5 Case Studies of Successful Marketing Strategies

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Marketing has been around for centuries and has evolved through the ages from trade to tech.  Often enough, businesses can see marketing as a second priority and opt to invest their money in growing their sales team, IT or the operations of the business.  But there are great examples of companies who have built their business through solid marketing strategies and proving that marketing is not just a support function but one that can actually drive real revenue or traction into the company.  In this article, I discuss marketing examples where companies have executed different marketing strategies successfully.  I’ve diversified the strategies to showcase that there isn’t one go-to-marketing strategy that will always win. I’ve also included entries that range from global branded companies to local ones! 

Content Marketing – Hubspot

Coining the phrase, “inbound marketing”, Hubspot has grown over the years into one of the biggest marketing tools out there.  The key to their success? Their content marketing strategy.  Hubspot blogs are the central part of their strategy helping them attain traffic to their target audiences through relevant content and SEO.  This is split into a few different categories including: 

• Sales
• Marketing 
• Services 
• News & Trends

By focusing on relevant information, it helps drive thought leadership content to subscribers and potential customers. They also accept high-quality guest blogs which allow Hubspot to continuously churn out new articles.  To put this in perspective, they drive over 320K Traffic per month. That’s nearly 4 million visitors to their blog every year! Hubspot is one of the greatest examples of B2B content marketing done right, especially in one of the arguably hardest spaces to do so. 

Social Media – Showpo

Social Media when mastered correctly is one of the strongest avenues for business to drive their marketing strategy. With a low cost of entry, especially valuable is the ability to leverage images and media compared to other marketing strategies.   An Australian entry, Showpo is one of Australia’s largest E-commerce stores. Currently, at an $85 million dollar E-commerce empire, founder Jane Lu started the business in secret, too scared to tell her parents she had dropped out of a cadetship with KPMG and failed at her first startup With more than 1.2M Likes on Facebook and 1.6 million followers on Instagram, the social branding is what Jane calls her “biggest competitive advantage”.  From her own blog, Jane states that the biggest factor for her was “learning how the algorithm works, and figuring out what content to create”. 

When we look at engagement, we look at a number of factors: 

• The outfits featured
• The model or influencer
• The pose
• The lighting, background and filter
• The caption
• The posting time
• Hashtags used
• And the length (for videos and blogs)

With this in mind, Showpo drives regular content on their channels to not only promote their clothing but also their brand. Social media is often sought as a quick win but never as a company’s main marketing strategy. This example shows how powerful it can be if done correctly. 

Influencers, Sponsors, and Events – Red Bull 

Austrian company Red Bull is one of the most iconic brands in the world and surprisingly its main product is simply an energy drink.  Another surprising factor is that many other energy, sports or soft drinks fall under a FMCG but Red Bull is under its own which is very hard to accomplish during present times. Having such an extensive brand is hard especially since it keeps to its niche so what does Red Bull do well to stand out from the crowd?  One of its main marketing strategies is to host and sponsor extreme sports and athletes all across the globe. From the Red Bull Air Race all the way to Red Bull BC One (Breakdancing), it helps become a figurehead brand for each sport. Generally, the sports are much niche which allows Red Bull to position themselves a lot easier as the main sponsor, further promoting their brand.  Aside from events, Red Bull’s packaging also plays a part in its global appeal.

“Red Bull really looks like a product from a global economy. It doesn’t look like a traditional American soft drink — it’s not in a 12-ounce can, it’s not sold in a bottle, and it doesn’t have script lettering like Pepsi or Coke. It looks European. That matters,” explains Harvard Business School professor Nancy F. Koehn in a 2001 article.

With packaging and a marketing strategy involving events and sponsorships, Redbull has catapulted itself into a worldwide global brand with no slowing down.

Loyalty Program Marketing – Sephora

“Can I go to Sephora to get my free birthday gift?” says my friend

Sephora is a luxury cosmetic retailer established in 1969. Featuring over 300 brands along with its own private label, it offers beauty products across the range from skincare all the way to fragrances. One of it’s most effective marketing strategies is its membership program called “Beauty Insider.”

The membership program is a merit-based program that separates consumers into three different member tiers: Beauty Insider, VIB, and VIB Rouge. Similar to frequent flyer clubs in airlines, each tier hosts its own set of exclusive rewards. By tempting and creating an incentive to spend, it’s an effective way for Sephora members to spend more in order to reach each status. The most important thing is that it’s tailored to its specific audience (in this case, millennial females). The rewards in the highest tier (VIB Rouge) are so appealing to consumers that it provides heightened incentive to spend more so they can breach the price threshold.

Community Building – Twitch

On the other spectrum, Twitch is a live streaming platform where gamers (and now other genres) can stream and connect with others on the platform. Introduced in 2011, it has since being acquired by Amazon.com for a whopping $970 million and now part of its portfolio. What you might not know that Twitch is“the fourth largest source of internet traffic in peak times, behind Google, Netflix and Apple. This is extremely impressive as all 3 beforehand are all common household names. As an avid user myself, it provides those who want to enjoy watching games with other users who have the same intentions. Twitch’s marketing strategy is brilliant. Other streaming platforms in the past lacked a community feel which Twitch masters. They help nurture it by providing tools (and an open API) such as live chat rooms, exclusive benefits for subscribers and more. In return, streamers can host exclusive giveaways and events which allows them to not only grow their community but in return, the Twitch.tv community. .

As voiced in the following video from HP Matter, Twitch’s strategy “echoes a core principle of the internet itself: people want to learn and they want to connect with each other”. The role of the brand has been to “build a community around a niche and create clever ways of providing value.”

By encouraging fan engagement, Twitch creates a platform where others can connect and learn off each other and provide each other with real value for specific niches and games. This is one of the most amazing examples of how building out a community can build out your entire business model.

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