Christopher Earle: Marketing Strategy Secret Sauce: Exploring Nasdaq’s Brand + Content Marketing Overhaul #C2C16

Thursday, 18 February 2016

Marketing Strategy Secret Sauce: Exploring Nasdaq’s Brand + Content Marketing Overhaul #C2C16

“Company culture is king. If you can’t spread your vision and values internally, you certainly won’t be able to market yourself externally either.”

The financial sector is littered with marketing strategy failures. Nasdaq has truly bucked the trend. First-time Content2Conversion speaker Jeremy Skule delivered a keynote that explored how Nasdaq used a killer combination of branding and content marketing to unlock an amazing marketing strategy (and results) for the brand. How did they do it? A well-timed one-two punch of brand overhaul and content marketing.

Below, I outline the secret sauce that made this amazing tale of B2B content marketing possible.

1. Using Vision, Voice & Visibility To Pivot the Brand

Just two years ago, Nasdaq was known primarily as a premium stock exchange listing brand. From a marketing perspective, the trouble was that less than 10% of company revenue came from their listing services. Nasdaq offered technology solutions, market performance tracking, market intelligence among many other services (which made up the other 90% of revenue).

Jeremy Skule knew they could do better. He re-aligned the company’s marketing efforts, by putting the following content marketing pillars in place.

Vision: As Jeremy explained, it doesn’t matter if you’re a 1-person shop, or a 100-person team. You have to develop a vision for where your organization is going, and exactly how your content marketing fits into that broader vision.
Voice: Tone-of-voice is crucial to content marketing (and social media) success. Understanding the language your customers use, cadence, level of humor, among many other factors is essential to an effective content marketing brand strategy.
Visibility: This is all about delivering the right message, at the right time, in the right place. Running some qualitative research around where your audience exists can help immensely. There’s plenty of free data floating around on the Internet about which channels customers prefer. Read it! Or, start with a Twitter poll. Or if you have to, conduct your own research.

Old versus new Nasdaq logo

2. Igniting Internal Adoption

Before developing any external content marketing programs, Jeremy knew he had to get employees on board. As Jeremy explained, “Positioning ourselves for growth that fit with company culture was crucial to success.” Furthermore, he understood that developing an internal advocacy program across thousands of employees could have just as much amplification potential as any old-school advertising.

It was a smart move. According to a recent employee advocacy study from Kredible, employee advocacy programs involving 1,000+ employees can generate $1,900,000 in advertising value. And the cultural payoff is even bigger. If you’re looking to build your brand around employees, here’s how Nasdaq did it:

They took the pulse of employee sentiment at town halls and internal meetings
They surveyed clients to mine for employee strengths & weaknesses
They socialized the process with leadership
They developed a Nasdaq “brand journey”
They recruited employees to be featured in content (including the following video)

3. Thinking Big with Content Marketing

The next step in the process was to ignite their content marketing effectiveness. As a company with more than 3 billion in revenue, Nasdaq had no shortage of great minds producing outstanding content. The problem was, they had no central repository. So, they created a content hub. Nasdaq MarketInsite provided a stomping ground for their core content producers. Here’s how they ensured their content hub was a success:Nasdaq MarketInsite

Nasdaq’s Content Hub

Simply put, the content marketing team began to innovate. They began doing things no other exchange or financial services provider had ever done. They offered the world the first livestream of a market bell ceremony. They engaged directly with customers via Twitter. They amplified the brand with a Times Square takeover. They partnered with Elon Musk, Etsy and others. Out of these events they developed loads of real-time and ongoing content.

Nasdaq & Etsy Times Square Takeover

The Results?

325% growth in social following
10 million in revenue directly from MarketInsite
30 million in the pipeline directly from MarketInsite
Significantly broadened their social reach and target awareness
Content Hub increased overall site traffic, ranking as top visited page

In conclusion, the Nasdaq case study forces us to rethink the relationship between brand and content marketing. Where does one end and the other begin?

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