How I’d grow Luma

No doubt the future of meetings and events will be digital. We’re already doing it.

Luma came under my radar very recently, and this is a fascinating product.

Luma takes a stab at the excruciating pain of setting a zoom call event and sharing it with your audience. You don’t need to come up with your own landing page to host your event registration form or manage attendees anymore — Luma takes care of it for you.

Luma is looking for a Marketing & Ops lead to grow their product. Here’s how I would tackle the project.

Website

Landing page

Hero

What strikes at first with Luma’s homepage is how clean it is. This is a great way to convey simplicity and ease-of-use — a far cry from the video platform it’s trying to build upon.

I am not entirely convinced that “Host delightful Zoom events” is the right way to describe the product. To me, “hosting” refers to the activity of running the actual event, which has to be done in Zoom anyway.

However, “sharing” your zoom event sounds closer to what Luma actually does.

Moreover, using Luma, the clear benefit of the product is how simple it is to set up my Zoom event to share with my audience. In the past, I would have to create a landing page myself, using Unbounce (or similar), and manually connect it to Zoom using Zapier. With Luma, it’s all done for you with a pre-cooked landing page and Zoom integration baked in.

So, when it comes to the messaging, I would suggest something along the lines of “Create Zoom events in a flash”, “Create Zoom events with Ease” or “Create delightful Zoom events” to re-use the current language used on the page. Something to A/B test of course.

The supporting image displays fictitious events showcasing parts of the platforms using skeleton lines to replace event copy — a nice touch. My opinion here is that they are trying to explain “too many things at once” — ticketing, event page and invitation email — when they should narrow it down to the event page, and only explain the other features further down the page.

CTA

The CTA section is interesting. As you would expect, the “Get started for free” button lets you sign up to the platform first before creating your first event. However, the secondary CTA “Continue as guest” is daring — you can create your event right on the next page, without even signing up.

In the future, every SaaS should move to allow users to test their platform without signing up. This is friction in the process that can easily be removed and will greatly improve conversions.

The difficulty is that we have been conditioned to know that the first step of any SaaS product will be to create an account. How can we bypass this, and clearly explain that they can try the product without signing up?

For Luma, I would only have one main CTA “Try Now (No Sign Up)”

Body

The rest of the page looks fine. I can get behind “a page that elevates your event” and “Sell tickets to your event” — definitely value propositions that would resonate with potential users.

“You’re all-in-one event concierge” is perhaps a bit more debatable. My assumption is that users manage their event through Zoom, which already offers similar functionalities (attendees list and email reminders). This is unlikely to “drive” new users.

We’ll talk about other USPs that Luma can add further below (pro features), but as it stands, I can think of a few more value propositions worth mentioning:

• Integration with Zapier.
• Manage multiple events (Luma creates a nice page with all your upcoming events).
• An editable form, allowing you to ask more questions to qualify your attendees.

The CTA at the bottom of the page — while beautiful — is perhaps a bit weak when it comes to getting users to take action. “What will you host?”, which forces users to reflect and not take action, could be swapped for “Host your next Zoom event now”.

I would also be a bit cheeky with the “Create a beautiful page for your event in 30 seconds” tagline. First, I would change “30 seconds” to an odd number like “34 seconds” to force the user to do a double-take. I would also link it to a video where someone shows you how he sets an event in just 34 seconds. That would be fun to watch and deliver a few chuckles.

In addition to these changes, I would certainly consider adding the following sections to the homepage:

• Success stories: can Luma share successful upcoming event pages of successful users that do it right? What are their profiles (instructor, company etc)? Why do they use Luma? Any high-profile user that they can highlight?
• FAQ: what are some of the recurring questions from prospects that could be tackled at this stage of the sales funnel and increase conversion? (i.e. “Can I use Paypal to take payments?”, “Do I need a credit card to sign up?” etc)

Other considerations

The website is still fairly new, so content is likely to be light. However, here are a few observations that I can make:

• The blog is hosted on a sub-domain: https://blog.lu.ma. While this can be quite convenient from a technical point-of-view, this also can be disastrous from an SEO perspective, as Google sees the blog and the website as two different domains.

• The Stories page puts a face on the many users (and applications) that Luma serves, but short of being shown on the homepage or including a link to explore more, it is a missed opportunity to drive new users.

Product

Luma’s great design and ease-of-use is what immediately strikes the user when playing with the platform for the first time. Everything is neatly organised and immediately makes sense.

Luma’s attention to details is what great startups are made of — notice the “Whoa it’s late” above the brand name, as I was using the platform late at night? 😉

However, a few details could be improved in my opinion.

