Red Bull & Ford Content Marketing Strategies from Garyvee’s book Crush it

In this article today I’m going to give you an in-depth understanding of 3 of the most valuable insights that I found from this book called Crush It written by Gary Vaynerchuk. And I’m going to derive these insights using 3 of the best case studies that I could find with my research.

1. How Ford Used Social Media Marketing in 2011

The first insight comes from the iconic marketing campaign which was carried out by Ford in 2011. This case study teaches us a ton of things about how marketing in general has evolved over the past 20 years. Now because you and I, both grew up during the times of the social media revolution which is why we don’t realize how much social media has changed the dynamics of marketing.

A very simple example to understand the same would be to look at automobile marketing which is the marketing of cars.

Since the 1990s even until 2008-2009. Ford just like any other company had 4 major mediums of marketing which was TV, radio, newspapers, and billboards.

They used to spend millions of dollars on finding the best location sponsoring the most popular events and hiring the best ambassadors possible. But even after spending so much, they had very less scope to actually find out what exactly is causing the customers to buy the product. Was it the radio Ad? Were the TV ads doing very well? Or was it the combination of both that was doing very well?

And if you look at the case of billboards, let’s say they put out 100 billboards they had very less scope to find out which 30 out of those 100 billboards were actually grabbing the attention of the people.

So they had to spend millions of dollars and just hope that the output that comes out turns out to be worthy enough.

But after social media, this marketing pipeline has become so powerful and accurate that it is beyond our imagination.

Automobile Marketing by Social Media first time in 2009

And that’s where our case study comes in In 2009, a mastermind by the name “Scott Monty” came out with an idea that redefined the standards of automobile marketing forever.

Now back in 2011, Ford was about to launch its “Fiesta” model. In the US and what they did was about 2 years back, in 2009 they handpicked 100 social media influencers and gave them the car for 6 months with a few tasks. All they had to do was make videos and tell the world about their experience with the car. Back then in 2009, social media was just getting started and it was still in its baby stages.

So to the conventional marketers, it looked like a marketing gimmick and nobody really expected anything extraordinary to come out of it.

Seriously?

But you know what? The entire automobile industry was shocked to know that the campaign turned out to be one of the most successful campaigns that were ever executed by Ford.

And this is what the result looked like. In terms of visibility, it got 6.2 million YouTube views, 750,000 Flickr views along with 40 million Twitter impressions. And more importantly, in terms of sales, they got 50,000 potential customers 6000 of them pre-ordered the Fiesta. And you know what the best part was 97% of those 50,000 potential customers were first-time Ford buyers.

If you’re a marketing student you would understand that it takes 5 times more money to get a new customer than to sell it to an already existing customer. And this is what made Fiesta movement an insanely successful campaign.

As far as the campaign was concerned, Ford can literally look into the micro details of the campaign. Find out

how many people saw the campaign.

how many people engaged with the campaign?

what kind of people engaged with the campaign?

Which influencer’s video was the best?

Which influencer’s video did not work?

And more importantly, they can draw a direct correlation between the campaign and the outcome of the campaign.

And this is what gives us 2 very-very valuable lessons over here.

There is a paradigm shift in marketing that is happening right now and we are moving very-very quickly from paid media to earned media. In 2021, if you want to grow your business, you have the potential to leverage content marketing. No matter how small your business is. And the best way to leverage content marketing would be to use storytelling to create valuable pieces of content for your audience.

2. How Red Bull used social media to leverage Content Marketing

In the genius marketing strategy of Red Bull If you look at Red Bull, as a product. It’s a non-alcoholic product, not the tastiest drink in the world, and of course not the healthiest drink in the world. But even then, every single year Red Bull manages to make a billion dollars. All of this is mere because of their marketing strategies.

Marketing Stunt by Red bull in 2012

This is a story that dates back to 14 October 2012 when Red Bull came out with something called “The Stratos Project”. Wherein they decided to throw a man from the stratosphere to break the record of the highest free fall jump done. So, they got hold of a professional skydiver by the name “Felix Baumgartner”. and they spend $65 million on preparation and social media campaigns.

Just like the Ford campaign, everybody thought that Red Bull is crazy to spend $65 million dollars to market an energy drink. But you know what the result was?

In terms of visibility, they got 8 million YouTube Livestream viewers making it the most watched YouTube live in history. They got 52 million views on webcast. It got shown on 70 TV stations. 3.2 million tweets, 72,000 mentions with #redbull 22,000 Instagram photos, and more than 130,000 Facebook shares. And when all of this happened, even the news channels and this event newspapers started reporting. Eventually, they got a ton of PR.

The most astonishing fact of all is Red Bull spent $65 million dollars to carry out this campaign and some reports say that the visibility that they got out of it and the publicity that they got out of it was worth more than 1 billion dollars.

And the direct result in sales?

Well, sales rose by 7% in the following 6 months generating $1.6 billion dollars in revenue.

This is what brings us to the second most valuable insight from this book which says “Content is fire, Social Media is gasoline“. If you know well to light it, your business will explode beyond your imagination.

Now the question is These billion-dollar brands are doing it, and that’s fine but what about normal people like us? How do we market our work?

That’s where the third insight comes into play That is about how to monetize your craft using social media.

3. How a portrait artist is earning from social media

This is the story of my friend called Rohan. About 3 years ago, he used to make these wonderful portrait paintings but in spite of making great paintings, he was not able to find a way to monetize them.

But then 2 years back he came out with this brilliant idea to make the same portraits but instead of making them on canvas, he started making them on coffee mugs.

And he positioned it in such a way that he said that you could give the perfect gift to your loved ones by giving them customized mugs.

For example, for Mother’s Day, you can literally gift your mother a mug with her own beautiful portrait on it.

On valentine’s day, if you wanted to gift something to your fiancé you could gift him/her a mug with a beautiful message and both of your portraits on it.

Guess what? Every time somebody received his mug, they posted a WhatsApp story and an Instagram story thanking Rohan for his work and their loved ones for the gift. And every time someone put out a story, Rohan got a new order. And today this guy is overbooked during all such gift-worthy occasions.

[Do You Know How is it that CRED is getting so much funding?]

Social media is nothing but a word of mouth on steroids (Conclusion)

And this is what brings me to the most valuable advice that Gary baba preaches everywhere and that is “Social media is nothing but a word of mouth on steroids”. In order to leverage it, you have to find a way to make your work a value-add in someone else’s life.

If you got an amazing product 20 years back, it was practically impossible for you to scream it out to 500 people but today it is just one click away in terms of a WhatsApp status and an Instagram story. And merely with that 1 press of a button, you are screaming it out to 1000 people in your contacts. Who is spread all across the country? And this word-of-mouth publicity is by far the most powerful medium of marketing.

Those were my insights from this wonderful book called Crush It.

That’s all from my side. If you learned something valuable please write in a comment. And if you want in-depth knowledge Buy & Read the Book Crush it