Software advancement to the West: expectation vs. reality on the example of one video editor

Articles on the promotion of IT products, as a rule, can be divided into two categories.

The first is advice to start-ups that are about to launch an ultra-innovative technology on the market to solve one of the most pressing problems of humanity or at least challenge some giant like Google. In the second category - tips on the proper distribution of the budget between advertising platforms, conversion optimization and all that.

In an ideal world, of course, this is exactly what happens: every new product has a high goal and a decent budget to advance its achievement. In the real world, marketers often face much more trivial tasks with a number of limitations.

With this text we want to identify the third category of articles: what to do if your product is not unique, does not solve the global tasks of saving humanity, there are no giant advertising budgets, but you still really want to grab a piece of the global audience.

As an example, we will rely on the results of the VSDC video editor's promotion to the Western market, which we have been working on for the last year, and we will tell which methods worked and which did not.

“Freebie, come!”, Or how best to start promotion from scratch

A product can be three times better than competitors, but it is unlikely that they will take your word for it, especially if you are just starting out or have never been actively involved in promotion. Therefore, the freemium model and in general everything that can be attributed to “free goodies” is still a great way to speed up and facilitate the process of attracting an audience.

Some people think that free = is attractive only in our market. This is not true. Free is equally loved in Germany, and in Spain, and in America. These are not unfounded statements, these are the data of our Google analytics.

The very fact that our video editor offers a fully functional free version without any watermarks on export, in-built ads and other unpleasant surprises helped us organize more than one mention.

How to use free to receive publications?

• First, knock on major publications that publish lists of "free alternatives." Many bloggers update these lists at least once a year, so your task is to inform them that you exist and are worthy of attention. Among the traffic leaders, we regularly keep articles “5 free alternatives to Movie Maker”, “5 free video editors for Windows” on sites such as Techradar , Techadvisor , Makeuseof and so on.

• Secondly, there are sites specializing in the review of only free products. For b2c, for example, Techsupportalert is just a godsend. Adequate edition, active community, guaranteed quality traffic. If you have an honest free program, be sure to knock there.
  

What to do if you are not freemium

Select several publications with a live audience that occasionally publish the so-called giveaways - free giveaways of premium versions with some limitations (in time, technical support, etc.) This method can be especially useful for new projects - the chances are that your the product is approved for distribution high enough, as the editors are interested in daily promotions for readers. You will get a good impetus for further promotion and high-quality traffic.

Do not be greedy! This is visible to everyone - both the editorial staff and the readers.

Everyone wants to climb the tree and not get scratched, but in advancement - especially with minimal budgets - this will not work. Trying to push the "distribution" of the product at a 25% discount, at best you will not get the expected reaction - traffic, installations, word of mouth - because the offer is not so generous, and at worst you will not even be published, because 25% is not interesting .



If you are interested in this method of promotion, here are three sites that gave us excellent results from the distributions:

1. Cnet Cheapskate - distributions of almost any b2c products - both software and hardware.
2. Giveawayoftheday is one of the most popular and rated resources in this category with a very active audience.
3. TheWindowsClub - as the name implies, the audience of Windows users.

NB: in most cases, distributions of the same program are carried out either one-time or not more often than every six months.

Total:

Tricks with free should be used: if you are honestly generously willing to give out something and understand what it will give you.
You should not use it: if you want to cheat and turn on "half measures" - for example, make a pseudo-free version. This will only negatively affect the reputation of the product.

Hiring a Western PR Agency

To get into those publications, where it seemed impossible to get on our own, we hired a PR agency that specializes directly in IT products and publishing publications. That is, the package of services did not include the development of a concept, image, strategy. Only the job of posting in online publications is exactly what interests us.

We cannot disclose the name of the agency, but we can name two reasons why we turned to them. Firstly, he was recommended in his podcast by a well-known Western guru of online marketing. Secondly, it was necessary to pay only for the result - that is, for the articles published as a result. Ideal, it would seem.

As a result, in three months only two articles were published, which, apart from dofollow, did not provide any links. After a while, we understand why it happened.