Referrals

This feature, which sounds more like a marketing feature similar to what Dropbox did in the early days, sits in the middle of the app for no apparent reason, looking like another feature to explore.

This could have been better highlighted at the end of the navigation bar (after Settings) with a slightly different colour or icon to indicate that it is not part of the core app.

The offer is also complex (or perhaps it isn’t — I just don’t quite get it). At this early stage of the platform I would have been satisfied with just “brownie” points such as swag, early access to pro features etc. Your biggest fans are not interested in monetary rewards, but just want to feel special.

Form

Another aspect that I would consider tweaking with the product is the form. I love the simplicity and design but if you insert too many questions, it simply pushes your content — Event Information — too far down the page, which impacts on the experience of the visitor.

How to solve this? A few solutions come to mind:

• A simple button that would reveal the form when clicked on.
• A pop-up (not my personal preference, but this can still be done well).
• Move the form to the right column instead (something you would find on a real estate website for example).

Banner image

While gorgeous looking, I think more can be done with the banner image section. For example:

• Insert multiple images (slider)
• Insert a promotional video (this is a Zoom event after-all)

Email Invitation

Luma offers a neat functionality allowing you to email anyone a link to your event. This is also a smart way to organically grow referrals back to the platform and build a flywheel effect.

However, I found two problems with it:

• The email went straight to spam :(
• The email comes from support@lu.ma. Not really optimal from a delivery perspective. A gmail (or similar) integration to send emails on behalf of the organiser would go a long way to fix this issue.
• The email did not include any reference to who sent the email. If I received this email out-of-the-blue without knowing who sent it, I would certainly not click on the link.

Pro features

Pro features are perhaps for me the biggest opportunity to drive adoption and profits for Luma. Let me explain.

As a potential heavy user of the platform, running multiple Zoom events per month with over 1,000 attendees, Luma is certainly a great product to consider for my business. However, no matter how much I enjoy the product, some of the features are a must-have if I intend to move all my events to Luma.

• Luma branding: this is an easy one — most businesses of a certain size would be reluctant to promote a page mentioning the hosting platform in the header and footer. My main issue however has to do with the permanent Luma Intercom button that might confuse users signing up to my events. I wonder if Luma receives a lot of unrelated enquiries for someone’s event. 🤔
• Company/personal branding: Luma certainly made an effort in allowing some sort of branding on the page (logo, brand name etc), the killer feature would be to allow custom domains. I would also like to have the ability to modify the existing og photo tag that appears on social media when sharing my event — it is currently still heavily branded towards Luma (that being said, I did see some events with a custom image, so perhaps I am missing something).

• Confirmation email: the design currently feels like an after-thought, and larger companies would be reluctant to let those going out in the wild. Short of offering some sort of branding capabilities, at the very least, Luma should offer the ability to turn those off so businesses can use their own automation (Mailchimp etc).
• Tracking: it is currently impossible to know what traffic goes to our event page. A Google Analytics integration would be welcomed. The current ability to add a Facebook pixel to the page is a nice touch.
• Other video platform integrations: Zoom might be the go-to platform for most users, there is a growing demand from businesses to also use Microsoft Teams for example. Since it primarily caters for enterprise clients, I would definitely only offer this integration as a paying feature.

Marketing

Now that product considerations are out of the way, let’s tackle how to get the word know about this awesome platform.

Target Market

So who is likely to be using Luma on a regular basis? I say “regular” because we are unlikely to turn casual users (one-off events) into paying users any time soon. So let’s focus on heavy users who will make the most of Luma instead.

Here are potential users coming to mind:

• People running online classes
• People already using Eventbrite (or similar)
• People running webinars (think SMEs at this stage)
• Marketers
• No-code users (this is how I came across Luma)

I’m certainly missing some categories, but you get the idea. Go where the users are.

I would however differentiate between two types of users:

• the one-man band / casual event organiser: branding is not all that important to them. All they care about is to quickly and efficiently run Zoom events without the hassle to set up a landing page in Unbounce to promote their event, and potentially collect money for their event.
• SMEs: they run events on a more professional level, and projecting a consistent brand (URL etc) is more important to them. They currently have a process to promote their event (perhaps they’re using Eventbrite already), but would like to shift to something simpler to manage and more embedded with Zoom.

Why the distinction? The first group will easily adopt Luma and praise the product, but to a certain extent, will always remain cash-strapped for this sort of service. My gut-feel is that the money is to be made with the second category (pro features).

It doesn’t mean that we should forget about those users, but simply understand that the first group will help you ramp user acquisition, while the second will deliver profits.

