Visme-Marketing-Ebook PDF

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Visme-Marketing-Ebook...

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Marketing Strategies We used to bootstrap Visme to

3 MILLION USERS

CONTENTS Letter from the Founder

3-7

CONTENT MARKETING STRATEGY

01

Intro to Content Marketing

8-105

Process of Writing Blog Posts Step 1: Building the Machine Step 2: Topic Research Step 3: Promotion Other Tactics Infographic Marketing (Guestographics) Guest Posting Videos Educational Resources

INFLUENCER MARKETING & PR STRATEGY

02

Introduction to Influencer Marketing

106-142

Getting on “Best X in The Market” Lists Getting Reviewed by Relevant Creators Affiliate Program Competitor Backlinks Help a Reporter Out Google News Unlinked Mentions/Graphics

CO-MARKETING (PARTNERSHIPS)

STRATEGY

03

Intro to Co-marketing

143-155

Process for Co-marketing Step 1: Come Up With a Mutually Beneficial Idea Step 2: Reach Out to Potential Partners Step 3: Get the Partners Promoting

Last Words From the Writer

156-159

Marketing Strategies

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Letter From the Founder There’s one thing you can’t buy in life – time. It’s our most precious commodity. So I’m not here to waste a minute of it. In this ebook, we’re giving you bare-bone facts and strategies that we’ve learned the hard way – through trial and error, and 18 years of hard work, successes, and failures. 18. That’s the number of years I’ve spent facing struggles and making plenty of mistakes running a web agency and two SaaS products. My journey is filled with successes, while still riddled with failures and painful mistakes along the way.

Welcome to the world of entrepreneurship, my friends. The land of the brave, where you take on risks in uncharted territories and create your own faith.

I started working in 1989, at the age of 13, when I was fresh off the boat from Iran. To help with our expenses, I worked as a part-time newspaper boy for five cents a paper for the LA Times.

A few years later, I moved onto assembling desktop PCs for $5/hour during the summers in junior high before starting my web design agency in 2001 to pay my way through college.

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Visme was just the natural next step.

I started incubating and bootstrapping what is now Visme out of my web design agency in 2013.

We have since grown Visme to a profitable start-up that is now one of the leading cloud-based presentation and infographic tools, empowering over 3 million non-designers in more than 100 countries to become great visual communicators.

Visme is not only used as a replacement for PowerPoint by our users including organizations and Fortune 500s but as the all-in-one content tool for all forms of visual content.

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It’s the perfect marriage between PowerPoint, Google Drive, and graphic design software, taking the core features of each, and seamlessly integrating them together into one easy-to-use interface.

What’s more, we’ve achieved this without a single dollar of outside funding to date, a healthy growth rate and great margins that we continue to reinvest in our tool and our team.

As I see it, we’re just starting to scratch the surface of its full potential. I can only imagine how much further along Visme would be had someone shared this same ebook with me years ago.

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So consider this book a holy grail of proven strategies that have helped my start-up gain traction and acquire over 3 million users to date with next to no budget for sales and advertising.

And that’s exactly what you’ll get by reading it: cold hard facts and strategies written for anyone to understand and implement.

I welcome – if not highly recommend – you to read it in bite-sized chunks in between your busy schedule. Then pass it on to your peers, and make sure they read it too.

Why Did We Write This Book? Our team has spent over 450 hours putting together and explaining, stepby-step, each of the strategies that has worked for us.

Here’s why I think it has a positive ROI:

1. I don’t want you to make the same mistakes that we’ve made. The more successful businesses out there, the more potential customers for us. :)

2. I’m sick and tired of seeing wannabe entrepreneurs selling expensive courses full of nothing but repurposed content that you can find online anyway, instead of their real-life experiences.

3. I’m also confident that by reading this, you’ll also learn more about Visme, the product we’ve dedicated our heart and soul into for the last six years, and Respona, the time-saving solution we’ve built to address the major challenges we faced in building our brand awareness on the web.

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We’re laying out the practical know-how and strategies that have worked for us, the majority of which are low cost, requiring limited resources with maximum ROI.

That being said, not everything will work for you. No two brands are the same, no two products are the same and neither are their audience.

What we’re giving you is the blueprint, and it’s your job to refine and adjust each strategy to fit your needs.

Last but not least, a great business starts with a great product or service. At Visme, everything is about our product, and our marketing is simply the avenue that puts the product in front of the right people.

That’s also the main reason why we’re not afraid of sharing all the specific details of our marketing strategies in the book. :)

Assuming you’ve already gotten your product/service right, I’m confident the following strategies are going to help take your company to the next level.

