Does Your Business Really Slow Down during Summer or Are You Missing an Opportunity to Keep it Growing?
Ah, summer! The very word brings images of freedom and soaking up the sun at the beach or poolside. You can smell bar-b-que in the air and feel cool soft grass beneath your feet as you jump to grab a frisbee being thrown in your direction.
Spring has officially sprung and Spring Fever has once again become epidemic in places where winter is actually cold. CEOs and students alike can be prone to distracting thoughts of vacation and..getting…OUTSIDE!!
This is yet another time where having a really strong attention grabbing whiteboard video can get your audience thinking about you and your business again.
Spring Fever used to be deadly to a lot of businesses. Not so much nowadays. It doesn’t kill anymore; let me tell you why.
Clients Unintentionally Take You with Them Everywhere They Go
Thanks to mobile devices your business can be in front of millions of viewers faces at times where they aren’t completely immersed in work and/or school. They actually have time to pay attention. This particularly applies when they 1-work remotely or 2-go on vacation.
1-People Work Remotely
Technology has made it so people can work remotely, or, take work on vacation with them. They are able to focus on work without the distractions of daily life or the office buzz. It is just them and their laptop. You can take part of their undivided attention.
2- Vacating Your Life Completely on Vacation is almost IMPOSSIBLE!
Imagine a family going on vacation to the Florida Keys. How many times will they use their mobile devices during the trip?
A-Travel Time
Chances are there will be very little singing in the car and the alphabet game, if played at all, will be short lived. GPS will periodically chirp directions at the driver, interrupting his or her favorite Pandora station.
There will be either a movie going in the back seat or, you guessed it, everyone else will be playing on his or her phone or tablet. If they’re flying, once the airplane hits cruising altitude–guess what?
Long gone are the days when travel time meant being forced to come up with something creative to do while just sitting.
B-Meal and Leisure Times
It takes conscious effort to be present and detached from your cell phone in any situation. This family will likely have good interaction and conversation during meal and leisure times, but with conversation lulls and as family members wind down for the evening, cell phones will come out at least once or twice.
C-No Service and Cell Phone Free Zones
What will happen when they volunteer or are forced to surrender their beloved cell phones for hours on end to “unplug” in a cell phone free zone or an area without service?
SEPARATION ANXIETY!!
Imagine the relief on their faces as screens light up and the buzz of new text messages and emails announcing their existence are heard!
D-Vacation Documentation
Finally, while they are “vacating” their lives they will make sure to post selfies and pictures of the cool food they eat and the fun things they see and do on Instagram, Facebook and their YouTube channels.
How You Can Use Whiteboard Video During Spring Fever Season to Ignite More Interest in Your Business
Let’s face it–dependency on mobile devices is real and is not likely to go away any time soon! So why not utilize this state of the human condition in your marketing plan? It can be a great thing for your business when peoples’ noses are pointed phone-ward.
This is a fantastic time to start putting them into practice if you haven’t already.
Let’s go back to our traveling family in the last section.
After a fun filled day of deep sea fishing, CEO Joe proudly posts a picture of he and Joe Jr. holding up the 11-foot swordfish they caught on Instagram and/or Facebook. CEO Joe, like most of the general population, will probably glance at his news-feed for at least a few seconds before or after posting, since, it’s really hard to enter the social media world without getting at least a glimpse of what’s going on there.
He will likely revisit and either add more posts or see what kind of popularity rating his post earned among his friends and followers. He might even post a video on his YouTube channel of the glorious moment when the swordfish was caught.
This is where a fun whiteboard video from your company could get noticed, watched and possibly even shared. After all, CEO Joe is on vacation and has leisure time to enjoy social media.
2-A New Season is a Great Time to Make an Online Announcement and/or Launch a New Video
People love “new” things and “news”. They will do a double take at something they haven’t seen before. If you’re planning on releasing a new product or bringing on new programs, aspects or talent, announcing it during a slower season could breathe extra life into your business.
Be strategic and make sure the timing is just right. Your announcement doesn’t even have to be earth shattering or company-changing; news is news and news turns heads.
New seasons can be a great time to consider launching or looking toward creating a new video–just to spice things up!
