How Go GungHo Tapped the Power of YouTube and Pinterest to Launch Their New Energy Drink
June 19, 2012
Recently, Pinterest announced that you can pin videos from Vimeo in addition to YouTube. However, looking through the top brands or categories on Pinterest you won’t find a lot of videos being pinned or repinned. Even in the video category there are almost no videos with more than a single repin.
An example of the weakness of video on Pinterest is the beauty retailer Birchbox. On Pinterest, Birchbox has over 22,000 followers for it’s unboxing video board, but unfortunately they do not have more than a single repin on any of their videos.
With these numbers, it might be surprising to know that Birchbox does well on YouTube. They have over 11,000 active subscribers on their YouTube channel, and close to a million views. Yet, when these same videos are pinned, the Pinterest community doesn’t visibly engage (though, undoubtedly their Pinterest fans help their overall YouTube viewing numbers).
Speaking to Danny Mason, co-founder of Go GungHo, a new alternative to caffeine rich energy drinks, he shows three possible reasons for why people don’t share videos as often as images:
1. People are not sure what the video is before they click it.
2. People are not sure what their time commitment will be to watch the video.
3. People are not sure they will want to share the video.
Aware of the challenges of getting people to share video, Danny and his new company found a way to combine video marketing with Pinterest — and it is not in the traditional Pinterest way.
Instead of incentivizing people to pin videos on Pinterest and hoping for the best, Danny tapped into the power of a YouTube community. They invited YouTube viewers to go to a landing page for a special offer for sharing their funny ninja images (ninjas are a serious part of Go GungHo’s brand).
Go GungHo initially thought they were marketing to a younger male demographic, which fit best with YouTube. Their focus was on college students who want extra energy to get through their finals and college courses.
Go GungHo looked for a YouTube celebrity that could reach both men and women. They found the husband and wife duo, Charles and Ally Trippy. The couple agreed to do a video review of the product. Danny provided an exclusive deal to the Trippy audience, giving free samples to the first 5,000 people to respond.
The Trippy’s shared how they were fans of the “world’s only energy shot with Ninja-like focus” and then provided the exclusive offer to their 760,000 plus viewers. Within seven hours Go GungHo had given out all of their 5,000 free samples, beating Orabrush’s YouTube marketing record that moved 10,000 free samples in ten days.
Yet, the success of this launch really wasn’t about how quickly Go GungHo gave out free samples, or even the power of the Trippy’s YouTube community. The true magic came when all of the Trippy fans hit the Go GungHo landing page.
On the landing page people could choose several funny ninja images to share on social sites including Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest. To entice people to share, the Go GungHo group promised to provide additional free samples or a steep discount if someone bought product after clicking on one of their ninja images.
The second wave of sharing brought down their website for over an hour. As unfortunate as a crashed website is on a product launch, the massive amount of response Go GungHo received provided some great insights.
The first insight they gained was that women were more gung ho than men about sharing on social media sites. According to Danny, almost 60% of the social engagement was from women.
Women also proved to be a valuable contribution to the campaign because they often added their personal endorsement with their shares. These findings made the team re-evaluate their strategy, which included a redesign of their packaging to make it more appealing to women.
“We learned our most vocal advocates are women. Men would just share to get the product. Women would add their comments about it, even though they didn’t have to. Men also tried to game the system” more than women did, stated Danny.
Finally, Go GungHo learned the power of Pinterest. Even though more people used Facebook and Twitter to share, Pinterest users were more active in endorsing the energy shot. Due to this level of engagement, Pinterest outpaced the other social networks when it came to referral traffic.
Video is powerful, though it may not necessarily be in getting pins and repins on Pinterest. Instead, by tapping into the YouTube community Go Gungho was able to grow all of their social numbers, and get increased engagement from women — on Pinterest in particular.
The funny images combined with an easy way to share resulted in growing their fan base on every network.
