…we’re super nervous about video and our marketing guy thinks it’s safer to do what we’ve always done (even if it doesn’t work)
I get it. Diving into anything new is scary. However, where a few years ago video seemed optional or like a novelty add-on to your marketing campaigns, now it’s a necessity. Your competitors most likely have one or two or ten and your clients probably expect you to have one too. In the ongoing conversation your organization’s marketing department has with potential customers, video wields a lot of power. This aside, there’s still a lot of established businesses that are wary of committing to video content. The reason seems to be that they worry about not having control and handing the reigns over to a production company that isn’t on their monthly payroll. Some worry about what video, especially animated video will say about them. Does it appear amateurish to have an animation representing a law firm? With smaller companies and start-ups, it’s more to do with throwing down money for something that might not be what they expect or that doesn’t perform as well as they assumed it would. All perfectly rational and realistic fears.
Here’s what we do to fix this
The way we work with you removes the risk. If you look over our ‘Working with us’ page, you’ll see that we set up our workflow to allow our clients as much (or as little) access and sway over what happens as they’d like. We don’t move on from, say, writing the script or creating a visual style until everyone is happy with it. It sounds simple but it’s a huge difference between us and other explainer video producers. Before we commit to production, you – the client – will have signed off on the initial concepts, the script, the voice-over, the style samples, storyboards, the animatic and the choice of music. This basic approach means that there’s no room for surprises. Before we create the video itself, you’ll know exactly what we’re moving ahead with and it’ll be something that you’ve agreed upon. We even keep you in the loop throughout production so that you can make sure everything is going to plan. Again, no room for any nasty surprises.
And we don’t have four or five ‘cookie cutter’ styles that we push on clients depending on their industry. We look at each individual client as having a unique identity. Each company brands itself in a certain manner. A business selling plastic wrappers to other businesses will want to approach marketing themselves in a very different way to a brand offering services to the public. The way an organization raising funds for charity comes across to it’s viewers will need to differ greatly from the way a bank would want it’s account holders to see them. We take these elements into consideration before coming up with ideas and concepts for our clients.
The 90/10 balance
Most project are balanced 90/10. 90% pre-production and 10% production. This surprises most as it seems too unbalanced but what it means is that the 10% really counts. If you have reservations about moving ahead with an explainer video project, let us know about it. We’re more than happy to help.
