Buffer Analyze Launch: The Goals, Plan, Results, and Lessons
Written on 31 August 2019
On July 16, we launched Buffer Analyze to the world. Our goal was to generate 50,000 page views of buffer.com/analyze and 1,000 trial starts within the first week of the launch.
In the end, we generated only 8,788 page views of buffer.com/analyze...
but 1,758 trial starts!
Here's everything behind the launch -- how we set the goals, how we plan and execute the campaign, and what we achieved and learned.
How we set the goals
The last time we launched an entirely new product was in 2016. Since that was so long ago, I didn't feel that the numbers from the launch would be a good reference.
The nearest benchmark I could refer to was the launch of Stories Creator, a free tool for creating Instagram Stories, last November. For that launch, we set a target of 25,000 page views in three days and achieved 14,439.
Given that Buffer Analyze is a more useful product, with more features and even paying customers while in beta, I was confident the launch would generate more attention that of Stories Creator.
So I set the goal of driving 50,000 page views within a week -- simply by multiplying the previous ambitious target of 25,000 by two for the extra number of days.
Then I went to look up the average landing page conversion rate in the B2B space. It is around two percent. Multiplying 50,000 page views by a two-percent conversion rate gave me my 1,000-trial-starts goal.
How we planned the launch
We planned the entire launch using a Dropbox Paper document. The template has been refined several times over the years by my fellow product marketer, Michael Eckstein.
The sections we had in the document were:
- Overview
- Date of launch
- What is Buffer Analyze?
- Who is our target audience?
- Why did we build Buffer Analyze?
- What are the goals for this marketing launch?
- Launch timeline and checklist (for my planning)
- Major Launch Components
- Marketing assets
- Social blog
- Open blog
- PR
- Social media
- Community
- Product Hunt
- Podcast
- Hello Bar
- Advocacy (our support team)
- Data
Here are a few screenshots of the document:
For each major launch component, I would work with the respective owners within the document and link out to a separate document when required (e.g. the draft of a blog post).
How we executed the launch and what we achieved
Launch day mission control
As we wanted to make a big splash with the launch, we used all of our marketing channels.
Content
We published a blog post on how to create a data-informed strategy with social media analytics and emailed our blog list.
It received about 1,500 page views within the first week, and only about 50 organic page views every week. I think the blog post can be edited a little for longer-term organic traffic.
Tom Redman, the product manager for Buffer Analyze, also published a blog post on how we built the product over the last two years on our Open blog, and we also emailed our Open blog list. (For people who are unfamiliar, our Open blog is where we share our company journey transparently.)
PR
Hailley Griffis, our Head of Public Relations, got in touch with her contacts to get us some press attention during launch day.
Social media
Bonnie Porter, our Social Media Manager, organized a giveaway contest on Instagram (where we believe our target customers hang out more often nowadays than other platforms). Three random people who liked and shared our Instagram post to their stories and tagged us could win a free one-year subscription to a Buffer Analyze Premium Plan (worth $600).
While we were unable to track the reach, 115 people shared this post to their Instagram Stories, which felt like a win to me for such a niche contest.
We also shared to Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjQiiPKUERg
Community
We also shared the news in our Slack community and new community platform. Several community members were already testing Buffer Analyze while it was still in beta.
Product Hunt
A week before the launch, we did a soft launch with people who signed up for early access. Among the list was Chris Messina, who is often known as the inventor of hashtags. He kindly offered to submit Buffer Analyze to Product Hunt when we are ready. I sent him all the required information (descriptions, images, logo, etc.), and he hunted us at 12:01 am on our launch day.
We ended the day in the fifth place, after strong competitors such as HubSpot's free email marketing tool and a cryptocurrency product. I felt alright with the result as we didn't heavily promote our Product Hunt post and Product Hunt isn't where most of our target customers hang out.
We also got great feedback and recommendations from the community there.
Website banner
We also added a banner at the top of our homepage and relevant blog posts to let people know about the new product.
This banner was the top referral source, driving about 2,300 page views, which is a third of the referral traffic.
Login page
Because we wanted to share this new product with our existing users too, we promoted it on our login page.
This was the second referral source, driving about 1,000 page views to the Buffer Analyze landing page.
Finally, and most importantly, we emailed the 3+ million Buffer Publish Free users who are subscribed to our product emails.
From past launches, we learned that this group is often the most interested in new products and features since they are already using Buffer Publish. We were expecting most of the 50,000 page views would come from this group.
Except it didn't.
We made a last-minute change just before the launch.
During the soft launch, the link in our email brought people to the Buffer Analyze landing page. People who were already using Buffer Publish told us it was a confusing experience as they felt they were being logged out of Buffer. Mike San Roman, one of our product engineers, quickly put up an in-app page about Buffer Analyze to make the experience smoother for existing Buffer Publish users.
So instead of driving traffic to buffer.com/analyze, we linked the email to this in-app page. While this change caused us to miss the page view goal, we felt this is a much better experience and would help encourage more existing Buffer Publish users to try Buffer Analyze. (About 60 percent of the trials were started by this group!)
We also emailed beta users who were already paying for Buffer Analyze, to participate in our giveaway on Instagram and to share their recommendations on Product Hunt if they wish to.
What I learned
Communications
The key lesson for me was the importance of communications across teams.
It takes a village to execute such a product launch. Product, engineering, support, design, and marketing. Because I was coordinating the launch, I was often the person with the most information. But every team involved needs to know what's happening.
For example, to support our customers effectively, it's helpful for our support team to know when we are sending out all the emails, what's possible and isn't possible within the product, and what's our product roadmap for the next few weeks or months.
And the information is spread across multiple places -- Slack, Dropbox Paper, and Threads (our internal async communications tool). I tried to keep all the people involved in the loop regularly by posting updates on Threads.
It took more time than I had expected but everyone found it useful.
Best marketing asset
The best marketing asset you could have is an email list with an engaged audience.
Your email is delivered to your audience's inbox, which they check regularly, and your reach isn't affected by algorithms.
While it's common for companies to build their list through content marketing, having a freemium plan or free trial is a great alternative -- and arguably better. People who signed up for a freemium plan or free trial are already interested in your product and would be more receptive to new features and new products from your company.
With a freemium plan, we have about seven million free users. About three to four million are active and subscribed to our emails. For this product launch, most of the trials were started by our existing users.
Creativity
It’s easy to default to a template marketing launch plan -- content, email, social, etc. But I think trying something different can potentially have an outsized impact.
For this launch, we experimented with a share-to-win contest on Instagram. The worst-case scenario is that few people share it and we give away three one-year subscriptions. But the best-case scenario is it goes viral. It didn’t go viral as I hoped but it was still a good try.
Limited downside and unlimited upside.
Another thing we realized is that we were mostly marketing to our existing audience (content, email, and social) rather than reaching new audiences. We didn't explore any new channels this time but we have been thinking more about reaching new audiences through partnerships.
Soft launch
Because we were launching an entirely new product, it was beneficial to do a soft launch to a smaller audience before the actual launch. It brought several issues to our attention and gave us time to fix them, such as bugs, wrong messaging, and confusing flow.
For feature launches, we also try to roll the new feature out to a small percentage of our customers to see how they would use it. This also gives us the opportunity to fix any issues before a huge marketing splash.
This launch was very tiring. I remember working long hours the week before the launch. I was even working on the launch video in my hotel in Rome while I was there for a friend's wedding.
But taking what your team has built tirelessly, and sharing it with the world is one of the best things about being a product marketer.