Speaker 1: Congrats if you've reached the Explainer milestone. It's probably an exciting time for you and your company, and chances are you have a million other things on your plate. While Explainer production is a good hurdle, it's a hurdle nonetheless. If you're anything like my clients, you're wondering about questions like these. How do you create something memorable? How do you make sure your video converts? How do you find the right balance between quality and cost? How do you choose the right producer? How do you select the right technique? How do you have a smooth production process? This book will give you relief from all of these worries and many more. While I'm big on the conceptual, we'll also get both nitty and gritty. The Explainer video does not live in the cerebral realm of white papers and sales collateral. Rather, it's a neighbor to the music videos, show openers, movies, and Super Bowl commercials that tug on your heartstrings. When you combine the tired and true magic of good storytelling with your product's powerful message, you'll create your most effective marketing asset. Let's get into it. Setting Expectations I wrote this book to give you the strongest framework for creating an awesome high-converting explainer. That being said, the ingredients that go into a compelling script and a seamless production process can just as easily be applied to other video formats and marketing undertakings. If you read my video marketing book, you might be aiming for a different video approach like a testimonial, PSA, or walkthrough. This book is not a do-it-yourself instruction manual, nor is it a technical course on video editing. Although we'll touch on a few DIY video platforms, that's not our main focus. If you're a startup or entrepreneur, your time is valuable. Producing an awesome homemade explainer is probably not realistic. Settling for a low-quality stick figure promo will most likely do more harm than good. So instead of spinning your wheels and hurting your brand, you'll learn how to a. Build the foundation for your video, your message, script, and voiceover, and b. Hire out production to the pros in a highly cost-effective way. If you're tight for funds, you might choose to save a bit of money handling your script, voiceover, or storyboard yourself. You'll learn how to do that later. Why Video? As Comscore found, the average viewer watches 32.2 videos per month, and that web video as a whole is experienced by 100 million viewers per day. Granted, a fair slice of that is probably cat videos. So why does this matter for your business explainer? According to Forbes, 50% of CEOs watch business-related videos on a frequent basis, and 65% visit the company's site after viewing. The simple act of adding an explainer to an email can increase click-through rates by 200 to 300%, according to Forrester Marketing Group. We can go anecdotal. Before Dropbox was the cloud storage leader we know today, they were a fledgling company in a competitive space. The simple act of adding an explainer to their homepage brought them 10% more leads and a revenue increase of $48 million, according to Switch Video. At Idea Rocket, we experienced a 46% lead increase when we added our homepage video. Quality vs. Cost Pop in your third-eye-blind CD, zip up your baggy pants, and step into my time machine. We're zooming back to the late 90s and early 2000s when the internet was in its infancy. Marketing gurus raved that it was imperative for all business entities to create websites. Within a year or two, thousands of pages sprung up. Many site creators thought the internet could represent a radical departure from the best marketing practices of the last 100 years. They neglected quality design, buyer psychology, and customer experience. The result was a dull landscape of low-quality, homogenous sites. Over time, businesses began to realize that the above considerations are important online in the same way they had been offline as applied to mediums like billboards, brochures, and television commercials. Eventually, we achieved today's vibrant and visually diverse digital landscape. Let's go back to the future. When it comes to the state of web video, doesn't it feel like the early days of the internet? An echo chamber of marketers, including yours truly, rails off about the importance of video. Create one immediately or you'll be left in the dust, we say. In the face of this pressure, it's tempting to repeat the mistakes of the past and rush into creating something prefabricated or formulaic based on the models of this or that successful company. Deceptive case studies about the success of certain stick-figure explainers make it seem like quality should be an afterthought. As a result, intelligent marketers are often misled into producing low-quality videos for sophisticated products. This medium is viewed and shared more often than any other content. Quality matters, and its brand implications run deep.