How did Tesla increase sales with a 0$ digital marketing budget?

Article : https://www.extole.com/blog/tesla-referral-program-how-to-grow-with-0-marketing-budget/

A closer look into Tesla's Marketing Program : 

Tesla has a really different relation with digital marketing from its competitors. Unlike most of the companies in the car industry, Elon Musk’s firm does not spend a huge amount of money neither on their communication nor marketing. Instead, Tesla built a 0$ referral program as its main digital marketing campaign.

According to ‘marketers’, Referral Marketing can be defined as « spreading the word about a product or service through a business' existing customers, rather than traditional advertising.”

Extending a company customer base and get new customer is costly: Tesla evaluated that the cost of a new customer was around 2000$. As the company’s marketing strategic presence is almost exclusive to online channels (both in their selling processes and communication) they understood that to be leader in a very competitive market, a special relationship with its customers was important. Therefore, since 2015 Tesla has decided to launch 5 different referral programs. All these programs reward  - on a different level -Tesla customers who advocate the acquisition of a Tesla car.

• ·       The first Referral Program: reward both the newly referred customer and the advocate with a 1000$ in Tesla Credit (with an online voucher code.)
• ·       The second Referral Program: reward the biggest advocates of each region by offering them a new Tesla, a home charger and a trip to the opening of the Tesla factory in Nevada. Again, the new customer received 1,000$ in Tesla Credit.
• ·       The third Referral Program: reward the advocate with a raffle to win a tour of SpaceX HQ (company managed by Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla). Also, the new customer received 1,200$ in Tesla Credit.
• ·       The fourth and fifth Programs: reward the advocate with exclusive Tesla items, based on how many referrals you are responsible for. Again, the new customer received 1,000$ in Tesla credit.

Referral Programs : A Risky Digital Bet ? 

As business students, we do think that this type of marketing can be both really effective and risky. Indeed, the specific case of Tesla or companies like Dropbox that have used Referral as main Digital Marketing campaign are the proof that it can work very well. It makes the customers feel like they have the power to be part of the company’s successtory. However, in order to be effective this referral programs have to rely on a highly qualitative product. Meaning, if your customers appreciate your product, they will likely advocate it and recommend it to their relatives. Yet, if your product or service lacks of quality, this strategy can then be dangerous as people are more easily tempted to write negative reviews that would spread online really fast. According to a lot of studies, a satisfied customer will tell 3 people about his/her experience with the company or the product. A unhappy customer will tell around 10 people about the poor experience he/she had with the company or the product. Online, this example is decupled.

Still, making Tesla’s users its best salespersons (for instance, one of the user is responsible for 16 millions in sales) is one of the smartest way to use digital channels today.  Social networks are a great catalyst for this kind of programs. Thanks to this tool, people can share their story and develop the brand awareness. According to Forbes, “92% of consumers believe recommendations from friends and family over all forms of advertising”. Giving people the incentive to expand the brand awareness is a great way to get new customers while fidelizing already acquired users.

What's in it for us ? 

Word of mouth marketing is complementing the Marketing 4Ps by the principle of the 3Es: Engage, Equip, Empower. With the rise of growth hacking and operational cleverness, digital tactics like this referral project are more and more important to interact with users. Understanding how to use traditional marketing levers in the digital area is, for us, a must have, in order to engage growth in either a small start up or a big company as Tesla.

Maxime K.

Mehdi S.

Other Sources : 
1- http://www.marketing-schools.org/types-of-marketing/referral-marketing.html
2-http://www.forbes.com/sites/kimberlywhitler/2014/07/17/why-word-of-mouth-marketing-is-the-most-important-social-media/#261737087a77

Current Black Hat SEO Methods

Black Hat SEO practices is an issue in Digital Marketing worthy to be addressed. To start off exploring the current trends in black Hat SEO, we should refresh ourselves with the definition of SEO: Search Engine Optimization which “is a marketing discipline focused on growing visibility in organic (non-paid) search engine results. SEO encompasses both the technical and creative elements required to improve rankings, drive traffic, and increase awareness in search engines.” The key elements to note in this definition are first, ‘organic’; meaning non-paid results opposite of SEM: Search Engine Marketing. Secondly, ‘discipline’; meaning that there are rules and guidelines to follow. So, Black Hat essentially means the mal-practices of SEO.

