A common purpose of business web videos is to help convert website visitors into enquiries and sales. It’s not just about getting lots of views. If we can get even a small number of the right target audience, to stay on a website longer than it takes to blink, many of us are doing well. In this article we deconstruct two strategically clever videos.
So what are some of the elements that make a web video work, beyond all the cute kittens, or toddlers who bite their brother’s fingers.
These two examples generate business and as it happens they do have huge numbers of views.
DOLLAR SHAVE CLUB
My apologies if you’ve seen this one already – you’re one of 15 million people who have.
It helps that it’s very funny, catching your attention. It also has a great proposition – $1 per month to keep a man in razors. But I think the real insight is that blokes don’t care about all the ‘shave-tech’ that all the other shaver and toothbrush adverts push at us.
When the actor says “there’s no vibrating handle. flash light, back scratcher or 10 blades”, we all go ‘Yeh – right on, who needs that stuff’ – or at least I do. Even though there’s no other razor in the world that offers one of those things. Doesn’t matter, we relate to it. We feel like we know what he’s saying.
It would also be a pretty brave move for most of us to show our warehousing fulfillment process to be completely dysfunctional to the extreme, with happy but useless staff. It appeals to my sense of wanting to be naughty at work, not always being straight and conforming to expectations. It’s funny!
DOVE REAL BEAUTY SKETCHES
It’s been around a few years but this is still a great case study.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=litXW91UauE
The insight is how baby-boomer age women really feel about themselves, compared to how others see them. They judge themselves, both in looks and as people, much more harshly than others do. The video is a great creative interpretation, using the artist to draw how women see themselves based on their own description, and then he draws how other women see each subject. Emotion is brought to the story when the subjects get to compare the two drawings of themselves and realise the difference.
Dove moved away from advertising their anti wrinkle creams by showing beautiful women who already have perfect skin. No longer did they seek to make other women feel ugly and anxious, as all their competitors do. And apparently real women loved the ‘real’ approach. Within six months of starting this campaign, sales of Dove’s firming products increased 700 percent in Europe, with similar figures in the US.
Interestingly Dove identified the insight of how baby boomer women truly felt about themselves, by doing market research.
LESSONS
What are the lessons for our own video production projects?
- Most of us realise it is important to understand how your target market thinks and feels. What is their ‘pain’. But is there an insight about your target market that you can really leverage, opposite to what your competitors are doing? PS, small businesses don’t need to spend on market research to find the ‘insight’.
- Is there some emotional connection associated with that insight you can use?
- Can you make a video, or use other media in which you do something to the extreme, make an extreme claim or go completely overboard in some hilarious way? For example, a removalist that takes great care moving furniture, can show big blokes in tuxedos with white gloves, trolley’s and fork-lift trucks wrapped with cushions, packing like each item is a Van-Gogh painting – you get the idea
- Or even just a touch of light humour consistent with your message, but which brings a mild smile and warms folk for the close.
Here’s some more great tips on deconstructing the strategy behind business videos. Give me a chance and I’ll write a video script like this with you… That’s my close 🙂
By Keith Rhodes, Director, Clips That Sell.
