The Happiest App in the World's Billion-dollar Marketing Strategy.

The Billion-Dollar Marketing Strategy

In Episode 1 of the MUSEDLetter, we spoke about the moment of inspiration that launched Calm, the first mental health unicorn.

In today's episode, we will delve into the meteoric rise of the brand. How did Calm go from a start-up in the meditation space to a globally-renown brand with a $2 Billion valuation? How did they do it within seven years? Or one dog year, if we're getting technical.

Here is the billion-dollar marketing strategy.

The Vision

Calm doesn't just want to be a meditation app. Their vision is to build one of the most valuable and meaningful brands of the 21st century. According to its co-founder Acton “health and wellness is a $4 trillion industry and we believe there is a big opportunity to build the leading company in this fast-growing and important space.”

While this may seem like a corporate planting of the flag. It’s actually an astute pillar of Calm’s marketing strategy. By bundling meditation, sleep, and focus music, Calm offers multiple entry points to the world of wellness, enabling users to chart their own path to inner peace.

Getting people to meditate is hard. So instead of commodifying “meditation”, a practice with a niche audience, skepticism, and stigma attached to it. Calm chooses to commodify “wellness”, a universal aspiration.

Brand sculpting

Branding is an investment. And for Calm, each touch point serves as an opportunity for users to understand the brand.

Some elements may be open to interpretation. I think, for instance, that the typography of their logo is reminiscent of what you might find scribbled in a journal. Evoking a time in the day for reflection.  

Other elements are based on pure psychology and neuroscience. The brand’s color palette, for example, plays on the psychology of color to evoke pure, calm, and secure emotions. Calm leans on this psychology of color in their communication too. Are they are looking for users to decompress? Blue, green, and violet colors feature heavily. New features? Oranges and yellows dominate. And for when Calm wants to be playful? Pinks and violets are deployed.  

To evoke positive emotions, Calm also makes abundant use of nature in its brand imagery. Much like the color palette, different nature scenes can be engineered to activate the right moods and feelings among their audience.

Marketing strategies

Every brand must choose the drivers of its marketing engine, and in the run-up to its $2 billion-dollar valuation, Calm focused on creating dialogue around mental health, YouTube SEO, mobile app advertising, and A-list influencer marketing. ‍

Strategy 1: Dialogue around mental health‍

Creating dialogue around mental health is one of Calm’s mantras. The brand’s communication revolves around this. Across their social media platforms, Calm has found 101 ways to destigmatize, establish new wellness idioms, and platform top voices in the mental health space.

But one of the lesser know strategies to create dialogue (and brand growth) is Calm’s blog. Calm masterfully creates blog content to shape and contribute to the dialogue around mental health. For instance, if mental health is a subject you are into, you may have heard of Dr. Gloria Willcox’s “Feelings Wheel”, a circular graph that depicts the range of human emotions. This graph amounts to 52,000 monthly searches, 21,000 of which are going directly to Calm’s blog, which has developed a stunning graphic and explanation of the wheel.

Additionally, Calm writes blogs according to frequent searches around mental health. Articles such as “5 benefits of tracking your mood”, “5 habits of the mind that make heartbreak worse”, and “9 ways to help a friend with anxiety” generate 1000s of views each month. Why? Because “Tracking your mood”, “making heartbreak worse” and “help a friend with anxiety” amass 1000s of searches each month. 1000s of searches that help Calm appear at the top of the search engine. ‍

Strategy 2: YouTube SEO - Nightime Edition‍

YouTube generates over 50% of Calm’s organic social traffic, the brand relies on it more than Google as a search engine. Calm’s focus on YouTube SEO as a growth channel came from an interesting user insight. Time of use. The team noticed that most Calm users were active between 9-11 PM. This told the team that most users turned to the app when trying to relax their minds before bed.

And so their creative team produced YouTube videos around keywords people search for when they can't sleep, such as “mindfulness meditation”. Each month, there are over 100,000 searches for “mindful meditation”. Calm created three of the videos that appear at the top of this search. Most of these videos are years old, but still, generate hundreds of views per hour.‍

Strategy 3: Mobile App Advertising ‍

And yes, Calm has grown rapidly with content strategies. But they continue to be the top mobile app advertiser in the wellness space with a tremendous advertising spend. In 2021 alone, Calm spent over $13 million on mobile app advertising to promote app downloads, far outpacing competitor apps like Headspace. ‍

Strategy 4: Influencer Marketing ‍

Perhaps Calm’s most infamous growth strategy is its high-budget influencer strategy. Calm partnered with celebrities like Lebron James, Harry Styles, Michael Buble, and Matthew McConaughey through its Sleep Stories series, which, as it says on the tin, involves recognizable celebrities reading original or fiction stories to help listeners sleep better. Celebrity power helped to boost Calm’s authority and cemented its credibility into the zeitgeist.

MUSED’s hot take

Calm invested major resources in sculpting a meaningful brand. They used user insights and data to inspire their content strategies. Creating SEO-friendly dialogue around the issue of mental health and targeting audiences looking to unwind at the end of their day. These organic strategies may have been enough to propel them to success among meditation apps. But it was their vision to dominate the wellness space, major investment in mobile app advertisement, and partnerships with A-list celebrities that catapulted them into the billion-dollar mindfulness & wellness media company they are today.

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