Key Stats:
- The GungHo webs site got 69,000 hits within hours. The 5000 free were gone in 23 minutes. The next 5000 (with discount) was gone in under 4 hour live up time (site was down for >1.5 hrs). After 40 minutes when site went down, they turned off the discount. With no barriers to sharing it spread too fast. Only Trippy’s fans got the discount after that.
- Of the 69,000, over 5,700 bought or got the free sample, but the company had to turn off the viral share piece because they lost money on the $10 discount if they chose the monthly auto-delivery option. They are convinced they would have been wiped out of product if Trippy’s fans’ friends got the offer. Trippy’s fans friends just saw the funny image but did NOT get the offer.
- Our buyers from the Trippy’s site was about 59% female.
- The men tended to share via Faceboko and Twitter. The women, via Pinterest.
- Women shared their endorsement (comments from them vs our pre-populated text in the FB, twitter or Pinterest window). Less than 5% of the time men shared personal endorsement. Over 80% of the women did.
- Go GungHo got over 1300 new Twitter followers and over 1100 new FB fans in a matter of hours from the Trippy offer. They had almost zero following before (this was our launch campaign).
- The community loved the offer from the Trippys. They had over 80 tweets, posts or other comments from his fans thanking for the hook-up. We had over 60 comments / reviews on our fan-page (we offered a free 12-pack for the best review).
- 5778 customers total pinned their image before they turned off the offer. 3409 were women. 2292 of those women chose to pin vs. share on Facebook or Twitter (67% chose pinterest vs FB or twitter). They determined the sex of people sharing by looking at the name of the person.
Have any launch tips or stories of how you successfully leveraged social media or Pinterest? Please share in the comments?
Written by Janet Thaeler, @Newspapergrl and Paul Wilson, cofounders of PinAlerts.com – a new free tool to let you see what’s being pinned on Pinterest. You get an email whenever someone pins something from your blog. Their Pinterest account is Pinterest.com/Pinnablebiz
Will Blog For Traffic – 7 Tips to Increase Your Posts + Traffic – Part 2 In our Blogging Series
April 3, 2012
This is part 2 of a 3 part series on blogging. Check back tomorrow when I’ll share how to make the most of your posts to increase your traffic.
Did you know that, according to HubSpot, sites that blog twenty (20) times a month receive five times more traffic than blogs that don’t? FIVE. TIMES. That’s a lot more traffic. Do you want more traffic to your site?
This month on StartupPrincess.com we’re going to be talking about publishing. Both traditional and digital publishing. Though we’ll mostly be talking about helping you birth your books, we’re also going to talk about blogging for success.
Today I want to share with you some valuable tips that can help you increase the number of blog posts you have a month. Before I share the tips, I want to ask, do you know what kind of traffic you are currently getting on your blog? If not, you should get “in the know”. It’s easy to set up a Google Analytics account for your site, and it provides a great 3rd party resource if someone is asking about your traffic (sometimes the traffic numbers from WordPress or Blogger are unreliable).
Now, onto the tips. Here are the seven tips you can use to blog MORE to increase your traffic.:
1. Keep your posts short and sweet – There is no rule that you have to provide long posts in order for them to be good. In fact, sometimes the short ones are more likely to be read all the way through. When people come to your site and see a long post, they may think, “I don’t have time to read that now,” and they’ll skip it and move on. It will also help you spread out your expertise over a number of posts instead of packing it all into one. Now, obviously, you’ll have some long posts. I’m not saying they all have to be short, but don’t be afraid to put out some quick tip and be done with it. Seth Godin is a master at this. He produces one or two paragraph posts on most days, and they are super high quality.
2. Create a series of posts on a similar subject – Series can be a great way to get people back to your site for a continuation ofinformation. For example, you could do a Four Part Series on ______ (spring fashion, blogging, marketing, discipling children, etc). Tell your readers in advance that you are doing a multiple part series and how often you’ll be updating so that they make it a point to come back. For example, this is a 2-part series on blogging. Tomorrow I’ll be sharing tips for making the most of your blog posts to increase traffic to your site. 
