How to launch Pied Piper (Part 2)
Actionable steps for marketers to launch a product
This post is the second part of a three part series. I recommend reading Part 1 first.
Quick Recap
This post is meant to be an actionable guide for launching a product. I’ve drawn from some of my past experiences and learning points to outline the steps I would take to launch Pied Piper.
Pied Piper is a compression-in-the-cloud service that promises to dramatically reduce file sizes. It is used in the live video streaming space for lossless compression of higher quality content, resulting in significant space and bandwidth savings.
In part 1, I’ve covered the pre-launch phase. This second part will cover more to-dos in the pre-launch phase.
TL;DR
- Customize social media content
- Find user communities
- Start content marketing
- Prepare emails
- Build hype
(also discussed in Part 1)
- Define KPIs
- Figure out how to scale growth
- Build pre-launch landing page
- Install tracking code
- Write product announcement
Customize social media content
Claim the Pied Piper accounts on popular social media channels. Also ensure that it shows up well when mentioned on social media. This can be customized easily by adding some meta tags to the site.
Facebook Open Graph properties
Facebook uses Open Graph properties to generate the rich snippet for every link. Here’s the rich snippet for Pagerduty (DevOps alerting tool), Digital Ocean (cloud infrastructure) and New Relic (software analytics). Screenshots were taken in Jun 2015 and may be outdated.
Notice that the share dialogues for PagerDuty and DigitalOcean are highly customized and well designed. However, the share image for New Relic is misaligned, and the share dialogue is missing helpful description. Facebook has a best practices documentation which I find helpful. In particular, read the section on optimizing image sizes for the best sharing experience. Also add FB insights for a deeper understanding on how the content is performing.
<!-- facebook insights -->
<meta property="fb:admins" content="[my fb admin id]"/><!-- facebook -->
<meta property="og:title" content="Data management solution with the best middle-out compression algorithm | Pied Piper" />
<meta property="og:site_name" content="Pied Piper"/>
<meta property="og:url" content="http://www.piedpiper.com" />
<meta property="og:description" content="Pied Piper is the industry leading middle-out compression algorithm that will dramatically reduce your file size and storage by 50%. Live streaming a video? Now stream faster in 4K!" />
<meta property="og:type" content="website" />
<meta property="og:locale" content="en_US" />
<meta property="og:image" content="http://www.piedpiper.com/share.png" />
Use Facebook’s URL Debugger tool to debug the OG properties. This tool can also be used to force Facebook to re-scrap the contents of the site.
Twitter Cards
Twitter Cards is Twitter’s version of rich stories. Twitter Cards is free, and requires only a few meta tags to get working.
<!-- twitter -->
<meta name="twitter:card" content="summary_large_image" />
<meta name="twitter:site" content="@piedpiper" />
<meta name="twitter:creator" content="@piedpiper" />
<meta name="twitter:url" content="http://www.piedpiper.com" />The share image and description for Twitter Cards is customizable as well. For simplicity, I usually let it fall back on the open graph tags which were set for Facebook. There are many types of twitter cards available. I recommend the summary large image card since it places a larger emphasis on the image.
When searching for DigitalOcean, I realized that their Twitter Card was not whitelisted. This prevents the image card from showing up. (This is in June 2015 and may be outdated.)
Compare the Digital Ocean tweet above to the Kong tweet below. The one with Twitter Cards enabled is more informative and engaging.
Use the Twitter Card validator to validate the card and request for it to be whitelisted.
JSON-LD & Schema.org markup
JSON-LD & Schema.org markups are useful for increasing user engagement in Google products. For example, a Google Now card can show up after a successful order for easy order tracking. With Gmail actions, the “Track order” button can be added for emails. Embedding the schema is as easy as adding a JSON-LD script in the body of my email. See the Google Schema documentation.
Google also allows customization of the knowledge graph for contextual information to show up. Use the Structured Data Highlighter in Google Webmaster Tools to tag the site.
Find user communities
Find who the early adopters are and where they hang out. Actively engage with DevOps meetup groups in various regions to forge a closer relationship. This encourages them to spread the word about Pied Piper organically.
