This Viral Social Media Campaign 9x’d Sales in 45 Days 👇

250M impressions, 500k followers, 500k site visitors, 60k email sign ups, 9x in sales, ALL IN 45 DAYS. WITH 0 in ad spend. ZERO.

That’s what today’s guest has been up to these last few months.

Meet Mike Chambers, CEO of SMASHD, non-alcoholic beverage brand who absolutely took over the internet this spring and the story is legendary.

For a 30 second background, the brand was called Mixoloshe and a rebrand was at the forefront of their minds because of the hard-to-pronounce name that was also gender specific. They had all this leftover inventory with the old branding on it that they set out to sell.

That’s where the story begins, here’s what Mike had to say on the pod in his own liiiiiightly edited words.

1. The Origins Of The Campaign:

“I had seen this account called “MonkeyMarketing” (I tried finding the account but I couldn’t LOL) and it was this kid trying to prove to his professor that a picture of a monkey was more effective than his professor’s Marketing course.

I immediately saw it as an interesting construct. The problem with it was he wasn’t really Marketing anything, he was just posting the same picture of a monkey every day. It was effective in a sense that people were laughing about it. 

So I thought of ways we could use that formula for our surplus of inventory before our rebrand and the idea for smashing a can came out of nowhere.

One day I was on the phone with Nicole [creator behind all the viral content], I asked her to go into her backyard with a baseball bat and a can of our soon to be expired product and just smash it. She put an overlay of text on it that read “X days remaining to prove to my boss that smashing this can is more effective than his entire Marketing strategy.”

The first day we got 1,000 views, second day we got no traction, but the third day she smashed a can and it got 30 million views (oh, slay). 

When that first video went really viral, we saw it as an opportunity. We found from those first few posts that people were really interested in this concept of an intern challenging her boss, and the boss quickly became a villain.

And then we were really transparent, there was a build in public element to it where we were really transparent about the impact that the can smashing campaign was having on the business. 

In 60 days we were able to build a community of over a half a million followers. We had almost 200 million views on the content during that time period, 70,000 email signups, and total sales increased by 9x (some numbers to shut up the “organic social doesn’t work” crowd.

2. Throwing Traditional Out The Window:

We realize we stumbled into this whole campaign which is a case study in success, so we’ve spent weeks analyzing what exactly the key ingredients were.

It all came back to communities rallying behind clear objectives. Right from the very beginning we used the text overlay to let our audience know what we needed to accomplish, with clear consequences. 

Nicole’s outcomes were she would get a job or she wouldn’t get a job.

It was very clearly defined and then you add in the spice of a villain and underdog story, we had Nicole, the intern, vs Mike, her boss (the power of a COMMON enemy as well).

Those two things as part of the storyline are vital. 

On top of that, we were able to make the community feel like they were a part of the success of the whole campaign.

We tried traditional Marketing tactics like running contests, asking people to tag 2 friends, but what really pushed the needle for us was involving the community in the creative process by listening to their comments and DMs (the whole campaign is 🤌).

3. Building The Modern Social Team:

Modern social teams right now should have a creator whose sole focus is on creating content (THIS). 

It should be someone who has a demonstrable background in creating content themselves.

Finding these types of people is not putting a job description out on Indeed and hoping they come to you. You need to be in the trenches on Instagram, finding people who are under discovered, hungry, and who you think has what it takes to represent the brand.

The camera appeal, charisma, creativity, that must be demonstrated through their own content.

And then with that person, you need someone who can oversee strategy and be communicating the effectiveness of that strategy to the team. They need to be in the weeds with the analytics as the creator is solely focused on creating content.

(That’s the one-two punch you need on socials to crush in 2024.)

4. Was It Luck?

People may think we had this whole campaign that led into a rebrand to “SMASHD”, planned all along but the truth is we were building the plane as we flew it (SEE everyone’s just figuring it out as they go).

Once we had that first video go viral we had a shortlist of names that we thought we could rebrand to. From the jump we wanted to get the community behind this rebrand.

We landed on SMASHD, we trademarked it by that second week of the campaign, and then we crafted the story arc of arriving at a place where SMASHD would become the name.

Every single day we were making decisions on the fly based on the temperature of the community, the comment section, the feedback we were hearing from people. 

We knew the name, we knew a rebrand needed to happen, we knew we needed to really bolster this secondary storyline of what’s happening between the boss and Nicole, and we were kind of doing all of that on the fly. 

We were going to still rebrand if we didn’t hit half a million followers, we were going to end up just saying, you know what, it’s happening anyway. Luckily it did happen lol.

This was our opportunity, we realized that we need to be completely invested in the outcome here and everything else needs a pause while we ride this thing out to its conclusion.

We just gave this campaign all our focus and that’s how the team operated.

5. Alignment On All Fronts:

We leaned so in on this dynamic between Nicole and her boss where we took it off socials and wove it into our site experience (we love a cohesive approach).

When we started to see an increase of traffic we created this narrative between Nicole and her boss where the boss was skeptical that the traffic was coming from the campaign. 

This was all intentional, to rally people to say, “You know what, tell your boss it’s definitely coming from us.”

Simultaneously we placed a pop up on the website that said “Here for Nicole the intern? She claims all this traffic is coming from her can smashing.” If you’re here, enter your email below. 

People loved it, the conversion on that pop up was like nothing I had ever seen in my 20 year professional career.

Once they signed up the postscript said “Thanks, but she’s still a long way. There’s no way she’ll ever hit a half a million followers.” 

All super lighthearted banter, which people appreciate.

And then with that email list we were sending emails with updates on the campaign throughout the campaign, with specific asks and promotions.

We knew that this campaign wasn’t going to sustain itself forever so we really tried to use it to move as much of the Mixoloshe inventory as we could.

It was a simple pop up, simple email strategy, and it all paralleled the social strategy (key word, PARALLELED, it all aligned). 

I do have to say though, everyone was like “Why didn’t you guys do this on TikTok or Youtube shorts?”

I am very bullish on finding an acquisition channel that works and doing a really good job on that one acquisition channel and not trying to be everywhere all the time in the name of just because you think you have to (RETWEET).

If we had tried to also manage a YouTube shorts version of this, we would have not been as high touch in the comment section.

We would have not been in tune to what was happening in the DMS. We would NOT have been as successful quite honestly. 

Once you’ve come up with an acquisition channel, eventually it’ll plateau, that’s when you can go on to something else, but when things are working really well, continue to make sure they’re working really well. Don’t spread yourself too thin, that’s when results will suffer.”