Humans are storytellers. It is one of the oldest traditions we have. Before modern methods of record-keeping, storytelling was how we survived–how we preserved knowledge, taught, and shared memories–and it continues to be one of our primary sources of entertainment. And everyone has a story. Just ask the thousands of people who attend the Scottish International Storytelling Festival every year.
Good marketing strategies make use of stories that will stimulate an emotional response and drive a customer to act, whether that action is signing up, making a purchase, or volunteering. At Ydraw we specialize in telling stories through short animated explainer videos, whiteboard animation, 3D animation, and more. We know we can help you tell your story, but first let me tell you Y.
Y Draw?
Of all the ways to tell a story, drawing might be one of the oldest. Just think about ancient hieroglyphs and cave drawings. That’s how people communicated! If that is not a compelling enough reason, here are a few more.
Say More With Less
Have you ever heard that a picture is worth a thousand words? Well, so have we. That is why we know that animating a short video to tell your story can help you say more in less time. That’s great news considering it only takes about a minute for an audience to stop paying attention. In fact, if you don’t have them locked in after 5 seconds they might just move on, but more on that later. However, with animated videos you are not just getting one picture, you are getting several.
Plus drawing has the potential to break down speech barriers and tell a story even without words. That is how powerful they are. You can maximize the short amount of time you have to get your message across by showing your audience what you are talking about, not just telling them.
Enchant Your Audience
How many of you know someone who will sit there for hours watching 10-second videos on Tik Tok? Their eyes glaze over and they can’t seem to tear themselves away because there is something trance-like about watching those videos. That is how easily you can hypnotize your audience with a simple video.
Whiteboard animation in particular is excellent at captivating an audience from the first frame. This is because the viewer is watching things being drawn right before their eyes. As a result, their whole mind is engaged in the process while they listen to the information being shared and are visually stimulated with constant motion. Much like anticipating the punchline during a comedy routine, the viewer is waiting for the whole picture to be revealed and is held in suspense. When the image is complete there is a sense of relief.
Be Contagious
Videos also have a high chance of going viral. In his book, Contagious Jonah Berger talks about “the science behind why things catch on,” and it is full of advice on how to create content that has the potential to ‘go viral.’ The technological age we live in makes it so easy to share a video that they can receive millions of views overnight. So when you have animated explainer videos as part of your marketing strategy you increase shareability and reach a larger audience.
The chances that you will go viral are higher if you have a catchy script and fun artwork. Shakespeare wrote, “the eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen…” to describe how our individual senses come together for a more complete experience. Food that looks good, smells good, AND tastes good is way more enjoyable than food that just does one of those things. In the same way, hand-drawn visuals will complement a well-written script to give you that viral effect.
So now you know Y. What about how?
Explainer Video Basics
The most infuriating thing about every tutorial on how to create a great explainer video or how to write a killer ad script is their number one step. Inevitably it will be something like, “start with a great hook.” Yes, that’s swell advice, thanks…now how do I do that? Well, after some research and a bit of trial and error, here are the basics. Some guides may add a bit more fluff, but these points are found in each one.
Create A Fantasy (AKA Tell A Story)
We’ve all seen enough advertisements to know exactly what it sounds like to be sold something. How thoroughly can a teenager tune out an adult or a husband tune out a nagging wife? That is how easily we tune out advertising all the time. Instead of using boring, overdone ad copy, insert your brand/product into the story people are living out every day.
Taking the idea of telling a story one step further, into creating a fantasy, ups the stakes. Most people at a fundamental level are focused on their own survival. Will your brand or product help them get a promotion? Look better to a potential mate? Be healthier or more fit? Show them a fairy tale and position yourself as their guide, helping them look good or accomplish their goals. They will want to buy into whatever you are selling naturally. Create a fantasy they will want to see played out.
Misery Loves Company
Think about every great movie or comic book villain. What are they trying to do? Make everyone else as miserable as they are! Usually, their backstory is some woeful tale about why they are so full of hate, because it is true: misery really does love company. So when it comes to wooing new customers, sympathy goes a long way.
