When Fara Howard joined GoDaddy as its Chief Marketing Officer in February 2019, there was a Super Bowl-sized elephant in the room.
How could the company reinvent itself from its controversial past as a brand previously best-known for racy, male-gaze ads starring celebrities like Danica Patrick, Bar Rafaeli and the Pussycat Dolls to more of a user-friendly resource for small businesses and entrepreneurs to build their careers?
It started with a media strategy that could complement the creative. “We moved away from a one time a year, really loud, quite polarizing strategy to more steadily being a part of a mix of vehicles that put the customer at the center,” says Howard of her first year reinventing the brand, during which she invested a lot more resources into original programming for GoDaddy’s YouTube channel. “What that really ended up influencing as we moved into 2020 was all the more important to make sure that our actual customers, not actors, are at the center of all of our advertising.”
That groundwork paved the way for GoDaddy’s new logo, which was announced in January 2020 just months before the coronavirus pandemic upended operations for GoDaddy’s core customer base virtually overnight. “Local, small business owners are truly heroes and being regarded as such, so their stories are even more relevant,” says Howard, noting the 2019 brand refresh allowed GoDaddy to start telling some of those stories even pre-lockdown. “It’s imperative that we were telling really honest and real stories of our customers to build the credibility that we aspire to be.”
Being based out of GoDaddy’s headquarters in Kirkland, Washington, a.k.a. ground zero for the first reported cases of the COVID-19 virus in the United States, also proved to be what Howard calls “an odd silver lining” for getting ahead of the seismic behavioral shifts 2020 had in store. “We were working from home by March 2, so we as a team all started talking about our new normal and the impact it was having both on us as employees and humans and for our small businesses.”
Those early conversations led to #OpenWeStand, an industry-wide initiative incubated by GoDaddy that provides free products, discounts and resources to help small businesses navigate such challenging times. The initiative has expanded to include more than 75 partners, including Mastercard, American Express, Uber, Adobe and Salesforce, and helped generate more than 60 million views to the program’s commercial on YouTube. To date, nearly 30% of the traffic on the program’s website has been directed to the resources page.
“Even though we directed traffic to Openwestand.org rather than GoDaddy.com, the message’s ROI performed akin to more traditionally transactional messaging,” Howard says. “That enabled us to heavily invest in the campaign, which in turn helped more customers.”
Prior to GoDaddy, Howard spent over a decade in executive roles at Dell, as well as three years as VP-Global Marketing at Vans and most recently a nearly two-year stint as CMO of Amazon Fashion. Brand Innovators caught up with Howard from her home in Kirkland to learn more about how the importance of listening and empathy that she’s applied to each of her roles, GoDaddy’s brand refresh and the company’s ongoing support of Black-owned businesses. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Brand Innovators: February will mark your two-year anniversary with GoDaddy. What appealed to you about joining the company coming from your previous roles on the tech and apparel side of marketing?
There were two reasons why I made the change. One was I really wanted to be back in a mission-led company. I really bought into GoDaddy’s mission and vision and where they were going strategically from the very first conversation I had with them, which was really about empowering entrepreneurs everywhere and getting an opportunity to be on the ground floor for a lot of that work was really inspiring to me.
Which brings up the second reason I joined, because in order to do that, they knew they needed to make major changes to their brand. GoDaddy has incredible brand awareness, but we certainly are inconsistently known for who we seek to be as a brand today, tomorrow and in the future. And having an opportunity to reshape a brand was something that was really important to me. I’ve had an opportunity to work on really strong brands and continue to bolster them, but getting to work on a brand with really high awareness that wanted to build their strength in a different way was a challenge that I wanted to take on.
And the third, which was what tipped me over and made me make the change, is that I was wildly impressed by the people that I met during the decision making process. They are fantastic and why I’m here today. So the combination of the customers you get to serve and who I get to serve with everyday has made the decision a really easy one for me.
GoDaddy just reported its third quarter of accelerated new user growth, with an 11% year-over-year increase in total revenue during the third quarter of 2020. What cultural and consumer trends have fueled that increase?
We started our conversations talking about the odd silver lining of the global pandemic, and I used those words not lightly because it’s a really tough time in the world. And it’s a really tough time for small business owners and entrepreneurs. But the obvious trend that we witnessed in our industry was when physical doors closed and everyone went home, particularly in the months of March and April when folks really didn’t know what was going to immediately be next for them, small business owners immediately turned online. They said, “I have to figure out a way to run my business differently.”
In fact it generated a broad-based communication we had for a long time, called #OpenWeStand, which was really around helping small businesses find a different way to be open. And for us that’s generated a tremendous amount of new ways in which we go to market because customers have told us it’s important for them. That’s everything from the importance of ecommerce and focusing on those solutions for customers, communicating to our customers how easy and important it is to be on social media that we have those tools.
And once we get back out into the world, what just happened this past year with the acceleration of being online won’t slow, it will just be complemented by being in-person and digital. That’s really the biggest thing that I’ve observed, is what we were seeing steadily increase in digital presence, I don’t see that changing. I see that being complemented by going back into the world.
Going back to your first year at GoDaddy, what were the phases you took to reinventing the brand and logo?