If you do not have a good news reason, then you have no reason to contact the agency.

What were we hoping for? On the professional relations of PR specialists, creative approach and perseverance in organizing articles - all the more so because the payment directly depended on their quantity. As a result, we realized that there are no magic wands, and the guys at the agency did exactly the same thing as we did - we simply sent the product to relevant bloggers by email.

Total:

Perhaps it’s worth using: if you are just launching a product or have received investments, and / or at the same time you do not have time / skill / desire to distribute this news. The key point here is the news item.
Not worth it: if you don’t have a news item and objectively unique advantages, but you hope that the agencies have some special approach to the placements. This is not true.

Sponsored Paid Publications

There is an opinion among marketers that “Sponsored” automatically makes posting an article useless because no one reads such materials.

We experimented with paid publications in large niche publications several times and came to the conclusion that they’re talking about sponsorship content, and you can still remove it from it. Yes, the traffic from it is noticeably less than from the "natural way" of the received articles. But there are a number of points from which you can benefit:

• Firstly, it’s 5 cents in your seo. Dofollow link on a high DR site - important for those working on organics.

• Secondly, it is a long-term investment. Objectively, breaking through hundreds of letters to the editor and drawing attention to yourself is very difficult. Especially if you are not Google (and you are not Google, do not be fooled). Sometimes a sponsorship review is the only quick way to do this.
  
  However, if the same edition subsequently prepares, say, a selection of services in the same niche as your product, then the likelihood that it will at least be considered for inclusion in some Top 5 is higher than if you had They were not published.
  We had it, for example, with Techadvisor . After a paid review, we were several times included in the selection of the best video editors.

• Thirdly, this is the perfect time to discuss free accommodation options. While you are having a dialogue, say that in the appendage you can write a guest post or column for posting in the same publication. The odds that you will be allowed to try are 50/50. Not all blogs have flexible editorial policies regarding guest posts, and not always the advertising department can and wants to connect you with the editors. But worth a try.
  
  We thus received 3 additional publications in various publications over the past few months.

• Finally, ad placement can be made readable and very shareable if you include the added value. Make the “Sponsored” mark fade in the background of something larger.

You can arrange a contest, again - give out free licenses, discount coupons - anything to switch readers' attention from “advertising”.

For example, in August, we offered 5 free licenses for the PRO-version of VSDC in the review on the SLRLounge , and despite the “Sponsored” stamp at the very beginning of the article, it was actively rummaged and commented on in social media. networks, and we got normal traffic to the site and 5 satisfied users of the pro version. A satisfied user, as you know, is also an investment.

Well, it’s worth noting that, fortunately for marketers, there are still publications that simply know how to make advertising content in a very high quality. In RuNet it is, perhaps, VC.ru and DTF . In Western blogs, for a rising price, this is more difficult to find.

Total:

The sense will be: if you have a budget to pay for the review and ideas on how to get the most out of the placement, not limited to what the editorial office offers.
There will be no sense: if you want to post a press release or something just as boring.

YouTube and YouTube

Strange, but still not everyone believes in this channel of promotion. Like VK, it is considered a platform for schoolchildren. On YouTube, we still spend much less effort than on text content, and yet this site is growing faster than the rest, giving 60% of traffic among social networks and tens of thousands of clicks per month. However, only 10% of these transitions are from our own channel.

What have we done:

Firstly, we revised the channel’s analytics to understand which videos work for our audience, who watches them at all, where they come from and at what moment they close the window. All we publish is short simple video instructions on working with a video editor, but even here there was something to optimize: the regularity of publications (at least once a week), visual design, navigation, and keywords.



We publish new videos on Facebook, on the website in the instructions section and, if possible, embed them in sponsorship publications. As a result, without much effort for the year it turned out to recruit 10 thousand subscribers from scratch.

By the way, an important point here is the human approach. We noticed that many competitors ignore or do not pay enough attention to the feedback for the video on the channel. We noticed ... and decided not to be like that, because leaving a comment today is an effort on the part of the user that deserves to be noticed.