Chances are you already know some key pain points your clients are suffering from. After all, you created a product or service to fix their problem, right? When you start your video by sharing in their distress, you let the viewer know that you understand how they feel. Then you can comfort them with your offer, and empower them to become the hero.
Don’t make that common mistake. In this story, they must be the hero, not you. This will create a more compelling reason for them to interact with your brand.
Include A Call To Action
One thing you should never do when creating video advertising: exclude a call to action. The audience needs to be told how to obtain your offer, and no it is not because they are dumb. Marketing students have been told for years that “people are dumb, and you have to tell them exactly what to do.” Really, it has much more to do with being lazy.
If you have produced a quality video then you’ve sold the audience by the end of it. The viewer knows that they want whatever you are selling, but they want it to be easy to get. If you don’t make it easy to obtain whatever you are offering they will move on. Some kind of click here, buy now, or call today ending to your script is vital. Make it easy for them and they will flock to you.
Yes, of course, it is important to have a hook, but there is no format for how to do that. A great hook depends on your audience and other variables. First, do the groundwork of figuring out what story you want to tell, then trust the process. A hook will come. It should never be the first step or you might just get stuck there.
There Is No I
You probably want one of these videos for yourself right about now, but deciding to create a video like this is a huge undertaking. So, if this all sounds like a pretty tough nut to crack, don’t worry: hiring us gives you a team of people who know what they are doing. When I first started this job, I thought there was no way that I was going to be able to pull it off. My coworkers kept reminding me that I was part of a TEAM and that it would take time to learn everything, but they would help me along the way.
Here is a peek at our process. Right off the bat, we get to work diving into the story that you want to tell and begin scripting your video. You might already have a script you want to work with, but don’t know what to do with it. Our writers will help you spin it into gold. Then we hook you up with the perfect voice actor to bring that script to life. While the voice actor works their magic, our artists will begin illustrating your project and recording it live. Editing comes last. This is when our genius team pieces together the voice-over and the recorded illustrations with a little bit of digital magic to unveil a work of art: your video.
Still not convinced? Check out some of our work and you’ll see what I mean.
Is your website actually communicating the right message to your audience or turning them away? Don’t let yourself fall into the category of those who are doing things incorrectly! We’ve got plenty of tips that will help guide you to the perfect website and make sure you are sending the right message to your audience.
Take a look at this weeks Moron Monday video to learn what you should and shouldn’t be doing when it comes to your website.
If you missed last weeks episode, you can find it HERE! We talked about how to run successful video ads!
VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION
Hey, what’s up guys? I want to welcome you to another session of Moron Monday.
It’s not Monday, we call it Moron Monday because we just show you the different things that morons do in marketing, and especially video marketing.
Today is probably one of the most important episodes we’ve had. We’ve only had three, but it’s probably one of the most important episodes you’re going to see and continue to see, because we’re going to talk about the words. The words we use and the messaging we use. If you are a business and you are creating a website or you’re creating a new video, it’s really important that you say the right things to get people to take action.
If somebody comes to your website, they need to know what it is that you do immediately. It needs to pass the five second test.
If you’re creating a video, they need to know “Hey, what is this video about?”. Don’t go into some long old story before you tell them what it’s about. It’s like a trailer.
Whatever it is that you are using to get your message in front of people, you need to have your Unique Selling Proposition there.
And then same with your video message, it needs to be in there.
STEP NUMBER 1
This is probably where we see people screw up the most, is with simplicity.
I am a big fan of keeping things simple, and a lot of times when a customer comes to us and they’re like, “Hey, we want you guys to create our script,” (because we do all the scriptwriting when it comes to our videos), most of the time there’s a bit of a clash because what they’re focused on is actually confusing the heck out of the audience.
There’s that knowledge gap where they have been working in that industry, they know everything about it, and then you have a consumer who knows nothing about it.
