In Glenn Karwoski’s most recent blog post at Twin Cities Business Magazine, he discusses innovative marketing strategies by becoming a marketplace “disruptor,” using Yeti Coolers as an example. He wrote:
Yeti’s coolers saw a 50 percent sales increase in 2013, reaching the $100 million mark. While that’s still a far cry from giants like Coleman, the company has captured a segment of the market that others have ignored: outdoorsmen.
How did Yeti do it?
Understanding Outdoorsmen
In large part by understanding outdoorsmen intimately. By being able to see the world through their target audience’s eyes, Yeti had insight into what drives them, what outdoorsmen are passionate about. Yeti captures their attention with content that aligns with those passions.
Outdoorsmen are serious about their outdoor pursuits and they want serious gear to support those pursuits. Yeti establishes that their coolers are for the serious outdoorsman though drama and humor:
Outdoors Lifestyle Content
At their Field Notes blog, they write about the obvious topics such as How To Pack A Cooler For A Hunt (and capture traffic from How-To related searches) but they also write about the whole content ecosphere related to the outdoorsman lifestyle not specifically related to their products. Examples include:
The outdoors lifestyle is all about experiences, so Yeti offers helpful content to make those experiences more enjoyable and empathetic content that shares aspirational experiences.
Virtual Experiential Marketing
Because Yeti understands that outdoorsmen love to share their experiences, they actively prompt their target audience to share their stories:
Yeti asks, and Yeti receives:
Those pictures are telling thousands of stories because most of Yeti’s 44,000 Twitter followers can relate to them. And by sharing them, Yeti stays top of mind with content they didn’t have to create, includes their product, and acts as a third-party endorsement.
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