Defending Brand Position Against Aggressive Competitors
After its parent company became Momentive, SurveyMonkey faced competitors bidding on its brand name, pushing paid search costs up as much as 75%. By 2022 it needed to win back its position as the brand people think of first.
With Alli, PMG mapped both existing users and the curious, business-minded audience SurveyMonkey wanted next. The "Give the people what they want" campaign featured Giancarlo Esposito across streaming, podcasts, and out-of-home, supported by more than a dozen TikTok and YouTube creators.
Brand cost-per-click fell 58%, freeing more than $1.5 million for other programs, and brand awareness, recall, and favorability rose 3% to 5%.
In June 2021, SurveyMonkey rebranded as Momentive to better highlight its enterprise solutions and distinguish the company's broader portfolio from the self-serve SaaS surveys that helped make its name 20+ years earlier. As SurveyMonkey tried to balance disparate internal objectives, competitors swarmed in to seize share of mind and market share.
By the spring of 2022, SurveyMonkey looked to regain its leadership position in the market, improve its financial performance, and address competitors increasingly bidding on its brand terms, which drove paid search costs up as much as 75%.
Elevating the Brand Through Innovative Strategy
PMG led a mass-market campaign, holistically across data, strategy, creative, influencer marketing, and media, to reinforce SurveyMonkey as a culturally relevant brand and business solution, particularly during these turbulent times.
We expanded our audience to extend the brand's voice beyond those already aware of SurveyMonkey, while still targeting business-value-oriented decision makers. Audience research led us to tap into curious consumers' mindsets as they go about their daily lives to reach the right people in the right places while raising awareness about how SurveyMonkey can inspire people and ideas to thrive. Through this, a consumer journey was born, along with a unique opportunity for the brand to say something unexpected by challenging conventional wisdom.
Reaching curious decision makers beyond SurveyMonkey's existing users meant understanding both groups, and Alli, PMG's operating system, put them side by side. Alli Audience Planner put established SurveyMonkey users next to the curious, business-minded decision makers the brand wanted to reach next, showing what the two groups had in common and what would make the newcomers pay attention. That became the foundation for the consumer journey and the media plan.
Showcasing SurveyMonkey With Bold, Multi-Channel Execution
Aligned to three customer mindsets, discover, experience, and investigate, we delivered the company's largest brand awareness campaign to date, running a robust full-funnel media plan across CTV, digital, social, podcast integrations with iHeartMedia and Spotify, rich media, and digital out-of-home.
The integrated campaign also represented SurveyMonkey's first foray into streaming with new 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 their customers and employees to make better business decisions.
Running nationally, the spot appealed to the unprecedented pressures business leaders have encountered in recent years. Appealing 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."
The campaign also used partnerships with top TikTok creators to celebrate the power of SurveyMonkey, including @yourrichbff, @imdrebrown, @sidneyraz, @herfirst100k, @astro_alexandra, @brittandjohnny, @taylor_loren, @nitetoast, @thecorporatechase, @callmebyyourcarl, @corporate.bro and enlisted YouTube creators in partnership with Studio71, including Jacksfilms, Josh Otusanya, Lauren Curtis, Bukola Ayodele, Brian Hull, and Jay & Sharon to create original branded content for the campaign. The influencers highlight a range of SurveyMonkey use cases, including employee feedback, event planning, and social media content planning.
CTV, digital, social, podcast, and out-of-home results sat in one Alli view, alongside the creator content, so the team could see how the message landed at each touchpoint. Planners followed up with Ask Alli in plain English and moved investment toward the creators, channels, and moments where SurveyMonkey was breaking through.
Turning Viral Engagement Into Brand Growth
30% WoW Boost in Interest & Impressions 58% Drop in Brand CPCs 3-5% Lift in Brand Metrics
The mass-market campaign is helping SurveyMonkey reach its audience of business leaders through innovation and creativity. Our influencer creative led to more than 127MM video views, and caused the #surveymonkey hashtag on TikTok to skyrocket from 200k views to nearly 9 million in just four weeks. Our video campaign starring Giancarlo Esposito broke through the noise and quickly produced record engagement. With 530 million impressions to date, the campaign drove 3%-5% lift in brand awareness, recall, association, and favorability.
Search activity also validated the campaign's success. Query volume went up (and has stayed the case), and an increase in clicks, combined with paid search refinements, delivered a 58% drop in brand CPCs, helping SurveyMonkey reallocate over $1.5MM in savings across other performance programs and channels. Alli Brand Equity tied brand and business signals together in real time, giving the team continuous visibility into how the campaign was moving both brand lift and paid search economics at the same time. Downstream impact also included notable growth in sign-ups, reinforcing that SurveyMonkey was so much more than B2B, as the brand of choice for a new generation who wants to be heard.
