Photo Credits: Twilio

Intercom is a silently massive hit boasting in excess of 17,000 paying subscribers, $50m in ARR( Annual Recurring Revenue) and most importantly, investments from a number of prominent names including Jason Fried, Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey. As we talk, Intercom is worth in excess of $1b in valuation.

Noah Kagan of Okdork asked Chris Wilpert, the brains and ideas that have driven Rocketship Agency to become one of the best marketing detective as well as marketing strategies and that has made the company grow fast. Chris Wilpert said;

Maintain a relentless focus on solving a clear problem that …you understand very well, and you know exists for a lot of people who you can reach, and who are actively attempting to solve it today. There’s lots in there to chew on, but a piece people miss is number three. They solve problems that people don’t really want to solve or problems people just don’t really care about.”

Source : Medium

In this guide, we will look at how Intercom grew from 0 to $50m and we will also look at how you can use the same strategies to grow your own business.

1. Introduction

2. Strategies Intercom used to grow from zero to a $50m dollar Saas Business.

• Find Sources they used to build their brand through reverse engineering the traffic from competitors and conversion strategy
• Dynamic keyword insertion that powered the biggest viral marketing hack
• Using alternative landing pages to steal your competitor’s traffic
• By use of core-problem framework and focus on google keywords that bring you the highest number of qualified leads
• New brand-building content strategy, writing original thought-provoking branded content to get thousands of shares using the topic proven framework
• CTA method, the unique way of converting content into new product signups
• Follow intercom simple offsite content strategy to get all your content seen by a new audience
• Ultra-granular paid search-marketing strategies. Focus on high intent keywords if you want to be successful without a big ad budget
• Advanced landing page strategy: convert your landing page with one of the 5 levels of market awareness

3. Summary

4. Funding and monetization

Introduction

Intercom is a tool that was founded by Eoghan McCabe, Ciaran Lee, David Barret and Des Traynor back in 2011. The tool was designed to help companies and organizations to organize, manage, simplify, and personalize their communication.

The four co-founders had previously run an Irish software consultancy and together they created a bug tracking tool called Exceptional in social media marketing.

McCabe asserted that the concept of Intercom emerged when they were in their usual local intimate coffee shop where the four use to regularly congregate to carry out what we could a ‘fruitless search’ then, that was aimed at finding a customer-facing tool .

After the sell of Exceptional, which is now under Rackspace back in 2011, the team was able to launch Intercom from the proceeds they made.

Since then, the organization has really grown and to a matter of fact, faster than most prominent SaaS startups including shopify, New Relic, Hubspot, Zendesk, Ringcentral and Atlassian.

One other interesting fact about intercom is that it is the second fastest growing SaaS business. Only Slack has grown faster! 

Best of all, the company – Intercom, has grown and is still growing and interestingly, it is growing without having to spend insanely huge chunks of funds on marketing and advertising. This means that any entrepreneur out there can do it including you, the one reading this piece.

To begin with, intercom has managed a busy traffic on their website. The image below clearly indicates that.

Photo Credits: Google

The busy traffic is a result of an amazing blog, an advanced referral traffic strategy and a selected group of targeted paid keywords. It is because of that that it really makes sense when the website claims to boast of busy direct traffic.

Intercom also gets most of their traffic from referrals, search, and does not entirely depend on direct website traffic.

There are a number of ideas used by intercom that can be applied by any other upcoming entrepreneur if they want to achieve the same traffic and that is what exactly we are going to look at in this case study.

Strategies Intercom Used to Grow from 0 to a $50m Saas Business

1. Dynamic Keyword Insertion that Powered the Biggest Viral Marketing Hack

Top referring sites on intercom include app.intercom.io, private.atlanticga, mail.nhst.no. medium.com, and g2crowd.com as the image below shows;

Photo credits: Google

At the top of the list is Intercom itself, and as it seems the traffic comes from paying or free-trial customers who are logged into the website or app. It gets more interesting with other referrers due to the remarkable ‘powered-by’ tactic.

For instance, on the list, we have private.atlantiga.

Photo Credits: Atlanticgam

On this web page, you will notice a private or personalized live chat box on the extreme bottom right corner. If you happen to click the chat box, you will be hit by a ‘We run on Intercom’ unobtrusive message.