3-Use a Seasonal Topic to Bring Attention to Your Current Video(s).
Your customers need to know you’re there for them. This means bringing up topics they could be interested in, even if those topics aren’t directly related to what your business offers or sells.
One option is to blog or maybe even create a short newsletter with some helpful hints or healthy summer recipes. You could also post a picture of your amazing office softball team to help reinforce the human side of your business and connect them to you even more.
Regardless, make sure and link your video, old or new, to any form of online communication you put out there. It will get views and repeated views, and repetition is a good thing!
Become part of your audience’s leisure time with a fun distracting and informing whiteboard video that will make them smile.
Approached the right way, Spring Fever won’t kill your business; your whiteboard video really can light a fire under it and help keep it growing!
Thanks for reading How Whiteboard Video Can Keep Your Business from Dying of Spring Fever!
When the words “voice over artist” are brought up what’s the first thing that comes to your mind? Chances are you can hear that kid in grade school who could perfectly impersonate the 98-year-old librarian, or your Uncle Dave who used his best Donald Duck voice and made you laugh when you were 6 years old. You might close your eyes and think of the soothing intonation of the lady on your yoga DVD who helps you wind down from a long stressful day…”just brrreeeeaaattthhheeee,” and who could forget celebrities who brought your favorite Disney characters to life by giving them a voice? Now that’s magical! Regardless, the combination of tone, speed and inflection in a person’s voice makes you respond emotionally; whether it wakes you up, puts you to sleep, sets off alarm or makes you smile..OR..piques your interest in what is being said..or SOLD. Indeed, voices over artists are and should be our favorite people! Here are 8 reasons why…
1-VO Artists make us smile
Ydraw videos are power-packed, concentrated stories or overviews of a company or product that are used for marketing. We do what it takes to maintain the attention of your audience from the right script to the right art. It must catch attention and make a lasting memory—a memory they will revisit.
For example, eight years ago, on the last night of a humanitarian trip to Mexico, I was finally falling asleep in a tent. BOOM!!!! We were hit by a torrential thunder storm. All 50 twenty-somethings ran around frantically shoving muddy sleeping bags, tents and coolers into about a dozen cars, knowing we had just minutes to climb to the top of a very, very, very steep and slippery half-mile high dirt road in order to get back to the good old USA.
Our poor leader stood in the rain shouting out orders amidst the chaos. The driver of the car I was in sat wide-eyed and white-knuckled as the heaviness of dread almost buried us all. “You vill listen to vhat I say! You hear me?!” My friend Ben broke the semi-silence with a strong sharp German accent. “You must…stay in line! You must…move forwaaad…” The weight lifted instantly as we erupted in belly laughs with tears streaming down our faces. Ben’s irreverent impersonation of our leader (who actually had a California surfer boy accent) changed our mood in seconds.
We obviously made it out alive and Ben…well, he went on to be a key player in a reality TV show and supported himself for the next almost decade in Hollywood. His voice over talent definitely paid off! To this day that moment is one of my fondest memories and I can’t think about it without smiling!
2-What they say sticks
This is especially important with your video. Our imaging and the words are critical, but what helps a message stick even more is the way it is heard. Though it has been over 8 years since that car ride, Ben’s pseudo German tirade is still fresh in my mind. We want a similar result for your video. The combination of music, visual and the way things are said will create a sense of memorable happiness, possibly urgency and definitely a call to action.
3-What they do is NOT EASY!
It’s a known fact that getting ahead in the entertainment industry takes a lot of guts and sustained effort. Making money as an actor, a model, a hand model, a hair model, a rock and roll legend or a voice actor means sacrifice, lots of time, constantly putting your best foot forward and hoping people with a budget love you, and love you enough to keep hiring you.
Kendra, an instructor at Edge Studio, a voice over school and agency in New York, told me her feelings about what it takes to become a successful voice over artist. She said “If someone wants to get into (the industry), they need to know there is a lot of work to it and requires training. It isn’t a super easy get rich quick scheme that you can do at home in your PJs. Make sure you know you will be marketing yourself or need an agent.”
