Marketing Practical: A Disruptive Marketing campaign with Live Results

Jun 13, 2019

Before the current contract I am on I applied for a contract Eloqua position at Panasonic.  I thought that running the agency that did all Sony Professional Services EMEA Eloqua work would guarantee me this position.  I was wrong…  They said I had spent too long away from marketing campaigns.  I took it on the chin, and I have decided to play around with marketing areas I am unfamiliar with in a bid to learn a few new tricks, have some good talking points for interviews but ultimately alleviate my 35 minutes each way commute.

Disruptive Marketing – what is it?

This buzz word has been banded about in marketing circles for a while now.  Disruptive marketing comes from a concept called disruptive innovation.  This is when a new product displaces other very well-established products in the market place by filling a gap in user requirements that the current products do not fill.  A perfect example of this would be how the rise of Netflix, Amazon Prime, etc saw in the demise of DVD rental stores – one could even argue DVDs entirely.

Disruptive marketing identifies gaps in traditional marketing campaigns through outside the box thinking.  If you manage to pull of a good disruptive marketing campaign you will challenge conventional thinking in your current market or connect with an entirely new one.

The problem with most traditional campaigns is people of seen it all before so they zone out.  How often do you go through your inbox and think, “oh, another product focused webinar invitation”, or look at your LinkedIn feed and think, “oh, another blog article that will no doubt try and get my to sign up”.

To some people, the individuals that create and launch disruptive marketing campaigns are innovators – for others, they’re anarchists – it depends entirely on your point of view.

Disruptive marketing providing what your audience want – to do this you need to create a story that will connect to people at a personal level.

What are the benefits of disruptive marketing?

Your brand perception will be shifted

A good disruptive marketing campaign will change your audience’s perception of your brand from another boring company selling the same old stuff that your competition do to a business that understands your needs and can satisfy them.

You personally connect with customers

Disruptive marketing will engage with your customers at a personal level.  This is way more interesting because you need to get creative and tell a story rather than churn out the same old repetitive marketing assets.

Prevent copy-cats

The other cool thing about disruptive marketing is once its been done once, it can never be done again.  No one will ever duplicate the effect you have just had.  Competitors can try to be different, but they will only ever be known as a copy-cat because if you got your disruptive campaign right, people are going to know about it.

Why customers respond to disruptive marketing techniques

Customers talk about disruptive marketing

Disruptive marketing responds to a need in the marketplace that no-one else is serving.  It shows customers something they have never seen before and that on an emotional level they can connect with.  As soon as you have made that emotional connection with your customer you have them in your grasp.  If you haven’t already, you can now make them push your campaign viral.  In this social age of likes, comments, share, etc society as a whole seems to have devolved into the gossip monger no liked when you were a kid – Use them, harness them and profit from them by giving them what they want.  Something to gossip about.

Disruptive marketing is affordable

Disruptive marketing doesn’t need to cost loads to be powerful and get results.  The emphasis is on creating a unique approach that the world hasn’t seen before.  This could be product focused or you could be harnessing something else.  It is tapping into the emotional response that is key and getting your customers to talk about it or even better feel involved in it.

Be VERY prepared for the consequences

By their nature disruptive marketing campaigns can blow up in your face losing you customers or reputation.  With this in mind why try it?  The answer is simple….  Customers love disruption.  If you manage to swing it, your disruptive campaign will be truly unforgettable resulting in big business.

Enough theory…  Lets build a disruptive campaign.

DISCLAIMER: Before we start I do not hate cats.  I am not very interested in politics.  I believe I have a clean bill of mental health.

As with any campaign – lets start with the reason why we are doing this.

I am doing this because:

  • I wish to extend my network in LinkedIn
  • Display some pretty radical outside-the-box thinking to prospective clients
  • Run a marketing campaign in an area I am unfamiliar with
  • Make a few people laugh including myself along the way

Disruptive Campaign Background

As many of you know Brexit is a hot topic here in the UK.  This all started as a result of this.  Every second post on my LinkedIn feed is about either Brexit, for or against arguments, Scottish independence, for and against and this is usually separated by posts about our current leadership contest for prime minister.

I long for the return of the days of food, selfie and holiday snaps.

So I decided to start posting comments about cats in response to whatever people were posting.  This then made me think wouldn’t it be funny to get a poll into the UK e-petition system where members of the country can post things they want our politicians to debate and if 100,000 people agree then they have to discuss it.

Then I thought wouldn’t it be funnier to spoof a poll in something that people would be interested in so I could see how many people fell for it.

Then I thought hang on, If I create a hot button topic for a fake poll designed to get people to click through I could harness it as a marketing campaign – specially designed to achieve the campaign objectives you read above.

And this lead us here.

I decided to create a fake poll that looks like the e-petitions website.  The topic was banning cats.

Yes, you read it right – Ban Cats.

Given the utter chaos that the UK is in politically it is actually believable that this notion could get put through.

Next I thought about the call to action on the page.  On the real e-petition site you can only vote for a notion.  You can’t vote it down.  This means that my landing page call to action will lose every single person that does not approve of the notion.  I decided to add a Beta feature which allows members of the public to vote down a notion meaning it was more democratic.

I then posted this on LinkedIn talking about just how outraged I am that a petition like this would even be allowed through, yet alone gain enough responses to warrant being debated in parliament.

The call to action on the landing page (then links through to this page where they will see the message below.  I connected this all through using a very simple internal page anchor.  I have also added in some additional tracking so I can learn how much people either love or hate cats on LinkedIn.

When I posted the link and sent it to a few friends, it went viral.  People went mad or found it funny, it got posted in forums and all sorts.  Here are the website stats from my website.

Eloqua Disruptive Marketing

Sadly it all got shut down on the day I launched because of people complaining, but you can see the massive spike in my web traffic from just one day because I was bored, left to my own devices and decided to try my hand at disruptive marketing.  And yes, it works, I had a load of fun and….

I don’t hate cats!

If I can get you to click through to my website – imagine what I can do for your business.

I created this disruptive marketing campaign for my blog and a bid to get more people to connect with me on LinkedIn.   Please feel free to connect with me here.

First all if I have offended you – I apologize.  Hopefully you will find this funny after reading the article.  Please scroll up to the top of this page because if you have gotten this far I owe you an explanation.

For those of you who have made it this far well done.  I hope you enjoyed this.  I will now go back to writing dry Eloqua technical how to tips and tricks.

Finally please do share the post in LinkedIn that you clicked through.  I will post the results of this campaign shortly and repost this as a proper article.

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