How Google Fiber Killed it with Persona-Based Marketing

One of my favorite marketing campaigns of the past year has been from Google. The tech giant really put on a clinic with the way they have used social media to engage regions, states and local communities to generate awareness and demand around Google Fiber.

Google Fiber has been in the works for some time, but this year, we have seen the gigabit Internet rolling out city by city in an increasing fashion. For many, this is uncharted territory – connecting Internet users to the need for a Google network is a whole new experience, bringing with it a marketing question mark. With any major brand’s roll-out of a new product, there’s an incredible novelty attached that brings fanboys running but leaves a big question mark around market share, like we saw with the iPod, the Amazon Buy buttons and the (storied) Apple Car. It’s one thing to bring the raging fans on board – for Google, the Internet power users who can appreciate faster speeds – but it’s something else entirely to sway the regular Joes away from their pre-existing Internet packages they’ve had for years and onto the Fiber network.

How do you drive demand for a product that people may or may not know about? That’s the question we ask ourselves every day, and if you follow the inbound marketing methodology – or any solid marketing theory, for that matter – you begin with customers, and that’s exactly what the crew over at Google did.

For those of you who are unaware, Fiber requires many logistical, legislative and infrastructural hoops to jump through, generating a city by city roll-out model. This has created a prime landscape for a scalable marketing model that Google can use in each market – they surveyed each market they were rolling out to and systematically targeted each. By using this blueprint across markets, they created one hell of a persona-based marketing program and saw through-the-roof user engagement and demand.

Region-Based Pride & Appreciation

The first thing that the Fiber team did was identify the (now somewhat trendy) importance of state pride. The “locally made” trend has created an increased pride in local communities, regardless of whether you care about organic veggies.

1. They noticed there’s also a bit of a state pride trend right now (maybe there always has been, but now it’s cute)

2. They satisfied people’s love of free stuff (everyone in the zip code of a Fiber city got a free state-branded t-shirt)

Community Involvement & Transparency

The next step to meeting diverse types of potential customers came in the form of good old fashioned community involvement. Similar to what was done around state pride, Google took it to the next level and put actions to notions, creating programs, calling on authoritative local voices, talking about local issues and just flat out showing that they cared. There has been a complete and utter lack of local involvement by large Internet providers in this country – creating resentment and a “big brother” mentality surrounding ISPs (Internet service providers) in America. Google did a great job to identify that:

1. Their target audience likely had a distant relationship with their previous provider, and

2. They could completely change the conversation about ISPs by being involved in local markets

“I’m For” Campaign

The final element that Fiber used to target their personas was (in my opinion) one of the most effective and simple social campaigns I have ever seen.

How do you reach people and convince them to consider your product? Appeal to their values. Apple and Nike have built their marketing divisions off of this. You won’t find a campaign that focuses on benefits, costs or features in a Nike commercial – it’s all about hammering home values, as opposed to products. In a similar fashion, Google did this with the “I’m about” campaign, except they did it in true persona-based marketing form.

The campaign concept is incredibly simple – individually break out each customer type (or persona) with a statement detailing what they care about. The statements are meaningless outside the context, but with the Fiber logo below each statement, they trigger an immediate internal tie-in to how faster Internet could be the solution and could allow all of these customers’ needs to be fulfilled. The result is one of the most elegant persona-based marketing social campaigns you will ever see.

So, pretty impressive, right? What do you think of persona-based marketing? Do you want to market your product or service but lack millions of dollars to spend and the best-ever widespread Internet service product? Let us help. We work with companies every day to help them connect to their specific customer types in unique and authentic ways, and we’d love to help you do the same! Reach out and let us know how we can help you achieve your goals.

Updated: Apr 13, 2022