Anne De Aragon Speaks with us About GoDaddy's Canadian Advertising Success

Anne is the Vice President and Country Manager at GoDaddy, a long time marketer, she started out working for Microsoft in customer service before moving into a range of marketing and sales roles throughout her career at Microsoft. After working with many small businesses at her time at Microsoft, Anne wanted to take a step away and start her own small business or at least get into the great things others were doing at the smaller scale, which led her to GoDaddy in 2015, where she became their first marketing director in Canada.

GoDaddy had been known for domains and hosting in Canada at the time, but they wanted to express the full breadth of what they can do for Canadian consumers. They wanted to speak to Canadians in a way they knew would work for Canadian entrepreneurs specifically through the use of humour and famous Canadian icons. “We really wanted to focus in on our website building tool,” she explains, which led them to working with the Toronto Raptors because they represent all of Canada as our only basketball team, and because there were a lot of crossover between small-business owners and basketball fans.

Running with this idea to use the Raptors to showcase GoDaddy’s tool, they created a commercial featuring Toronto Raptor Jonas Valanciunas, selling his mini figurines on a GoDaddy website he had created. You can view the ad here on vimeo. The fun part about this ad, is the website they advertised was a real one you could visit, and you could actually purchase said “itty bitty ballers” while the proceeds went to charity. Genius! GoDaddy got the exposure, and the charity would benefit. “We wanted to have that really immersive experience where you saw it on TV, go to the website, and it was built on the platform that we were advertising, you could get one of these, and you saw it everywhere else,” Anne describes, you were seeing it on social media and all over the web.

As the years went on, GoDaddy and Anne’s team went running with this Raptors idea, using different members from the team and different quirky mediums that would be released in real life for consumers to explore in their own time.

For many, GoDaddy is a nostalgic company because it's the first place many of us bought our first domain, but over the years they have evolved into a kind of “one-stop-shop” for small business owners that makes it easy for anyone to get online. They have customer care guides and 24/7 support for any question you may have, giving anyone and everyone the power to create your own website. GoDaddy makes it easy because you can purchase your domain through them, design and build your website for free through them as well, taking out the hassle of figuring out how to go through the hoops of getting your business online. You never even need to leave the GoDaddy ecosystem to get everything you need and you have the ability to control your brand. On top of that, they offer tools such as e-commerce, email marketing, social media management tools, SEO, and much more at an extra cost.

Anne is constantly looking for new trends and better results for their GoDaddy campaigns. Prior to 2020, her team was having fun and was able to come up with lots of out-there ideas. Since COVID-19, then they have changed their marketing to reflect authenticity and transparency as the hallmarks of their campaigns. “I think with people feeling somewhat overwhelmed with what's going on in the world, they crave simplicity and uncluttered experiences so if you go to check out online you want a really frictionless experience,” she explains, consumers want ease and transparency. Anne shares that lately they have been focusing on showcasing authentic GoDaddy customer websites and businesses rather than the side hustle of making crazy fake sites that are just for show.

Written by Juliana Bermudez