Category: Explainer Video

“The purpose of a storyteller is not to tell you how to think, but to give you questions to think upon”- Brandon Sanderson People love watching films as every film has a story to tell, a story which people can believe and a story which entertains them. Marketers use the same idea to create explainer videos to have people hear their message. The message can vary depending upon the needs of the company but a good story must have a clear message relevant to the target audience besides engaging them. Most of the time, marketers want to use multiple videos to interact with the consumer, which I feel is definitely a great option provided you are getting good response. Prefer using A/B testing to know what kind of videos work best for your audience. Use video metrics to know the effectiveness of your content. Video metrics like play rate, player load time, play-through rate, keyword effectiveness play an important role to find out the effectiveness of your video. On the contrary, there are many explainer videos with good scripts that float online without grabbing the attention of the viewers. Such videos are lost in the crowd as they fail to create an impact. Besides having a good script, there are many other components that add sheen to your videos. Having good animation, drawings, music effects and voice over are important for a good presentation. This brings us to the point that the production of explainer videos must be given to a professional production. There is a lot at stake. While a good video increases awareness and conversion rate, a bad video may deform your brand image. We share with you five important tips for a good storytelling through explainer videos: Keep them short and snappyExplainer videos just can’t be long. Your prospects will never listen to you if the length of your video is long. Getting them to watch your video is a tough task. Why should they listen to you? Neither do they know you nor are they interested. In such dire situations, breaking the ice becomes difficult.To deal with such circumstances, focus on the introduction of the video so that they are willing to watch it further. A short video will be seen entirely. An ideal explainer video should not be more than 2 min. Within this limited timeframe, carefully choose your words. Do remember to insert keywords relevant to your product besides relating to the story. Use quick transitions and interesting visual movements to keep the customers engaged. After watching a compelling video, 80% of the visitors look for more information on your website. Moreover, a shorter video is easy to remember without confusing the audience with too much information. Avoid jargonsAs a businessman, you would love to use jargons that specifically describe your product and business operations. Probably, you think that people will be impressed and get curious by the typical words you use and feel that you are the only company who is giving actual information about the products. I am afraid to tell you, you will find yourself in a la-la-land.A marketer will think differently. What’s the point in using jargons when it does not connect you with the customer? All businesses are alike for customers. There are some who understand your business and probably your jargons too. But what about others that are completely unaware of your product and business. To cater to a wider audience, you must use simplified language of explanation. Both your voice over and text used in the video should be as simple as possible. Let your video do the talkingLimit the use of text in the video as reading text in a video is a big let-down for people. Furthermore, text can have different interpretation. Videos let the ideas flow through creative drawings and animation effects. And people grasp more from what they see rather than what they read.An explainer video should be able to show what your business can do for the people and why they should prefer you over competitors. The reason you decide to create explainer videos is to make your marketing message more effective. Despite having an audio narrative, it is important to use visual narrative. Don’t say too much; let the video explain certain things. Moreover, people tend to remember motion pictures lot more than static photos. Do not place static facts and figures in your video. Use animation or transition effects if you really wish to place it. Avoid using infographics as it crams the screen space. Your video should not look like a boring power point presentation. Keep it dynamic throughout the play time. Clarify the objective A good story is incomplete without objective. Explainer videos give you a limited time to express yourself. But it certainly does not make sense to fill in as much information as possible. Do not get mixed up with your objective. We would like to explain this with an example:Suppose you launch a new product in the market. And you are given the