Photo Credits: Atlanticgam

Suppose you are curious and you want to learn more, you will click and be re-directed to a dedicated landing page that was set up by intercom that targets people who have come from the Atlantic global Asset Management website.

The landing page looks like the image below;

Photo Credits: Atlanticgam

The intercom team utilizes dynamic keyword insertion in the headline to personalize the landing page experience for visitors basing on the refereeing company.

This is done by a custom keyword that varies in the URLs they use in re-directing. For Atlantic Global Asset Management, here is the link used. https://www.intercom.com/intercom-link?company=Atlantic%20Global%20Asset%20Management&solution=live-chat

If you take a close look, you will realize that intercom uses a company parameter in the referral URL. Intercom has therefore combined dynamic keyword insertion with the ‘powered by’ tactic to achieve an increase in conversions from referral traffic.

Point to note: As an upcoming entrepreneur in the SaaS business, you should be able to identify marketing platforms that already work for you that time and always find ways that can let you growth hack them to a completely new level.

2. Using Alternative Landing Pages to Steal Your Competitor’s Traffic

Drift is one of the main competitors of intercom and it is not a surprise that it is on intercom’s list of top paid keywords.

The Intercom team did enough research and found out that most people who search for Drift have certain needs. Intercom, therefore, knew they could intercept those kinds of people by appealing directly to their needs and then eventually convert them into potential customers.

Photo Credits: Google

You can see the paid ad used by Intercom to direct Drift-branded traffic back to their website below;

Photo Credits: Google

To be specific, Intercom re-directs people to their landing page, which is basically a live chat for traffic they get at Drift branded keyword. Form observation, you will realize that Drifts top paid keywords are intercom-based.

Photo Credits: Google

Drift, on the other hand, are not just stopping at that, they also follow a similar strategy by trying to get people from Intercom to their website. Drift have however taken the strategy to a completely different level. You can check the landing page called Intercom Alternative here.

The Drift team use that personalized page to try and convert intercom users or customers into their own users.

The questions Drift use are shown the picture below and if you observe closely you will realize that Drift create unique selling points tied to question-based copy to try and convince people to switch from Intercom to their website.

Photo Credits: Drift

The Drift team goes on and use their chat widget that links to a case study published on their blog about why people switched from Intercom to Drift. You will see that when it is your first time on the page. The image below shows the real picture of how it looks like.

Photo Credits: Drift

That is to say, it is your David vs Goliath moment to use highly relevant, targeted marketing strategy to take down your major competitor. Bidding keywords on your competitor can be costly especially when they use their own originally created branded keywords like Intercom do.

Point to note: Always be aware of the prominent competitors who may turn out to have more enticing referrals than you have and work to counter them. For instance, Intercom apply a similar strategy for Zendesk branded keywords and by that, they send keyword traffic to a dedicated Zendesk Alternative landing page.

3. By Use of Core-Problem Framework Focusing on Google Keywords that Bring you the Highest Number of Qualified Leads

Intercom has created their own SEO presence and keywords by giving solutions to problems faced by their target customers every day. With that, they have achieved two major goals:

• Designing a trusted brand expert site
• Focusing on Google keywords that have brought and still brings them quite a large number of qualified leads

A good number (409) of Intercom’s total keywords (29,230) rank as first page results on Google search. While 409 may seem little in terms of raw organic keywords, every keyword that ranks on Google’s first page has a collective theme and each content solves the main problem.

Below is a summary of some of top organic keywords rankings that have managed to appear on the first page of google search in average worldwide monthly search volume.

Photo Credits: Google

The above rankings were not achieved through keyword-stuffing articles but writing content that solved real problems their potential customers faced. That is what is usually referred as Semantic SEO by SEO experts.

To put it in other words, for an article with content that answers certain search phrase or questions and does not have or contain the exact keywords, the Google search algorithm is usually smart enough to interpret the intention of the searcher and then generate preferred results to the user.

Point to note: Using the central problem framework is hack SEO strategy that has worked with the artificial intelligence that has been incorporated into the search engines and has evolved beyond keywords.

