Marketing lessons from a 19.5 million € revenue company

[SchenkFinancial]

Blinks Labs GmbH, commonly known as Blinkist, is a book-summarizing subscription service based in Berlin, Germany.

Revenues increased by 167% year-on-year to 19.5 million euros and the number of active subscribers rose by 77% compared to the previous year.
Blinkist was able to grow so strongly particularly thanks to good marketing.

Their Facebook advertising consists mainly of short video clips. One ad that I would like to highlight is an ad entitled "Listen to the big ideas from the world's most influential nonfiction books in just 15 minutes.“

The accompanying clip is then showing people in business attire with the sentences "The average CEO reads 60 books. 88 % of financially successful people read at least 30 minutes", followed by a woman with a smartphone in her hand and the information “Blinkist users read key ideas from up to 5 books per day".

At the end, the request and call to action "Start learning like a CEO" is showing up. It should be noted that that this was created with simple pictures and with a font. Anyone can do this. You could even reproduce this with the internal tool of Facebook.

This advertisement is certainly aimed at entrepreneurs. Blinkist has certainly researched into statistics and want freelancers and self-employed people to see this advertisement. Otherwise this advertisement would not have emphasized the word CEO to such an extent.

 

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[Enki]

Their Facebook advertising consists mainly of short video clips.

This is the content of this advertisemnt. What's going on behind the scences?

At the end, the request and call to action "Start learning like a CEO" is showing up. It should be noted that that this was created with simple pictures and with a font. Anyone can do this. You could even reproduce this with the internal tool of Facebook.

How many campaigns are they running? What's their demographic? Are you the target? How many funnels do they have? how many split tests do they do at any given time? Are they really only targeting CEO's, or are you only seeing this because you are the demographic of one of the plethora of campaigns they have running? What's their follow up like?

On average it takes 12 contacts before people make a purchase from a company they've never purchased from before. You might not be in that catagory of conversions but if they are having explosive growth most of the customers are.

How do you know you aren't seeing that short ad because you skip through chapters on audible or kindle? (There is so many ways your data is being captured). Maybe you fall into the demographic of people searching for nuggets in books but don't waste your time reading menial paragraphs and chapters???? I'm not saying this is you. I'm just asking questions.

And last but not least of all, Whats their retention model like?

focusing on this 1 advertisement is like saying "Look all Lebron James does is walk out on the court and win a championship", What about the 1000 games he played before that? What about the 1000s of hours spent behind the scenes practicing? What about the other ads/players?

What your really seeing in that short ad is on re-iteration of many advertisements. And those and all subsequent advertisements were tweaked over and over. And the result is explosive growth because they captured as much data as possible and correctly interpreted and implemented the changes that the data commanded to increase revenue.

Essentially everything you said is correct. I'm just expanding upon it. Thanks for sharing.

 

[SchenkFinancial]

Chill, I just mentioned one quick idea for an ad.