MarTech Interview with Zoe Black, VP of Product Marketing, Vimeo

Zoe Black, VP of Product Marketing, Vimeo shares a few marketing and martech thoughts and tips in this quick catch up with MarTech Series:

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Welcome to this MarTech Series chat Zoe, thanks for being here! We’d love to know more about your time as a marketer and what your journey is like as VP of Product Marketing at Vimeo?

Thanks for having me!

I just celebrated my two-year mark at Vimeo and was reflecting on how much has changed since I first started: Vimeo is a newly public company, my team has grown from 2 to 20 people within the past year, and the frequency in which we release products has scaled significantly.

Video is such an exciting industry to be in; it’s evolving constantly, and I like it because it keeps me on my toes. Prior to working here I ran marketing at ShareThis, an adtech startup, and did product marketing for Yodle, a B2B digital marketing SaaS platform. All very different roles, but each enriching.

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As a product marketer, what are some of the biggest challenges you face in a day to day role, in B2B?

Vimeo has an ambitious mission— to bring the power of professional-quality video to every business in the world— and our products sit at the heart of this. My greatest challenge is also what I love most about my role: our market is large and growing with so much opportunity ahead. But there are new players emerging every day and it’s easy to get distracted. Leading the product marketing function, I’m responsible for capturing the opportunity and our right to win, and then reaching users and prospects in a way that resonates. It’s not an easy job, but I am lucky enough to feel both challenged and rewarded in my daily work.

How in your view can product marketers streamline internal processes and efficiencies to enable better collaboration with the rest of a brand’s core marketing-sales people?

I’m always trying to improve this, especially with a large and distributed team. Streamlined internal processes mean everyone feels empowered to move forward without question or delay, and access to the right information at the right time helps keep things moving. I’ve found a few things to be very helpful in driving efficiencies: First, product marketing uses the same project management tools as the product and marketing teams, allowing for easy collaboration and more transparency between departments, a RACI framework helps to enable cross-functional accountability, and aligning OKRs across teams ensures joint prioritization and focus that connect teams to the bigger company strategy. Lastly, I found that my team has been able to work well asynchronously leveraging our video tools. Video messaging, specifically, captures nuance and complexity better than email, and it’s changed the way my team operates. Not only does it reduce meetings, giving everyone time back in their days, but it allows people to work uninterrupted.

What are some of the top must-have martech tools that product marketers should be more comfortable navigating today?

For competitive analysis, Crayon or Klue is great to track top competitors in the space. For market research, Gartner and Forrester are useful, especially if your company has an enterprise SaaS focus. If you have a sales team, Gong is great for getting a quick snapshot of what’s happening across customer calls, and Salesforce is useful for win-loss analysis.

Closer home, we’d love to know more about your product marketing practices at Vimeo

Vimeo product marketing is organized around several core disciplines: solution (product areas), enablement, growth, partnerships, and pricing. In addition to leading go-to-market launches, we are deeply embedded with product, marketing, and sales teams to ensure that we are bringing the voice of the market into the company, and the voice of the product into the market. Everything starts and ends with the user. And we believe product marketing should first and foremost understand the market by conducting market research, regularly talk to customers, and deeply understand the competitive landscape to identify target markets and personas. It’s also critical that we dig into our ideal customer’s key problems, how our product solves them, and reasons to believe that we solve them better than alternatives. Once we understand who our customers are, we craft positioning, packaging, and pricing to develop our ideal offer. And then, we map out where we’ll reach our target customer by identifying the right channel strategies. As we develop go-to-market plans, we establish KPIs, monitor performance, and feed learnings across cross-functional teams so we can continue to iterate on both our products and our strategy.

Vimeo recently announced the launch of their events platform, tell us more about this, what inspired this capability. How will the future of events and webinars start to shape up with innovative solutions enabling brands in these areas?

Webinars and virtual events are increasingly effective and important tactics for marketers to engage customers— both due to the pandemic, as well as the technology being able to support professional-quality video. But there is so much room for improvement in the experience of producing and attending them. We had been consistently hearing from our users that they faced so many barriers with virtual events. And this was true for both small business owners and marketers who work at huge companies with seemingly unlimited resources. They either didn’t know how to get started, couldn’t afford to do it well, or faced concerns about the tech being unreliable. So Vimeo built a solution, top-to-bottom, with these challenges in mind. Vimeo Events is our cloud-based DIY live production studio that has dynamic audience engagement tools, the ability to record and storyboard scenes in advance, and market to attendees afterward using integrations with platforms like HubSpot, Constant Contact, and Marketo. Best of all, the tech is foolproof.

Vimeo didn’t invent webinars, but what I believe we have done is make a platform that is radically simple to use with sophisticated results. Our hope is that marketers of all kinds will be able to confidently produce more of these kinds of events— and be less stressed along the way— with this solution.

Some last thoughts, takeaways, product marketing tips and best practices before we wrap up!

Always focus on delivering impact— for your users, your team, and the business. If you start with the user by deeply understanding their needs, your ability to craft the right messaging, packaging, and pricing follow. Learn how other teams work and influence them to put the users’ needs first. And stay abreast of market trends and have a pulse on where the industry is headed to inform your company’s strategic direction.

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