Apart from offline communities, also engage online forums and build rapport with the community. They could help to validate your authority in the cloud compression space. Some online communities to explore are Reddit (/r/sysadmin or /r/devops), HackerNews, Stackoverflow, or AWS forums. Note that engaging with online community doesn’t mean selling. It means being insightful and building reputation/ authority around the topic. Direct selling/ advertising on such online communities is generally frowned upon.
Developer advocacy
You can also start your own meetup group. Topics can include cloud storage, video streaming and compression algorithms.
If you have the marketing budget, sponsor some beer at meetups, bring swag to give out (Tshirts, stickers), or give a talk. Showing love to your customers is the best way to turn them into advocates for the product.
Start Content Marketing
It takes time for blogs to build up credibility for a particular domain. Hence, I recommend starting content marketing early. Use Google Trends to figure out the topics which are more popular. For instance, interest levels for “cloud storage” far outshine “data storage”.
“Live stream” also seems to be more popular than “video stream”.
The initial blog content for Pied Piper could revolve around topics such as:
- How to optimize cloud storage space
- Enabling higher quality and faster live streams
- Comparisons and benchmarking results of Pied Piper’s algorithm vs. other competitors, such as Endframe
Start Blogging
Personally, I prefer using Wordpress. The Yoast SEO plugin does an amazing job at making posts visible on search engines. When composing posts, the Hemingway app can help to make the content readable.
Each blog entry should have a key call to action in order to drive traffic back to the main product. Start a mailing list for the blog to capture an audience. You can convert them to paying customers or customer advocates once the product launches.
Keep social media active
In order to appear active and engage online readers, schedule periodic posts on social media. Tools such as Buffer or Hootsuite are useful at keeping social media outlets consistently updated. Make use of BuzzSumo to discover interesting content to share.
Prepare Emails
Design the drip campaign, email flows and draft the email content to start testing them from day 1. For inspiration, Really Good Emails is an amazing repository for email designs. This list of email marketing resources compiled by Autosend is super awesome as well. Some of the key emails I’d make sure to set up are:
Transactional Emails
- Forget Password
- Access Trial & Production API keys
- Subscription confirmation & cancellation
- Request for feedback/ rating of customer delight (Net Promoter Score)
- Confirmation of account settings/ details/ preferences change
Behavioral Emails
- Encourage to test API (Signed up for trial but yet to make test API calls)
- Encourage to deploy to production (Made test API calls but have not converted to production usage)
- Encourage to upgrade/ Special promotion to upgrade before trial expires (Trial expiring soon)
- Retention email (Deployed to production but have not made any API calls for X days)
- Thank you & motivation to invite other users (Positive rating from Net Promoter Score survey)
Newsletters
- New streaming services powered by Pied Piper (weekly/ monthly basis)
- New blog post (for blog subscribers)
Build Hype
Attend conferences
Consider attending tech conferences to showcase an early demo of the product. (See Pied Piper at TechCrunch Disrupt.) Beware: such events require considerable investments in terms of time and money so be sure to reap as much value as possible.
Pull publicity stunts
Live stream videos to demonstrate the technical prowess of the product. Make sure that the event has a large captive audience who fit the profile of the product’s target users. Condors that hardly move and Homicide energy drink stunts may not be as relevant to Pied Piper’s target segment.
Use Facebook’s custom audience to get insights into the interests of your target users. If many of the developers enjoy gaming, launch with a live stream of the Dota 2 Championships to bring publicity and press.
Pied Piper could even broadcast HBO’s popular TV series, Silicon Valley. The show has been known to have a captive audience who fits the exact profile of Pied Piper’s target users. How’s this for some meta? ☺
Test & Check Everything!
I can’t emphasize this enough. Before the launch, dedicate time to sit down and go through the entire product — as a new user and an existing user. Also make sure to check for spelling and grammatical errors on the site. Make sure that there are no broken links, and tracking is functional.
Finally, don’t forget to have a backup plan! I’ve had the experience of a SAAS provider going down a couple of hours before the launch. The team had to scramble to recover our content and switch to a different provider. This probably doesn’t happen often, but save a local copy of your content and be ready to move providers when required!
This post is the first part of a three part series. Read Part 1 of this post, or continue reading part 3.
