Hey Everyone, what’s up !
Have you seen the fidget spinner phenomenon everyone is raving about? Seriously these things have spread like wildfire and many are asking, how? Well, I’ll tell you EXACTLY how my partners and I created this fidget spinner phenomenon that’s trailblazing around the world.
You can check out our Instagram @Fidget360, the original fidget spinner.
In November 2016, I met the two 17 year-old Fidget360 Co-Founders Allan Maman and Cooper Weiss. They had created a fidget spinner using their school’s 3D printer. In only the second week of production the teens had over $2,000 dollars in sales. I admired their hustle because they showed resourceful creativity that any entrepreneur and business person should learn from.
Opportunities are all around us if we take action and execute on them.
Allan told me that his fidgets became so hot at school that they got banned from three different classrooms. It was right then and there that I knew we had the potential for something big. Luckily, I had expertise in influencer marketing and a social media network of 150-million users through social media. I told them that influencer marketing would be the way to go with this product and that Instagram should be our start.
While I had the social media network myself, I’m a firm believer that collaboration is key.
I spoke to my friend and business partner, Gerard Adams, and asked him what he thought about this little fidget product that had come across my lap. Initially, like everyone else at the time, he was a little hesitant because the product seemed so stupid and simple. Yet when he got it in his hands he couldn’t stop spinning it. By the way, Gerard is a leading Thought Leader and Co-Founder of the mega-popular media site Elite Daily that sold to the DailyMail in 2015 for roughly $50-million dollars.
Gerard decided to test this product with his pre-teen nephew and see what his thoughts were . Long story short, he was hooked! With Gerard also coming on board Fidget360 we had a pretty awesome team. Gerard and I struck up a deal with Fidget360 founders, Allan and Cooper, to invest in the company and connect their product with our influencer network of hundreds of millions of users, primarily through Instagram and Facebook.
We ran burst campaigns buying ad space across social media on themed influencer accounts for 6, 12, and 24-hour periods. By doing this, we directly reached an organic audience and created viral content that received millions of views. Next, because of this virility, media outlets like Forbes, CNN, and USA Today featured pieces on fidget spinners, and Allan and Cooper even received their own Forbes feature ! It took about three months of marketing before we had saturated the market, and everyone started making fidget spinner knockoffs of their own design.
I’m writing this piece because I want others to learn from the strategies we used to hopefully implement them into their own product and brand campaigns.
Here’s 3 Tips You Absolutely Need in Order to Go Viral
Create shareable content
The videos we used were specifically engineered in order to be shared through social media. They described the problem that fidgets dealt with and also gave the solution. We tied in growth hacking tactics like, “Tag a friend,” which brought thousands of new and organic followers and customers. This plus one model is something that brands like DropBox have used extremely well to entice its users to spread to their friends for free computer memory.
Build a brand people engage with
Allan and Cooper were brilliant in responding to their target market. Being teens themselves, they ran fun giveaways and even started a very popular “Fidget Trick Tuesday” featuring the best fidget tricks sent in by their audience. This created lots of brand loyalty and evangelical customers.
Influencer Marketing works!
Build the relationship with influencers or partner with people who have direct access to big social media accounts. Facebook and Instagram sponsored posts work, but nothing works as well as getting posted directly on the page. You can only do this if you nurture the relationship and have ad dollars to spend. Depending on your relationship with the page, 24-hour posts will run you anywhere from $150 – $1000.
If you guys can implement those three tips immediately into your marketing campaigns you should see an immediate ROI. Fidget spinners are a perfect example of what can happen when you use the right recipe to blast a simple product through social media. If you can execute and create some momentum, you’ll start to gain earned media that can really help propel you forward. Press and publicity is important, and its much better if you earn it by going viral instead of lobbying for your story to be written about.
I hope you guys enjoyed these insights from the fidget spinner phenomenon and use them in your campaigns! If you’re someone who’s purpose driven and looking for a content, community, and an events hub, then check out our Leave Normal Behind community. The mission of LNB is to inspire others to become the best version of themselves by creating things that matter and encouraging others to do the same.
Hope you guys enjoyed this piece.
Email me rob@leavenormalbehind.com to connect or add me on Facebook / Linkedin
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