She said the most successful voice over artists are hard workers who take direction well, are coach-able, easy to work with and understand lots of practice is required in order to succeed. Great voice over generally cannot be done on the fly. Just because you made your 4th grade class laugh and your teacher angry doesn’t mean that same impersonation is going to feed your family. It is a fun profession, but takes real work and is not easy!
4-They will make you money
This point has already been addressed, but to drive it in, I’ll just remind you that the whole point of hiring a voice over artist is to make people love your product or service and to become customers. The old cliché “you get what you pay for” applies here. If you hire an inexperienced voice over artist, you are looking at investing in longer hours of recording to get the desired result, or gambling on a short session where you might end up settling with what you get in the time allotted.
5-The wrong voice can drive potential clients away
“Wake up! Allicia, you fall asleep every time I talk to you and it makes me feel bad.” Oops…it was true. I looked up apologetically at my roommate. Her soft, slow, slightly-slurred, verbal delivery put me to sleep despite my genuine interest in what she had to say.
Hiring the wrong voice talent can make your potential clients miss the message entirely or even worse, be like fingernails on the chalkboard and make them stop listening. If you try to pitch a medical product with a lazy accent dripping with slang or have a not-so-trained boisterous actor energetically push a call to action too hard you’re going lose credibility and drive people away.
6-For better or for worse, your voice over artist will set the tone of your video from the very beginning
The magic number for making a first impression is seven seconds. Those first seven seconds should be filled with an inviting sense of authority that keeps your audience captivated. The thing is, the absolute worst accent for one video might be the absolute best for another. Aunt Sally Mae with her sweet southern drawl might be the perfect person to talk about brisket night at your home town café, but please don’t let her invite people to invest in the stock market! You get the picture. Let’s set the tone well and keep your audience listening.
7-They can create zillions of different meanings out of the same sentence just by the way they make it sound.
“You bring that HERE!” “YOU bring that here!” “You bring THAT here!” You get the picture; the same four words request three totally different actions. We all know there are multiple facets to getting meaning from the spoken word. Intonation, just like music, can set the stage. A dark room on a movie screen can be terrifying, alluring, or hilarious, depending on what music is being played in the background. Where voice isn’t necessarily that powerful, it’s pretty darn close!
Just think about how the same sentence can sound hateful or complimentary, excited or exasperated depending on where the emphasis is and that the tones are. Even the slightest change of tone can change the entire meaning and mood.
Listen below as Mike O’Brien, one of our top voice over artists, gives an example of this.
8-They are just great people
At Ydraw we love our voice over artists for all the reasons above and the fact that they are just great people. We want the best videos for our clients so of course we only hire the best in the industry. Good grief, we even have the Little Ceasar’s guy and Barney the Dinosaur on our team! Before I end, I would like to introduce you to our most frequently requested voice talent and let you read and hear for yourselves why they are some of our favorite people!
When as a kid, Mike O’Brien asked Morgan Freeman for the chance to interview him, he couldn’t have dreamed that the next day he would be invited to the set of Shawshank Redemption and granted that interview by the actor himself. He also had no idea that years later he would own his own in-home art studio where he “works” as a voice actor 7 days a week. He has passed on his love for his career/hobby/way of life to his wife and three kids who have also earned a little cash on the side with their voice talents. Mike absolutely loves what he does and it shows in his work! He has been in the industry just ten years and has done commercials for Best Buy, Amazon, Buffalo Wild Wings, and Levis among countless others.
Acting was in Lauren’s blood from the time she was a tiny kid. She left the Poconos of Pennsylvania out of high school to shoot for the stars in New York City. After graduating with her BFA in Acting and booking her first radio ad she knew voice over was her passion. Her road was not an easy one with life changing events such as losing her mother to Lung Cancer. She left New York and followed her heart back to mountains and a small city vibe in Asheville, North Carolina where she found success. She is the Associate Producer for FaffConn, a voice over UN-conference and has companies like AT&T and Starbucks on her resume. As she helps others pursue their dreams we are so glad she pursued hers and ended up giving a perfect voice to so many of our characters!