task of devising a video marketing plan through explainer videos for different sales stages. The chronological order for your objective should be as follows. To create awareness for your brand, to educate the consumer, respond to their queries and then persuade them to buy your product. You will definitely need different explainer videos for serving different objectives. To create awareness, introduce a problem which your target customers face and how your product is the perfect solution for their problem. Ask them to subscribe to your emails and follow social media profiles. To educate, you need to share added benefits of your product. New customers have a lot of doubts in their mind; answer all their queries to win their trust. Offer them value for money. And finally, you make a video to persuade your informed customers so that they just pick-up your product without delay. This is the time to introduce call-to-action buttons like links to your e-store. So, when you

If you have just come up with an idea for starting a business an enterprise and are looking for venture funding, you might already be ready with a heavy dossier and a professionally made PowerPoint presentation. The day when you present your pitch to the venture capitalists, you find that many of them are busy texting to their spouses or are just drinking coffee and staring at the ceiling. What could possibly be wrong in that dossier, in which you have managed to write exceptionally well why your business is a great bet? Or what could be the problem with that PowerPoint presentation which you thought looked swell? Well, the short answer is, people don’t like to read a lot of text. They also find PowerPoint presentations boring. Venture capitalists are people too and they see these files and presentations, dozens of them even, every single day. In order to grab their attention, you need something more than just textual content or PowerPoint presentations. What you really need is an explainer video. Explainer videos are animated videos that are relatively affordable to produce and are entertaining enough to hold attention. They explain why your business, product or service must be given attention and how it matters to the audience. The growing importance of explainer videos online Nowadays, venture capitalists look for potential startups online as well. That means, the old fashioned way of presenting in front of an audience is kind of out. What is in is, you may need to upload videos of your pitch on your website, share them on social media or directly mail to potential VCs. There is always a huge competition when it comes to funding. Most venture capitalists know that they will be bombarded by start-up pitches almost all the time. Thus, they have more reasons to eliminate than to be eagerly looking for the next start-up to fund. To make sure that your pitch is not ignored, you should make sure that you invest in a good explainer video consultant and get a video that explains your pitch in a lucid and entertaining manner. You must also make sure that your explainer video is not a lengthy one. Ideally, it should be under 2 minutes. What really ticks at the end of the day is, what the explainer video is trying to convey and how useful it seems to the viewer of that video. With that in mind, you should get an explainer video produced by professional animators. Here are some of the tips to making a great explainer video for venture capitalists Tell them a story. Make sure that you are weaving your narration using metaphors, parodies, humor and other rhetorical devices. All this helps to grab the VC’s attention. Do not keep the video long and boring. It should be less than 2 minutes, in order to be successful. Use very little text within the video. Instead, use graphics, charts and other visual cues. Understand that human beings are visual in nature. They need to like what they see in order to develop a favorable opinion. Make sure that your explainer video does that. Hire professional script-writers to form a compelling script for your video. Do not hesitate to spend a little more in order to do so. Do not rely on text 6 out of 10 venture capitalists hate textual content and they just won’t even bother to fund a business that heavily uses text in its pitches. You may probably gain more from using explainer videos, when it comes to attracting funds. There are a number of startups these days and getting funding has become very difficult. In order to remain relevant and in order to make sure that you do not lose out on opportunities which could have been yours, you must begin to get great explainer videos made. Explain to the audience what your business is, what products or services you are trying to sell and why the investor must invest in your company. Just following these three steps in an explainer video will ensure that VCs begin to take you more seriously. For further assistance, get in touch with Oomphbox.

