Here are my thoughts on Monday’s marketing, which I wrote for my upcoming portfolio summary. But since this is relevant to this topic, I decided to add them here.
Also, this is not a counter-argument to @LisaOnCloud9 thoughts (love them!), but should provide an additional perspective:
I believe, their Marketing is very strong, and they know what they are doing. And I don’t believe, they randomly put a few million dollars into Super Bowl ads and “hope for the best”.
Monday’s marketing strategy in a nutshell:
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Usually, you are driving demand by raising awareness on top of the funnel, i.e.: with Superbowl- or Instagram ads. To become top of mind and create trust.
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Then, you (re-)target your ideal customers (which already are aware of your brand) with performance ads about specific use-cases to drive them to the bottom of your funnel.
This is what Monday does:
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Finally, their most powerful component of their demand generation engine is what really drives sales: Product Led Growth (PLG). Basically, the product sells itself:
a) Its basic version is free to use, which makes people experience a “wow moment” without any friction like hitting a pricing wall or having to talk to someone first
b) The product is so good and polished which make people fall in love to finally buy and recommend it.
Side note: PLG is what Cloudflare does very well, too!
So, while I agree with their messaging being weak on the surface “The platform built for a new way of working”, as it is not really telling:
- what it is
- who is it for
- why should one buy it
… there are dozens of sub-pages which make the use cases to the potential customers clear. And those pages, plus most likely, hundreds of invisible, specific landing pages
are used to target ideal customers.
I.e. the use case for Sales: “The CRM software that’s simple to set up and easy to use monday.com lets you handle all your work in one place. What would you like to manage with your CRM platform?”
What: CRM
Who: Sales
Why: One source of truth
At the same time, Monday is not just a CRM. Any department can create anything they can think of. Eventually the whole organization could end up using one software for which you currently need dozens.
“Why Monday” from their investors presentation sums it up well:
But wait!
There is their demand creation layer:
Organically (SEO) more than 525k people reach the site through search. That’s a lot of people. One of the major attraction spots on Monday website is their blog. It gets 140k+ visits.
Here’s what they do right:
- Aligns well with search intent
- Keywords in the right places
- It’s a true guide on the topic
- High density of keywords
- It’s long-form, quality content
- They include CTAs throughout the blog post to drive sign-ups for PLG.
And Monday embraces the 3Es. Content that educates, engages & entertains.
They:
- Educate you on using their product, being a better project manager and much more
- Engage you with unique creative, stories and design
- Entertain you with humor and inspiration
Additionally, the Monday dot com YouTube channel has more than 100 million total views on their video library and 60k+ subscribers and is in the top 10k YouTube accounts for views.
Most SaaS brands still rely JUST on blog posts to educate their customers on how to use their features. Monday leans heavily into YouTube videos and is seeing some great ROI on the back of it.
While I sound like a raving fan of Monday, I am not. My position is the smallest of all, and I was debating selling it. Still, I wanted to highlight, Monday knows what they are doing:
Instead of pumping every ad-dollar into expensive lead generation tactics like Google Ads to let a costly sales team talk to customers,
→ They play the long game as a customer-centric and product-first company.
→ They create demand by a combination of driving awareness and quality content.
→ They let the user experience the polished software for free until the user become advocates to sell it inside their own organization or every other organization they might join in the future.
→ Every happy user becomes a sales person without even knowing.
That’s the power of brand awareness + demand creation + targeted campaigns + PLG.
Also, they mentioned using an internal, customized tool to measure all of that very efficiently. That’s not hoping for the best. That’s a strategy driven by data.