When Nestlé Waters launched its new campaign two weeks ago for Pure Life water to educate consumers about the importance of hydration, recycling and other information related to the world’s fresh water supply, it tapped into a growing and appealing way to market to consumers.
As marketers know, the hard sell is largely a lost art, replaced by storytelling, social media tweets and posts, video, digital and other new channels or updated means of displaying relevant and engaging content.
On Monday, the Nestlé campaign began rolling across digital, social media, new packaging and online educational videos, also called explainer videos.
Explainer videos are typically short and require their own unique strategy and content. It’s a delicate balance between too much information and not enough. Hoe Horner, the CEO of Lemonlight Video Production shares nine simple, yet critically important elements necessary to effectively (and perpetually) deliver your brand’s messaging to your target audience.
1. Analyze By analyzing what makes a brand’s explainer video go viral, you can glean some overall best practices to make the most of yours. (The hilarious educational Dollar Shave Club video now has 2.8 million views.)
2. Pre-production Consider your audience and the problem you hope to solve for them, and then decide how to best relay your product’s core features.
3. Call-to-action The best-case scenario: The customer was blown away by your video and is now strongly considering your product. Don’t expect viewers to seek out more information on their own. Instead, decide what you want them to do next, and set them on that path.
4. Think ahead If you think carefully about your video ahead of time, you can plan to shoot some alternate scenes that you can A/B test or utilize later as you optimize your campaign.
5. Keeping it short is key It’s unlikely your explainer video will enjoy as much success or exposure as Dollar Shave Club’s, but you can do a few things to maximize its effect. It may seem counterintuitive, but keeping your video short is absolutely essential.
6. Don’t overwhelm Deciding what information to leave out is challenging. However, the shorter your video is, the more people will watch it. Lots of extra information won’t do any good if the length of your video turns viewers off.
7. Animated video For a particularly complex product, using an animated video can help simplify it and quickly walk customers through the story of its creation. These videos can elicit a strong emotional response from audiences, but they’re typically less personal.
8. Narrative ads are the easiest videos to repurpose because they’re usually carefully scripted, so you can plan different scenes and takes. Designed to walk potential customers through a very specific set of features and highlight the most important elements, they’re great for tech companies and e-commerce retailers.
9. Quality. Quality. Quality. The type of business you’re marketing will greatly influence the content of your explainer video. However, one area where you don’t have much choice is quality. If you’re filming your company’s video on your iPhone, you’re probably going to regret it. Dollar Shave Club couldn’t have made its viral video on its own, and it didn’t try to. You shouldn’t either.
Related articles:
Education is the Focus of Nestlé Waters New Pure Life Campaign
Network