4. New Brand Building Content Strategy, Writing Original Thought-Provoking Branded Content to Get Thousands of Shares Using the Topic Proven Framework

Many people tend to think that Intercom’s organic traffic originates from their high position in Google keywords ranking. That is not the case, however. In fact, the semantic SEO optimized content is just part of the overall brand-building content concept of Intercom.

The content strategy that intercom use includes, thought-provoking and original branded pieces of articles that get quite a large number of shares, which you will not get them ranked anywhere on Google’s search the first page.

Des Traynor had asserted before that;

For Intercom http:intercom.io blogging has been our most effective weapon thus far. we’ll give advertising a go soon, just to compare. but right now it looks like a good article that’s related to the product drives readers, which we try to then funnel into the site“

The authenticity and the self-branding of the articles are at the core of customer acquisition strategy and Intercom marketing.

The Intercom team that works on content has been blogging for more than 7 years building their own branded content. Des Traynor published their first article which was titled ‘Recent new features in Intercom’ back on 6th of October 2011. That was months after the launch of Intercom.

The branded content published on their blog has largely helped Intercom to grow rapidly and below we have shared a picture that shows some of their most shared posts.

Photo Credits: Google

We will, therefore, go on and break down how the individual posts became popular.

a. Browsers not Apps are the Future of Mobile

“Browsers not Apps are the Future of Mobile” is the most popular article at Intercom and it drew inspiration from an article previously published in 2014 on Qz.com with the title “Most smartphone users download zero apps per month”.

Intercom’s own article went viral on Hacker News garnering 185 comments after drawing information from the inspiration article and adding it to the discussion.

Photo Credits: Hacker News

You can only come up with topics like this if you read widely and that’s why we will discuss another strategy called ‘read widely’ which was explained by John Collins, the managing editor at Intercom in his article written: How do you decide to what to write”

b. People Leave Managers, Not Companies

On the list of most popular articles at Intercom “People leave managers, not companies” comes second which was published on 7th of March 2017. However, surprisingly, there had been a post that had gone viral and was ranked number one on Hacker News years back in Feb 2013. That was exactly of the same topic.

Photo Credits: Hacker News

Of course Intercom had leveraged the success of the number one post on Hacker from over years drew inspiration and added it to the debate. The intercom content team, however, did not just draw everything from the article as it was.

In fact, they led the story with data backed evidence from a recent study that “moved the conversation on” which is included in the next strategy by John Collins on his already aforementioned article.

c. Supporting our Muslim Sisters and Brothers in Tech

The third most popular article at intercom is “Supporting our Muslim sisters and brothers in tech” and it was a direct response that offered to help relocation of Muslims in the tech community to Dublin.

The initiative provided free relocation advice, paid legal bills of up to $5000, a job opportunity at the Dublin Company and lastly, a buddy program that would help explore Dublin.

No wonder the articles received many shares and became so popular. Intercom had decided to give an offer without expecting anything in return. This kind of initiative also perfectly aligned with the company’s original marketing strategy, vision and current policies and solutions all that emphasize on a real human connection.

d. Vanity Metrics, the Future, and 100,000 “Thank Yous”

“Vanity Metrics, the Future, and 100,000 “Thank Yous”” is the fourth most popular article on Intercom and the last we will have to talk about in this category. This was the first update by Eoghon McCabe one of the co-founders that reported Intercom’s growth since their last 4 funding rounds.

In the published report, Eoghan revealed a number of active users in a month. Additionally, the report revealed the application’s conversation, growth and revenue from the past years and potential future growth and plans.

We can call it “expose your data or success’ kind of content and it is a tactic explained very well in John Collin’s article, we have mentioned above.

Point to note: There are quite a number of ways that you can use to make or promote your content to go viral. Pick a content idea that can market your articles, it may be from your competitors, then you can write original content that touches the emotion of the reader.

5. CTA Method, the Most Unique Way of Converting Content into New Product Signups

Two elements have been kept constant and uniform across each and every one of Intercom’s blog posts. They include; the author’s caricature which keeps in line with Intercom’s policy and emphasis on natural human connection.

A large bold statement usually at the top of the page. All Intercom’s blog posts start with large bold lines that aim at capturing the attention of the readers and at the same time gives them a hint they might come across once they keep on reading.

