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Linktree’s CMO on marketing a brand that (seemingly) caught fire naturally
Linktree was created in a six-hour burst by two Melbourne brothers and their friend, after expressing annoyance that social media doesn't allow multiple links. This was 2016, when there was no landing place where users could display all their social media links in one easy place. Overnight, the site got three-thousand users, crashing their server. By 2018, Instagram had banned the site, calling it 'spam', which lead to a revolt from Linktree's then-million-strong army of users. Instagram relented, and issued a rare apology.
Now, the Melbourne company is an international juggernaut, with expansion plans, overseas offices, and over 40 million users.
Linktree's chief marketing officer Monica Austin is in Sydney for SXSW, and spoke to Mumbrella yesterday about the delicate dance of marketing a brand that seemingly caught fire naturally.
Linktree seems like one of those internet sensations that just jumped out of nowhere and grew quickly, and organically. But as chief marketing officer, I’m sure that’s not the truth, nor the perception that you like to hear. Because, obviously, such huge growth takes a lot of heavy marketing. Where do your marketing dollars go? And what’s your strategy?
Well, big picture: Linktree did come from solving a problem. And it was very organic at the time, right, which is the kind of universal truth we see with creators, brands, small business, that are really building the foundations of their work on these social platforms: on YouTube, on Tiktok, on Instagram, on Twitter. They really do need the ability to unify, grow, engage their audience, and ultimately push them to a destination where they can monetise them, or sell tickets, or bring them together in community.
And so, Linktree really was born pretty organically out of that problem, and really took off as a kind of viral sensation, especially with music, artists, and talent. And they’re really savvy about wanting to really maximise their audiences, right? And really capture that attention that they already had on these social platforms.
That organic growth took us to the very early bootstrap stage, we then took on financing: VC funding has a way to really supercharge what we were doing on the platform side, and build the product, solve more problems, and build more solutions for our linkers.
In 2020, we had about four million linkers. Today, we have 40 million linkers. And so much of that investment has gone back into the product. But to your question on the marketing side, I think about our marketing as having two components. One is the growth engine that we want to build, where we are really driving folks. And we’re really focused on our unit economics across kind of the traditional growth channels. Our primary ones are search, paid search, and paid social.
And our goal there — if you think about our product, it’s a freemium product. It’s a SAS tool [Statistical Analysis System] in your marketing toolkit. The bulk of our 40 million users are using our free product. But if you are really looking to supercharge what you’re doing on Linktree, we have a ‘pro’ product for you. And that is subscription-based. That’s what my growth team really thinks about: how do we go out to those users who are really looking to essentially use Linktree as, instead of a website, as their centralised destination? They’re looking for things like customisation. And ultimately, some of the ‘a-ha!’ moments they have when it comes to our paid plan is analytics.
So you know, really being able to get analytics into the hands of folks to understand what levers they can be pushing and pulling to drive those outcomes that they’re looking for. So that’s what my growth team really thinks about day in and day out.
The other side of the house: We also think like a consumer brand, because while we have 40 million users, we are driving 1.5 billion clicks every single month. We are reaching huge amounts of consumers that experience us as a consumer platform. And so the other side is really focused on how are we connecting with culture. How are we connecting with our creators, and really being an authentic voice of the internet.
So that looks like really heavy focus on our brand creative, which you saw in the beautiful Creator Report.
We really wanted to resonate with that audience that we care most about. We’re doing super fun activations that really get to the heart of the creator community. We just did one in Los Angeles with Alfred coffee — which can’t compete coffee-wise with Australia — which is known for its murals, its activations; it’s very much a scene, and we wanted to be there, so we worked with some local ‘linkers’ to create this really wonderful pop-up shop experience with them. So we really want to go deep into experiences.
And then the rest of it is really connecting on social media. You know, that’s really where so much of the cultural conversation and the creator conversation is, and we know so much word of mouth is really the proxy for social media. So that’s how we split it all up. Simple question, but I wanted to give you the full picture.
So what do you do about all the numerous copycats that have popped up? How do you differentiate yourself, apart from simple brand recognition? Or is brand recognition enough?
We’re very, very fortunate. Having built the category, we are really the number one in the category, we have over 85% of the market share. And we have built so much validation and trust, based on the great experience and product that we have built.
So, really, if you think about our day-to-day, one of the things that we — at a company level and just with marketing — think about is how do we solve more problems?
That means we’re really looking at the rich data that we have, to not only build what they want from us today — you can look back, we quickly built a link out for Threads, we just did a Calendly integration, we just did a Snapchat deeper integration — those are real-time problems, but we’re now thinking what don’t they even realise they need yet, that we can get ahead of. Problems that we’re already seeing in the greater economy. And I think that can continue to build trust in this space, that gives us that competitive advantage.
As you said, Linktree solved a problem, which is now no longer a problem. How do you balance moving too far away from your original proposition with the obvious growth that needs to happen if you want to scale?
Oh, that’s a good question! You’ve got to do the core things right. Simplicity is the core of our experience. And they have to know, with trust, that we are going to be able to get their audience from A to Z in a really efficient way. And like I said, we have to continue to build those products for them that we know are meeting that need.
We’re starting to think a lot more about things like social commerce. It’s a really natural next step — as we think about what we solve for in the first place was bringing folks together, unifying their audience, allowing them the ability to mobilise them where they want to go.
And now you have brands, affiliate programs, and the platforms that are all realising the power of creators. So we saw with the Creator Report that a third of purchase decisions made in the US are being influenced by creators and influencers – and over 50% of Gen Z is being influenced. That’s super meaningful. So for us, we’re thinking about how we continue to build for that, so it still feels core to what we do as a utility. We know that our creators and our small businesses and our brands want the continued ability to monetise and mobilise their audiences.
More generally, what are the main mistakes you see other marketers make?
What I love about marketing is the cross of art and science; it is storytelling and data-driven decision making. And I think that the really savvy marketers can lead with a creative-first, brand-first approach, and ultimately, you know, rooted in insights and research. And so that’s how I approach the work that we do: making sure that we are rooting ourselves in those things that we can really back with insights and some data.
But ultimately, we’re also here to take some risks. You know, some of my most epic wins and epic failures have given me a bit of heartburn and this feeling in the pit of my stomach. And, I think that’s what you’re always looking for as a marketer – that feeling, because you know at that point, you’re onto something, right? And, it can go epically well, or it can go epically bad.
And I think a lot of brands often stay in the middle, where they’re a little bit more risk-averse. And in today’s world, with the speed at which culture is moving, I don’t think you can afford to be [risk-averse], especially as a startup and as a brand that’s really looking to make an impact with younger audiences.
With the accelerated speed that culture, and also technology is moving, how do you plan ahead?
The only constant is change. That’s the mantra we have on the walls, the other one is, ‘you just have to get really comfortable being uncomfortable’. So, I like to think about, on a quarterly basis, we have our big stones, the big things that we know — as a business, as a brand, as a marketing organisation — we want to plot towards, we have that long term goal. And that’s going to have a steady track. Underneath that, you have to build in flexibility. And you have to build adaptability into the plans. We call it “just-fucking-do-it work”, right?
You have to build in some space, about 20% of your capacity, to be able to react to culture, and be able to react to how the product is adapting, to be able to react to what we’re seeing from linkers. Because, to your point, it does move so fast. And so you got to do both well, and that’s really hard to do.
The marathon and the sprint.
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