If you’ve been following RevenueHero on either LinkedIn or Twitter, you might have come across some of these posts. 👇
For the uninitiated, here’s some context on why we started this campaign.
About a month ago, one of our prospects told us on a call about a page that Chili Piper put up about us. Naturally, we were curious, went through the page, and realized it was filled with inaccurate information.
Of course, we informed our prospect about all the inaccurate information, had a good laugh, and eventually won the prospect over. Things were beautiful, and we were pretty happy that we won over another customer.
PS: As a marketer, I loved listening to that Fathom recording. ;)
Couple of days later, one more prospect asked us about one of our basic features that Chili Piper claimed our product wasn’t capable of handling. Clearly, a pattern of misinformation was forming.
We needed to get ahead of this. That led to a few Zoom calls, multiple Slack huddles, and a couple of drafts in our favorite Google Docs.
Before we go any further: We’re not here to diss our competitor. We have immense respect for our competitors and how they’ve moved the industry forward. Personally, I was a PMM before and I know how hard it is to keep up with competitor updates, especially when they’re shipping fast and furiously.
Solving Mysteries, Having Fun, and Setting the Record Straight on LinkedIn
Clearly our prospects were puzzled.
Because they were seeing our ads and hearing from their peers about all the things we can help them solve, but our competitor was saying the opposite.
So, how do we set the record straight? Here’s what happened behind the scenes and a sneak peek into our thought process.
Set the record straight. Don’t turn it into a mud-slinging campaign.
Growing up, I was a fan of the PC vs Mac campaign that Apple put out. It was quirky, cool, and communicated the point (here’s a link to see all 66 of them). Similarly, the cola war between Coca-Cola and Pepsi in the early 1980’s and 1990’s were some of the coolest ad campaigns.
The common factor between these campaigns was, they were not afraid to set the record straight. Even if it meant calling out the competitor.
Unfortunately, this isn’t common in the B2B world. The only time you ever come across any competitor specific campaigns is when the company is looking to satisfy Google’s SEO or SEM algorithm. Otherwise, a few sales enablement collateral. Beyond that? Not that many.
Fun fact: Outreach ran a similar campaign the following week and they saw some great results too!
Andy McCotter Bicknell often talks about why you should talk about competitive intelligence in public. In one of his recent posts, he rightly says:
”Doing nothing is probably the safest answer. But if you handle it right, you might actually win over some people.”
For us, it didn’t make sense to let our competitor present inaccurate information about us. Especially when it was confusing our target audience. And so, we took some inspiration from some classic campaigns and got to work.
We listed everything that was inaccurate, decided we would address each inaccurate information with its own post, and crafted the message.
Staying true to the channel and having fun
LinkedIn is all the rage for B2B right now. Twitter, not so much unless Elon Musk posts something.
Am I following the wrong set of people?
If I’m being honest, we got a little lucky because we get to market to marketers and sales folks. Sure, it’s a little tricky to convince them because they know all the sneaky hacks. But it also gives us room to be quirky and get creative in our pursuit to attract our audience.
So, when we sat down to write copy, we wanted to make sure we added just enough sugar, spice (couldn’t help it), and a whole lot of facts into the mix. Too much spice is not how we roll, and too few would just end up being bland.
And so, to keep things interesting we hired the coolest and the smartest detectives we knew — Scooby Doo and his gang — to help solve these mysteries for our prospects and set the record straight.
Since our product and engineering team looked like this when they saw what Chili Piper was claiming about us,
It helped us to get the entire org to rally around the campaign and get active on LinkedIn (yes, our developers were active on LinkedIn).
Finishing with an “Oomph!”
Even the coolest and most creative campaigns can go from spreadsheets to trash cans if they can’t end in style and entice prospects to convert. We definitely wanted our campaign to end with a bang.
So we decided to replicate our competitor’s landing page about us, including the design, font, layout, pretty much everything you can think of, and just replace the content with facts.
After a few sleepless nights, a couple of energy drinks, and 3 iterations (yes, we actually kept count), we got something on our staging environment.
If you'd like to take a closer look, here's the link to the parody page we built
When we wrote the copy for the landing page we could’ve gone on and on about all the things that they misrepresented about us. But after a point, we thought who better to convince future customers than people just like them — other businesses who switched from Chili Piper to RevenueHero.
So we removed the tabular style comparisions and just replaced it with testimonials from real people who saw real RoI from RevenueHero.
Show me the numbers!
Of course, you’re curious about how this impacted our numbers. So let me get straight to it.
- We ran this series for 1 week on LinkedIn.
- There were no paid efforts that went into this campaign.
- Received 50,000+ organic impressions during that week.
- We drove 3 new businesses.
- Laughed about it with several prospects at least a couple of times.
- Had at least a dozen people reach out to us asking for more information and becoming good buddies.
We made sure to make a copy of the landing page, and it’s a good thing we did. Because guess what? As our LinkedIn campaign gained traction, we started seeing changes being made one by one on their landing page. To Chilipiper’s credit, they took note and took action. Unfortunately, it’s still filled with inaccurate information. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Internally, it was a fun campaign to work on. It got the entire organization to rally towards a single goal, our Slack channels were buzzing with ideas, and we got new customers and friends.
Burned by spicy stories? We're here for you
For our prospects who might’ve been swayed the other way because of this inaccurate information, I invite you to come talk to us, even if you just signed the contract. We'll buy out your Chili Piper contract. You can use RevenueHero for free till your Chili Piper contract runs out.
We’re confident RevenueHero can help you increase conversions across your pipeline and help you increase your RoI at literally half the cost. So we are happy to take the first step to build a long-term relationship.
