How Vimeo Scaled Their PLG Motion to 300 Million Users

Melissa Matlins, VP of Marketing, B2B, at Vimeo, joined Alina Vandenberghe on MasterSaaS Live to discuss the challenges of implementing product-led growth (PLG) on Vimeo's user base of 300 million users.

Melissa shares her experiences around the importance of educating Vimeo’s user base, creating a holistic journey, and looking at attribution when trying to replicate and scale your business.

She is responsible for driving demand across self-serve and sales-assist businesses, and leads a global demand generation team focused on providing users with inspiration to create better video and introducing customers to various ways Vimeo's utility can be used beyond hosting and embedding videos.

Vimeo's Approach to Product-Led Growth

Melissa shared that educating users and creating a holistic journey are key to scaling successful PLG efforts.

She emphasized the importance of looking at attribution and replicating successful campaigns to achieve growth.

Melissa's team focuses on providing inspiration for users to create better video content and introducing customers to the various ways Vimeo's utility can be used beyond hosting and embedding videos.

By showcasing how Vimeo's platform can be used to create interactive videos, live streams, and ad-free video hosting, Vimeo has become an attractive option for creators looking for reliable platforms with a variety of features.

Authenticity Always Wins in Video Content

Melissa believes that authenticity is key when it comes to video content.

Vimeo is no longer perceived as an indie alternative to YouTube, but rather a platform used by small businesses all the way up to the Fortune 100.

According to Melissa, the narrative of why people use video has not changed, even as technology has become more accessible.

People use video to elevate their human expression, to be more human, and to tell stories in new ways to more people.

Marketers need to focus on natural and immediate video formats instead of professional and pixel-perfect videos.

This means staying close to customers and marketing ahead of aspirational customers.

By understanding their customers' needs and providing them with a platform that allows them to create authentic and high-quality video content, Vimeo has become a preferred platform for businesses.

Vimeo's Marketing Strategy for Businesses

Vimeo's marketing strategy is focused on educating existing users and tapping into the existing user community to bring in more businesses.

They showcase the utility of their platform beyond hosting and embedding videos, providing inspiration for users to create better video content and introducing customers to various ways to use Vimeo's features.

Additionally, Melissa's team is involved in cross-selling and upselling applications to provide even more value to their customers.

Businesses are looking for reliable platforms with a variety of features to help them create high-quality content and reach their desired audience.

Vimeo provides a variety of features such as analytics, live streaming, and ad-free video hosting, making it an attractive option for creators.

By creating a holistic journey and looking at attribution, Vimeo has been able to replicate and scale successful campaigns, driving product-led growth for the platform.

Wrap Up

Vimeo's marketing strategy focuses on providing users with inspiration to create better video content and introducing customers to the various ways Vimeo's utility can be used beyond simply hosting and embedding videos.

By tapping into the existing user community and showcasing the platform's features, Vimeo has become an attractive option for creators looking for reliable platforms to create high-quality content.

By focusing on authenticity and natural video formats, marketers can provide even more value to their customers and drive product-led growth for their businesses.

Full Transcript

[00:00:00] Melissa Matlins: We try not to spend too much time [laughs] focused on this is, you know, sales credit, and this is marketing credit. No buyer ever has a single touchpoint with a brand. I, in some cases our support team should probably get credit for deals. It's really about how we create a holistic journey, and then look at attribution when we say this interesting combination of touchpoints is something that we can actually replicate and scale.

[00:00:24] Alina Vandenberghe: Today, I have Melissa from Vimeo with me. Uh, Vimeo is a publicly traded company with a kickass CEO, a woman, and Melissa is a woman. And today it's International Woman Day, so I feel very lucky today to be talking about what it takes to do PLG on such a big user base, 350 million users, um, what it takes to educate that user base as well, and in the end, talking about how authenticity in a video always wins.

Who is buying Vimeo? Why? And what are they getting out of it?

[00:00:55] Melissa Matlins: Mm-hmm, um, so, lots of people still think of Vimeo as like, an indie YouTube. But the reality is is that we work with small businesses all the way up to the Fortune 100, and they're all using video in different ways. But um, the two sort of markets that we target are uh, marketers who are using video to communicate, to engage with their audiences, and thinking about all of the ways that they do that in kinda video-first ways now.

[00:01:24] Alina Vandenberghe: Mm-hmm.

[00:01:24] Melissa Matlins: Um, and similarly with employee comms, people that sit internal to companies, they're also thinking about replacing training programs, onboarding programs, communications programs, employer branding with a video-first approach. Because again, this is how they attract the best talent, and it's also how they cascade strategy to the employees all around the world.

[00:01:46] Alina Vandenberghe: Interesting, because Vimeo is, has been perceived as a YouTube competitor because that's how it started.

[00:01:51] Melissa Matlins: Mm-hmm.

[00:01:51] Alina Vandenberghe: And as a marketer, you have the tough job to change the narrative to sell to a different persona, to a video, uh, team, and to a creative team. How did you do that? What was the journey?

