It’s 2009 and Oli Gardner is broke and almost files for bankruptcy. Shortly after, he starts Unbounce, the high converting landing page builder with 5 friends.
Fast forward to today and they have passed $1.4m MRR with 14,000 customers and less than $1m in funding.
How?
This posts explains…
As we discussed in a recent email on Outreach’s content approach: buy up successful blogs in their space.
Unbounce took a different strategy.
Check this out: www.thelandingpagecourse.com.
They built a content site on a separate domain… why?
As we mentioned in that previous email, content that seems neutral will generate more awareness than overtly branded content and the domain “thelandingpagecourse.com” will help with SEO.
And of course, if you are searching online to learn about landing pages, there is a good chance you will be investing in a landing page builder at some point in the future.
If you have found their course (very likely if you search for anything related to landing pages online) then you will have been subtly exposed to Unbounce on those pages:
And:
As Unbounce own the domain, they can place retargeting pixels on all visitors, I would not be surprised to see ads around the internet over the coming weeks driving me to their free trial.
But actually, we think there is something else going on here…
Throughout the course, there is a continuous reference to the power and importance of landing pages.
Unbounce is not promoting themselves.
They are promoting a category.
They are promoting the category: landing pages.
As Al Ries and Jack Trout share in their seminal book Positioning: The Battle For Your Mind, if you are able to introduce and effectively educate about a new category… you will be seen as the category leader.
And category leaders take a disproportionate size of the market. They are making good progress:
What did we learn?
Instead of just pitching your product, why not try pitching (and educating about) your category and by default, becoming the leader.