In 2021, SurveyMonkey rebranded as Momentive to better highlight their enterprise solutions and distinguish the company’s broader portfolio from the self-serve SaaS surveys that helped make its name 20+ years earlier. Following the rebrand, competitors swarmed in to seize SurveyMonkey’s share of mind and market share.
By the spring of 2022, SurveyMonkey looked to regain its category leadership position in the market, improve financial performance, and address competitors increasingly bidding on their brand terms, which drove paid search costs up as much as 75%. We launched a cross-channel mass market campaign in just weeks to increase awareness and consideration, sign-ups, engagement with audiences who were not already familiar with or users of SurveyMonkey, and increase SEM’s cost efficiency.
The campaign leaned on insights gleaned from SurveyMonkey’s own products to understand what prospects seek, how customers feel, and what employees need to be successful. Our audience was facing heightened decisions, with so much at stake for their businesses during an uncertain 2022. They sought solutions that would help them make the right moves, quickly.
We saw an opportunity for the brand to say something unexpected by challenging conventional B2B marketing, and help business leaders improve employee morale and customer satisfaction, and get the answers they need — just ask. ‘Ask, listen, and act’ would be a plainspoken way to show the power of what SurveyMonkey offers, reinforcing the power of finding out what people want and using that to inform your next move.
The campaign leveraged a robust full-funnel media plan targeting CTV, digital, social, podcast integrations, rich media, and digital out-of-home. It represented SurveyMonkey’s first foray into streaming with ads featuring actor Giancarlo Esposito (“Breaking Bad,” “Do the Right Thing,” “The Mandalorian”). With a new tagline, “Give the people what they want,” the campaign enticed business leaders to listen to customers and employees to make better business decisions. Speaking to the grit and perseverance of today’s leaders, Esposito delivers the answer to the question of what to do next: “Ask the people. Listen to them…And then act.”
SurveyMonkey also leveraged influencer partnerships for the first time to make SurveyMonkey part of the cultural zeitgeist. Focusing on the power of surveys to make people feel heard, we worked with top TikTok and YouTube creators to demonstrate the potency and relevance of SurveyMonkey through authentic storytelling. Each influencer entertained by sharing unconventional ways surveys foster connections, empower people, and engage their communities to #justask.
For example, self-proclaimed ‘corporate baddie’ DeAndre Brown’s TikTok revealed that (BREAKING!) Gen Z doesn’t want free pizza, but instead wants 401k’s and flexible work schedules — feedback that, if his boss would only ask via SurveyMonkey, would result in ‘more employees and less leftover pizza.’ Using a different approach, Astro Alexandra invited followers to submit their favorite space-related conspiracy theories, followed by her signature lightning round debunking those hypotheses.
We successfully engaged business leaders through innovation and creativity. Our influencer creative caused the #surveymonkey hashtag on TikTok to skyrocket 45X from 200k views to 9 million in just four weeks. Through the innovative use of TikTok and YouTube creators, SurveyMonkey built awareness, cultural resonance, and active consideration, and the campaign delivered some of the strongest results ever seen in the tech category on TikTok.
Our video campaign also produced record engagement, and with 710MM video views to date, bumped brand awareness, recall, association, and favorability up 3%-5%. Search volume also increased, and combined with our optimizations, brand CPCs dropped 58%, delivering millions in savings that we reallocated to drive notable growth in sign-ups, reinforcing that SurveyMonkey was the brand of choice for a new generation who wants to be heard.