And now I’d like to introduce one of my close colleagues Farzad Rashidi, author of this book and a key member of our marketing team.

Farzad will take it from here.

CONTENT MARKETING STRATEGY 01

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Introduction Let’s imagine you’re a beekeeper, and you want to start an organic honey business.

Now guess what you need to make honey (AKA money!)? Bees. A lot of bees.

But that’s no problem because there’s no shortage of bees in this world. However, how are you gonna find all of these bees and get them to create honey for you?

One obvious way is to go into the wilderness and set up a ton of tiny traps to get bees. But it’s going to cost too much money to buy these traps, and every time you use them, you’ll have to go out and buy more traps to get other bees.

The downside? Even when you buy traps, there’s no guarantee that they’ll trap bees. There are so many distractions and other shiny objects in the jungle, you might not attract many bees at all.

More than likely, you’ll end up with your expensive bee traps filled with other bugs, and more importantly, empty pockets and a whole lot of wasted time.

You’re probably thinking by now that there has to be a better way.

Well, another way would be to take a step back and think about what bees are looking for.

Instead of focusing on what you want, focus on providing a mutually beneficial relationship with your bees (I hope you know where I’m going with this).

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Almost every single bee is looking for flowers to make honey, so why not plant some bee-friendly flowers in your garden and wait for the bees to find you? After all, these bees are desperately looking for flowers to pollinate.

Over time, your garden turns into a bee attracting machine, and you can expand your honey business indefinitely with very little cost by just expanding your garden.

The bees are happy because they have access to a great source of nectar, and you’re happy because the bees are making a lot of honey (AKA money).

Your business is booming! In nature, this is called a symbiotic relationship, and it’s one of nature’s great wonders.

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If you haven’t figured it out yet, the bees in the example above resemble customers, the tiny traps are paid ads and the garden is content marketing.

The Content Marketing Institute defines content marketing as:

“… a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and retain a clearlydefined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.”

Content has undoubtedly been one of the best ways to create brand awareness for Visme by bringing a huge crowd of relevant audience members to the very top of our funnel.

Over half of our traffic comes directly from our blog, the Visme Visual Learning Center.

I want to take the time here to dispel the myth that content will bring in thousands of paying customers overnight; if you go in with that mentality, you don’t have the right mindset.

Most users, myself included, have never once pulled out their wallet to purchase a product directly after reading any blog post. I bet that you haven’t either.

It takes several “touch points” to generate a quality, sales-ready lead (one might say 6-8 touches). Let your content be the machine that creates those touch points.

In other words, the main objective of content marketing is to increase brand awareness, build trust and patiently create awareness of the need for a

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solution to your audience’s problem.

Also, it’s important to note here that a large majority of new users are those who have previously heard of Visme.

We have no way of knowing how many touch points they’ve had with the product, but chances are high that they heard of Visme through content (either on other blogs or our own).

We publish an average of 2 posts per week on topics relevant to visual communication, design and digital marketing.

We launched the blog in early 2015, and the growth rate has since been incredible. As of August 2018, we had about 250k visits/month, and we passed half a million visits/month in March 2019.

We changed the blog URL from blog.visme.co to visme.co/blog on November 2018 for SEO reasons, so I don’t have a graph showing the whole picture, but you can take a look at the data from January 2016 until the end of October 2018 below.

*Visme blog traffic growth since 2016

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As you can see in the graph above, our blog took a year or two before it got some decent traction. It’s normally true for any content strategy that things are a lot slower at the beginning, but then start growing exponentially if done right.

As of Mid 2019, we receive a total of close to 1.4M monthly organic traffic to our website (blog and the Visme website).

*Visme total traffic growth since 2016

As Nayomi Chibana, Visme’s former content manager puts it:

“The first year took a while to find our footing since Payman [Visme’s founder] brought me on board specifically to write original, “viral” content. Many of our most shared posts, with thousands of shares, were written during this time.

However, we realized that it wasn’t just about creating one-off viral posts (as traffic spikes then dies off after some time), but finding a content strategy that is sustainable over time.

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This is when we started focusing heavily on SEO. I would say that there are still 3 types of content we strive to create: 1. Link-building content: Could be original content with viral potential, such as original data visualizations, infographics; or practical, comprehensive guides, like e-books and long-form resources.

2. SEO-driven content: Content that answers common user questions in a way that is not completely new, but fulfills a basic need within our audience.

3. Bottom-of-funnel content: Content that is more user-focused and targets those looking for a product that can solve their visual communication needs.

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Important lessons from this early phase:

• Plan for the long-term. Create a content strategy according to your users’ needs, not assumptions and the bottom line (although of course, this will eventually play a part).