I want to give credit to the team that I inherited when I walked in the door. There was already really great brand transformation work under way that they had progressed significantly. And the team had outlined the strategy and a handful of really important tactics they were going to put in place to start to drive that change. So what was important to me as a catalyst of that change was accelerating the momentum around some of the decisions that had been made, either without enough spend or speed put behind them.
So a handful of things happened in the first year I was there. We launched a new logo, and logos are critically important to brands. They can also be quite polarizing, so you have to move very cautiously toward that launch. The team did amazing work analyzing the impact of that change, and at the same time we started to put new advertising out in the market.
How has your media mix evolved from a Super Bowl-heavy, event-based strategy to more of an always-on communication approach throughout the year, and which platforms tend to work best for you?
We employed a strategy that worked really well for us at GoDaddy for years before I arrived, which was quite heavy on the top with television, and heavy on the bottom with search. Those two channels are still really important for us, but where we’ve been focused is making certain that we’re really rounding out the mix. That we’re investing heavily in online video, in over-the-top television. So thinking about non-linear television and social media is critically important to us. That’s where our customers are often building their business, so those three channels have been a big focus and growth for us from an investment standpoint.
What I would also say is we have shifted to more storytelling and some longer-form content. I’ll give you a specific example. We have a content series called “Made in America,” which is stories of local entrepreneurs as they build their business, and many of those entrepreneurs were actually born through a partnership program we have called Empower. We do everything from going into local communities and managing childcare for folks’ kids so they are able to wholly focus. So getting the team to really think about how we get the inside GoDaddy into the outside world, and tell those stories more broadly. Thinking more about brand communications, not just advertising, has been a big shift.
Now that you’ve had a chance to add brand building at GoDaddy following your previous roles at Amazon Fashion, Vans and Dell, what are some guiding principles you’ve maintained as a marketer throughout your career?
One of the guiding principles for me as a marketer is first and foremost about listening. And I should expand on that because by no means is it a cliché concept of listening because it’s important in all things. But really listening to customers. And very early in my career I spent a lot of time working on dot-com and building out Dell’s Dell.com, and when you spend hours, days of your life in focus groups and in small forums hearing prospective customers engage with your product, you build incredible empathy. And I’ve carried that forward into every job I’ve been in.
I spent as much time as possible getting out in the field. Vans afforded me the opportunity to talk to our customers every day. They had hundreds of retail stores and big physical events, it was awesome. So number one, you have to listen.
Number two, you have to be nimble yet consistent. If you’re listening and people are telling you what you say isn’t resonating, you’ve got to shift. But you need to shift within the confines of your brand. And I use that word intentionally because if everyday you show up differently, you erode trust within your brand and your customers. You gotta flex, but you gotta flex within the parameters that are defined by your brand.
And the third is the best stories are human stories. Tell stories about your customers, put them in the center and acquiesce creative control so that your customers’ actual stories are what you communicate out in the world. The unvarnished truth can speak to the heart a lot better than something super slick and shiny.
Tell me about GoDaddy’s foundational role in the #OpenWeStand initiative, and how the coalition of companies all came together. Where did the concept originate?
The first most powerful step we took is a credit to the in-house creative team for really tapping into the human insight of what it means to be open and how hard that was psychologically, physically, financially for everyone. It was a message that hit everyone who saw it really hard. They would say, “Wow, I am struggling because I feel I can’t be open in the way I was before.” And that’s whether you’re a small business owner or not.
What we did with that insight was we said, “We have an obligation, we have a mission to do something for our entrepreneurs.” And our CEO partnered very closely with me, I talked to him daily on this, and we pulled together a larger coalition across GoDaddy and said, “We need to put our money where our mouth is, this isn’t about GoDaddy. This is about resources and content for entrepreneurs.”
And we reached out to hundreds of partners and asked them to join us. And truly, nearly every single partner we called said yes because they were also trying to figure out how to do it. OpenWeStand.org is still absolutely relevant to entrepreneurs, the partners have continued to grow, the content has continued to grow and so has the community. It’s definitely moved from a campaign and turned into more of a movement for us. Credit due to the creative team and all the folks internally at GoDaddy who said “This could be more” and then leaned in and made it more fast.
This year we saw an outpouring of support for the Black-owned businesses who’ve been especially hard hit by the pandemic. Did you include any specific outreach to those businesses as part of GoDaddy’s 2020 small business initiatives?
We did, and will continue to do so. As we think about the program Empower, that has been a critical component of how we engage with local communities. We have expanded Empower to more cities with more funding behind it. We were doing this before but now we’re doing it even louder and prouder, recognizing Black-owned businesses and calling out specifically their businesses on social media directing traffic into their business instead of back to GoDaddy. We also built several content series that we pushed out to YouTube and Facebook that were highlighting panelists of Black entrepreneurs, and what it meant to be a Black entrepreneur and the challenges they’ve been facing period, not just in 2020.
We went on a listening tour and then we specifically engaged with a handful of entrepreneurs that we’d had relationships prior and helped them push their content out, and brought more Black-owned businesses as well to bring their stories to the world. Our focus on Empower is the most important program for us, and we just continue to dial them up even more.
Andrew Hampp is an entertainment marketing consultant for Brand Innovators and the founder of consultancy 1803 LLC, based in Berkeley, California.
