Arbitrage Marketing to Find Your Customer

Wow, issue number 2 of Market Mix. Here we are. Fun fact: I didn’t even know there would be an issue number 1 until about 72 hours ago.

About 500 of you were kind enough to take the time to subscribe since I announced the launch on Twitter Monday morning. You guys are great, thank you!

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Brand marketing is one of my favorite parts of a marketing mix. The standards seem to shift every few weeks, largely driven by social media culture. As a result, social is one of a brand's key verticals. It’s engaging, it’s creative, and maybe best of all, it’s free.

There was a time not too long ago where best practices dictated that to maximize efficacy, the best way to grow a brand’s visibility was to be on every single social platform that exists no matter what. For example, when I worked at an agency, we had a client in the industrial temporary building manufacturing space that had a Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest account that we would actively manage.

What??

Looking back, I couldn’t imagine how spending time on those platforms could have helped that business in any way. But that’s just where the industry was at the time.

Today’s best practices are significantly more strategic. Now we only focus our time on being in the places that are integrated into our customer’s every day internet life. You can only find these marketing arbitrage opportunities by understanding your audience’s online habits.

But where do you start to understand someone’s tendencies? By understanding their intent.

In early 2020, my team and I at eToro US spent a bunch of time trying understanding what it would mean to “own Crypto Twitter.” How do you get people to organically engage and amplify your brand all over one corner of Twitter?

Twitter ads don’t really have the potential for the kind of virality we were looking for. At the time, we hadn’t had much luck with influencer marketing, either.

One thing I quickly recognized is the prevalence of gifs on social media as a communication tool. Want to know something crazy? According to their founder, Giphy is the second biggest search engine in the world by search volume. And it makes sense -- Giphy is integrated into all of the major chat apps (Twitter, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, etc). These platforms are used by billions of people a day. I buy it.

The opportunity became clear and all of a sudden this brand play turned into an SEO activation. We started uploading eToro-branded content in February of last year with some targeted keyword tagging and waited.

In April, I uploaded this bitcoin gif. Growth was initially slow, but we soon found traction. Then, by the first couple days of November, that piece of content found the holy Giphy grail: ranking as the first position search result for the term “bitcoin.” Over the next 30 days, that single gif went from views in the low tens of thousands to more than 15 million.

Did I mention these views were free? Not a bad ROI. To-date, our Giphy page has over 69.5 million views over 135 uploads. Not a bad ROI at all.

The fun part about being a marketer is being able to color outside the line of best practices. Someone who I think literally and metaphorically does this is Jack Butcher. You may know him on Twitter and Instagram as Visualize Value. He is particularly great at compressing complex ideas into minimalist graphics.

This guy has expanded VV into a thriving business, inspiring countless marketers and entrepreneurs along the way. He recently shared a fantastic demonstration of what I mean by marketing arbitrage. One of his followers recognized the immersive qualities of VV content and created a browser extension that displayed one of Jack’s designs every time a new tab is opened. Genius.

A modern marketing strategy is more dependent than ever on understanding the interest, routines, and tendencies of your audience. You can find limitless brand marketing value by simply taking advantage of the ancillary moments of your customer’s day.

Before I go, I’d like to give a shout out to Phoebe Bain from Marketing Brew for writing up my Giphy marketing story last month. 🏆 If you don’t already, you should absolutely subscribe to her fantastic marketing newsletter.

Thanks for reading!