• Find your northstar. In most cases, it will be the answer to, “How can we best serve potential users with unique, valuable and actionable content?” and “What unfulfilled needs or unanswered questions might they have?” Over the years we’ve tried many different strategies to accelerate the growth rate of our blog (and referral visits to our main website), and some have been more successful than others, but what’s even more important than trying out different tactics is the process we use to generate the content.

We always put the quality of content at a much higher priority than quantity, but this was not always the case.

Back in 2015-2016, we used to publish 3-4 posts a week, but after some internal debates and analysis we decided to try the “less is more” approach by publishing less-frequent, high-quality content, which attributed to significantly better results in terms of both traffic and engagement.

Fast forward to today, we spend tens of hours researching, writing and creating high-quality visuals (often using our own product Visme) to support our articles, and have turned our content team into a machine that produces useful content for our community and promotes the posts to gain traction.”

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Before we get to the process, I should mention that content marketing is not complicated, but it does require consistency, a certain degree of effort and a high level of motivation.

You get back what you put in, so if you want it to work, you should be ready to put in the time and energy it takes to do it right.

The good news is, over the years – after spending a lot of time and resources – we’ve learned what works and what doesn’t, so I’m going to explain everything we’re doing here at Visme step-by-step.

Hopefully you’ll be inspired enough to craft your own strategies.

Process of Writing Blog Posts

Step 1: Building the Machine The most important step in starting and maintaining your content is the team itself.

Very early on – and before I joined Visme – our Founder Payman realized that content is by far the most effective way to drive traffic to the website consistently over time; so he hired our former head of content.

She was one of the first hires at Visme, and her addition proved that content is worth the investment. She was the solo team member of the content team

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for a few months, until we started hiring writing contractors on Upwork.

Finding good writers was definitely the most challenging part. We went through a lot of mediocre ones to develop the network of authors we have today.

We’ve learned to be very careful with whom we hire.

When you begin building a content team, review your potential hire’s portfolio and previous work and give them a small task/project before you rely on them for bigger, more important projects.

The key to the success of your content strategy is to have one of your team members manage your team of writers and connect the pieces together.

This method will allow you to scale your blog much faster by building a network of contractors and designers over time.

It’s very important to have a clear vision of who your audience is, what the purpose of your blog is and what differentiates it from others out there.

As you begin the hiring process, find contributors who are genuinely passionate about the subject matter.

I know it sounds cliché and self-explanatory, but we fell into the trap of hiring good writers that have no knowledge or interest in design, and it was clearly reflected in the poor quality of their content.

Many early-stage founders try to do everything on their own, only to find

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that they become way too busy early on to create quality content.

These founders quickly learn that their content either becomes low-quality or infrequent (both of these are a recipe for the demise of your blog).

Each business, and the obstacles that it faces, is different.

In our case, one of our main challenges is that our audience is made up of non-designers; that’s why they’re looking for a tool that will save them time.

Because our audience doesn’t read about design or visual communication topics, we have to make our content very visual, easy-to-skim and easy-to-follow.

It’s important to first define your product’s target audience clearly, and define your unique value proposition. This will help you create a laserfocused content strategy.

Step 2: Topic Research Once you have your editor hired and your network of contractors ready, it’s time for step two: figuring out what to write about.

One key step here is tuning to your target audience’s needs, challenges and pain points.

To address these needs, we interviewed dozens of real Visme users, and sent out surveys via email asking questions like this one:

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We also designed a few survey forms and sent them over to our paid users (AKA our target audience), asking their background, content preference and their feedback about the product.

In exchange for taking the time to fill out our survey, we offered to extend the subscription of those who participated.

The incentive worked, and we had a pretty decent response rate.

The cost to incentivize participants was worth it, because in order for our survey results to have any significance, we knew we needed at least 30 responses.

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We realized the majority of our users were interested in learning about visual communication and data storytelling, so we expanded the study to get a more granular perspective.

Here’s the survey we used to gain some of those insights.

We also asked participants to leave their email addresses if they were interested in an in-depth, one-on-one interview.

Not only did this allow us to understand what topics they wanted to read about, but it also helped with our product development process.

Here’s a copy of the questionnaire we used to achieve this.

Once you have a good idea about what kind of content your audience wants, come up with general terms people could potentially use to search for it.

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Let me give you an example. One of the most popular features of Visme is the infographic tool.

We ideally want to write blog posts that rank for the most popular infographic related keywords, so that people who are looking for similar tools will find us.

We use a tool called Ahrefs to do keyword research and backlink analysis for SEO.

We found to be the best in terms of quality of data and accuracy, that’s why we’re using it to illustrate most of the examp...