Photo Credits: Intercom

However, one of the most unique and interesting aspects of their blog post is that their final call-to-action is not as common as you would think or expect. At the end of  blog post for most average websites, it’s almost guaranteed that you will be bombarded with exasperating sign-up boxes or sales pushes usually very brightly colored that is aimed at prompting new visitors to sign up.

Intercom does things differently; some of their articles do not offer the lead magnet as you can see below.

Photo Credits: Intercom

Let’s quickly look at the breakdown of the CTAs from the above images

• You will get Intercom on Product Management -Free book download that you get when you sign up worth your email address.
• you will also get Intercom on Customer Support – a free book download that you also get when you sign up worth your email address
• You will get a downloadable Research Message Cheat Sheet, a cheat sheet that readers will be able to download without having to worry about giving any detailed information about their contact. This is an unusual tactic as Intercom are not able to nurture their leads in future.
• Post conspicuously absent of any type of call to action at all.

Sometimes, while on their blog post, you will come across a CTA that asks readers to join a free newsletter as the image below shows.

Photo Credits: Intercom

If you will observe closely, you will realize that the CTAs that broadcast the newsletter are the boldest and biggest although not as bold or big as compared to what you usually see on other websites.

Even their weekly newsletter does not have any of the usual CTAs that readers are most likely to meet on most growing blogs and websites.

That is to say, the lack of CTAs is a reflection of their vision. Unlike having to focus on keyword stuffing and obsessed lead generating articles, many of Intercom’s articles operate from a basis of a strong, genuine, and personal communication.

Outlined below is an example of an article that stands for the company’s number one goal: open dialogues and clear communication.

Photo Credits: Intercom

In one way or another, maybe creating articles without having to include strong CTAs, aggressive marketing speak, or annoying popups is one of Intercoms strategy that shows their customers that the company has not given up on their initial vision of original human connection.

This could be one of the beneficial ways to strengthen your customer loyalty and trust and at the same time enhancing the perception of your brand as whole if we have to put it in other words.

Point to note: As a blogger, think about the most logical next step is for anyone can take after reading your piece of content and then use that as your CTA. Ask yourself questions like, will they fancy downloading a cheat sheet, your book, would they sign up to get your newsletter or anything else?

6. Follow Intercom’s Simple Off-site Content Strategy to Get All Your Content Seen By a New Audience

Intercom has set up a medium publication known as Inside Intercom that matches their brand and it is aimed at increasing traffic, stretching out and engagement for all of their blog posts.

Having been launched on 3rd of July, they use Medium as a channel that re-posts their articles from their blog.

Surprisingly, Intercom does not just re-post through the channel right after publishing a blog post. Instead, they will wait for 2 – 11 months before having to re-post their original piece of content from the blog.

Outlined below is a table of top posts that were re-posted through Medium posts alongside their published dates on Inside Intercom.

Photo Credits: Intercom

If you look at the table closely, their most articles that are recommended on Medium are entirely not the same as the ones shared on blog posts from their main website. And you will get similar findings if you researched Hubspot’s Medium Strategy.

Hubspot is marketing sales and services software that helps your business grow without compromise. And the company found out that their optimizing for a search for blog content did not generate enough views on medium.

Therefore, instead, they realized that optimizing for people with personal accounts, opinions, and reaction posts had a remarkable performance on Medium.

Point to note: Articles with controversial and unique viewpoints perform better in general on Medium platforms as you can observe from Intercoms Medium data vs intercom’s blog.

The most common Intercom Medium articles have 4 different CTA links:

• Intercom home page
• Intercom blog
• Author’s Twitter profile
• 3 other relevant articles on Intercom’s blog

Therefore, instead of prompting readers to take a certain path, Intercom has given their visitors and readers a number of options that can help them engage further with their brand.

Point to note: Try to find other media channels where your target audience can hang out and at the same time re-purpose your content for that channel just like Intercom have done with their content on Medium.

7. Ultra-Granular Paid Search Marketing Strategies – Focus On High Intent Keywords If You Want to Be Successful Without a Big Ad Budget

Of all the 2000 pay-per-click keywords that Intercom bids on, we have outlined below the top highest performing ads for the company.

Photo Credits: Google

The ads vary in terms of directing visitors and customers to a number of different landing pages baaing on the search term. This kind of variance in the ads, lets each of the company’s solution to get enough exposure.