The use of explainer videos is growing exponentially in the business environment. Businesses gain several benefits by uploading multiple videos on their website. Videos make it easier for marketers to influence the customers thus serving as an effective marketing tool. With that background, let us discuss the ten most essential reasons for having multiple explainer videos on your website. • Higher traffic and conversion rate As a matter of fact, video is hundred times more enticing than the use of text. Customers find it irking to go through elaborate textual content when a short video is enough to explain what they want to know. If your website has multiple explainer videos, then your customer will be enlightened and is likely to generate more satisfaction with your offerings. A satisfied visitor will be glad to become your customer and share your videos with his friends. We have already experienced the virality of social media campaigns. This brings us to the necessity of embedding social media buttons with the video. This will direct more traffic to your website and consequently a higher conversion rate. Even a survey conducted by Video Rascal concluded that 85% visitors are more likely to buy your product after watching an accompanying explainer video. • Videos are fun to watch Reading text becomes boring and tiresome. It is undeniable that videos hold the potential of instilling an element of entertainment for the fast-paced customers today. Besides infusing knowledge and information to your customers’ head, you are providing them a means of amusement that can bring a smile on your customers’ face. A happy visitor goes a long way onto the loyalty track. We have seen that TV ads work quite effectively for brand promotion but then they carry a huge cost of production and distribution. On the contrary, explainer videos are produced and distributed at a much cheaper cost. On top of that, such videos turn out to be 38% more effective than TV ads according to a survey by comscore.com.  Impressive videos with graphics and animation component leave an indelible mark on your customers. It improves your brand recall value. • More than one story to share Often businesses are caught in the dilemma of selecting one video out of multiple good videos to share. It keeps the marketers unsatisfied as they want to share myriad stories with their customers.  A website with multiple explainer videos provide the marketers with the power to share different customer success stories, case studies, experiments, new products, experiences, challenges and so on. Moreover, when you venture into different business verticals, the need more multiple videos for different sections further increase. A number of video hosting sites are available which helps to do away with storage issues on website. • Videos for landing page Customers have different queries depending upon the information they require from your company. It is not necessary that they land at your homepage when they click a result on the search page. Place multiple videos at different landing pages so that there is a video for the required information at every page they land. Your homepage may contain a video that talks about the vision and mission of your company. On the other hand, there are sections like problem diagnosis, new products, R&D etc for which you can create unique set of videos. For instance, problem diagnosis section may contain videos which guide the customers to resolve the issue with their product by following user-friendly procedure. Similarly, I would suggest you to create interesting video clips when your company launches a new product or invests in innovative ideas. • Higher ranking on SERP I am sure you have observed that besides investing in SEO tactics, your company is unable to garner top position in the search results. It is due to the fact that the search engine algorithms are becoming complex with every passing day and their focus is skewed towards quality and originality of your content. When you create and upload original videos on your website, search engines automatically give more preference to your web page. And higher the number of videos you create for different search queries, higher is your likelihood of appearing in the top search results. Make sure that you provide new information and problem solving videos. And do remember to tag your videos with appropriate keywords and meta-data. Though I would recommend you to host high quality videos on Youtube and Vimeo, but you must prefer using your own domain for hosting most of your regular videos. It will help you to create video sitemap on a sub domain of your own site. • Visitors spend more time on your website The sole objective of your website content is to have a prolonged visiting time by your visitors. But often plunge on this objective when you fail to create content that interests the visitors. And t is a known fact that visitors read less but watch more. Why not take advantage of this congenital and congenial habit? It is also found out by researchers that visitors tend to spend more time on the website after watching an interesting video clip. And spending more time means they will get to know your company and products more. Companies often build upon this fact and introduce email and video subscription by asking them to sign up. The whole idea is to grab the attention of the viewers to take forward your interaction with them. • Data collection It is a lesser known fact that many marketers use explainer videos to track the behavior and demands of their customers. Tracking the video metrics will empower you to serve your customers very effectively. You can track play rate that shows the number of people who actually clicked the play button. Play through rate adjudges the number of people who saw the entire video. Apart from that, you can find what keywords led them to the video page. You can also determine your sales volume as compared to

