Learn Slack’s marketing strategy to grow your business.
Since its launch in 2013, Slack has emerged as a powerhouse in the realm of collaboration and communication tools, revolutionizing the way teams work together. With an intuitive interface, robust features, and an unwavering focus on user experience, Slack quickly became the go-to platform for organizations of all sizes.
The team at Slack works hard to bring their slogan of “Make work life simpler, more pleasant and more productive” to life. In fact, here are a few interesting statistics:
- Slack has 200k+ paid customers spread over 150+ countries.
- Their daily active users amount to 280 million as of 2023.
- They reached a billion-dollar valuation within 8 months (in 2014) and are currently valued at $26.51 billion in 2023.
Apart from their stellar features, there’s a reason a huge chunk of the business world chooses Slack over its competitors—their content.
So, in this article, we’ll look at Slack’s B2B content marketing strategy along with their social media strategy.
Table of Contents
How did Slack grow so fast?
Slack’s growth marketing strategy during the early stage helped them grow exponentially. They:
- Listened to customers
- Used word-of-mouth marketing + social proof
- Developed more integrations (for referral traffic)
- Kept iterating to present the best product
- Chose a freemium model
- Built a social media following
Plus, they have an extremely diverse audience that caters to huge demographics.
What’s more, they struck a deal with Atlassian in 2018, which led to the discontinuation of platforms like HipChat and Stride in 2019. The Slack-Atlassian partnership means a bigger user base for Slack and added credibility.
Slack’s marketing strategy: A deep dive
Slack uses the power of media to bring in more customers. Here’s what intrigued me the most:
✅ Slack’s content marketing strategy
✅ Slack’s social media strategy
Next, let’s see how they use these avenues to drive growth—
What is Slack’s content marketing strategy?
Slack’s content marketing strategy serves as a shining example of how a well-executed plan can propel a brand to unparalleled success.
From its early days, Slack harnessed content marketing to create valuable resources that educate and engage their target audience.
But before we dive into Slack’s content marketing strategy, let’s see their top 3 sources of traffic (according to Similar Web):
- Direct
- Organic search
- Referrals
This is because of their strong brand presence, word-of-mouth marketing, and high search engine visibility, showing a combination of brand recognition and effective SEO strategies.
Email marketing
With a deep understanding of their users’ needs, Slack leverages email as a powerful channel to nurture leads, onboard new users, and engage their existing customer base. Their emails strike the perfect balance between informative and visually appealing, delivering valuable insights, product updates, and tips to enhance the user experience.
By incorporating clear CTAs and thoughtful design, Slack’s email marketing initiatives foster a sense of connection and empower users to make the most of their platform, ultimately driving user retention and loyalty.
The best part, though? They don’t send long emails that eat into a person’s productive hours. They add a crisp headline to get to the point, followed by short copy to explain the crux of the email. Next, they share a distinct CTA to incite action.
Finally, what makes Slack’s email marketing efforts stand out is the cadence of their emails. They don’t clutter your inbox. They simply share onboarding emails and tips on how to make the most of their product.
Case studies
Slack has a dedicated ‘Customer Stories’ page wherein they showcase some of their biggest clients and how they positively impacted their business. What truly adds value to this initiative is that they share data points, get senior associates to make a video testimonial, and finally give a rundown on how they achieved influential results.
Resource library
Slack enjoys a whopping 105+ million website visits each month.
They have an extensive resource library that includes:
- Blogs and guides
- Reports and news
- E-books
However, you can navigate it using the search bar or browse through relevant topics by using filters.
Also, you’ll notice Slack’s marketing strategy for their website content is mostly based on creating helpful guides. This helps their customers use their product fairly easily.
The result?
- Better customer experience
- Increased customer lifetime value (CLV)
- Reduced customer churn because of product familiarity
👉 The key takeaway for SaaS brands from Slack’s marketing strategy is:
- Keep your customers at the top of your mind and map out their journey
- Build out a meticulous content funnel
- Finally, create content (based on the customer stage) that educates them and helps them overcome minor setbacks themselves
With their website content out of the way, let’s look at how Slack leverages social media marketing to build a community of loyal customers and brand advocates—
What is Slack’s social media strategy?
To understand Slack’s social media strategy, we’ll dive into the 5 platforms listed below since they have a sizeable following here:
- Instagram: 68.3k followers
- LinkedIn: 1.2 million followers
- Twitter: 462.2k followers
- YouTube: 52.8k subscribers
- Facebook: 128k likes and 134k followers
Slack’s Instagram
Now, it’s not every day you see a B2B SaaS business thrive on Instagram. LinkedIn and Twitter? Maybe, but Instagram is rare. That’s why Slack’s marketing strategy on Instagram is worth mentioning.
Starting from their simple yet effective bio to their well-organized story highlights, Slack makes a great impression on visitors and followers.
Source: Slack’s Instagram
👉 What makes Slack’s marketing strategy on Instagram a success?
- They stick to their brand colors to create a cohesive feed. This also helps them improve brand recognition.
- They use a variety of formats on their feed—static images, carousels, and reels.
- Their content is educational yet fun.
- They incorporate UGC in the form of reels and customer testimonials to reach a wider audience and build credibility.
