Linktree’s CMO on marketing a brand that (seemingly) caught fire naturally
Linktree was created in a six-hour burst by two Melbourne brothers and their friend, after expressing annoyance that social media doesn’t allow multiple links. This was 2016, when there was no landing place where users could display all their social media links in one easy place. Overnight, the site got three-thousand users, crashing their server. By 2018, Instagram had banned the site, calling it ‘spam’, which lead to a revolt from Linktree’s then-million-strong army of users. Instagram relented, and issued a rare apology.
Now, the Melbourne company is an international juggernaut, with expansion plans, overseas offices, and over 40 million users.
Linktree’s chief marketing officer Monica Austin is in Sydney for SXSW, and spoke to Mumbrella yesterday about the delicate dance of marketing a brand that seemingly caught fire naturally.
Linktree seems like one of those internet sensations that just jumped out of nowhere and grew quickly, and organically. But as chief marketing officer, I’m sure that’s not the truth, nor the perception that you like to hear. Because, obviously, such huge growth takes a lot of heavy marketing. Where do your marketing dollars go? And what’s your strategy?
Well, big picture: Linktree did come from solving a problem. And it was very organic at the time, right, which is the kind of universal truth we see with creators, brands, small business, that are really building the foundations of their work on these social platforms: on YouTube, on Tiktok, on Instagram, on Twitter. They really do need the ability to unify, grow, engage their audience, and ultimately push them to a destination where they can monetise them, or sell tickets, or bring them together in community.
And so, Linktree really was born pretty organically out of that problem, and really took off as a kind of viral sensation, especially with music, artists, and talent. And they’re really savvy about wanting to really maximise their audiences, right? And really capture that attention that they already had on these social platforms.
That organic growth took us to the very early bootstrap stage, we then took on financing: VC funding has a way to really supercharge what we were doing on the platform side, and build the product, solve more problems, and build more solutions for our linkers.