This article from Positionly.com identifies and presents the common Black Hat practices in SEO:

 http://positionly.com/blog/seo/black-hat-seo-techniques

The list of common practices include:

•         Paid links: Which is explained by it’s title; when people pay for links for SEO.
•         Spam comments: Commonly seen and identifiable by all of us, those obviously bot generated comments sprinkled across the web; containing links.
•         Duplicate content: pasting sections of identical content across multiple domains, resulting in skewed organic search and poor user experience.
•      Cloaking: Masking totally different content with relevant URL and presenting it to the user, in order to create false click through rate.

These are only some of the common practices of Black Hat SEO. I believe it is important for us marketers to be aware of these practices, as they are rather prevalent. Also, it is important for us as users to recognize when a click lands in faulty web-content as it could be the result of Black Hat SEO.

However, the most crucial part remains in knowing the consequences of such practices; and to avoid being tempted by these acts, as most of them are simple to execute. The consequences of Black Hat SEO could but rarely result in banning of the website, but penalization is common; which involves paying negative SEO and lowers your website rank. Ultimately eliminating all efforts of the Black Hat practice, and probably losing much more in the process.

So as Marketers, we have to ask ourselves the final question: will it be worth it?

Rose Yin

Article '8 Risky Black Hat SEO Techniques Used Today' 

@positionly. "8 Risky Black Hat SEO Techniques Used Today." Positionly Blog. N.p., 08 Oct. 2015.     Web. 30 Sept. 2016.

Source: 'The Beginners Guide to SEO' 

"SEO: The Beginner's Guide to Search Engine Optimization from Moz." Moz. N.p., 04 Mar. 2014. Web. 30 Sept. 2016.

Why do efficient dashboards become essential for marketing directors to monitor marketing performance ?

In today’s industries, companies along with consumers, are getting digitalized. Companies’ managers and top management will soon or late have to learn how to make decisions over digital data only. Technological infrastructures, software and analytical tools have made it possible for companies in order to have information about their own performances. At the forefronts of the digital monitoring of perfomance, dashboards have become an essential tool for managers and top management. Today, companies have to deal with more and more data, a lot of content at a high frequency, dashboards are a perfect solution to this evolution issue. Indeed, you have to focus both on the content and the form to make it a reliable decision making tool.

Example of a dashboard

Dashboards can be used on a daily basis as well as monthly or weekly, depending on whom it is destined to. The thing is, efficient dashboards are monitoring tools to those who actually using them. Dashboarding is different than reporting in the sense that reporting is about checking data whereas the aim of dashboarding is to monitor activity. It usually shows numerical data, trends, curves, diagrams, histograms, or tabs about companies’ activity and are visually well organized in a small layout in order to offer a synthetical vision of performance to the readers. This is why a good dashboard is nothing else than one that is adopted by companies’ internal teams. This synthetic vision must be provided in order to facilitate decision making at any hierarchical scale. Those tools enable internal teams to report, analyse and optimize. It is all about communicating in the right way to management, in other words, sending the relevant data at the right person. The reader will have to identify the source of an under/over performance on the dashboard and therefore, will be able to provide active recommandations/actions about marketing optimisation. Dashboards are becoming common in important companies that already deal with data. Indeed, they enable companies to consider their performance compared to a given goal to achieve and also to measure the impact of diverse actions in the quest of that same goal.

ð Here are a few tips to make your digital dashboards become useful tools for the monitoring of your performance.

The content:

Your dashboard must contain clearly defined KPIs, which stands for Key Performance Indicators and are closely related to your global strategic objectives. According to business, you will want to analyse your profit, your costs, your sales by region, employee satisfaction or even the number of clicks on your advertising banner for example. In this sense, dashboards show only the combination of the KPIs you want to look after in a visual way.

KPIs must be the combination between the frequency of the data you are analyzing (weekly, monthly…), its temporality and the point of comparison for your data (what are you comparing your data with?).

The form:

Your dashboard must be presented in a very synthetical way, in order for the reader to see the maximum of relevant content in less time possible. It is the key for an efficient dashboard. Indeed, you have to feel free to use colors and eye-friendly design to make your dashboard easily communicable and operative.

It has to contain useful numbers (percentage, ratio…), visual representation (heat-maps, flows, graphs…) and comments if necessary to analyse and to give sense to your data.

Sources :

http://www.idashboards.com/

http://converteo.com/blog/10-minutes-tableaux-de-bord-bonnes-pratiques-de-conception-et-realisation/

https://www.sisense.com/dashboard-examples/

http://www.visualmining.com/gallery-of-dashboard-examples/