What happens is they try to take all their jargon, all of their message, all of their features, and they just cram it into a video, and usually it doesn’t turn out good and it confuses the audience.
What we try to do is get them to step back and say, “Hey, let’s keep things simple and do not confuse.” Because if you confuse your audience, you’re going to lose them. They’re going to jump over to somebody else who doesn’t confuse them.
STEP NUMBER 2
And then the next thing, everything that you do needs to be customer and problem-solution focused.
Don’t go out there and say we, we, we, we, we.
You need to talk about what it is that you’re going to do for them.
How can you solve their problem? Because people really don’t care about your awards, they don’t care about that kind of stuff.
Now, you do need to show social proof, I’m not saying go get rid of all your awards, go get rid of all your testimonials. No. That comes a little later, like if you’re creating a website, social proof should be down below.
But you don’t want to start off with “we’re the number one lawyer in the world”. And I’m going to show you some examples of different sites.
I’m going to jump over to a simple screencast and give you guys an idea of what to do and what not to do on what makes sense.
So the very first site we’re going to go jump into is a lawyer site.
Lawyers are actually notorious for confusing their audience, and they love cramming so much information on above the fold.
It just doesn’t make sense. And people don’t pay attention to it anyway.
So the very first one I pulled up was this NevadaDivorce.net. And you will see above the fold, which above the fold is above the crease, you have a bunch of call to actions.
You have a ton of paragraphs. You have no idea what it is that these guys do, I mean they’re divorce attorneys, but it just says Nevada divorce and document service.
Now they have some bullet points, they have a whole paragraph here, paragraph there, and bunch of links on the right, call us … You just don’t know what it is that they actually do here, so most people will bounce.
Compare that to this. Neil Patel. If you don’t know who Neil Patel is, he’s one of the SEO experts out there. He ranks for a lot of different things.
But on his website he just says “Do you want more traffic?”
Great. You come there and you’re like, “Oh, what it is that Neil does? He gets me more traffic.” Do you want more traffic lead sales? Enter your URL below if you want to grow your traffic and revenue.
And then he has a website. Now, what he’ll do with this website is more of a lead capture. You put your information in here, and that’s it. That’s what his whole website is set up to do.
It’s simple, effective, and I like to use some of his stuff.
Here’s another attorney. I just kind of make fun of attorneys, sorry. But their websites are usually the worst.
So they start off, here’s my number. They’re the 702 Firm.
Now, you have a smiley, a mean, a half-smile guy here, and they’re awarded the best personal injury law firm. That is a hundred percent me, me-focused, it is not consumer-focused.
Best injury lawyers in Las Vegas…personal injuries…
They’re trying to do a lot of stuff with search engine optimization and load it in here, but this whole website does not talk one bit about the consumer.
Compared to this. This is StoryBrand.
If you don’t know who he is, he actually writes about clarifying your message. So workshops to help you clarify your message, that’s what he does.
He does workshops to help clarify message. And then he just says eliminate confusion, connect with customers, grow your company.
You can see that that is customer-focused and it’s not about him, he doesn’t say, “We do this, this, this, this,” it’s like no, you’re going to eliminate confusion, you’re going to connect with your audience, and grow your company.
And then in the background he actually shows a good image of what’s going on so there’s just no confusion.
Compared to this one, this is a mortgage one. So hundreds of mortgage options under one roof.
Then they have this slider here that is going way too fast. They have nothing here, they just have some images and then this creepy little thing that pops up.
And then if you scroll down, there’s this long old paragraph here that nobody reads.
If you looked at the bounce rate and just said, “Hey, what happened?”
Now, if you space it out it’s okay to do some paragraphs. I’ll show you what I’m testing right now.
Okay, if you jump over onto this page here. I’m testing some longer form because long form sales letters do work.
It doesn’t all need to be simple, but if you hit the website, a YouTube Campaign can grow your business.