[00:02:03] Melissa Matlins: Mmm, um, I think a huge part of it was realizing that the narrative probably didn't need to change that much. The market changed. So you know, video used to be something that only Hollywood could do. Right? Big production, huge budgets, star filmmaker, you know, the whole thing. Um, then that got democratized a little bit, where suddenly everybody had a, you know, kinda personal camera. Right?

[00:02:31] Alina Vandenberghe: Mm-hmm.

[00:02:31] Melissa Matlins: Now everybody could do that. Then that camera got put in your pocket.

[00:02:35] Alina Vandenberghe: Mm-hmm.

[00:02:35] Melissa Matlins: And then, this huge explosion in the amount of video content changed, but the, why people were using it never really changed.

[00:02:44] Alina Vandenberghe: Mm-hmm.

[00:02:45] Melissa Matlins: Right? They're, they're using it to be able to elevate their human expression, to be more human, to be able to tell s-, interesting stories in new ways to more people. That is, like this, you could say the same thing about the film industry, right? [laughs] They're making Holly- films in Hollywood to accomplish the same goal. Um, so I think it was more about convincing businesses that this was a part of what they needed to do with brands.

[00:03:09] Alina Vandenberghe: Mm-hmm.

[00:03:10] Melissa Matlins: Than it was, you know, hey, companies do Vimeo in a different way. They're actually using it in many of the same ways.

[00:03:15] Alina Vandenberghe: Curious also what are some of the strategies that you've seen marketers using video, um, that impressed you recently?

[00:03:23] Melissa Matlins: I think people are thinking creatively about a lot of different types of video formats now. Um, I personally think that one of the biggest things that marketers have to get over is this idea that video all has to be professionally produced-

[00:03:37] Alina Vandenberghe: Mm-hmm.

[00:03:37] Melissa Matlins: ... and pixel-perfect. It doesn't. I think that there's a lot of opportunities for marketers to use video in ways that are more immediate and more natural. [laughs]

[00:03:46] Alina Vandenberghe: Mm-hmm.

[00:03:47] Melissa Matlins: Um, the same way that we've been watching people in our consumer lives on social channels use video to talk about what they're gonna wear today, or [laughs] talked about, you know, like, you know, a random thought that they had on a walk. It can be that type of content too, because that's what we've now adapted to using in our consumer lives.

[00:04:06] Alina Vandenberghe: What are some of the motions, some marketing motions that your team has been doing recently that are working for you?

[00:04:12] Melissa Matlins: Um, so Vimeo has a really large base of existing users, and that's everything from people who were making a, you know, birthday video to use in their personal lives all the way up through somebody who's, you know, producing thousands of hours of video a month for a large company.

[00:04:27] Alina Vandenberghe: Mm-hmm.

[00:04:28] Melissa Matlins: Um, so, right now, uh, what we've been really focused on now for a number of years is looking at this community of users and looking at kind of the commonalities that we have across these things. The same person, in some cases, who's doing video production in a large company is also making the birthday video. Um, and we're looking for ways that we can tap into this existing community to bring more businesses into the world of more advanced video tools. So, if you're already making thousands of hours of video in a company, what's happening to that video? Are you just, you know, kinda storing and hosting it [laughs] um, somewhere? Or um, are you area that there's also ways that you can take that same video content and remix it and repurpose it and get more utility out of it, ultimately? And those are some of the advanced tools that we're using to market to our existing community of users.

[00:05:17] Alina Vandenberghe: Mm-hmm. So you're educating, uh, them to become better creators?

[00:05:22] Melissa Matlins: Yeah.

[00:05:23] Alina Vandenberghe: I like that. How, wh- what are some of the things that you've tried that are not working?

[00:05:27] Melissa Matlins: Learning has always been that if you don't stay close to the customer [laughs] um, you can really get off your mark a little bit. Right? Um, and so I find that there's always this like, very delicate dance between here's the customer that we have now, and here's the customer that we want in the future. And you need to figure out ways to market just a little bit ahead of where your sort of aspirational customer might potentially be. Um, so in the past if you were marketing to somebody who's using you sort of in a more tactical way, if you go and speak the language of the CEO to that type of customer, you're going to miss the mark.

[00:06:04] Alina Vandenberghe: How, um, how do you approach customer marketing? Since I imagine that a big part of your job becomes synonymous with customer marketing.

[00:06:11] Melissa Matlins: Mm-hmm.

[00:06:11] Alina Vandenberghe: Do you have a separate team for that?

[00:06:12] Melissa Matlins: Mm-hmm.

[00:06:13] Alina Vandenberghe: Actually how, how is your team structured?

[00:06:15] Melissa Matlins: Yeah, um, so we have um, a life cycle marketing team that also focuses on customers and customer advocacy. Um, so within that team, they're focused on, yeah, I would say primarily two things. One is how do we provide our users with the inspiration that they need to, you know, create more, better video? Um, and also, how do we start to introduce video to customers who historically think that the utility of Vimeo kinda stops once you create a video, host it on Vimeo, and then embed it on your website?

[00:06:48] Alina Vandenberghe: Mm-hmm.

