Over the past month, I’ve been doing a lot of efforts to drive as much traffic as possible to my SaaS. Lately, I found a strategy that works for me, and I’d like to share it with you.
A Quick Backstory about Clippulse
Clippulse is a browser-based platform that empowers anyone to create eye-catching promo videos for their products, without needing any video editing skills.
It all started with my personal struggle. Some time ago, I wanted to create a promo video for the product that I was working on at the time. I won’t go into much detail here, but I didn't know much about video editing and money was tight. I spent around a month trying to figure things out and the results were mediocre at best.
Fast forward to 27 May 2023, I announced Clippulse and validated the idea with a Pre-Sale offer. After a month of building the MVP, I launched it in public beta on 16 June 2023. Since then, the app had 2,000 unique visitors, 239 of whom created an account, and eight turned into paying customers.
How It Happened
My main marketing channel is Twitter and I’m trying to be as active as I can. I didn’t have a big audience when I started - 645 followers at the moment of writing this article and around ~400 followers before starting to work on Clippulse.
During the building process, I experimented a lot and created a lot of videos - and some of them turned out pretty good, so I decided to share them with my audience. I didn’t think that they would go viral and get a lot of engagement. I just wanted to get some feedback and hear what people think. But I had a pleasant surprise! Every video that I shared got at least 3k impressions and a lot of engagement. The one that performed the best to this date was the one that I shared when I publicly launched the product. It got 9.1k impressions, 48 likes, and 8 retweets. This was a lot for a small account that had under 500 followers at the time!
So, How Does It Work?
As I kept sharing videos and getting a lot of traffic from Twitter, it got me thinking that it could be an actual marketing strategy, so I doubled down on it. Since launching the product and to this day, 904 people came in from Twitter, and 136 registered an account. The difference in traffic from the previous image was due to the Product Hunt launch, which I will talk about shortly.
Most of the content on Twitter is text-based content. So, when people see things moving on their screen, they usually get interested and stop there for a second. It stands out. It's like a shiny toy in a box of grey legos, if you will. Of course, other things matter as well, such as timing, engagement in the first few hours after tweeting, and the other changes that Elon’s making to the algorithm. But the point is that sharing an engaging video has a higher chance to succeed and go viral than sharing plain text content.
An important mention here is that different types of videos resonate differently with audiences. I've tried product promo videos and typography-style videos that play with fast-paced text and images, in the style of Apple's promo videos (there is a good example here). The latter tends to perform better for my audience, but it's crucial to remember that what works for me might not work for you and vice-versa. Other types might perform better for you and your audience, so you need to experiment for a bit and measure the results.
The rule here is to ensure your video is engaging. It should captivate the viewer and pick its interest. Make it dynamic. Use animations, and highlights, play around with different colors, and timers, and make creative effects (like flickering texts, or images on top of each other). It’s all about creativity at this point. There are a lot of great promo videos out there that you can get inspired by. Find the things that you like and try to put them together in your video. My main focus while building Clippulse was to allow people to express their creativity. It’s not the “we only do this kind of video” platform.
Practical Example - Clippulse’s Launch on Product Hunt
One of my most successful video campaigns was during Clippulse's Product Hunt launch. It was a week-long campaign involving two videos, shared in an interval of one week. There were 2 goals with this campaign: to get people notified of the launch and to get as many upvotes as possible during the launch day. So I created a video for each of those.
The first video, released a week before the launch, gained 6k impressions and resulted in 53 people clicking the "notify me" button for the launch.
On the launch day itself, the second video wasn't as popular - most likely because of the spam that was made throughout the day - but still managed to gather 4.2k impressions. We got #6 Product of The Day on a pretty competitive day and managed to get 243 upvotes. Of course, there were other strategies used here, but I believe that sharing those videos had a big impact on the end result, as they reached over 10k people (combined) and resulted in a lot of traffic and most likely some upvotes as well (but unfortunately there is no way to track it).
When & Where to Share
In this article, I talked mainly about Twitter and strategies for this platform because that’s what I am mainly using and focusing on. But there are a lot of other channels out there that are worth exploring, such as Youtube, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, or even Facebook, depending on where your target customers hang out the most. Another common use case would be for creating video ads, which can be shared among all of those platforms.
As for when to share them, there are a lot of use cases. Some of the most common include product launches, new features, or any other important announcements about your product.
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