Using animation and video to explain your product or service

It's a Monkey Monday. Howdy partner! I went cowboy.

Why are you a cowboy?

I dunno. There's no reason. There's no segway. Just did.

No.

All right. So we're talking explainer videos today.

Oh yes. What is an explainer video?

Good question.

Explain the explainer video.

Well, uh, I guess you could describe them as an animation most of the time. Sometimes not. Um, Which really just helps demystify your product or service to customers. I think if you're selling something that's complicated or it's like software or this it's quite a big service, or there's complexity to it an explainer video is almost a must. You've just got to do it because it gets, uh, it gets all of that complexity neatly put into a narrative that, that your audience can understand. Um, You'll probably see your competitors will have one too, and it's really going to help the audience connect with your product better. They're really good. They can be really good.

And it's a great way of presenting solutions to your customer's problems.

Yeah. It's a fairly typical format of them. Isn't it? Do you suffer from, well, maybe not that, but yeah, it's, it's um, it's just a good way of getting that, getting your uh, solution your customer's problems in front of them. They can digest it in an easier way, rather than reading pages of stuff and PDFs and all of the complexity that can come with trying to sell your solution or whatever it is you're doing.

It's often easier than writing a script and then having to try and talk to camera about it. So storyboarding something out and making, having those extra visuals are really help and it will all be really concise. Um, and it can make a product or service, which is complicated, uh, seem quite simple and easy to understand.

Yeah, there are challenges involved, I think, around it. So the things, we're going to try and share some of our experience with some of this. I think one of the first things is to think about the touch points, really. So once you've got your finished product, where is it going to live? Is it going to be something, is it going to be an advert on YouTube? Is it going to be your big hero thing on your website, is your website your key touch point? As you're doing it, could you chop it into loads of smaller bits that you can put out on social, are there smaller messages inside? So there's some interesting things you want to tackle really early doors, which is its purpose. Where are you going to put it? Of course budgets.

Yes. I mean, that is the big thing. Like how much does an explainer video cost? And it it's like one of the biggest questions we get and it's, if you go onto something like Fiverr, you could get an explainer video, which is a templated thing, so it will look like everything else, but won't really match your service, but that they can be done in a country, uh, far across the world for next to nothing. Is it going to produce any results. Um, and equally you could spend a million pounds on something over here, like completely bespoke, and that might be just wasting money as well. So you've got to really assign a budget that is actually going to make a difference and produce a quality product that, um, yeah, looks good and fits into your branding as well.

And it's 100% the right way round to do it. If you are out there trying to find out how much an explainer video costs, you genuinely can get one for like almost next to nothing. You can get a template off video hive or Adobe Stock or something like that. That is a few dollars that you can then open up and tweak and voice yourself. And you can probably get there. It's really is from not very much to an awful lot of money, depending on what you're doing. If you start with a budget and what you're trying to get it to do, that's a great place to be. So if you go, well we've got £5,000 to put towards this. Um, but we want it to achieve a certain amount of things. So measure the results, make it a meaningful piece of work. But they can be absolutely life-changing with regards to the - life changing is maybe a bit over egging the omelette - it can really impact, um, the amount of, sort of connections you can make with your audience. The amount of sales you can make. It can have a huge, huge impact. So knowing how much it can do for you is a good place to work back from, with the budget as well.

Yeah, and the more money you put into it, the more authentic it's going to be, rather than just another thing for this, this bloke over here, just knocking them out for a fiver a pop.

And you get the whistly Audio Jungle thing, don't you.

Yes. We've all seen them though. Cause you, you can go onto YouTube and find reviews for something and there's that robotic voice going, the top five of this is, and there's, there's all this stuff out there that, you know, people can do things really cheaply and really fast, but is it gonna make a difference? And I think that's what our entire marketing philosophy is about is like, will you do something that makes an actual difference? And it could be that you need to do something quite cheap and that's fine on it. But if it's, if you're doing something cheap, which won't actually make any difference, then you might as well give that money to charity or do something better with it.

Well, definitely. And if you think about, um, what the end product is, you could go, you could, you could go, well you could go cheap and it could be horribly off brand. So you could go, well, let's get this, let's get this free template thing over here, but it will look nothing like everything else you've got, because it generally won't. It may not cost very much, but you could probably take that same budget and do something on brand. That's a much simpler messaging thing. Even if it's just Keynote. Keynote's notbad really. You can move some stuff around, you can get most of it out there. You could probably do a short little message and script and try and explain some of your stuff. If you're selling software, do some screenshots, you could build it, you could do it. Your team might be able to do it. So it's just under - and it could be on brand. It's just understanding how to get the best of, out of the budgets you've got for the results you want. Work backwards from what's coming out of it, because these explainer videos can be really impactful.

Yeah. And I think the, the thing that is that we see a lot of is, uh, people coming to us with wanting a quote for an explainer video, but the, the script has been already done or the storyboard has been done by about 50 people in the office. And we go, well, we need to mention X, Y, and Z, but, there's an, it becomes an overly long something that's not actually going to make a difference. So I think if you go to some experts to get the messaging right, for a start or at least gen up on what's a good explainer video, or you might end up with something stupidly long and yeah, pretty boring.

Yeah. It's easy to waste some money and time and effort on this, if you don't do it right. If you've spent some time absorbing all of our wonderful information and developing your brand and audience, you should have most of the tools you need to be able to get this good, I think. So everything kind of hinges back on to having a good brand, understanding your audience, understanding what they need. That will help an agency or yourselves or whoever get that messaging working well. Um, and that's kind of it. Remember it's horses for courses. If you're running a small dog walking business, don't spend 100,000 pounds on an explainer video. If you are launching some new software, you probably might want a hundred thousand pounds on an explainer video because it could turn into tens of millions.

Yep. And I always remember start with why not with what.

That's us. I'm Matt, this is Chris. We're going. Bye-bye.

Howdy. I mean, whatever the cowboy for goodbye is.

See y'all later.