Then I go into these long form paragraphs here, where I talk about what kind of results we get for customers, and this seems to be working.
But you’ll see I space it out. I very rarely have two sentences per paragraph. I space it out, I highlight it. I don’t make it look all slammed together where people aren’t going to read that stuff.
You don’t need to eliminate all the writing on a website. This seems to be working, and we’ll keep testing.
But the main point it, just don’t confuse your audience.
Keep things simple, don’t confuse them.
Go back through your material.
The best way to get the most out of these courses that we do is go back through your material and apply these things that we talk about. Look at your website messaging and say, “Am I confusing my audience? If they come here, do they know what it is that I do within five seconds?”
And then another big thing, on a website you should have your headline. You can have a sub-headline here.
Make sure you have a call to action. You want to say, “Hey, if you’re here at my website, this is what I want you to do. Here’s what you’re going to get.” Don’t forget to put a call to action, and most of those websites that I did show you did not have that.
Same with video. So video, it needs to kind of fall in the same format, but it’s a little different.
What we like to do on videos is a headline, problem, solution, call to action, and then we’ll extend it out.
There’s a lot of popular videos that have millions of views that follow this same formula. They will do a guarantee, another solution, another call to action.
But don’t forget this call to action in your videos. You want them to do something. After they engage with any of your material, whether it’s brochures, website, videos, you want to ask them to do something so that you can do business. So don’t forget that.
And that is it. Go through your stuff, make the changes, and we’ll see you on the next episode.
Hey, guys. I want to welcome you to the second episode of “Moron Monday“. This is where we talk about the dumb things (and good things) people are doing in marketing. Last week, we went over a little bit about video remarketing. I want to show you a little more on this. We’re going to go over the different ways you can target your audience. Remember, I’m Jace with Ydraw and Marketing Hy.
Here are the different ways you can run ads in front of your audience. This is specifically for YouTube. One cool thing that YouTube came out with last October is what’s called TrueView for action ads.
This year, they also came out with being able to target TVs. So you know if people are watching your videos right on their TVs.
1. Placement campaigns
What is a placement campaign? We’re able to handpick the videos we want to run your video ads in front of.
If you’re a financial company and you want to get in front of other financial videos or in front of your target audience who is watching financial videos, you are then able to run them a placement campaign, and you’re also able to target your competitor’s videos. A lot of people like doing this.
If your competitors have a YouTube channel, you’re able to run your videos in front of theirs.
2. Remarketing
We went over this last week, but you’re able to target your website visitors and your YouTube viewers. If they watch a video on your YouTube channel, you’re able to run them more YouTube ads, or if they go to your website, you’re able to run them YouTube ads.
3. In-Market Audiences
There’s four steps, but I just combined these. I ran out of whiteboard space.
You have keywords and in-market audiences. In-market is kind of like your TrueView for action. If they’re searching for a new car, we can run them a video ad if we have a new car video ad,or if you’re a car dealership.
I don’t know why car dealerships aren’t doing this, but what they should be doing is running video ads in their local area to people who are searching for cars. Simple to do, nobody’s doing it.
Same thing for restaurants. If you’re in a local area and you want to get a little bit of traction, you might as well be running your video ads to those who are searching for restaurants, or just in your local area because it’s so cheap.
4. Keywords
The last one is keyword base. You can go and focus on certain keywords like you would a pay-per-click campaign, or a search campaign on Google Ads. You can do the same thing on YouTube.
If people are searching for running shoes, you can have your video pop up at the top for running shoes. Got it? That’s a simple thing you can do for video ads.
If you have questions, just go to our site ydraw.com. We’d love to help you. We’d love to create some of these video campaigns for you. It’s cheap, and we’ll post on there some examples and some results that some of our clients have got.
In 2019 we are sharing all the goodies. We’re starting a video series called Moron Monday talking about what we’ve learned about video marketing over the years and what you should be implementing into your business. You can check these out weekly on our YouTube Channel.