Explainer videos are short and concise videos ideally 60-90 seconds that explain your product or service to the potential customers. They are being rapidly used by businesses in the form of animation to explain a problem and provide a solution to the problems. We want you to know that a good script defines the quality of your video. Do search engines understand good scripts? But search engines will not recognize good scripted videos until you incorporate good SEO tactics. And it is no fun when an explainer video with a good script is unable to generate traffic to your website. The whole idea behind creating an explainer video is to create brand awareness and increase conversion rate. Search engines give higher ranking to authentic and quality textual content. Videos are no different provided they are optimized for search engines. Search engine crawlers can only understand text associated with the video for indexing purpose. There is no room for ignorance as video SEO tactics is a must practice to increase visibility of your video on the web. No wonder that 70% of the top 100 search listings contain a video. Let me share with you 10 important tips for optimizing your explainer video. Apt title Your titles must look natural. A video title must include your most important keyword. Titles are the first visible piece of information in the search engine results. A good title has to be simple and catchy. YouTube provides a character limit of 100 for video titling. Adding trigger keywords attracts the attention of the viewer and you are most likely to have a higher click-through-rate. Trigger keywords are supporting words used with your keywords to form a title. Also, prefer to use the keyword in the beginning of the title. For instance, if you are making an explainer video to demonstrate how to operate the application ABC, then you can use the title as “Operating ABC application” or “Learn ABC application” instead of using “How to operate ABC application” Gripping description and thumbnail Video description is the longest textual content associated with the video used by search engines to index your information. Write quality and SEO-friendly content with relevant keywords. Your title and description should relate with each other. A good description contains the summary of the video with a link to your website. Place your link both in the beginning and at the end of the description to get a better chance of being viewed. Place an attractive thumbnail of your video to grab attention of the viewers. Thumbnail is a snapshot of your video that is visible on the result page. Right set of keywords Knowing the most popular set of keywords is important to get higher visibility for your explainer video. You must know what keyword phrases are used by your target audience to search for your product so that you can optimize your title and description accordingly. There are a number of free tools that allow you to do keyword research and note the response received to your website. Doing a check for keywords will tell you if you chose the right keyword. Type your selected keyword on Google and see if you get any video results on the top page. If you do, then you have chosen the right word. You must also remember not to stuff keywords in your content unnecessarily as it deteriorates the quality of your content and search engines mark it as spam. Tags Quite similar to keywords, tags are additional keywords that you pick up and place with your video assuming that many people use these tags to search for your product. In other words, tags are keywords with lesser significance. Unlike keywords, tags are not placed strategically in your video title and description. Your keywords should definitely be a part of your tag list but the opposite is not necessary. Tags also help the crawlers to define the category of your video. Create a video sitemap After all the hard work of creating an explainer video, you will certainly not like to miss the traffic. Video sitemap is necessary when you have multiple videos on your site but they are hosted by video-hosting websites like YouTube, Vimeo etc and you want the visitors to be directed to your site. Video sitemap includes detail like category, title, tags, description, published date, duration of your videos etc that guides the search engines to index your videos correctly. A searcher who finds your video will be directed to your site and not to YouTube after you create a video sitemap. Google Webmaster Tools help you to submit a video sitemap. Transcript your video Video transcription adds value to your content. Search engines index according to the content associated with your video. Finding your video will become easier for search engines when people type content in your transcript in the search bar. Moreover, transcription helps people with impaired hearing and who speak a different language to see what your video say. Transcript content can be easily translated via Google Translate to the language of the viewers’ choice. Video quality A low resolution video with poor clarity often puts off the viewers. Besides that, bad audio and blurred readability makes it hard for the viewers to understand your message. It also affects your brand image. The content of your video can be good enough but a standard video quality is a bare minimum requirement to get more number of hits. And you don’t really need a HD resolution for this. Post on your own website Your priority should be to host your video on your own website as it gives your website a prominence over video-hosting sites like YouTube.  Furthermore, it reflects your brand personality and promotes your brand. And the visitors land directly on your website which allows them to browse further information on your product instantly. On the contrary, you should also post your video on YouTube and Vimeo as it increases your visibility on the web.