Pizza! Pizza! Those two words immortalized by Dawson McKay have influenced the dinner decision for countless Americans for decades. Dawson started practicing for his career when he was 5 years old, but didn’t realize it until years later. As a working professional he successfully tried his hand in several creative industries such as cartooning, sound design, video editing, acting, magic and puppetry until he found his niche in and love for voice over. From X-Box games to electric cars to Marriott hotels to rock and roll announcements to voicing little old ladies and animated villains; Dawson McKay’s diversity speaks for itself and delights audiences across the board.
When Stephanie graduated with her BFA in Musical Theater she never would have dreamed that she would find her professional passion behind the curtain. She enjoyed singing and dancing in front of audiences on professional New York City based tours like West Side Story and High School Musical. She has also delighted families on Disney Cruise Lines. When she took her first voice over class in 2009 she was hooked and hasn’t turned back. This singing, dancing photography loving actress now gives characters from Goody to Good Housekeepng a voice full time. And she’s only just beginning! We’re grateful she jumped the cruise ships and came aboard as one of our most requested voice over artists!
Some voices just make you feel comfortable and at home and Greg Simms’ talent is a textbook example. His voice carries a sense of calm authority that companies like Wal-Mart, BMW and Coca Cola among countless others have used frequently to market their brands. Greg is an LA based voice actor who honed his trade under some of the greatest legends in the industry, including the voice of Porky Pig. Besides being “the conversational guy next door” Greg also specializes in redneck, folksy, even a little leprechaun among other specialized dialects. This West Coast boy will bring the hometown feel to any script.
Kelley loves..her..job! She also loves Jeeps. On February 25, 2016 AdWeek featured her love for both in an article about an 8 video campaign she put together to get Jeep to hire her (read the article and watch one of her videos by clicking the link below). Where this voice of Amtrak Acela Express is not hurting in the slightest for paying customers, she hopes to combine two of her primary passions in the paying gig of her dreams! Kelley hadn’t planned on acting as a career. It was a fun hobby and side moneymaker for her through high school and as a DJ and VJ in college that spilled over into her post college life when the Michigan born Public Relations grad got a job at a country radio station in Tucson, Arizona. Moving forward she experienced success with several forms of media, ultimately choosing to go full time utilizing her signature voice to make a living and make money for her clients.
With professional background and training in acting, singing and even as a recording studio engineer Dean brings much more to the table than just his animated narrations. He has an impressive string of clients and accents worth mentioning but way too long to list. Dean has also been delighting children for decades! As the first DJ on Radio Disney and as Barney the Dinosaur he’s kept countless kids captivated. Unless you’ve spent your life under a rock, at some point you have heard and likely been influenced by the voice of Dean Wendt.
With talent like this you can see why we pride ourselves on every aspect of our videos! Pair up a Disney animator, one of our award winning creative directors, a highly organized and detail oriented project manager, and one of these rock stars, and you’ll have a memorable masterpiece of a video that will stick with your audience and make that call to action heard on a deeper level. Who do you want to tell your next story? We’re here to help, and so are our voice over artists!
The scaling is in motion. We are going to show you how we are scaling our business, with Ydraw videos, using Facebook, Adwords, and Instagram Ads.
When I say scale, I mean increase our ad spend which will, in turn, increase our leads.
The idea is more leads generate more sales. You’re getting a front row seat to the show. Feel free to ask questions and make comments–we love feedback and new ideas.
Many of you know, Ydraw is a video marketing company that focuses on whiteboard animation. We leverage our whiteboard animation videos to generate our leads on both ads and landing pages.
During this process, we hope to inspire you with ideas to scale your business by using the same mediums we are leveraging to generate leads. We are dropping a not-so-subtle hint that a whiteboard video from Ydraw is one of the most effective marketing tools to generate leads for your business. If you already have a Ydraw video, you can start implementing our practices. If you don’t have one, or need a new one, give me a call at 801-660-5154.
THE HISTORY OF SCALING YDRAW
Over the last couple of years we have been content with the growth and profits at Ydraw. This year, we decided to add another 100k a month in revenue.
One of the biggest limitations of Ydraw is that each video is customized. It takes a lot of creativity and human capital to create a whiteboard animation video. It’s even worse with 2D and 3D animation videos. For us to scale perfectly, we would need to have a turnkey video in place or we have to find a lot of new talent.
