Company: Intercom
Founded: 2011
Founders: Eoghan McCabe, Des Traynor, Ciaran Lee, David Barrett
Description: Customer messaging platform
This playbook focuses on marketing strategies and tactics used by Intercom.
The marketing playbook series is for founders who want to:
1. learn from real-life examples
2. discover which growth strategies fit which businesses and industries
3. find the 20% of strategies that return 80% of results
Social Proof Marketing
1. Testimonials
Intercom triggers social proof through testimonials. (Page)
2. Trusted By
Intercom uses well-known brand logos to trigger social proof and trust among prospects. (Page)
3. Customers Page
Intercom goes beyond testimonials by sharing customer success stories. Prospects may find persuasive case studies from companies in their industry. (Intercom Customers)
4. By the Numbers
Intercom quantifies value with statistics. Making the business case with cost-impact is effective in B2B marketing. This is reminiscent of WordPress and their use of numbers in social proof. (Page)
Content Marketing
5. Blog
The Intercom team blogs about marketing, customer service and product design. (Blog)
6. Webinars
Intercom uses webinars to generate leads. Most of their webinars are not directly related to Intercom tools. (Webinars)
7. Product Demos
Intercom provides scalable support with product demos. (Product Demos)
8. What’s New
Intercom keeps customers in the loop with a timeline of product updates. Notion also uses this strategy. (What’s New)
9. Twitter
Intercom uses Twitter to announce features, share customer success stories and retweet praise of their products. (Twitter)
10. Forum
Forums help the Intercom staff provide scalable answers and record product feedback. The user-generated content is also great for SEO. (Intercom Forum)
11. Books
Intercom uses books as lead magnets. They require contact information to read their books. The books cover lots of topics that don’t directly touch the Intercom suite.
They team opted to create interesting content that their audience would be drawn to. Physical versions are even available.
This large investment in books reminds us of Stripe and Webflow. (Intercom Books)
Permission Marketing
12. Gated Content
Intercom uses a gated content strategy for their webinars and books. These assets are used to create rich leads and feed into their sales process. (Page)
Viral Feature Marketing
13. Intercom Logo on Customer Sites
The Intercom logo is displayed on lots of sites. They leverage their customers to raise brand awareness. (Page)
14. “We run on intercom”
Intercom displays this message to customers of customers when they interact with the chat tool.
The tag links to the Intercom homepage. This strategy is extremely effective with Intercom’s B2B customers. (Intercom Tag)
Flywheel Marketing
15. Lead Generation Tools
Intercom helps businesses with lead generation by providing tools to collect and manage prospective customers.
They offer automated bots and live chat features to increase conversions. (Lead Generation Tools)
16. Customer Engagement Tools
Intercom helps businesses onboard customers with product tours, new feature notices and more. (Engagement Tools)
17. Customer Support Tools
Intercom helps route customer service requests and provide relevant help center content. (Customer Support Tools)
18. Customer Data Platform
Intercom creates customer profiles and help businesses segment customers. They also track customer events across platforms and devices. (Customer Intelligence)
19. App Store
Intercom’s app store helps users integrate with other tools.
These integrations are platform-specific assets that improve the Intercom ecosystem. The most popular integrations are Stripe, Slack and Google Analytics. (Intercom App Store)
20. Developer Hub
Intercom encourages developers to contribute to the ecosystem by providing developer tools and app distribution. (Intercom Developers Hub)
Discount Marketing
21. Trial Plan – Try for free
Intercom doesn’t offer any perpetually free plans. Users can try any plan for 14 days. (Pricing)
22. Early-Stage Discount
Intercom lowers adoption friction for early-stage startups with introductory pricing.
Intercom is able to grow with companies by offering lower pricing for a year. This also contributes to vendor lock-in with high switching costs. (Intercom Early-Stage Plan)
Micro Marketing
23. Live Chat Pop-Up
Intercom eats their own dog food. Very meta. The live chat pop-up helps Intercom provide direct support to prospects and users. (Live Chat)
Lock-In Marketing
24. Customer Data
Intercom collects a lot of customer data. This presents customers with high switching costs only to reach feature parity. This makes Intercom tools stickier. (Page)
Thanks for reading!
Which company you would like to see next?
Let me know — @DruRly.
Check out the playbook series for more growth strategies.