- They create relatable reels that are shareable, which increases their engagement and visibility.
Slack’s LinkedIn
Being active on LinkedIn for a B2B brand is a no-brainer, but Slack’s social media strategy on LinkedIn has helped them garner a whopping 1.2 million followers.
What helps Slack gain eyeballs on LinkedIn is how they subtly alter their tone of voice to sound more professional. Of course, this is limited to a few posts, since they also share their Instagram content here.
Source: Slack’s LinkedIn
What I truly appreciate about Slack’s LinkedIn is their ‘Life at Slack’ page. It basically doubles as a landing page for visitors. For jobseekers, it solidifies their faith in Slack as a potential employer. For general visitors, they get a glimpse of their team, values, and key initiatives.
What’s more, they have CTAs for visitors to take immediate action and increase their website traffic.
Finally, you can see their company photos, unique employee perspectives, and employee testimonials on their LinkedIn page, coupled with job openings and events they host.
👉 What makes Slack’s marketing strategy on LinkedIn a success?
- They have linked their website to drive more traffic.
- Their ‘About Us’ section clearly explains what they do, their mission and vision, and their value proposition.
- Repurpose their blogs and other social media content and share it here.
Slack’s Twitter
You know Slack’s marketing strategy works well at first glance because of their almost 500k followers and golden verified badge. Not only that, but 3 of their affiliates have also got a blue verified badge.
Keeping with their theme on other platforms, Slack also links their website here to increase their referral traffic.
Source: Slack’s Twitter
They also increase their direct traffic by sharing blogs as tweets. This cross-platform promotion also ensures they get more mileage from the content they have created.
Plus, they also run polls to get a pulse of their audience’s opinions and increase engagement. Not only that, but you may also notice they have some form of media attached to most of their tweets. This further enhances engagement, since in a sea of text-based tweets, their media stands out.
Finally, their attention to customer service is almost unparalleled. Whether you are praising them or you need help with troubleshooting, their social media team will actively reply to you.
👉 What makes Slack’s marketing strategy on Twitter a success?
- Use of Twitter’s varied features—text tweets, videos, polls, and pinning important tweets.
- Important product and event updates to keep their users in the loop.
- Prompt replies to issues and feedback.
Slack’s YouTube
What brings in 50k+ subscribers and 50+ million views? Informative and engaging content. And Slack does just that!
Right off the bat, their banner image and thumbnails are consistent with their brand language, which helps with recognition and aesthetics. Next, you’ll notice a well-organized library of useful videos that helps you navigate the tool. These include:
- Minute-long how-to guides
- Giving quick tips for easy use
- Short tutorials
- Customer and partner stories
While their marketing strategy on other platforms is commendable, YouTube is truly impressive. Why? Because Google manages over 90% of the search queries and YouTube contributes to 3% of those results.
This means that any query related to the tool can be easily answered either via their blog or by watching a quick video. It even ties in with the current state of video marketing since 91% of people shared they want to see more videos from brands.
👉 What makes Slack’s marketing strategy on YouTube a success?
- A well-segregated playlist section.
- Frequent posting.
- Use of different formats like videos, YouTube shorts, live streams, and community posts.
Slack’s Facebook
After Google and YouTube, Facebook is the 3rd most visited site globally, with 2.93 billion monthly active users. This means the platform plays a pivotal role in Slack’s social media strategy.
Like on every other social media platform, Slack stays consistent with their clean header image and crisp ‘About’ section. In only 2 sentences, they share their value proposition efficiently. And here, too, they link their website for higher traffic and share their feedback email. This further solidifies that Slack always keeps their customers at the forefront of their innovation.
Source: Slack’s Facebook
Their posts on Facebook are not content-heavy. Instead, they play with different formats, like images and videos, to drive a point home or to redirect traffic to the website or other handles.
From time to time, they also share engagement-oriented content that aligns with their brand persona—playful yet kind.
👉 What makes Slack’s marketing strategy on Facebook a success?
- Engaging their audience via posts and replies.
- Repurposing content from other platforms for higher visibility.
- Consistent visuals on and off Facebook to increase brand recognition.
Summing up Slack’s marketing strategy
Slack’s entire persona revolves around assisting their users.
Right from their CEO’s interviews to their marketing material, everything they put out aligns with this philosophy. In fact, Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield said this in an Inc interview—“It’s very difficult to design something for someone if you have no empathy.”
Of course, this empathy bleeds into their product innovation, but it also echoes in Slack’s marketing strategy across channels.
To up your content game, reach out to me!
FAQs
What is Slack’s marketing strategy?
Slack’s marketing strategy focuses on content marketing, social media marketing, digital advertising, public relations, community building, and data-driven decision-making to drive brand awareness, engagement, and user adoption.
Can you use Slack for marketing?
Yes, you can use Slack for marketing. Many businesses use Slack’s collaboration features to streamline internal communication, project management, and cross-functional collaboration, enhancing marketing team productivity and efficiency.
How does Slack market itself?
Slack markets itself through various channels, including content creation and distribution, social media engagement, thought leadership, industry events, sponsorships, and strategic partnerships. They prioritize user-centric messaging, emphasizing the value and benefits of their platform for teams and organizations.