We don’t know if we want to do that yet.
Once we increase our sales another 100K a month we will put a freeze on our ad spend and decide if we want to go on another hiring spree. Stay tuned.
WHERE WE CURRENTLY STAND
When I talk numbers, I will only cover Adwords (YouTube), Facebook, and Instagram. The numbers don’t include referrals, SEO, repeat business, referral partners, etc.
We’ll be discussing ads and video ads only. All the leads are coming from ad spend.
October 2015 Ad Spend (not a good month)
Adwords
Spend: $8,083
Leads: 81
Cost per lead $99.79
Click To Conversion Rate was 3% to 9%
Facebook and Instagram (Zero)
Last October we were running the following:
Keywords Search Ads (Adwords) : These are just simple keyword-targeted ads.
Gmail Sponsored Ads (AdWords): These are Gmail ads that pop up on the Gmail promotion tab
Video keywords Ads (Trueview AdWords): These are YouTube display ads for specific keywords
Video Placement Ads (AdWords): Hand-picked YouTube videos that allow ads
YDRAW’S ADJUSTMENTS
After looking over our numbers we realized we needed to make some adjustments to the website. This didn’t come to a surprise to us. We had discussed making changes to the site but didn’t make time to for the necessary adjustments.
I know…STUPID!
Anyone else have this problem? I hope it’s not just us, especially if things are going great and you’re making good money. It’s human nature to keep the status quo when all is well.
Our number 1 goal for the website is to collect leads. We want their email addresses or for them to pick up the phone and call. Calls have a much higher closing rate, but a lot of people are in research mode and will only leave their email.
That’s ok.
Once we collect an email address they enter our Email Campaign.
Our website was ok at the time, but was random and lacked a clear call to action.
Not to mention, there were a couple issues on Mobile that needed to be fixed.
Over Thanksgiving break, we went to work on the website. The updated version now has a clearer call to action (CTA) and we eliminated a lot of the clutter.
If you’re reading this with the intention of scaling your own business, there are a few numbers you need to nail down before you increase your ad spend.
Numbers you should know:
-Cost Per Leads
-Cost Per Customer
-Closing Percentage
-Profit Per Sale
-Life Time Value Of A Customer
If you’re losing money every month, one of the numbers above is messed up.
Cost Per Lead is different for everyone.
If your industry is highly competitive you could be spending $50 dollars a click which could turn into a $500 cost per lead. This is not uncommon (Attorneys are known to spend this kind of money on leads).
At Ydraw we can afford to spend $150 to $300 per lead or $2500 a customer, and still come out on top. You may only be able to spend $3 a lead.
Just make sure know your numbers.
Obviously, the name of the game is to get the lowest cost per lead.
If you can only spend a couple dollars to generate a lead, AdWords might not be the best place start. I would look at Facebook or Instagram. You will have difficulty reaching your goals with AdWords unless you find a way to increase your prices and profits per customer.
Either way, you have to test it.
FAST FORWARD TO JAN 2016
It was time to start scaling up. The new website was up, Instagram ads were working and our Facebook strategy was in place.
Adwords
Spend: $8,185.35
Number of Leads: 117
Cost Per Lead: $84.62
Click to Conversion: 5.69% to 10.53%
Facebook and Instagram
Spend: $4665
Number of Leads 446
Cost Per Lead: $10.45
As you can see, the website adjustments made a big impact on our conversions. We saw a 35% decrease in Cost Per Lead and close to 87% increase in Click to Conversion.
You will also notice that Facebook and Instagram campaigns really added to the number of leads.
Our Cost Per Lead is much lower on Facebook and Instagram, but those leads are not as high of quality as AdWords.
There is a difference between people who are actively searching and people you interrupt. Facebook and Instagram are interruption techniques, meaning they are not actively searching for our product or service.
There is a longer sales cycle, but the return on investment (ROI) is still big.
What I love about Facebook and Instragram ads are the shares, likes, and comments. Here is the Instagram video ad we are running.
A video posted by Whiteboard Animation (@ydraw) on
Take note of the comments and shares. We love these ads because we are getting free customers. When one person sees our ad and thinks their friend needs it, they share the ad.