A video, and not a picture, says more than a thousand words. Explainer videos are turning the tide for many marketers as they help them to take a giant leap in achieving not only their marketing goals but also their employee engagement and customer service goals. Predominantly used for introducing a new product or company, animated explainer videos create curiosity; infuse knowledge and acquaintance in a short while. A short and crispy explainer video usually 1-3 min long for your customers or employees saves you a lot of time in answering their queries and problem solving. Explainer videos can be enabled to prompt customers to take action at the end of the video. For instance, they can be asked to subscribe your newsletter, visit your website and a lot more. Apart from that, it offers an attractive way of promoting your product and services to prospective customers. Let us see how your explainer videos can be best put to use: Testing an idea in the market There could be many a reason for new product failures but they say that wise men always prefer testing over resting. Market testing is an important activity to get a sense of the market especially for the marketers who are willing to take risk through innovation. You’ve got a brilliant concept for a new product. But you fear whether it has acceptance among the masses. An explainer video will help you to take this idea to the market through your blog, social media platform and website. It further helps you to track customer responses and take their valuable feedback. It will tell you if your concept is ready to roll in the market or does it need to be dropped. There are many cases where the companies wanted to surprise their customers through new products. But unfortunately it did not somehow clicked with them resulting in considerable losses in invention, production and marketing. Idea testing through explainer videos will save you enough time and money in R&D investment. Furthermore, you may get opinions from your customers to amend and reform your concept. Advertisement through social media Advertisement can be used for promoting your company, brand, a new or an existing product. While TV and print media is used to increase brand recall value, social media platforms are probably the best bet for the marketers to increase liking for their brand and encourage customer engagement. Innovative and engaging video content on Facebook, Twitter etc often grabs eye balls and is liked and shared by your fans and followers. Make sure that all your social media profiles are integrated. This increases your presence across the social media networks.  People are free to comment and give opinions on your advertisement on the platform of their choice. Moreover, social media is a casual platform for netizens to relax so avoid uploading boring video description of your products.  Pervade emotions like joy, surprise, excitement, thrill or thoughtfulness, knowledge, innovation to get a widespread popularity for your brand. Live demos in trade shows If you happen to participate in a trade show, you often find that it becomes difficult to catch hold of customers, leave aside interaction with them. Customers tend to walk across your stall if they don’t find anything interesting from a distance. And we don’t expect customers to stop at every stall in the show. Here comes the role of explainer videos. Get those couple of inspiring videos that talk about your product and company. Play them all through the day. You’ll find customers stopping to see the video and gain information. And if they really like something about your product or the company per se then they are most likely to approach you for further queries. You’ve succeeded in your effort of making explainer videos as it does half the job for you. The rest lies with your face-to-face communication skills to acquire leads. And even if you miss out the customers who saw your video but didn’t turn up for interaction, you’ve been able to entertain them and advertise yourself. Pitching an idea to investors Accept the fact that explainer videos are studded with presentation abilities if made correctly. This is what you need when you are pitching an idea to worthy investors. If you want the investors to take you seriously, then spend time in making a great video. An investor will not spend time in reading your report or see your power point presentation until and unless he finds something haunting to invest in. Create a persuasive video that leaves your investors enthralled. Don’t go into too much detail but it should be able to highlight your idea clearly and the potential it beholds. Furthermore, an explainer video adds credibility to your company and leaves a lasting impression on them. Even if they are not ready to invest in your concept right now, they will not mind giving you a call back at a later stage. Another scenario could be that they pitch your concept to fellow investors by showing them the explainer video. Helping your employees In a large organization, HR department plays a pivotal role during induction of new employees in the company. It is but natural that new employees have a lot of anxiety and curiosity to understand the company well so that they can adapt in their respective roles aptly. Due to this, HR department has to devote a lot of time to this unproductive task. To avoid the same, many companies are using explainer videos for answering different queries of their employees.  For instance, a marketing professional employed in your company stays miles away from the production facility of your company. And for some reason, he is unable to visit the factory and is unaware of the production processes. At this point, a short video giving the gist of your production processes will instill confidence in the employee and he will be able to perform his job in a much better way. Similarly, you can make explainer