In this weeks video, Jace is sharing some tips on video remarketing and why it’s important.
Video Transcription
Hey guys, Jace over here at Ydraw. Today I want to go over just a couple things on video remarketing, why it’s important and what you need to do to put it into play.
1. Build Your Audience
First off, most people take multiple touches for them to become a customer.
If I’m going to go get a product, usually I’ll look at it online, I’ll talk to somebody, I’ll look at it some more, and then finally a couple months to sometimes years down the road, I’ll finally make a decision.
Something you can do to stay in front of your audience is create a simple video remarketing campaign.
Very first thing you need to do is actually build that audience.
Google gives you the ability to put a pixel on your website. If you go to Google Ads, within Google Ads or Google Analytics, you will find a pixel. You can also use Google tag manager.
You go in there and you find a pixel, you get the pixel and then you put it on the header of your website. That way when someone comes to your website they then get a cookie and you can start running and remarketing.
But you can go a step further… so instead of just running and remarketing, you can run them a video remarketing campaign that shows up on YouTube.
Also, they’re getting pretty aggressive on their TV advertising, so if people are coming to your site, they’re home watching TV, you can then run them an ad.
The very first thing is to get that pixel and get it on your site. You should be doing that anyway and building out your audiences. A 30 day, a 15, a 7 day, a conversion, there’s all types of audiences.
Then also, make sure that you build out an audience of anybody who has watched your YouTube videos.
2. Get A Video
Step two, you need to get a video. It can be professional or it can be homemade. You just need to get one, make sure that video’s very engaging.
Make sure that you have a good call to action on there and you’re telling the audience what you want them to do.
Another thing you can do to help it be engaging is educate. Kind of like what I’m doing here, I’m going to give you guys a lot of education, provide you some value, and then you can turn around and ask for their business later on.
If you can’t afford an expensive video, pull out your phone and give them some good education. Then make sure you give them a call to action like go visit your website.
3. Create Your Google Ad
Then finally when you have those two things in place, you got your pixels, you’ve tracked your audience, then you have your video, now you need to go create your campaign.
Go to Google Ads.
You’re going to target your website visitors or target anyone who’s watched your YouTube videos.
A small budget works but if you have too small of a budget, you need to make sure you exclude videos like games.
I even like to exclude mobile sometimes. I feel like when people are on their mobile phones they’re going to a YouTube video they want to watch that’s there and they’re more likely to skip.
But on their desktop, I get higher conversions. So, I’ll turn off my mobile remarketing campaign and just leave it on desktop.
There it is. If you have questions, you can go visit us at Ydraw.com. Feel free to call us. We’d be happy to help you on your video. We’d also be happy to help you set this up.
We’re doing video marketing campaigns all the time and this is just one little aspect of video marketing.
When talking with a Project Manager or other Creative here at Ydraw, it is important to help us understand exactly what your company wants.
Otherwise, how can we blow your mind with incredibly awesome and mystical videos?
One of our favorite things is getting to work with heaps of companies with unique brands and differing requests. Unfortunately, working with a wide range of opinions can make it difficult for our team to pinpoint your companies wishes.
It’s true…we are made of stardust and wishes and magical things, but let me tell you a secret…we can’t actually read minds.
I know, weird right?
For years, we have been diligently looking for a mind-reading crystal ball and unfortunately haven’t found one yet. But…we haven’t given up hope just yet, so we will let you know when that happens!
Until then…
It’s important that we continue to ask lots of questions and paramount that you and your team clearly communicate your wishes.
If you don’t know what you want, and we don’t know what you want, we’re just shooting in the dark. And although our accuracy is near perfect… we aren’t quite there yet.
Listen, we do this all day every day, so trust us when we say we don’t get our feelings hurt. We love working with diverse companies and that is why we have made our process collaborative and flexible.
So be raw, be truthful and communicate clearly.
By the way…
We are POSITIVE that if we did have a crystal ball, it would tell us that YOU ARE FULL OF MAGIC!!
