Think about it: Why does one buy a chair?
I know this sounds too archaic, but go with it for a moment.
Why does someone buy a chair?
“They don’t buy a chair but rather they buy comfort.” In other words,
And this is what drives the best marketing content – Value! With videos being the highlight to drive such content!
According to this notion, people don’t just want to know what your brand is and what it’s selling. Their major interest lies in wanting to hear and watch stories of people who have faced similar challenges as them and how their life is improved by using your product/service or philosophy.
Not only this mentality led to the slow demise of traditional in-your-face marketing, but also gave way to more personalised, humanised and engaging interactions between a brand and its potential consumers.
And why do these interactions work like magic, you might ask? Because they don’t feel like marketing, they feel like a human conversation.
To ease the task of propagating your brand to the consumers, riding on this new wave of humanised marketing is VIDEO! It’s easily one of the most effective and important growing mediums for marketers. They require lesser cognitive abilities to consume but create a huge impact, even better than blogs or just plain images.
Globally, around 54% of consumers expect videos from the brands they love. Moreover, 80% of all online content will be video in 2019!
Now as a B2B marketer you might think, “How does video marketing fit in my business, especially when my products/services are not even that interesting?” and “Do company executives and CXOs really sit and watch videos?”
They do!
More than 70% of executives watch and look out for video content online and not just a few snippets here and there. Almost 30 mins of content! And when it comes to you thinking about your product/brand/service not being interesting enough to market through videos, you are wrong!
The purpose of a video is to make difficult things easy to comprehend. Add some humour, emotion and relatability to it – and it works like magic.
Be it a difficult to explain digital product like a development platform or maybe something like company culture that gets people excited to work with you, or it can even be customer stories/case studies that show how well your product works – videos can do it all and do it well!
To get you inspired and excited about video marketing, we’ve rounded up 4 Indian Companies that are killing it with their video content to prove that even supposedly boring, technology-based businesses can engage the audience to skyrocket their success.
Go grab some popcorn, there are a lot of videos to see!
1.Postman
Postman provides a complete API development ecosystem that helps one design, mock, debug, test, document, monitor, and publish APIs all in one place. It gained popularity in 2012, when Abhinav, Postman’s founder, uploaded it on Chrome Web Store and since then the native, robust app has managed to gain 6 Million happy coders, worldwide.
What gave them such a great success?
It’s understandable that their product was great, but let’s be honest – no matter how good your service/product is, if not marketed right can break a few hearts. A hard to explain product is even harder to sell.
In Postman’s case, API development ecosystem is a niche topic to explain, which could have been covered in a blog with the help of images. However, video makes it faster and easier to communicate.
Postman’s target audience was coders and companies that develop apps. And where do they look for tutorials for their codes and softwares? YOUTUBE!
And Postman hit them right there with their content.
The brand is constantly churning out video content that includes:
- Explainer videos, how-to videos, video workshops, webinars that focus on providing step-by-step guides for using their platform and it’s updated versions.
- Testimonials that build trust for their platform
- Company culture videos that showcase the journey and values of the company to attract potential employees.
- Talks and recommendations by the top influencers and leaders of the industry that use Postman. These videos help them build an authority and come out as a top player in the API development industry.
- The idea behind going video was simple – explain the product in a quick easy manner. For a company like postman that is trying to get some space in someone’s workflow – video becomes a natural fit.
- The Takeaway
If you think your product/service is hard to explain, create easy to understand tutorials targeted towards helping your customers in their journey around your product. Testimonials, webinars and thought leadership interviews are also a great way to earn the trust of your consumer who might be sceptical about using your product. Place all of these strategically on your website or share across on a platform that your target audience uses the most.
- Toppr
Toppr is a startup in the ed-tech space in India that provides a personalised learning experience to students right from standard 5th – 12th and the ones who are preparing for competitive examinations. They believe that every student has different learning needs. With Toppr and it’s more than 1.5 million learning pieces, they want to create a personalised after-school learning platform that caters to every need.
Though their offering is easy to explain, the hard part becomes gaining the trust of students and their parents. The general notion is that a physical personalised tutor is any day better than a digital one. So, why would anyone choose Toppr?
Very early on, Toppr started churning out content on YouTube to help students get a taste of their offerings. Youtube becomes a natural choice considering the popularity of the platform.