This is like an instant endorsement.
These are factors that are extremely hard to measure. All I know is that things are working.
For example…
In one day I had $18,000 in sales from Instagram ads.
We spent around $150 on ads that day. The whole month of January we spent $4665 on ads for both Facebook and Instagram.
I do not have the exact amount of sales that came in from Facebook and Instagram, but it was a lot (still trying to track them more effectively).
These are exciting numbers!
The Plan Moving Forward:
Over the coming weeks I plan to increase ad spend by $3000 and make some more adjustments.
The goal is to lower or maintain the same Cost Per Lead.
Here are some key factors that contributed to our success in the month of January.
New Website Design
New Facebook and Instagram Video Ads
Lookalike Audience Created from Conversion
Increase Ad Spend
If you have questions, feel free to reach out to me at wes@ydraw.com I would be happy to discuss your business.
Sad, but true. Especially if that wall is your home page, Facebook wall, or email marketing campaign.
This has less to do with writing and more to do with people’s changing preferences and attention spans. If not writing, what do they want?
Video killed more than the radio star…
In fact, for more than a decade, video has killed anything that stands in its way. Let’s look at the new reality:
74 percent of all online traffic will be video by 2017.
70 percent of marketing professionals report that video converts better than any other medium. (Marketing Profs)
Video on landing pages can increase conversions by 80 percent. (Unbounce)
Video in an email can boost open rates by 20 percent and increase click-through rates by 200 to 300 percent. (Forbes)
59 percent of viewers will watch a video that is less than one-minute to completion. (Wistia)
The average online use spends 88 percent more time on a website with a video (Mist Media)
64 percent of consumers are more likely to buy a product after watching a video about it. (comScore)
So the question now isn’t should you use video, it’s how effective do you want your video to be?
The top two video styles are very different: live, talking heads (real people); and animated whiteboard-style explainer videos.
What happens if you take a talking head video and go toe-to-toe with a whiteboard explainer video? One video scribing company did just that. Identical audio and identical lengths but one was “live” and one was whiteboard. Here’s what they found out:
Those viewers who had seen the whiteboard video performed better in four out of five memory tests.
The whiteboard video was three times more likely to be shared.
The whiteboard video was over twice as likely to be recommended.
Four out of ten whiteboard video viewers would have bought the service described in the video—twice as many as the talking head viewers.
Those are important findings—especially for the next time you’re considering video for your organization!
In 1944, two psychologists made a brief animated movie. Fritz Heider and Marianne Simmel’s movie was part of a study entitled “An Experimental Study of Apparent Behavior,” and consisted of two triangles, a dot, and a box:
These inanimate objects moved around the screen and “interacted” with each other. When test subjects were asked to describe the actions of the triangles, dot, and box they explained what they saw in terms of a story.
“Oh, that one is a bully!”
“They’re fighting over the girl.”
“Oh no! The dot is trapped!”
Please understand, this simple animated black and white movie didn’t have music, didn’t have voices or sound effects—it was simply two triangles, a dot, and a box. Yet the only way to explain what the viewers were watching, each resorted to giving the objects personalities and telling a story!
“Results from a dozen prominent cognitive scientists and developmental psychologists have confirmed that human minds do rely on stories and on story architecture as the primary roadmap for understanding, making sense of, remembering our lives—as well as countless experiences and narratives along the way,” reports Kendall Haven, in his book Story Proof: The Science Behind the Startling Power of Story. He continues, “In our enlightened, literate, scientific, rational, advanced world, it is still story structure that lies at the core of human mental functioning.”
Stories are the most efficient and effective structural vehicles to use if you need to motivate, teach and communicate factual, conceptual, and tacit information (that’s stuff that has to do with attitudes, beliefs, values, and expectations).
For example, your product isn’t “just a desk lamp,” look at what Pixar did with their desk lamp!
Tell a story! Problem – Solution. A day in the life of… How it was before your product or service and how much better it is now. Here’s a Problem – Solution examle:
This is a brief animation we did for the National Safety Council for their campaign about “listening to your car”:
The takeaway is this: the next time your organization needs to provide employee orientation or training, or explain how your mousetrap is better than all other mousetraps, start with a story!
