Slack considers mass media campaign to gain more users

Group messaging platform Slack, founded in 2013, announces that the company is planning to increase its marketing strategy through mass media advertisement.

Its CEO, Stewart Butterfield said that he is planning to invest a total of $250 million in advertising alone in an effort to increase its users.

Currently, Slack's total active users are around 480,000 with its users growing steadily at a rate of 10 percent per month according to Reuters.

Butterfield said that he is planning to change Slack's direction from coping with its current steady growth to slowly start generating profit from the app.

The app has been gaining popularity with its great feature for team communication, but its current users are limited with businesses alone while many people still use Facebook's acquired, Whatsapp as their main individuals communication tools.

Currently, Slack is planning to increase its corporate users by promoting the app as part of communication among staff of a company.

With $3 billion in valuation, the company plans for mass media advertisement can be done without much problem according to its CEO as reported by The Globe and Mail.

Up until today, the company managed to raise a total of $340 million in investment from various companies.

However, Butterfield did not provide any specific marketing strategy that he is planning to perform. He was reported to say that among the advertisement medium that will be used includes print advertising, sponsorship and online marketing.

The company is planning to become the go-to platform and take the Chinese messaging app, WeChat as a model. The Chinese messaging app provides a great platform that even allows users to perform multiple tasks using it including online shopping and perform a job search.

The latest feature that Slack is offering is allowing users to call for a Lyft using the app according to TechCrunch.

Although the feature is not officially implemented through its main feature, but users can access it via developer's "Add to Slack Button". Through this function, users just have to input a simple slash command to hail a Lyft.

Besides Lyft, users can also get food recommendation from FourSquare using Slack by using the same developer's function. Butterfield said that Slack is planning to partner with more companies to bring more function to Slack and making it's the go-to platform and at the same time will increase its users.

Slack relies mostly on its partnership with different companies for its free advertisement and with more money piles into the advertisement, Slack is hoping that its app will get more attention soon.