20 Great Digital Marketing Examples by Fast-Growing Brands

Great digital marketing by fast-growing companies usually comes down to one repeatable mechanism: a launch video, a referral reward, a free tool, a mascot, or a community. The 20 companies below, from Dollar Shave Club in 2012 to Poppi in 2025, each grew by turning one channel into a system. Every entry names the mechanism and the evidence behind it.

Updated October 2026. Originally published October 2024.

1. Dollar Shave Club: one video, 12,000 orders in 48 hours

Dollar Shave Club launched on March 6, 2012 with a YouTube video starring founder Michael Dubin, and the company has said the video produced 12,000 orders in its first 48 hours. Dubin told CNBC the video cost $4,500 to make, as NBC News reported. Unilever bought the company in July 2016 for a reported $1 billion in cash.

2. Dropbox: a referral reward paid in storage

Dropbox paid for referrals with its own product. Starting in September 2008, both the person who invited a friend and the friend received extra free storage. Co-founder and CEO Drew Houston has said in public talks that registered users grew from 100,000 in September 2008 to 4 million about 15 months later, and that referrals made up roughly 35 percent of daily signups at the peak. Because the reward was storage and not cash, each referral cost the company little to give.

3. Warby Parker: try five frames at home before buying

Warby Parker answered the biggest objection to buying glasses online with a home try-on program: customers choose five frames, receive them free, and keep them for five days. The company launched on February 15, 2010, the same day a GQ feature on the brand ran. According to CNBC, Warby Parker reached its first-year sales target three weeks after launch and had a waitlist of 20,000 customers.

4. HubSpot: inbound marketing as the product's own pitch

HubSpot, founded by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah, built its business around inbound marketing, the idea of attracting buyers with useful content and free tools instead of interrupting them with ads. The company publishes guides, templates and free tools that match what its customers search for, then sells software that runs the same method. Its own marketing demonstrates the category it sells.

5. Mailchimp: a podcast sponsorship that became a joke

Mailchimp sponsored the first season of the podcast Serial in 2014, and the ad's wordplay on the brand name became a widely shared joke well beyond the show's audience. The company kept an offbeat, self-aware voice in its advertising afterward. Intuit announced in September 2021 that it would acquire Mailchimp.

6. Blendtec: a product demo turned into a YouTube series

Blendtec turned a product demonstration into a series. In Will It Blend?, which began in 2006, founder Tom Dickson blends unlikely items in a lab coat, including an iPhone. The format gave the company an early brand channel on YouTube, built on the one thing the product does.

7. Red Bull: publishing as a marketing budget

Red Bull treats media as a marketing asset. Red Bull Media House produces video, events and sports content, and the Red Bull Stratos project showed the model at full scale on October 14, 2012, when Felix Baumgartner jumped from a balloon at about 39 kilometers (roughly 24 miles) while the company streamed it live. The brand is the publisher, so the audience does not depend on borrowed distribution.

8. Glossier: a blog before a product

Glossier began as an audience. Emily Weiss started the beauty blog Into the Gloss in 2010 and launched Glossier in 2014, and readers' comments and requests fed directly into product decisions. The company built the audience first and launched products to it second.

9. Gymshark: free product for fitness creators

Gymshark, founded by Ben Francis in 2012, grew largely through social media and by sending product to fitness creators on YouTube and Instagram. In August 2020, the investment firm General Atlantic bought a minority stake that valued the company at more than $1 billion, according to reporting at the time.

10. Chipotle: a TikTok challenge on National Avocado Day

Chipotle launched its #GuacDance challenge on TikTok on National Avocado Day, July 31, 2019, asking users to post dance videos. It was among the first brand challenges on the platform, and it gave a restaurant chain a way to appear in the feeds of younger users without buying a conventional ad.

11. Liquid Death: a spoof ad before the product existed

Liquid Death founder Mike Cessario, a former advertising creative director, posted a spoof ad for canned water in 2017, before the product had launched. The video spread on social media and built an audience for a brand that sells water in tallboy cans with a heavy-metal look. The advertising came first, and the supply chain followed.

12. Mint Mobile: an owner who stars in the ads

Mint Mobile ran much of its marketing through actor Ryan Reynolds, who is a part-owner of the company and appears in its ads, which are written to be shared as comedy. T-Mobile announced in December 2023 that it would acquire Mint Mobile.

13. Duolingo: a staged mascot death and its measured results

Duolingo announced on February 11, 2025 that its owl mascot, Duo, was dead, and CEO Luis von Ahn read a eulogy on TikTok, as TechCrunch reported. In its first-quarter 2025 shareholder letter, Duolingo said the campaign generated 1.7 billion organic impressions and a meaningful lift in new and returning users. Daily active users that quarter were 46.6 million, up 49 percent from a year earlier. On the second-quarter earnings call, management attributed slower daily-user growth to reduced viral campaign intensity in the United States, which shows that a campaign spike has to be sustained.

14. Poppi: Super Bowl ads for a young soda brand

Poppi, a prebiotic soda brand founded in 2018 by Allison and Stephen Ellsworth, bought Super Bowl airtime in consecutive years. PepsiCo then agreed to buy the company for $1.95 billion, including $300 million of anticipated cash tax benefits, according to CNBC. The same report said Poppi's annual sales reportedly crossed $100 million by 2023.

15. Justin Welsh: a one-person business built on LinkedIn

Justin Welsh, a former software sales executive, built a one-person business by posting consistently on LinkedIn and X and selling courses and templates to that audience. His model shows that the same mechanism, a steady stream of useful posts leading to a product, works with one person and no advertising budget.

16. Canva: template pages that match what people search

Canva, which launched in 2013 and was co-founded by Melanie Perkins, Cliff Obrecht and Cameron Adams, publishes large numbers of template and tool pages that match the design tasks people search for. Each page leads into the free product, so search traffic becomes users without a separate sales step.

17. Spotify: turning each user's data into a shareable summary

Spotify releases Wrapped every December, a personal summary of each listener's year that users post on social media. The company supplies the data and the design, and its users supply the distribution.

18. Notion: templates and a community that teaches the product

Notion lets users publish and share templates, and its template gallery and community of creators and ambassadors produce tutorials and setups that new users can copy. The product teaches itself through examples that other people made.

19. Oatly: packaging as a media channel

Oatly, the Swedish oat drink company, uses its cartons as media, printing jokes and blunt copy on packaging and carrying the same voice into its ads. The company went public on Nasdaq in May 2021. The voice stayed consistent across every place a shopper meets the brand.

20. Morning Brew: a newsletter that grew through referrals

Morning Brew, a daily business newsletter started in 2015 by Alex Lieberman and Austin Rief while they were students at the University of Michigan, grew through a referral program that rewarded subscribers for bringing in new readers. Business Insider's parent company bought a majority stake in Morning Brew in 2020.

What do these 20 examples have in common?

The 20 examples share one trait: each company gave people something to do or share, such as watching a video, inviting a friend, trying five frames, posting a dance or sharing a year-end summary. In the cases where figures are public, the results were specific: 12,000 orders in 48 hours for Dollar Shave Club, a rise from 100,000 to 4 million users for Dropbox according to Houston, and a three-week sellout of the first-year target for Warby Parker.

The Duolingo case adds a caution. Management tied slower daily-user growth in the second quarter of 2025 to reduced viral campaign intensity, so a mechanism built into the product or the story lasts longer than a single stunt. The decision for a growing company is to pick the one repeatable mechanism, build it into the product or the publishing routine, and measure it in orders, signups or users.

Related EPR Coverage

• Why Branding Is Essential to PR