How to get started with marketing if you are self distributing

Steve once worked at and then left Vimeo to move to Michigan, get married, have a kid, and join VHX, which then became part of the Vimeo family, and now he's back. Life, man.
Stephen Niebauer
Using Vimeo OTT tools to help you, it's possible to spread the word about your work without a large marketing budget.

Build your own distribution business from scratch…marketing department included. Vimeo OTT features help you build your products creatively, market with agility, engage your audience, and sell sustainably.

Unlock the power of Bonus Content

Stripped

Feature documentary Stripped is selling approximately 30 digital products on their Vimeo OTT-powered website, from individual interviews at $2.99 each to a Deluxe Edition with over 16 hours of content for $49 dollars. Without direct distribution, they had no option for monetizing bonus content.

Stripped used:

Spur sales with Coupons and Promos

Girl Rising

Market with agility: Girl Rising partnered with Gathr to organize a crowd-sourced national theatrical tour in conjunction with their release. By the time they were ready to sell from their website, they had accumulated a list of thousands of supporters who had participated in Gathr screenings.

With Vimeo OTT, they were able to create a coupon campaign to incentivize word-of-mouth promotion of the film. To determine the most effective strategy for their audience, they first created five different types of coupons and corresponding messaging to test with a segment of their mailing list. We learned from this experiment that coupons that were both time- and use-limited — as in, coupons that could only be redeemed a specific, finite number of times, and expired after a number of days — were far and away the most effective motivation to get their audience to share and to entice others to buy.

If you’re selling a subscription you can achieve the same effects of a coupon campaign by using the promos tool.

Score a spike in traffic with Flash Sales

IGTM

Create promotions for special occasions, special target audiences, or bring new attention to old titles with a Flash Sale — a coupon code or promo code available for a very limited time. We see flash sales cause an average of 4 times greater conversion rates and 6 times greater week-over-week sales.

Convert your YouTube audience to customers

Use your YouTube description

Tell thousands of fans where they can buy the film. Include the URL for your online storefront directly in your YouTube description.

Bring viewers to your site with YouTube Cards

We support YouTube Cards, so you can create pop-up notifications directly in your trailer to tell viewers about your website, flash sales, and other titles. Link the card directly to your website or purchase page. 

Case study: Aziz Ansari

Vimeo OTT publisher Aziz Ansari posted six 2-minute clips from his hour-long comedy special “Dangerously Delicious.”

Takeaway: Create more ways to find you by adding trailers, clips, and teasers

Each clip Aziz posted received between 370,000 and 1.2 million views. In the description of each video, he included “Buy Aziz’s new hour stand-up special for only $5 at azizansari.com. Download or stream. Uncensored. Uncut” with a clickable URL to his Vimeo OTT-powered website. At the beginning of each video was a card calling out that same information. Within two months of posting these clips, Aziz’s YouTube channel had a sales conversion rate of over 20%.

Be everywhere with embeddable trailers

Vimeo OTT Twitter Card

Whenever you tweet a link to a Vimeo OTT site with a trailer, regardless of the URL, a sales-optimized player automatically appears in your tweet. Followers can easily purchase or Wishlist your title.

Sales-optimized embeddable player

Embed the trailer across multiple websites, blogs, and social media and make it easy for people to discover and purchase your work.

Use your data

Vimeo OTT provides publishers with the most robust traffic & sales stats possible, plus complete customer data.

  • Real-time customer information including customer email addresses
  • Daily traffic analytics and referrers
  • Robust customer behavior data
  • Support for complete Google Analytics integration

Don’t ignore it! Use your Vimeo OTT dashboard to see where your audience comes from and what they want. Make informed marketing moves and talk to your customers often.

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