3. Invite Guest Bloggers, where appropriate – You don’t have to do all the writing yourself. Invite other people in your field or closely related to your field to produce posts for you from time to time. This has really helped the Startup Princess site. We have 10 Fairy Godmothers that help provide posts and insights. It’s great for us to fill our blog feed, great for our readers to hear from experts and it’s great for our Fairy Godmothers to get exposure through a new network. We also take and post articles from guest bloggers from time to time. (Note though that you will always want to take UNIQUE posts that haven’t been posted any where else. Google will ding you for having duplicate content that appeared somewhere else first.)
4. Create a simple “Interview Series” where you can feature your readers or other experts on your site – We do this in our interviews section. We have a set number of questions that we can ask other Startup Princesses and we feature them on our site. It’s great to get to know and learn from other women entrepreneurs and because it’s a digital interview it’s easy to email off, and easy to upload. Get creative. It doesn’t have to be experts, but maybe a featured reader you can show some blogging love to. I love Allison Czarnecki’s “What’s In Your Purse Series” on PetiteElefant.com (My purse is famous! I was featured during week 50). Also, if the person you feature shares the post, it’s great for your site traffic.
5. Create “columns” that you can easily revisit on a weekly or monthly basis – Maybe you have a Marketing Monday, or a Wordless Wednesday (we’ll talk about this more in #6), or a Success Tip Thursday – you get the idea. Create a couple that make it easy for you to create a schedule and will help you fill your blogging pipeline. It also helps give you a framework so that you aren’t asking yourself, “What should I write about today?”
6. Use images – Images and photos will help you feel like your post is longer, and if a picture says 1,000 words, then it can help you cut down on your word count as well. Though this doesn’t always work for Startup Princess and business blogs. However, having a Wordless Wednesday where all you post is a picture and perhaps a short explanation, can be great for crafters and artistic type blogs. AND, we’ll talk about this more tomorrow, but images should be included in almost every post, if possible. Because of Pinterest, and the way people are sharing pictures online, you’ll want to have a visual that’s easy to pass around.
7. Schedule time in your calendar to write your blog posts – Set a regular schedule for writing your posts and uploading them. If you can get strategic and focused you could write and upload your posts for a whole week in one sitting. I know some power bloggers that blog a months worth of posts in one or two sittings so that it doesn’t feel like it’s something that overwhelms you each and every day. Once you create a schedule and make it a habit, you’ll be able to breeze your way through posts.
BONUS: Number 8 – In all of this remember that quality is more important the quantity. Don’t just produce a bunch of poorly written, inapplicable posts just to hit the 20 post count. You’ll lose readers if you are producing low quality content. If you can’t produce 20 posts a month without cutting corners, then create a consistent schedule you CAN stick to.
Want to take the 20 post challenge? Blog 20 times this month, then share with us how your traffic increased! The winner will receive a feature on StartupPrincess.com & 8 hours of Fairy Godmother magic for free!
Let’s connect! Follow me on twitter. Follow me on Facebook. Check out my free video e-course on Working Smarter Not Harder here.
Michelle McCullough is the Managing Director for Startup Princess. Michelle became a partner in Startup Princess in 2008. She is responsible for event planning, marketing, affiliates, sponsorships and partnerships. Over the past 3 years she has coached women entrepreneurs and helped them grow their businesses from “dream in development” to established thriving businesses. Michelle is a speaker, strategist, success expert and a serial entrepreneur. She started Doodads Promotional Products when she was 19. And has also spent the last 12 years working in marketing and advertising. She’s worked in all aspects of the industry from production to creative and sales to management. On top of her full-time jobs, Michelle has cultivated her love for entrepreneurship by running Doodads as a successful side business. Today it continues to thrive. This year Michelle launched a coaching program called “The Life Balance Myth” to help busy entrepreneurs build thriving businesses AND meaningful personal lives. She believes that life balance is a myth, but she provides practical tools to achieve personal and professional success. You can learn more about Michelle at SpeakMichelle.com. Michelle has two children ages 4 and 2 and lives in Utah.
