How To Make Your Own Explainer Video For Your Business

Video has been a big part of the internet marketing landscape for a while but lately it’s becoming even more major and lots of serious and very successful campaigns are incorporating it into their campaigns.

However, doing video usually involves one of two courses. Either you can try it yourself without really being sure about what you’re doing and maybe or maybe not pull off something decent, or you can hire a production company to make a marketing video for you and hope all the money you spent was worth it. Either way you choose, you also need to deal with the problem that having your video look decent isn’t enough; it also needs to actually do the job it’s intended for and convert your viewers into customers!

The Advantage of Doing your own Explainer Video

Now while there’s no guarantee of high conversions whether you pay someone else to make it or create the video yourself, at least making it yourself gives you the ability to use your existing knowledge of your target market to increase your chances of high conversions while also saving you the money you’d have spent on a production company or freelancer.

This is exactly what we’re going to cover briefly here, a summary of this great ebook by the SEO professionals at Digital Third Coast in Chicago about DIY explainer videos that rake in conversions.

Some Key Stats to Bear in Mind

Before we get down to the “how to” details, here are some key stats that underscore how much of a good marketing investment videos are:

· 92% of mobile viewers share their videos with others and while facebook is currently reducing the organic reach of fan pages to just 1 or 2%, video still creates the most organic reach of any content.

· 96% of consumers thin that video is very getting them to make a decision online and 75% of them are more likely to buy because of a video that explains some product or service nicely.

· It’s estimated that 69% of all market traffic will be in video format by 2017 according to Cisco and this means that telling an effective story via video will become essential for audience conversion.

Making an Effective Explainer Video in 4 EASY Steps

We’re now going to summarize the DTC ebook’s four step process for making an explainer video that not only informs your audience wonderfully but also makes them much more likely to decide on a converting action (ie: sales!!)

1. Write your script

You need to create a script that stays simple, focuses on your audience’s chief problem and explains clearly how you can solve that problem with your product or service.

In essence, a great script has these five elements:

· It solves a problem

· It says one thing very clearly and well

· It gets right to the point as soon as possible

· It keeps from being boring at all

· It’s well paced, moving from one key point to another in a way that builds towards a call to action.

Once your script is done, seek as much feedback from assorted sources as you can. Make sure they tell you two key things: if they ever lose interest in any part of your story and if they ever get confused. Revise until you’ve eliminated both points.

2. Source your Equipment

Sourcing your gear can seem daunting, but there’s really nothing to it if you go about the process in the right way. This means first finding out what you’ll need and finding great places to rent it from for minimal cost.

To cut to the essentials from all the detailed advice in the ebook, here are the key items you’ll likely need:

· Camera and lenses with different lenses with assorted focus for different shooting distances. Top of the line DSLR devices from Canon or Sony are great compact choices, especially 4K cameras.

· Lavalier microphone for interviews

· A shotgun microphone for natural sound

· A tripod for stable shooting platforms

· Memory cards for saving your videos, preferably ones with large 30+GB memory

· Lighting for maximum video clarity

3. Shoot your Video

The time it takes to set up a pristine shot that really captures the color and sound of your video clearly is absolutely crucial, because despite what you might think it’s much better to shoot a good scene right off the bat then try editing a bad shot in post-production.

In fact, video shot with too many errors will never look good no matter how much post editing you give it, and the same rule applies even more so for sound editing –it’s much better to get your sound right as you film.

Again, the details covered in the ebook go over many extremely important tips and points but the essential aspects of shooting you need to focus on getting right as you actually shoot are:

· Recording good audio: work on minimizing sources of unwanted noise external noise and record background sounds separately for easier post production editing.

· Recording good A-Roll and B-Roll: A-Roll is primary footage in your video and includes interviews or main speech and visual content. Space it nicely and set up your video tripods for maximal clarity and ideal angles. B-Roll means your secondary, brief shots of additional visuals or information. Keep your B-Roll simple and stable and capture plenty of footage for selectively editing the best shots later on.

· Focus on your Exposure Triangle: This consists of your Shutter speed, aperture and ISO setting. The three combined will set the brightness and clarity of your shots so they are extremely important.

· Set the right depth of field: Your depth of field selects what objects will be focused on in your shoots, DSLRs are great at making this easy to manage for great focus on what’s important in your video and a nice blurring of backgrounds.

4. Post-Production

Post production is the final process of cleaning your video up before its big debut to your audience and of adding in some select additional assets to spice it up a bit.

The assets you add to it could include music, special audio rolls, images, title fonts and extra B-Roll footage. Given that you probably won’t have a fortune ready for spending on Hollywood or major ad footage, all of your extra assets should be mined from two great low budget or free sources. They are “royalty free” and “creative commons.

Finally, for editing, there are great software programs out there that are not only affordable but also really easy to learn with a bit of practice and studying. One of the best you can easily get your hands on is Adobe Creative Suite. With its Premiere Pro video editing program, it will have pretty much everything you’d need to make your DIY video into a masterpiece of solid editing.

Help the editing process along by organizing all of your files in a single folder and naming them so that dozens or hundreds of different file types and shooting clips can easily be found.

Final Word

This was just a quick overview of what is a truly information rich ebook on creating your own absolutely top notch DIY explainer video for converting your audience powerfully. To see all those extra details, check out the ebook itself, its free and packed with step-by-step techniques.

How To Make Your Own Explainer Video For Your Business