A list of our most viral marketing campaigns
This is a list of the best marketing campaigns we’ve ran at Rows. Last update: August ’24
Over the last few years, we’ve conducted a number of unusual marketing campaigns. Looking back, I think they worked because they were both remarkable—defined as ‘unusual or surprising in a way that causes people to take notice’—and relevant to our audience.
Some campaigns pitted us against our ‘enemies,’ others leveraged the audience of our ‘friends’ and a few were creative ways to share our point of view within our industry.
Here’s a list of those campaigns and how you too can use your context to your advantage.
Use your ‘enemies’
I love Harry’s idea that you can differentiate your brand in a few different ways:
Through contrast: Where brands position themselves against others, typically incumbents. The “us vs them” strategy.
Through values: Brands that rally around more than their product. The canonical example is Patagonia.
Through category creation: Brands that invent new product categories and in the process become unique. When successful, it works as a forcing function for others to build around the category, strengthening the category creator. Think Drift for 'Conversational Marketing' or HubSpot for 'Inbound marketing'.
Through personality: Brands that are primarily about the person behind the brand. Think Ryan Reynolds’ Aviation Gin.
Through limitation: These brands are about a niche, like Head & Shoulders dandruff shampoo, a feature , Bumble's dating app where women make the first move, or as “X for Y”, like HipCamp the “Airbnb for Campsites”.
We’re building the Rows brand through contrast. Contrast against the Excel and Google Sheet, in an herculean fight against the duopoly of the spreadsheet world.
This strategy is a great match to what we’re building because:
it’s relatable: when we put up a billboard playing with the fact that Excel is 40 years old and it’s ready to retire, people get it.
it's versatile: there are an infinite number of ways we can reinforce the idea of contrast evoking a wide range of emotions.
Let’s go through our most popular campaigns using our ‘enemies’.
Billboards
Announcement 🎤 : X
This might be the campaign we’re best known for. In 2022 we bought two digital billboards as close as we could to the Google and Microsoft HQs.
We had launched Rows 1.0 a couple of months earlier on Product Hunt and wanted to tell the world we existed, and position ourselves as the first real alternative to Google Sheets and Excel. It was a classic physical-to-digital campaign. The physical billboards were the artifact to share the campaign on social media.
These were the billboards:
The billboards we bought in 2022People had fun with them. The campaign generated 5k new sign-ups, plenty of social mentions, landed us an article on Forbes and got a lot of smiles. We then followed it by telling the inside story behind the campaign on X and the blog.
2 years later, we still have onboarding calls with new customers who tell us they heard about us from the campaign. Talk about long conversions.
AI Analyst ✨
The launch of the AI Analyst✨ in June 2023 was our most viral campaign. It got over 30 million views on social media and more than 50 thousand sign-ups in the first few days.
A big part of it was an accident. One we can’t take credit for.
Part of the launch plan involved sponsoring a handful of content creators on Twitter to share the announcement. As luck would have it, someone came up with the hook “AI just killed Excel”. This was not part of the brief nor something we would have written, but it took off online.
The hook was provocative enough that it got people interested, and the launch video was compelling enough to convince people to try the Rows.
One of most viral tweets about the AI Analyst✨That started a cascading effect where it seemed that everyone was sharing the launch and talking about Rows (e.g. 1,2,3). More than one year later, we’re still seeing the ripple effects of that campaign. In any given day, if you go to X and search for rows.com, you’ll see mentions of us as a go-to AI tool.
It’s time for an upgrade
Elizabeth Arden once said that "Repetition makes reputation and reputation makes customers.”. The “It’s time for an upgrade” campaign exemplifies that.
This time, we created a series of mock billboards that reinforce the juxtaposition between the old world and the new. We played around with the idea that every appliance and technology product that we use is new and modern, but the spreadsheet you use is 20 (or 40) years old. It sounds off. That’s why we exist.
We followed the campaign with a landing page that tied the posters with our company story.
A collage of the billboards of the 'It's time for an upgrade' campaignHonorable mentions
Rows AdCells (Announcement 🎤 : X, LinkedIn). In April Fool's 2024 we launched (a fake) Rows AdCells product, playing around with the idea of a Google Ads-like product for spreadsheets.
Use your friends
Notion-style avatars
Another way to create memorable campaigns is to latch on your ‘friends’. That’s what we did in one of our best campaigns of 2023 to launch our Notion integration.
If you’re a Marketer in a B2B startup, you’ll know what other tools your target audience uses, and would love for those companies (or their brand ambassadors) to promote your product, especially if you integrate with them. The problem is you need them much more than they need you.
If you want your ‘friends’ to amplify your launch, it helps to give them a good incentive. And often, that incentive can be offering something that their audience wants.
We knew that the Notion community LOVEs Notion-style avatars. There are even dedicated websites where you can create or hire someone to design you one.
Embeds were already a very popular feature for hundreds of Notion customers. Now we were announcing a custom integration to allow people to import their Notion databases to Rows, analyze the data in a spreadsheet and embed the results in Notion. We wanted to get as many Notion users as possible to know about this.
What did we do? We celebrated the launch of the integration by offering everyone who shared the announcement a free, hand drawn Notion-style avatar. The Notion community reacted and the campaign was a hit.
In the first 48 hours we had more than 350k impressions on social media, more than 400 new users used the integration for the first time and 313 people got a beautiful new Notion-style avatar.
A selection of 6 of the 313 avatars designed for the campaign
Use your industry
Another way to get attention is by doing something that goes against conventional wisdom in your industry.
Instant Rows ⚡
Talking about defying conventional wisdom, if there was one launch that got people talking about us in the PLG community was Instant Rows ⚡. Cutting a long story very short, we removed the traditional marketing homepage and land everyone who visits rows.com on the product.
The interesting thing is that most of the attention to this launch came after we shared the results. I don’t think anyone was expecting (we certainly weren’t) that we’d tripled the conversion rate to sign-up or that hundreds of people would use the product in sandbox mode multiple times a week before signing up.
This caught the attention of some of the most prominent people in the Product & Growth industry and led to a flywheel or articles (1,2,3) and social media posts describing, analyzing and dissecting our experiment (1,2,3).
A selection of comments to the announcement on social mediaReference card
The idea for the Reference Card campaign came from a book written in 2001. In Founders’ at Work, Jessica Livingston has a chapter about Dan Bricklin, the founder of VisiCalc (the OG spreadsheet). There Dan talks about how Visicalc used a reference card to educate consumers on how to use the spreadsheet.
I loved that anecdote and was looking for an excuse for our very own retro-style reference card. The perfect excuse was reaching 500k users. We celebrated the milestone with a giveaway campaign, inviting people to share the announcement to enter a lottery to get a reference card. To sweeten the deal, one of those reference cards had a $1k Amazon voucher in it.
One page from the Rows Reference CardThe giveaway generated more 40k impressions and more than 100 people participated in the giveaway. Besides, I'm happy to sat that we got to design, create and ship a beautiful reference card, immortalized in this campaign page.
Conclusion
We have a backlog filled with creative campaign ideas. Don’t forget to save this article. We’ll keep it (and you) updated.