Manual Outreach

Luma is obviously very early on its journey to stardom, and may simply not have reached market-fit just yet. Therefore, acquisition tactics should be more manual and focused on understanding the different pain-points of their users.

The best potential customers for Luma are those already using a similar tool for online events.

For a starter, Eventbrite has a list of online events run on its platform. I would reach out to event organisers via email and try to sway them to give a try to Luma.

A typical email could look like the following:

Subject Line: Tired of Eventbrite?

Hi there,

My name is XXX, and I work at Luma, a Zoom event host platform on a mission to create delightful online events for its users.

You seem to be the kind of person who runs online events quite often. Go you!

But do you find Eventbrite hard to use for online events?

This is why we created Luma.

We are a small team working on this project and would love you to give us your thoughts on it. No gimmicks, no sales pitch (did I say the platform was totally free?) — we’re just after feedback from power-users like you to improve our product and serve our community better.

Just hit reply — I read all my emails :)

Regards

We could easily automate this process, but especially in the early days, I would prefer to keep it authentic and carefully select who I am sending them to.

More than user acquisition, we are testing our messaging (what is making people tilt?) and user feedback.

Paid ads

I’m sure Luma doesn’t have cash to burn at this early stage of their startup, but consider this: I could not find any estimate in Keywords Planner for the terms “create zoom event page”, “online event page” or even “Eventbrite Zoom”. So launching an ad campaign targeting those high intent keywords might end up being dirt cheap.

Only Eventbrite seems to be placing ads in that space.

Product Hunt

Luma already exists on Product Hunt, but under a different name: Zmurl. A shame.

For SEO purposes, while a proper redirect exists between zmurl and Luma, I would try to change the name of the page to “Luma” or relaunch on Product Hunt under the new name with additional features.

I would also spy on similar or closely related products on Product Hunt and try to strike a conversation online with users who commented — or showed interest — in their products.

Content

I don’t need to tell how critical SEO can be for a niche product. Instead, let’s take a deep dive at what a good strategy would look like.

First of all, what keyword would Luma like to rank for? Here’s what comes immediately to mind:

• “create Zoom event landing page”
• “Create online event landing page”
• “Host Zoom event”
• “Host online vent”
• “How to sell tickets for online events”

If we run some of these queries into Google, we can find some additional keywords to target.

I couldn’t find any volume estimate for the keywords mentioned above, but Ahrefs provided some information for the parent keyword “event landing page”.

Below are some ideas of what is currently out there for such keywords.

My assumption at this point is that “Event landing page” (and any more long tail keywords):

• Is very niche, so traffic is limited, but highly relevant to our product.
• Is incredibly underserved, with almost no relevant result once you search for “zoom event landing page”.
• Is incredibly easy to rank for.

With a combination of the right content and inclusion on some of the pages already ranking highlighted above, Luma has the potential to end at the top of Google fairly easily.

Twitter

Guess how I heard about Luma? From this very Twitter post below.

What’s interesting is that I wasn’t actively looking for a Zoom event hosting solution because I didn’t know any better — “you don’t know what you don’t know” — as goes the saying. But coming across that tweet started a chain of reaction that made me give Luma a try.

So what does this mean for Luma? Slowly building a profile and striking conversations with relevant actors in the Twitter sphere can work for SaaS products like Luma.

Reddit

Reddit is always a good place to engage with a passionate audience and “get the feel” on some niche topics. And Zoom is no exception with /r/Zoom.

Luma can adopt any of the three tactics below:

• Engage with users and answer technical questions (especially about Zoom event hosting) to appear as a “thought-leader” in the space and get users to check Luma out.
• Share content on how Luma can solve many pain-points of running a Zoom event.
• Simply run Luma ads in the subreddit.

Zoom Conferences

Victor, the founder of Luma spoked at Zoomtopia, an online conference organised by Zoom to present new features to its community (think Apple keynote).

This is definitely a solid move to engage with this highly engaged and relevant audience. I failed though to find similar conferences that Luma could also attend.

Conclusion

Luma is definitely on the right track with a solution in a growing market with virtually no competition (only Eventbrite). The only real risks would be to see Zoom offering a similar solution themselves, or not growing fast enough and find a competitor catching up.

Luma needs to offer a product compelling enough to capture the entire market share (think Uber for ridesharing) and dictate its price to market or be acquired.

Edits

At the time of wrapping up this article, and double-checking Luma’s event page backend, I noticed a few changes:

• They removed the Facebook pixel option.
• You can now (partially) edit email confirmations.