[00:06:48] Melissa Matlins: Um, there's so much more that you could be doing with those types of assets. You could be making them interactive, you could be using them in events, and we, you know, we just strive to making a lot of that easier. But most of the users don't even realize that we do those types of things.

[00:07:01] Alina Vandenberghe: I, I, to get back to the other question, how, how did you structure your team right now?

[00:07:06] Melissa Matlins: Mm-hmm. Um, so I sit in global demand generation, so we focus on, um, you know, how we drive demand across our self-serving sales assist businesses. Um, we have regional teams, um, that sit in our major markets within the US and [inaudible 00:07:24]. Um, so we work with life cycle teams and channel teams to execute programs across, um, across the board. So, some of those focused on marketers, and some of those focused on comms.

[00:07:35] Alina Vandenberghe: Is your uh, uh, marketing team also focused on uh, cross-selling up, selling up? Does it get involved in that [inaudible 00:07:43]?

[00:07:43] Melissa Matlins: Yes. Yeah. So, as you might imagine especially in a large company, lots of different users will create accounts. Um, once, you know, maybe 100 different people at a large company might actually have a Vimeo account.

[00:07:56] Alina Vandenberghe: Mm-hmm.

[00:07:56] Melissa Matlins: Um, when you start sharing video internally, that can become really cumbersome with lots of people in different accounts. Um, so we do some, you know, kind of upselling across, selling both within our self-serve base and also once they're on an Enterprise account. Let's say that we have a communications team that's using, uh, the tool for internal communications. We'll also seek to say, hey, by the way, your marketing team could probably also get utility out of the same types of tools.

[00:08:23] Alina Vandenberghe: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Uh, you do the handoff to the sales team when the deal is big enough, or when the, when there's a cer- certain threshold in activities I would imagine.

[00:08:32] Melissa Matlins: Yup.

[00:08:33] Alina Vandenberghe: So, so for the um, customer marketing part in app-

[00:08:36] Melissa Matlins: Mm-hmm.

[00:08:36] Alina Vandenberghe: ... do you have like, a special team, a growth team? Or it's the same life cycle team that handles it?

[00:08:42] Melissa Matlins: Um, it's a little bit of both. It kind of depends a little bit on where the, um, activation is happening.

[00:08:49] Alina Vandenberghe: Mm-hmm.

[00:08:50] Melissa Matlins: Um, but the signal, in some cases the signals that we'll look for are the same. Is somebody already doing sort of X, Y, and Z, and are they ready to take the next step in their journey to use more advanced tools?

[00:09:01] Alina Vandenberghe: What are the metrics that you drive your team on?

[00:09:03] Melissa Matlins: Mm-hmm.

[00:09:03] Alina Vandenberghe: And yourself?

[00:09:04] Melissa Matlins: Mm-hmm. Um, so our, our metrics fundamentally are, you know, pipeline and bookings. Like, that's what we're super focused on.

[00:09:11] Alina Vandenberghe: Mm-hmm, that's surprising.

[00:09:12] Melissa Matlins: Um, and then on the self-serve side, we of course look at, uh, you know, trials, first-time subscribers, and renewer.

[00:09:18] Alina Vandenberghe: Mm-hmm. And to, uh, measure pipeline you measure influence pipeline as well, or direct pipeline?

[00:09:24] Melissa Matlins: Both.

[00:09:24] Alina Vandenberghe: Which ... b- both?

[00:09:25] Melissa Matlins: Yes.

[00:09:25] Alina Vandenberghe: Mm-hmm. And how do you measure attribution?

[00:09:28] Melissa Matlins: Um, it's an interesting question. I would say, um, we measure it because mostly we want to see where do we invest and where do we continue to make smart decisions about what's gonna drive people along a journey.

[00:09:41] Alina Vandenberghe: Mm-hmm.

[00:09:42] Melissa Matlins: Um, and sometimes that's sales, and sometimes that's marketing. We try not to spend too much time [laughs] focused on, you know, this is sales credit and this is marketing credit. No buyer ever has a single touchpoint with a brand. I, in some cases our support team should probably get credit for deals. It's really about how we create a holistic journey and then look at attribution when we say this interesting combination of touchpoints is something that we can actually replicate in scale.

[00:10:11] Alina Vandenberghe: Mm-hmm. I love your comment [inaudible 00:10:12] support team. Our support team is like amazing, and, and we don't look like that kind of attribution. You're right.

[00:10:17] Melissa Matlins: Yeah it's the whole user experience. And when you get really wrapped around the axle on, you know, okay, well where do we attribute this to? It's often not the whole story of how a customer actually came to you. If you ask somebody on a form how did you find out about us, it's never going to be what your marketing system tells you it is. Never, never. The performance marketing team will say great, they responded to our search ad and the answer that they'll give you is, I found your name in a community-

[00:10:48] Alina Vandenberghe: [inaudible 00:10:48] [laughs].

[00:10:48] Melissa Matlins: ... of marketers, I saw a thing on social, you know, so-and-so from your company mentioned ... like that's always what it is.