Welcome to our monthly series Think Like a Marketer, where Simplifilm Director of Marketing Carly J. Cais offers advice for business growth from a marketing perspective.
Though we’ve made hundreds of videos in our history, we don’t think of ourselves as a video production house. Why? Because the videos we create are so much more.
What we do (and what we love doing and are really good at doing) is taking the essentials of the client’s business or product or message and leveraging it to create a video. It’s not a laundry list of product features or a droning voice telling you what’s so great about the company. It’s a video that speaks to the audience’s core emotions…and results in them doing something. In essence, it’s video marketing that we build in to each and every project we do.
Our videos get results. This is because we work with each client extensively to truly understand their business and their goals. Then we boil it down. One video is usually a minute or less. You have fewer than 8 seconds to grab your viewers’ attention. A list about why a product is so great or a video featuring long, complex narration can often defeat the purpose.
We want to create a stellar video with a stellar result for the Client, which is a win all around. This means focusing on the results first.
Here is how we redirect the conversation to be results-oriented with a video marketing perspective:
Client: We want this video to list this product’s 5 features in detail.
Simplifilm: What is the one thing you want your audience to come away with after watching?
Client: We want this video to show everything this product can do.
Simplifilm: What is the unique thing (or USP) that this product brings to your market?
Client: We want a video with this exact script word-for-word.
Simplifilm: We’ll see what we can do. Just keep in mind that that’s a lot of words, so the overall length of the video needs to be longer to accommodate.
Client: …Well, we’d really want to stick with the current length then. How can we get these concepts on screen in this amount of time?
Simplifilm: That’s no problem. Leave it to us and we’ll make the concepts fly.
Client: We want this and that and that other thing and those things featured in the video.
Simplifilm: OK – what results from this video would make it a big WIN for you?
Client: [Shares goal-oriented metrics]
Simplifilm: OK, we can do that. We’ll be working on refining the content to achieve that goal and we’ll be presenting you with a Script soon.
We’ve found that boring videos sell. That’s what you want your product to do; that would create a fantastic result for your app or software package. Strip it down to its essentials, and think goal-oriented. When it comes to the video concept, thinking like a marketer will help cut through the clutter and forge a connection with your audience.