DropBox is a cloud storage application for storing and sharing your important files from anywhere.  It lets you seamlessly access documents across all your devices with internet connection. It also means that you no longer have to save and transfer the files through flash drive or email. Even if you don’t download the application, it is available to you through your account on their website. Today, DropBox is valued at $4 billion despite spending very little money on advertising. Such exceptional growth story has hardly been witnessed by any start-up SaaS company. It is used by individuals and businesses across the world. Launching DropBox DropBox was first released in September 2008 by former MIT students Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi. Houston claims that his habit of forgetting USB drive at home during his college days led him to conceive this idea. The success story of DropBox has left everybody awestruck because a simple explainer video changed its fortune over a short span of four years when the number of registered users crossed the 100 million mark in November 2012. And exactly after a year in November 2013, DropBox touched the mark of 200 million users. Isn’t it phenomenal?  The struggle for DropBox was not easy as for any other start-up company. Like many others, DropBox started advertising with Google AdWords in 2009 but soon it realized that they were spending $233-$388 per conversion which was way too expensive for any company that priced its product at just $99. Clearly, this approach was not practical for any start-up company. Video referral campaign After receiving a poor initial response, DropBox started offering extra storage space to its existing users in exchange for invitation to their friends through social media. The campaign significantly helped the company as the early adopters eager for more space started sending the invitations across and soon 2.8 million shares were sent in a month’s time resulting which DropBox got its 2 million users. Creation of an explainer video The concept of file sharing and backup devised by DropBox was completely unknown to the people in 2009 when the cloud storage phenomenon started making news across the world. It was difficult for people to understand this concept and realize the potential of cloud storage to their benefit. The company by spending less than $50,000 on an explainer video created by CommonCraft added 10 million additional customers to its user base. It was indeed a remarkable achievement by a start-up. Moreover, many studies show that videos are quite effective for information retention for human brains. No wonder that they lead to higher visibility and conversion rate. Simplicity of web design The simple reason why the explainer video worked for DropBox is that it focused solely on the benefits rather than on technical specifications and features. People were more interested to know how this seemingly complex product adds value in their routine functioning.  On top of that, their website design has been fairly simple. The homepage only featured two main components i.e. an explainer video and a download link. This left the user with no other option than to watch the compelling video and then download DropBox to their PCs. Return on investment The impact of explainer video was so powerful that it helped the owners to pitch their idea to investors. Video made it fairly easy for them to explain their innovative solution. When you demonstrate something visually, it hardly takes a moment to clarify the exact picture. DropBox received a total venture capital funding of US$257.2 million from investors like Y Combinator, Sequoia Capital and Accel Partners. It is evident from the fact that DropBox owes much of its success to a simple explainer video that increased its conversion by 10% within a year. With less than 4 million users in the beginning, DropBox was able to double this figure in 2009. And an estimated return on investment for explainer video was between $24 million and $48 million. In 2013, the video received an average of 30,000 views per day and was viewed over 30 million times. Today, DropBox has over 275 million users and is still growing strongly. DropBox video review Video was short and to-the point with clear explanation of the idea A white background highlighted the graphics and animation used Frequent use of the logo in the video helped the audience to recognize the brand. Videos is interesting to watch as it explicitly explains the working of DropBox, its advantages   and how it is used by a person to share documents, itinerary and images. Why an explainer video is so effective? Explainer videos can do what thousand words can’t describe. Filling your website with textual content does not work the same way as does a simple and easy to understand product demonstration video.  An ideal explainer video uses a story, a case study by following a problem-agitate-solve approach. With its strong visual message, they enable you to fulfill your marketing goals. They are often used by companies with seemingly complex or technical product. Moreover, people resist reading time-consuming text in a fear that they will be left confused after reading.  These explainer videos are not only meant for your customers but also for your employees and investors. There are many reasons to why many companies rely on explainer video today: Engages the customer – Even while watching a video, customers lose interest if it is too long, boring or beats around the bush. Keep your explainer videos short and quirky. Hire a professional production team that understands your business idea and delivers exactly what you want. Entertain the audience – It is natural for every child to watch cartoons as they narrate innocent stories away from hardships of real life. Similarly, it is innate for adults to relate to animated explainer videos as narrate an imaginary story. They are not simply watching the video, they rather enjoy watching it. That’s the reason they are gripped to it. Animated characters, images, graphics, colors, drawing and sound