Imagine this...
Your marketing budget is cut by 90%.
Your headcount is cut by 90%.
The total time you have to show results is also cut by 90%.
How would you grow? How would you grow 10x?
The best marketing strategy is the lazy man's marketing strategy.
When you're broke and have the clock against you.
Never market alone.
Find someone else to market for you.
Find a horse to ride.
When that horse gets tired, go find another horse while this one takes a break. Climb that mountain. Then another.
A marketing team of 1 can't do a lot alone. You are more likely to dump all your budget or waste a ton of time.
Piggybacking in marketing
Start by answering these questions:
Who might be incentivized to promote you? How do you get them to promote you?
Who is not incentivized but isn't disincentivized either? How do you get them to promote you?
Add as many options as you can.
Then, rank them all on opportunity, effort, and scalability.
When that's done. You have a fine list. ⭐
Types and Examples of piggybacking:
1. Piggyback on indifferent platforms
Zynga piggybacked on Facebook. Airbnb piggybacked on Craigslist.
This is a channel partnership where Craigslist wasn't incentivized but wasn't disincentivized either. Likewise for Facebook, for a while. [2]
2. Piggyback on the founder or thought leaders.
Reforge got acclaimed as the best growth courses out there because it was promoted by Andrew Chen (thought leader) and Brian Balfour (founder story). They hire the best operators, and piggyback on their authority. Operators let them, because they receive industry recognition that fuels their personal brand. [1]
3. Piggyback on celebrities without paying them.
Henry Moodie created covers of popular songs but changes the lyrics.
Covers help audiences recall popular songs and changing lyrics helps him show his true skill.
Twitter ran the "If you can dream it, tweet it" campaign.
4. Piggyback on history
You can even piggyback on history. Piggyback on dead people. On monuments. On literally any historical moments that can evoke emotions and capture attention. Cafe Madras was established pre-independence era, and that's what they piggyback on. The food is unparalleled too (the best breakfast of my life).
5. Piggyback on governments and new policies
You can piggyback on a new government law. Clean energy laws. International trade. India's richest families piggybacked on new govt. policies. Find an opportunity even if that's Afghanistan.
6. Piggyback on macro-economic trends
You can piggyback on a macro-trend like the pandemic. That's what Shopify did.
You can do this on a smaller scale with moment marketing. Oreo's dunk in the dark tweet came out when the lights went out at the Super Bowl for a minute.
7. Piggyback on objects
Ever played the game: name, place, animal, thing. You can even piggyback on a fruit.
8. Piggyback on people even with interceptions
You can piggyback on other people, via 3rd party platform. Lenny's Newsletter saw this massive growth after Substack released their recommended newsletter feature.
9. Hey! You can piggyback off of your employees too.
Instead of simply providing accounts to reporters and tech media outlets, Google decided to try a different approach for the rollout of Gmail. The company gave its employees special "invitation tokens" that they could use to bring their friends into the beta testing phase.
10. You can piggyback on your own marketplace too.
That's what Lyft, the ride-sharing startup did to launch in 24 markets at once. I have a case study here.
11. Piggyback on other ad campaigns, or on an entire product line.
Oreo piggybacked on one of the world's famous ad campaigns "Got Milk?" and changed its tagline to "Milk's favorite cookie" so that milk created a trigger moment for Oreo. When Oreo outgrew milk, they piggybacked on the entire desserts menu range.
Think about who can you piggyback off of? The possibilities are endless.
As long as you aren't marketing alone.
Choose the route that will lead to a 10x growth with 90% less budget.
Choose a route that is scalable.
Your host needs to have an audience. If they don't, find another host.
Best,
Khushi Lunkad
Copyright notice: Remember to credit and link back to my website if you use this material. I find patterns and bucket examples in different categories so we can better understand piggybacking as a concept.