We have also outlined below the entire paid search funnel for the second ad known as “the autoresponder tool”

Photo Credits: Google

This is how the funnel works

• An autoresponder keyword
• An autoresponder ad relevant to the keyword
• A landing page usually relevant to the ad- this is the landing page  for customer engagement solution that discusses intercom’s autoresponder functionality)

If you scroll past the top 10 performers, Intercom’s focus seem to be on paid ads that target the live-chat tool. The reason could be that the search term must have proved to do quite well.

That said, we have outlined 4 main active paid search funnels at Intercom and alongside them the landing pages they drive traffic to.

• Unbranded Customer Engagement Keywords > Customer Engagement Ad > Onboarding & Retention Solution Free Trial Offer
• Unbranded Live Chat Keywords > Live Chat Ad > Live Chat Solution Free Trial Offer
• Unbranded Customer Support Keywords > Customer Support Ad > Customer Support Solution Free Trial Offer
• Unbranded Alternative Keywords > Alternative “X” Tool Ad > Alternative To “Zendesk” Free Trial Offer (hint: this is how Intercom steal Zendesk’s traffic and sales)

Most of the initial Intercom’s CPC keywords were seen at the end of 2016. This is a suggestion that, it is only currently that Intercom has ramped up its paid marketing strategy and this can be explained by the fact that their word of mouth marketing and content have been probably very effective.

Photo Credits: Google

As we will see below, it seems like Intercom has as well decided to invest in retargeting ads. The image below shows an Intercom ad that popped on Facebook.

Photo Credits: Facebook

The Facebook retargeting ads have been implemented to grab the attention of casual Facebook users and the ad double mentions the free-trail, something that google ads don’t have.

Point to note: CPC or PPC traffic works best when you use the ultra-granular strategy. (Keyword-Ad-Landing Page). Many SaaS companies employ that strategy to raise the number of qualified leads as they dial in their CPC/PPC campaigns

8. Advanced Landing Page Strategy: Convert Your Landing Page With One of the 5 Levels of Market Awareness

Intercom website has 3 main landing pages each having a solution. However, for a long-form solution, pages seen on ‘intercom’s site are not the same landing pages that they use for their paid ads. Instead, they use short form solution pages for their paid marketing campaigns.

The picture below shows a section for Onboarding and retention solutions on Intercom

Photo Credits: Intercom

So much usually happens on this page, and we will break it down below.

The attracting headline stresses on the promise of something most businesses strive to achieve. In other words, good communication.

The sub-headline explains some specifics in terms of the kind of messages Intercom can help their users with. Additionally, it hooks the readers with the prospect of better sale conversions by saying “drive people towards a common goal by sending messages based on behavior”)

The free-trial option there as you can easily see is an easy to use CTA and it makes it hard for any visitors or customers to say NO. As a visitor you know it’s free and all you will be required to do is to put your email.

Suppose a visitor browses more downwards or wants to know more, Intercom has inserted a secondary CTA below their primary CTA that lets the visitors speak to a representative through a live chat when you click the link.

Visitors are also able to watch a video, usually short simplified and animated that aims at giving a visually appealing overview of how Intercom works and what you can expect as a visitor and if you want to jump onto the bandwagon as well.

Visitors have an option that allows them to check out a second video that exponentially highlights the product functioning process in action.

Suppose visitors wish to know more, they have an option of reading through more features. It came to Intercom’s knowledge that people in their market, have a good knowledge of the market awareness about their products their solution is trying to replace. They are what Eugene Schwartz; a legendary copywriter refers to as “more aware”

Below we have outlined the 5 levels of awareness by Eugene.

Photo credits: MindvalleyInsight

When you are marketing your products to the customers in the ‘Most aware “stage, you have differentiated yourself on the product or the price. Intercom differentiates by convincing their customers and visitors about their new incorporated features on their app.

By that, the prospective buyers understand how Intercom differs from CRM, live chat; help desk, and standards marketing automation tools.

Intercom mentions some of the interesting features that most customers might not expect, for instance, in-app messages.

This section also uses attention-drawing sales language that visitors want to hear. Words like “drive them towards a goal”, “lead”, “live goal conversions”, or “target your customers” can be very appealing to the visitors.

