that go into it. One is you pick your channels. So, and the idea is you pick channels that every two weeks or every month or every quarter, you're, you're, you're kind of handpicking from these men this menu of channels that make sense for your business. So for Beehive, it's always been their company social on Twitter and LinkedIn, CEO Social on Twitter and LinkedIn, and I joke on, on Instagram for Tyler, because that's where he posts thirst traps. In addition to Beehive, to, to Beehive product drops company company newsletter, he has his own personal newsletter. Employees post on social. Their customers post on social company blog. For every product announcement they do, which to me, every company should do this, they, they drop it on product hunt. So they, they, every new product, they do a product hunt launch for it. And they have an own digital community where Beehive customers are. So you, you pick your channels for your company. The second is you pick your creative. So they know every time they're doing it, there's an animated short. They're making social copy, blog, copy newsletter, copy product on copy. Third, you pick your dates. And they usually do day before something like they say something like something big is coming soon. The day of is the big drop. Day after is amplification by employees and customers. And then like a week later is a reminder. And so just for context, when they did this audio newsletter drop on August 1, it got 283,000 free impressions from just all the different posts. They had their biggest revenue day in the last 30 days. And to me, every company should be doing exactly this. And by the way, like, functionally how it works, I think their employees and their customers being evangelists is like really like the amazing card that they pull. Because, for example, when Beehive posted about the audio newsletter drop on August 1, 18 employees all reposted or quote, reposted it. And so like, for that day, everyone knew about this. If you were somewhere in and around the email marketing world.

Look, I want to share a secret with you. There are companies out there. There are brands out there. They're building hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue off of this marketing playbook that I want to share with you today. We've got a special guide. It's available in the link below, but it's going to go through everything you need to know. It's going to give you the new marketing playbook. How do you actually work with creators for more personality led strategies? How do you protect against AI disruption, especially when it comes to how you're getting traffic from search engines? We're going to give you the new ways to think about building and executing your marketing. It's all for free. It's all in the guide. You can find it in the link in the description below.

We're doing this at storyarb also. Where at storyarb. So just for people who don't know, like basically what Story Arb is, is it's you're out of house. Head of content or head of content marketing. My view is content only gets more important for B2B companies. They generally don't know how to do it well or it feels incredibly, incredibly dry or robotic like, like Super SEO'd. But like as you guys know with the HubSpot Media Network, like just great content, period, is what you want to create and it will naturally act as marketing for us. We offer a lot of different types of content. Email newsletters, email marketing, website copy, company social, founder social. We basically planned out for the next 12 months, every month we're doing a drop of a different type of content. And on the day we drop it, we actually throw a virtual event. It's called Comic Con. My the, the vision is content meets Coachella. So it's like the best content festival in the world. And the idea behind it is I get the best speakers to talk about the type of content we're dropping. Which the funny thing is is we're not really dropping anything. We already offer all of these things. We're just making it known to the world. Yeah, we're just packaging it. We do these virtual events where I interview. So like Brynna from HubSpot is interviewing her for the next one, which is on Company social. Last one, we had 1500 people attend the last Comic Con. Say 1500 people join. 1500 people who clearly give a shit about company social, which means they're great leads for Story Arb. I'm also selling sponsorships against it now. So I actually want to get paid to be able to do drop marketing for our business. And then we also take all of the interviews from the event and we turn it into everything from an email newsletter to Playbooks to Social Copy for the next month. So my view is like, we've just kind of manufactured drop marketing by putting some sort of structure around the menu of items we offer at our company.

Yeah, it's kind of like using your traditional product marketing, but as a much bigger kind of distribution content merchandising strategy.

Yeah, my whole thing is like, if you're going to create products, why not like squeeze as much juice as humanly possible out of them?

Yeah.

This data is wrong every freaking time.

Have you heard of HubSpot? HubSpot is a CRM platform where everything is fully integrated.

Whoa.

I can see the client's whole history. Calls, support tickets, emails and was a task from three days ago. I totally missed.