Marketing piece, or product explainer? Hmmmm …
A guy walks into a video production company office and says, “I wanna make a video about my product!” The production company people say, “Great! Do you want to make a video for potential new customers, or to educate current product users?” And the guy says, “It should do both!”
Listen, I totally understand that impulse. Making videos is expensive, time consuming and emotionally taxing. Who wouldn’t want to create a single video that checks all your boxes?
But, of course, there’s that all-important AUDIENCE. You want to get your potential customers excited about your product, but you also want to educate your current users about how to get the most out of their experience with it. Marketing vs. customer education: those seem like two pretty different goals. Is it even possible to make a single video that will meet the needs of both those audiences?
The answer is a resounding … maaaaaybe.
I’ll be honest: It would be a lot easier to tell you that one video just won’t cut it on its own, and you’ll really need to make two videos to do this job. That’s probably the “right” answer. (In fact, I just got an marketing email from a video production company telling me there are five types of videos that every company needs to make. So maybe you actually need five! At least five! Maybe more!)
But if you only have money for one, you’re going to have to choose one segment of your audience and prioritize them. How do you choose? Here are a few questions to ask yourself:
- What are the real goals for this video? Is it product sales? Is it attracting investors? Are there particular metrics or demographics that you need to make sure you hit? (Hint: If one of your goals is to decrease the number of calls to your customer support center, you may need to focus on a single audience of current customers.)
- How complex is your product? Can you truly convey the product’s full effectiveness and feature list in two minutes or less, or are you likely to be able to tell a better story in that short time with a higher-level overview?
- Where and how else are your customers supported? If the two-minute explainer leaves them wanting more, are there detailed instructions on your website? Will there be webinars or other resources they can dig into for more details? Do you have a customer support line?
- Would the emotional story of your product make a more compelling video than showing what it actually does? For example, if you tell me you’ve got an amazing product that has the potential to disrupt gender and economic inequality all over the world, I’m going to get pretty excited … but if you follow that claim up with a video about the nuts and bolts of your distributed ledger system, I’m just going to be confused.
Not all of these questions will be easy to answer. But at French Press, we take our role as consultants seriously. We love to work with our clients to help them surface the answers to just these sorts of questions. We will workshop with you and your team through our creative discovery process to make sure that the content you create can successfully engage all of your intended audiences with the best possible results.