Once people understand the Intercom’s concept of onboarding and Retention solution and how it is of benefit to them, an ultimate scroll offers some social proof and guides them what to do next.

Let’s take a deeper look at more parts of the page;

Photo Credits: Intercom

3 Elements of the Page

Personal testimonial from a Vice President at a prominent company – the testimonial is well established and that means that headshots with short testimonials that are close to the lead forms and CTA buttons promote increased conversions.

The page is as well capped off with a final CTA that is easy to see and follow

There is a fine print below the email box, and it tackles any last minute doubts that visitors might have. This makes it likely that they could succumb to try out the 14-day trial at least.

Point to note: You should match your landing copy with the level of market awareness for your product in your market and this will help you in the conversion of more traffic into customers.

Funding & Monetization

Initially, Intercom found it hard to get funding in the US. However, their breakthrough came when Twitter Co-founder Biz Stone decided to invest an undisclosed amount in the company back in 2011.

As time went by, they received more funding from Andy McLoughlin, Huddle founder and David Sacks among others.  As by 2013 around March, the company reported a $6m Series A round that was led by Social Capital.

In January 2014, the company again received in excess of $20m series B funding, which was led by Bessemer Venture Partners. Intercom later received $50m series C-1 funding that was led by Index Ventures.

In 2017, Intercom offered to pay the legal fees for the people who had been affected by the US Donald Trump’s proposal that banned the Muslims who wanted to relocate to Ireland.

As we talk, the company just announced a $125m series D funding that is led by Kleiner Perkins and in participation is Google Ventures.

Summary of What We Have Discussed

Intercom has implemented a number of marketing strategies outside the normal ones we see every day on blogs and that has made them to outstandingly stay separate from them and at the same time stay wildly successful.

Through avoiding, big, over the top sale promises and flashy CTAs the company has kept its core concepts and ideas very strong.

We could also say that Intercom has maintained their word of mouth strategy in terms of creating awareness by thriving on the creation of not only original but also useful content to its customers. Moreover, the company has stayed true to their vision of real human connection in the name of communication.

Of course, we do not mean that the company’s entire strategy is flawless, but as you have observed in the Intercom’s 6 or so years of rising to success and the analysis, you will be the judge.

We will, therefore, look at the 8 key points to note from this case study:

i) Identify marketing channels that you have them working right already and look for ways that you can hack them for your blog’s growth to a completely new level. Intercom did it with a combination of dynamic keyword insertion and powered by tactic to increase their referral traffic.

ii) Use ‘alternative’ landing pages that vividly outlines the unique selling points of your product versus your competitors, if you want to use the strategy of steaking your competitor’s traffic

iii) you focus on ‘core problems’ the SEO can prove to be very simple and you will not worry about using keywords. That will help you get better rankings and ultimately help you generate more qualified leads.

iv) Keep in mind that you will be building a brand. With that, you should consistently come up with quality branded organic content basing on proven topics and the ROI plus the rewards will come back to you as time goes by.

v) Always keep brainstorming about what the most logical next step a visitor or someone would take after they are done reading your content. With that identified, you can use it as your CTA. Ask yourself questions like would it be good for the reader to download a cheat sheet, your book, sign up for your newsletter or something more and or else?

vi) Find other media channels or platforms in which your target audience can hang out and re-purpose your original content for that channel just like Intercom have done with their website blog content on Medium.

vii) CPC/PPC traffic will work efficiently when you use the ultra-granular strategy of one keyword – one ad- Landing page. It’s a strategy seen being used by many SaaS companies intercom inclusive and it increases qualified leads as they dial in their CPC/PPC campaigns.

viii) You can match your landing page copy with the level of market awareness of your product in your market to help in conversion more of the traffic you get into potential customers.

If you want learn more, you can watch the video below to learn more about product strategy when scaling your company. The video is basically a summary of everything we have talked about. Des Traynor at the TNW conference talking about the strategies they used to scale Intercom.

Video Credits: YouTube

Wrapping It Up

According to a blog written recently, the Intercom team asserts that:

On April 24th, we’re announcing the next wave of business messaging. Look for clues to what that could look like in this microsite. You’ll also have an opportunity to sign up to be one of the first to hear our big announcement.”

That is to say, we should expect more from Intercom and as they have put it themselves, it is going to be a big announcement.