3 Successful Marketing Lessons from Calm App

You’ve probably heard about Headspace and their marketing tricks all the time, but Calm is another B2C that came up from behind, starting 2 years after Headspace.

Calm is another wellness superstar, growing fast with over 100 million downloads and 4 million paying members.

From a business perspective, Calm has been a leaner company from the get-go. In fact, they focused on building a simple, well-designed meditation app that was top-notch.

But hey, this isn’t about seed funding or business growth. It’s a bunch of highlights of some cool (and maybe lesser-known) stunts Calm has pulled off in the past few years. This shows that its explosive growth was less about luck and more about smart choices.

The time Calm app went after elections

No need to remind us how hundreds of thousands of Americans were glued to their TVs in 2020 as the results from a super heated election started coming in.

Some folks might have missed that while everyone was on the edge of their seats to see who’d become the 46th President of the U.S., Calm was seizing the moment to send out a chill vibe to viewers.

In a brilliant move, the startup snagged a sponsorship with CNN. They got prime screen real estate during the network’s election coverage.

Yup, there’s some next-level sarcasm and irony here: Calm’s logo chilling in the corner of the screen while CNN anchors Wolf Blitzer and John King were anything but, well, calm.

Insert Yourself in the Conversation

“In what’s been an extremely stressful year. Our team is always looking for ways to give consumers a reminder to take a deep breath, and tune into themselves,” Erin Hassey, Calm’s senior director of growth marketing, said in an email.

Last November, the app had flashed on screen during CNN’s “Key Race Alert” coverage, reminding users of the need to relax during this stressful time.

“Our goal during CNN’s Key Race Alerts was to provide viewers a moment of Calm and a reminder to take a deep breath during a stressful night” Calm stated in an email.

Did the stunt pay off in the end? Calm got downloaded about 35,000 times on November 3 and again on Nov 4. In fact, they went up from its usual 26,000 downloads a day the week before.

On the same day, Calm was ranked as the 65th most popular app on the Apple app store, up 54 spots from the day before. It ended the day at No. 83, marking its third best day ever.

This wasn’t just a two-day stunt. The startup highlighted how, over the past few years, it sent out calming messages and breathing exercises. They targeted high-stress moments, like the presidential debates, while offering more free resources to potential users.

What can you learn from this?

Take advantage of big happenings and events and find natural (or even fun) ways to weave your brand into the current story, keeping your audience thinking about you as much as possible.

The time Calm app got Harry Styles

Calm is famous for building strong partnerships outside the B2B space, using awesome brand advocates to expand its reach.

In early 2020, Harry Styles teamed up with the meditation app Calm to narrate sleep stories. Needless to say this became a viral publicity stunt.

At the time, Calm’s official account gave fans a sneak peek of what to expect (including Harry’s soothing voice), with stories narrated by the former One Direction star to help listeners fall asleep at night.

Calm tweeted: ‘Wednesday. #DreamWithHarry,’ along with a video that ended with Styles melting fans’ hearts by saying: ‘Hello. I’m Harry Styles.’

Just four words, but it was enough to send fans into a frenzy, with many super excited fans commenting on the news and subscribing.

Choosing the Right Partners

This isn’t the only cool partnership the brand has snagged. In fact, many celebs have been lending their voices to the popular meditation and relaxation app for its sleep features. Names include LeBron James and Matthew McConaughey.

Not only did Calm tackle the sleep issue, which is a big problem for most, but it also secured powerful partnerships through that move. Was this a smart play?

During a Lincoln Motor Company-hosted “The Future of Wellness” virtual meditation and panel discussion, McConaughey was joined by Calm’s head of mindfulness Tamara Levitt. She confirmed that McConaughey’s bedtime story has been listened to “more than 11 million times” since its debut in 2018.

The WSJ article says “half of Calm’s users use it primarily as a sleep app rather than a meditation app.” This may have been one of the smartest way to approach partnership from the app.

Seriously, who wouldn’t want Stephen Fry to be talking them through lavender fields?

What can you learn from this?

Think outside the box – Calm is a meditation app, yet by focusing a lot of its efforts on sleep and tapping into a wider problem it was able to open up a whole new market and establish itself through powerful partnerships.

The time Calm app got its TV shows

Yes, a HBO TV show – you read it right.

Just like, meditation pioneers Headspace released its own Netflix series, Headspace Guide to Meditation, Calm did not want to be left behind.

“Calm started life as a meditation app but the brand has evolved far beyond that,” Calm co-founder and co-CEO Michael Acton Smith said in a release. “We are delighted to bring the magic behind our audio Sleep Stories to the screen for the first time. These experiences are visual Valium and will help people relax and unwind during these stressful times.”

Formatted as a season of 10 half-hour episodes, the show is built around Calm’s sleep Stories series. The visuals will be from the producers of National Geographic’s One Strange Rock documentary series.

As per the previous point above, you can expect a solid cast of Hollywood A-Listers narrating these stories. For example, they included Idris Elba, Oscar Isaac, Nicole Kidman, and Keanu Reeves.

Yet another proof of how powerful partnerships and creative content collaborations have supported the app to a wild and unchartered success.

What can you learn from this?

Storytelling is one of the most powerful ways to introduce marketing to wider audiences . By tapping into a unique USP (sleep stories) and delivering them into a medium that is familiar (TV show) you can refresh your brand positioning at scale

Calm app, a unicorn of marketing

By looking at the company now, you may be fooled to think its wild success was already written in the star. Yet the origin story of Calm is much different, as the company struggled to gain investors’ interest and break even for the first few years:

After about six months, Acton Smith and Tew decided they had no choice but to make the business profitable. They kept the team size under 10, worked long hours in a one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco and sharply questioned every outgoing dollar. Acton Smith paid for many of Calm’s expenses on his personal credit card. (Entrepreneur, 2018)

For further reading, I highly recommend to look up the whole story of the co-founders here.

In recent years, Calm has been slowly rising to success. It may have helped Calm win the Apple App of the Year award which helped a ton with marketing in 2017. Since winning App of the Year, the app has seemed to have a much higher growth rate than Headspace.

However, a consistent drive to adapt, pivot and try new angles may have contributed to its unchartered growth.

“Calm has managed to overtake Headspace because they’ve been laser-focused without getting distracted by the types of vanity partnerships, like with sports teams, that look good in the press but don’t move the needle,” says Harley Miller a Calm investor.

A few things that stood out for me included

• The interest in finding a big and relatable problem and capitalise on it
• Smart partnerships that speak to the consumers in a new way
• Positioning themselves as the solution during timely and pivotal times
• Constantly innovating their delivery and marketing

By doing what they do best, and focusing on doing it well, Calm has been able to stand out from the crowd.

This has truly proven this unicorn is here to stay.

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