News & Buzz
Recent and featured coverage about Chargify.
Boston Based Chargify Takes New Marketing by the Horns
Kristin DziadulJune 17th, 2010
We were at WebInno on Monday night for an outstanding evening devoted to demonstrating and celebrating local technology innovations like consumer products and enterprise solutions. Among the “main dish” presenters at WebInno was Boston-based Chargify, a recurring billing system for startup companies in the Web 2.0 and Software as a Service (Saas) spaces created by local startup Grasshopper Group.
We’ve been impressed by Chargify’s recent buzz in the local startup community and thought we’d dive a little deeper into their marketing strategies.
You may remember that last month we featured Chargify in another post introducing this unique startup to the community. Chargify’s parent company, Grasshopper Group, is a startup for startups, meaning they develop products to help small companies find traction and revenue. We have since been following their development and marketing initiatives and followed up again with Jeremy Butler, Director of Marketing at Grasshopper Group and Jonathan Kay, Ambassador of Buzz at Grasshopper Group, for more information on what’s helping them.
We are always interested in speaking with new companies who are employing the latest new marketing techniques.
What’s been key to Chargify’s recent initiatives? The answer is a multi-layered approach that involves live marketing at events, SEO optimization for words associated with their product, buzz marketing on social media and traditional banner advertising online.
You might say Grasshopper Group’s Chargify has been around the block a few times. Chargify launched at TechCrunch50 in Silicon Valley last September and also made the trip to Austin, Tex., this year for SXSW. Their SXSW on-the-floor marketing featured a life-size version of their green bull mascot, Charlie, accompanied by Kay as a matador (inset).
As it turns out, their experience at WebInno was a bit different and more interactive than other events. In order to prepare for such a popular local event, the marketers honed in on their key talking points so consumers could easily understand that Chargify’s competitive advantage lies in its recurring billing system.
Their goal was to have all attendees leave the event feeling comfortable with the service. “[We] made sure to take full advantage of the crowd by bringing plenty of schwag and having two of us at the table at all times to field any questions, show demos and explain the product,” Butler said. As a result, they received some press coverage and noticed a significant increase in web traffic and buzz on the web.
For Chargify’s marketing team, live events in the local startup scene have been the most valuable marketing initiative.
“What I think added the most value was the personal connections made over the last two to three weeks,” Kay reported. He went on to explain that in the past two weeks alone, Grasshopper and Chargify hosted a killer event at WorkBarBoston called the Summer Launch Party, which BostInnovation co-sponsored as part of our BeIn series of events. They also had a speaking gig at Startup Weekend Boston.
While event marketing has been key to building buzz, SEO is the linchpin of Chargify’s marketing strategy.
“SEO has been the real core,” said Butler. ‘The billing market in general is filled with a bunch of enterprise companies that seem to focus more on telesales than e-commerce-based sales. In many of our top industry terms such as ‘SaaS billing,”recurring billing,’ and ’subscription billing,’ we show up on the first page (of search results) in the top five results having only been around nine months.”
This is a great example of text book Inbound Marketing, as defined by local new marketing gurus HubSpot.
While Chargify utilizes the “expected” social media channels: Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Stumble Upon, Digg, and Reddit, it is their approach to these channels that we find most interesting.
Kay explained that Chargify not only make it imperative to engage with their community of entrepreneurs on Twitter, but they also use these places as forums to create tangible connections between Grasshopper and Chargify and their customers. “For instance if we see a customer really shouting from the rooftops about us, we will connect with them and send them a shirt,” he said.
When asked which traditional channels they are currently using, Butler said they are hosting banner ads on Rubyinsider, Rubyrow, and Feedmyapp — three sites dedicated to informing the kinds of software developers who might need Grasshopper’s products. As the Chargify brand has been circulating around the Internet, they’ve found that word-of-mouth marketing has been a huge player in their buzz marketing since the Ruby on Rails (RoR) community is very tight knit.
Chargify’s unique approach to social media marketing combined with their presence at events and meetups have thrust Chargify full steam ahead in the startup scene in what feels like no time at all.
Butler said that events, “easily generate the most buzz and bang for your buck in terms of spreading the word about your product, garnering new relationships, and landing potential leads and sales. We are continuing to do events.”
The biggest takeaways we can all take note of regarding this company are that 1) event attendance is key to generating buzz, and 2) being different with things like the “Charlie the Bull” mascot can be critical.
Said Butler: “[The] key is to stand out from the crowd in some way. Whether product, pricing, look and feel – whatever it is, stand out.”
Grasshopper Group, the company delivering Chargify also has another lower-tier company called Grasshopper. They have plans to officially launch grasshoppergroup.com today and with that new, clearer structure are aimed at “making a move toward becoming the brand for entrepreneurs. Grasshopper is our virtual phone system, and Chargify is our recurring billingsystem. We are on the verge of launching a really amazing word of mouth tool, but you will just have to wait for that one. There may or may not already be plans to release a few private beta invites to BostInnovation readers so stay tuned,” concluded Kay.
Given that Grasshopper Group’s first two companies, Grasshopper and Chargify, have been unique resources for startups, and that so many of our readers are startupers themselves, you can bet BostInno will be telling you about Grasshopper Groups new company as soon as it launches.