Launched in 2004 as a small community of filmmakers looking to share their creative work, Vimeo has since expanded into an enormous worldwide video-sharing platform with millions of users. And if you’re not promoting your brand or promotions on Vimeo, you could be missing out on more than just brand awareness.
Why Vimeo advertising can’t be ignored
Seventy percent of Vimeo’s user base is an international audience. Couple that with 25 million monthly members, 170 million monthly viewers, and 715 million monthly views; and it’s easy to see why Vimeo is experiencing 80% year over year global growth. With such impressive numbers and the opportunity to reach a global audience, Vimeo should be among the top of your list of potential video advertising platforms.
YouTube may have over 1 billion users and the top-of-mind awareness among the general population, but Vimeo shouldn’t be ignored.
Using their powerful video marketing and analytics tools, Vimeo allows you to:
- Create one-of-a-kind videos by working with other professionals
- Share, collaborate, and review videos with other members of your marketing team
- Store, organize, and manage all of your videos in one secure place
- Embed and share videos on other sites
- Generate leads with clickable CTAs or an email capture feature within your video
- Track video performance, and measure and analyze viewer engagement
Pavan Bapu, Co-Founder and CEO of Gramovox, can attest:
The Vimeo team created a video platform custom-tailored for the professional marketer. Everything from the hyper-customizable video embeds to the editorial review options make Vimeo the ideal video platform for marketers.
Vimeo vs. YouTube
Although YouTube is the world’s second most popular search engine, there are a number of reasons marketers may choose to advertise with Vimeo instead:
Vimeo is a niche community
Vimeo’s niche audience is significantly smaller than YouTube’s grand following, but there’s a silver lining: easier targeting for you. Vimeo is largely characterized by artistry, music, and filmmaking, resulting in increased supportive engagement. In fact, according to Vimeo Guidelines, only constructive, respectful feedback is permitted in the comments sections below the videos.
Vimeo videos are high-quality
The quality of Vimeo videos are higher than that of many YouTube videos — something that Vimeo prides itself on — which makes it a particularly valuable platform for the creative users and brands in these niche communities. In addition, while YouTube displays the site’s most popular videos, the Vimeo homepage promotes human-curated “Staff Picks” chosen for their high production value:
Vimeo is ad-free for some members
Vimeo does not support pre-roll, post-roll, or overlay ads. Without distracting or irrelevant ads before, after, or on top of your video; viewers are less likely to click away, and more likely to better focus on your content.
However, depending on the type of account a member has, Vimeo does allow limited display advertising on some Vimeo pages:
- Vimeo Basic members (and viewers not logged in) will see banner ads on all Basic and Plus members’ pages, and ads will appear on their pages.
- Vimeo Plus members do not see any banner ads, but ads will appear on their pages.
- Vimeo PRO and Business members do not see any ads, nor will any ads will appear on their pages.
Conversely, YouTube makes their money with ads — so you see all kinds of ads everywhere on YouTube, whereas Vimeo makes money on membership signups.
Vimeo offers a more customizable video player
This is one of the most sought after benefits of Vimeo advertising. By signing up for Vimeo Pro or Vimeo Business, brands can embed their own logos to the video player. While on YouTube, this capability isn’t possible because the video player always displays the YouTube logo. Vimeo Business also allows you to create a custom outro for your video, containing a CTA or email capture feature.
Deciding on a video streaming platform to advertise with depends on your brand’s specific goals and focus. If your goal is the maximum reach, no matter who they are or what their interests, YouTube is probably the better option. However, if you’re looking to target a more specific audience with a focus on increased engagement, Vimeo is your platform of choice.
No matter what you choose, keep in mind that your video ads are only part of the conversion process. To generate conversions for your promotions, it’s best to send them from your video ad to a dedicated post-click landing page.
So let’s see how Vimeo ads can help increase post-click landing page traffic, and what brands are doing to accomplish this.
How to drive post-click landing page traffic with Vimeo ads
It’s worth mentioning that Vimeo doesn’t identify specific ads like other platforms. For example, Twitter uses Promoted Tweets, Facebook and Tumblr use Sponsored Posts, Pinterest uses Promoted Pins. But for brands to advertise on Vimeo, they must do it by simply creating and uploading a video to the platform. There is no identifier such as “promoted,” “sponsored,” or “ad.”
Now let’s take a look at how brands use their video ads to promote on Vimeo and link to their post-click landing pages.
Video description link
One of the most common ways to use Vimeo ads to drive post-click landing page traffic is including your post-click landing page link in your video’s description. When you do this, make sure the description and URL are short so viewers can read the full link, and intriguing enough for them to click-through.
Here’s how Campaign Monitor does this in their Vimeo video ad:
Once viewers click the link in the description, they are taken to this click-through page to begin creating email marketing campaigns:
Embed clickable CTAs
Embedding a clickable CTA within your video is another, newly developed option to send viewers to your post-click landing page. These work similar to YouTube annotations in that viewers can click your desired link and visit your external (post-click landing page) link. Click through here to watch a step-by-step tutorial how to do this:
The key difference between YouTube’s annotations and Vimeo’s clickable CTAs is that Vimeo only offers this link function as a video outro. YouTube annotations can be placed at any desired point in an uploaded video and offer “end screens” with link functionality as well.
Vimeo On Demand
Vimeo doesn’t allow ads on their platform (aside from a few exceptions) primarily because they want users to have a more enjoyable experience. But they also believe that using ad-supported videos to profit is extremely ineffective.
For example, research shows that people earn an average of $2 per thousand views on YouTube; even less if you’re targeting within the U.S. and most of your views are international. Knowing this, you would need to acquire well over 2 million ad views per month to have a viable business and earn an average family income (about $54K per year). And that’s not even considering all of the expenses needed to create a quality, professional video ad.
Instead of relying on ad-supported video, Vimeo developed another way for their members to make money using the platform: Vimeo On Demand.
Vimeo On Demand enables creators to earn money by selling subscriptions for their video series or premium videos (feature films, long episodes, stand-up specials, etc.). The tool allows for complete flexibility and control, providing users the option to sell to anywhere in the world, at whatever price they choose (the average purchase price for a subscription is $10), for however long they want.
In comparison, while people are earning an average of $2 per thousand ad views on YouTube, creators on Vimeo are earning an average of $276 per thousand trailer views.
Using Vimeo ads to drive post-click landing page traffic
Although Vimeo’s platform doesn’t have the same global reach as YouTube, Vimeo ads can be extremely effective if your audience is active and engages on the platform.
Vimeo ads are only half of the equation, though, because once visitors arrive on your page, you need to convert them on your offer — and your website or generic product page won’t accomplish that. To get the most out of your Vimeo advertising, send your Vimeo traffic to dedicated post-click landing pages designed to convert.
Create your next beautiful post-click landing page with Instapage in minutes by starting from scratch or taking advantage of our fully optimized templates. Sign up for an Instapage Enterprise demo today.