The second step was to find videos about our video editor uploaded by users and ask them to give a link in the description. We were very surprised to find out how many people published entire ten-minute videos about VSDC, but did not include a link to the product.



The third is youtube. We started working with youtube not so long ago and so far we are experimenting with small English-language channels, which have not even hundreds, but tens of thousands of subscribers. However, such trends have already been noticed:

1. Getting a free mention is real. Moreover, some video bloggers, like journalists, fundamentally refuse money and any kind of partnership for the sake of objectivity. So, in the fall, a well-known installation expert Justin Brown (88K subs) included us in the list of the best free video editors for Windows. When we contacted him, we counted on sponsorship, but we were directly told that they did not need our money, and if they liked the product, they were mentioned.
2. If you see the numbers of 10 thousand subscribers, you think that youtuber is not worth attention, you are not always right. Pay attention to the quality of the content and the activity of the subscribers of the channel, because you can stumble upon a growing star. One young youtuber a year ago reviewed VSDC for only $ 100 with 40K subscribers. Today it has over 83K, and this review already has 147 thousand views and 693 comments.
3. When choosing between sponsored text placements and sponsored reviews with youtube, you should choose the second. The level of trust in video bloggers is still much higher, and the average review on the channel, say even with 15K subscribers, gives up to a thousand clicks per month with a conversion rate of 25%. Such a review is worth a few hundred dollars, if we are talking about the United States.

The difference between working with a journalist / text blogger and working with a youtuber is that for the latter, reviews are the main bread. He does not sit on a salary, and payments from YouTube, if any, are tiny. Therefore, free references are the exception rather than the rule.

The good news is that the cost here is quite uplifting, and bargaining is appropriate. The bad news is that they usually have a much longer production cycle. It happens that you have to wait three months for a short insert.

The platform on which you can find youtube from any country for cooperation is Famebit , but using handles also works fine.

Guest posts, blogger posts, that's all

A lot of materials have been written on this topic, including on Habré, and of course, for a reason. Text content is still very effective in promoting, but due to the growing flow of information, every year you have to strain more.

One of the main rules that is difficult to follow is to stop trying to post articles about your product and generally talk about it as if it were in a vacuum. Such publications make little sense for any, especially non-unique products. Bloggers are not interested in writing about it, and audiences are not interested in reading it.

If you don’t have a news occasion, look for contexts, trends in which your product can be successfully entered, and use them everywhere - in Facebook ads, in pitches to journalists and bloggers, in guest posts.

• Speak not about the product, but about the problem that it solves, about the benefits that it brings.
  ( "How to use the gradient to make beautiful subtitles for a video" )
• Think about the combination in which your product may be of interest to a typical user
  ( “A set of free tools for a beginner youtube” )
• Follow the news in your niche and use trends.
  ( “GoPro stopped supporting their video editor! Here's what you can now use to process recordings from your action camera” )

By the way, the last trend has become especially successful for us, because VSDC is now officially recommended in the FAQ on the GoPro website, and The Guardian included our video editor in the list of the best tools for editing video from drones.

Everything, we are already finishing

In this article, perhaps the combination of “news feed” is used too often, but the fact is that in the absence of it the difficulties with promotion begin - making you dodge trying to effectively light up on the venues where your audience lives.

Just in case, we give examples of what is NOT a news item:

• the very existence of the product (to be honest, even the launch of the product does not attract news every time),
• a new version of a little-known product (this applies even to those versions that users have been waiting for a whole year),
• opinion / comment of the founder, who does not have a unique expertise or is not a media person.

In general, when someone tries to offer you promotion through press releases based on these three points, politely refuse. Neither bloggers nor journalists will pay attention to your press release, and for the same money you can experiment with advertising on Facebook or with youtube.

Perhaps you can end with tips on this, but we will gladly answer questions in the comments, and maybe even be able to tell something to the owners of b2b products - because they also have experience of promotion.

gerente_capaz and galkinator