You’re a product marketer and it’s five weeks away from a major launch.
The office is buzzing with excitement and tensions are rising by the day. Your marketing team is busy prepping all the essential pieces in your marketing launch toolkit, from email communications to paid advertising to PR initiatives and beyond.
But something’s missing.
Your website needs updating to reflect the launch of your new feature or product… and then you need somewhere to send your paid campaign traffic.
If you’re relying on your developers to build a new page for you, it could take weeks (or longer). Besides, shifting your devs’ focus away from the product launch probably isn’t the best use of their time. Adding work to their plates could mean having to delay going to market (and miss your launch deadlines) — and that could be deadly for business.
The marketing team at Vimeo has experienced this stress first-hand. Garrett Bugbee, Manager of Search and International Marketing, recently described to me how product launches have put a strain on his team in the past:
We had a huge creative backlog, especially during product launches. We relied on our devs to build our pages for us. It was a slow and painful process, from design to the kick-off meetings and then actually waiting for it to be built and QA’d… It was a massive issue.
We had a huge creative backlog, especially during product launches. We relied on our devs to build our pages for us. It was a slow and painful process, from design to the kick-off meetings and then actually waiting for it to be built and QA’d… It was a massive issue.Fast forward to today, Garrett and his team have removed many of these pre-launch bottlenecks. When it came time to launch their new product, Vimeo 360, they’d mastered the art of going to market with new products on time and on budget.
So what’s Vimeo’s secret recipe to making every product launch a smash hit?
Garrett teases at it in the video below. Have a look, or read on for the blueprint to their success.
Make every product a smash hit: Watch this video to learn how Vimeo removed bottlenecks from their launches so they could go to market faster.
Meet Vimeo and their latest product, Vimeo 360
As one of the internet’s most popular video sharing websites, Vimeo attracts more than 100 million unique visitors per month and is home to over 50 million creators worldwide (and counting).
As their popularity increases so too does the competition.
In order to stay on top, Vimeo has to evolve and innovate. With at least four new video products or features being introduced to the platform each year, a failed launch for Vimeo could mean a loss of thousands (dare we say millions) in company dollars, so there’s infinite pressure to get it right — every time.
You can imagine then, the pressure that Garrett (the hero from our intro) must have felt when he and his team set out to launch Vimeo 360, a new product that allows users to upload 360-degree videos in stunning high quality:
Because some of Vimeo’s competitors were already dabbling in 360-degree video, Garrett knew they had to launch quickly — and with a splash:
It’s a tool that other platforms have already, and it’s something that we wanted to give our creators so they have a new venue for expression and a new way to produce, make and showcase content.
Removing bottlenecks from the campaign launch
Vimeo’s main goal for the 360 launch was to drive engagement, measured by new subscribers and 360 video uploads.
While part of their homepage was to briefly feature Vimeo 360, Garrett and his team wanted to build out a page to better explain the product and all the amazing things it could do, including:
- An example of a 360 video for prospects who were not yet familiar with the technology (shown above)
- A showcase of 360 video content created by some of Vimeo’s power users
- A detailed breakdown of features that make Vimeo 360 stand a cut above the rest (high-quality resolution, intuitive controls, powerful integrations)
- A promo for their 360 video school, which teaches creators of all stripes to make better videos
That’s a lot of heavy lifting for a website that is also serving a general audience, so Garrett and his team turned to Unbounce to create a click-through landing page for their campaign:
Garrett’s team used Unbounce design features like parallax scroll to appeal to his visually-inclined user base. Click to view full-length landing page.
Beautiful isn’t it?
Garrett explained why empowering his marketing team to build this page themselves was key:
The big benefit here is the flexibility we have to produce a marketing-specific landing page without the help of our engineering team.
Our devs get to focus on building a great product, and we can focus on designing a page built specifically for marketing purposes without pulling our front-end devs away from their work. We can go to market a lot faster by parallel-pathing both the product build and the page build.
The best part? The campaign landing page that the Vimeo marketing team created drove engagement, which was the campaign goal.
Garrett explains:
[Using scroll mapping,] we saw people scrolling all the way down the page, interacting with the content throughout. It really achieved the goal which was to drive engagement, not just with our paid subscribers but with everybody on the platform.
Better performing paid and social advertising campaigns
A beautiful, engaging landing page is well and good, but at the end of the day, your boss wants hard numbers that show that your campaigns performed.
Since adding dedicated campaign landing pages to their marketing launch toolkit, Vimeo has also seen better results for their paid and social advertising campaigns.
Some paid ads created by Vimeo for Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, the Google Display Network and DoubleClick Bid Manager.
Before Unbounce, Garrett humbly admits that they were letting their website get in the way of their campaign success:
Before Unbounce, we simply directed prospects to a page [on our website] with a pricing grid, and that’s pretty extreme to just throw that in someone’s face right away.
But now that Vimeo is sending paid traffic to product launch-specific landing pages like the one above (as opposed to generic pages like their /upload/ page and homepage), their campaigns are kicking serious butt. Check out these impressive results:
- 730% increase in subscribers from 360-related paid keywords
- 4529% increase in total video uploads from 360-related paid keywords
Bonus: Dedicated landing pages aren’t only bringing Vimeo better campaign results — Garrett explained that they’re also improving user experience and Google’s relevance score:
Unbounce has allowed us to target specific landing pages for top keywords, which is a huge win. I think that this one of the best use cases for Unbounce.
You can use Dynamic Text Replacement or make specific pages, and you just target your top terms, it’s highly relevant… I have complete control of that experience and that’s the marketer’s dream.
Unbounce’s Dynamic Text Replacement (DTR) feature gives Garrett and his team the capability to swap out text on their landing page — so that their ads and landing pages present exactly what visitors searched for.
That level of message match across the entire buyer journey is key to strong PPC performance.
When prospects click on an ad and see a landing page with a headline that matches exactly what they searched for, they’re reassured that they’ve made a “good click” and are more likely to stick around (and even convert) — and that in turn positively impacts Quality Score in AdWords.
What you can learn from Vimeo’s success
If there’s one thing we’ve learned from Vimeo’s 360 campaign, it’s this:
Yes, product launches are a lot a pressure, but they don’t have to be painful — not when marketing teams are empowered to move nimbly without bottlenecks.
According to Garrett, it’s all about focusing on your core competencies:
With Unbounce, we can now generate marketing-specific landing pages quickly and easily and translate those across different languages.
It takes the pressure off our devs and engineers, and lets them focus on what’s core — what’s vital to the business — which is building video tools for creators. We handle the marketing side.
By making Unbounce landing pages an essential part of your marketing launch toolkit, not only can you gain the competitive edge by going to market faster, you’ll also:
- Free up dev resources so they can focus on building and innovating your product
- Convert more prospects by sending paid traffic to relevant, high-converting pages
- Create beautifully designed pages that showcase your product in the best light possible
- Make your boss really happy by saving the company precious time and money
And that folks, is why you should NSAPLCWADLP… Never Start A Product Launch Campaign Without A Dedicated Landing Page. 😉