Their content includes:
- Explainer Videos of different subjects that provided value to the audience without a charge
- Testimonials of students and parents who benefited due to Toppr
- A series called ‘Humans of Toppr’ where employees at Toppr talk about their journey at the company and what it means to work there. They also cover the different positive aspects of learning through a platform that’s available at a student’s disposal and what motivates them to make their service even better. These videos helped the brand show the human side of theirs which prospect employees would be interested to check out.
- Ads in different languages that targeted different regional audiences.
- All of their videos have a CTA that leads the viewer to download the application. The videos helped Toppr gain the trust of students from different standards and eventually led them to download the app to learn more.
The Takeaway
Provide value! That’s the guaranteed path to gain the trust of people and get them onboard to use your product/service. The more you provide content that is informational to your audience and makes their life better without shoving your product in between, the easier it will be to get your audience to engage and connect with your brand.
- Skylark
Skylark sells drones solutions. A really fancy and easy to understand product that gets everyone excited. However, what it lacks is a proper awareness about its uses and a human touch. People see it as a piece of technological marvel used for photography. But Skylark does more. They deliver drone solutions that help enterprises increase revenue, reduce costs and save time by carefully surveying, monitoring and inspecting project sites.
The issue that Skylark had to tackle was the lack of awareness in the Indian Market about drones and how enterprises can use it to scale up their revenues. Skylark opted for the video solution.
The content they created that focused majorly on their website and LinkedIn included:
- An interview series ‘The Hangar’ which has field experts talk about drones and their use in the industry of agriculture, utilities and infrastructure. This method is a good and engaging way to spread awareness about the product that Skylark is selling.
- Case Studies on the website from each industry that showcase the on-field use of drones and how it has made projects easier, all in detail.
- Brand journey to showcase the human side of their business.
- All these videos helped Skylark spread the right kind of awareness about the product they were selling and how they could be used to make work easier. The use of field experts and case studies helped them build an authority and a technical product successfully engaged the audience without getting bored!
The Takeaway
The use of case studies in case of technical products helps people understand the product better and the use of it in their lives. The audience tends to relate to the problems and with it to your solution. Once, they find out that your solution gives a satisfying solution that has made lives better, they are bound to buy it. Add to it testimonials and voila! the fishing net has been cast successfully.
- Instamojo
Instamojo is a payment gateway that provides MSMEs with payment links that they can share across different platforms. In addition to this, they also provide customised dashboards and forever-free online store to manage everything related to business – sales, invoices, products and your customers.
The target audience is mostly the new age entrepreneurs, startup owners and other SME owners. The problem they had to tackle was as to:
how to create their own identity in a market that is already bustling with similar products
- How to connect with, engage and hook the Gen Z business owners as well as the traditional business owners at the same time
- The other key point to be kept in mind was trust building. Instamojo is a payment gateway, how to get people to trust the platform with their money?
The solution was videos!
Business owners are busy people, they don’t have the time to read blogs or spend on social media looking for tips. Videos are an easy way for them to intake information – less time, more value.
As for the other side of the story, the ones who are paying will only trust the brand when they see the human side of it – which is easily possible through videos.
Hence, Instamojo went heavy with videos on all their platforms and website.
They created:
- Tutorials and how to videos in a bite-size format that explain the steps to use the platform
- ‘Inside Instamojo’ series that showcased what it was to be a part of their company.
- Webinars, News Updates and General guides for business owners that had nothing to do with Instamojo’s product but provided value
- ‘MojoJourneys’ a testimonial series of Instamojo employees showcasing how Instamojo is a team to work for and with.
- ‘Mojo Makers’ series that shows the journey of business owners that have used the platform – a type of content that other entrepreneurs can relate to.
- All this helped the brand to position themselves as someone who knows in and out about all businesses and understands their struggles and problems. The business owners could connect to the brand because of the value they were providing without shoving the product in their face.
The Takeaway
When creating content, understand your target audience, their points and struggles. Once you have successfully comprehended the problems, start creating content that would help them to solve it, even if it doesn’t put your product on the pedestal. When you provide solutions to the day-to-day general problems, customers automatically connect to your brand and once they do that, it’s easy to sell them your product.
Now it’s your turn
Video no doubt can do wonders for your marketing campaign and eventually your business. However, the task of creating a video strategy can be a bit intimidating, all because of the amount of research and work that goes into it. Many fall into the “so less time, too much work” fallacy and let videos go.
However, keep in mind the positive ROI videos are capable to give you. So it’s better you pull sleeves up and start creating video content. Put in good research and hire a good production team to do the job for you. And if hiring someone seems a bit out of budget, start with your phone and make videos for your social media.
Take a cue from the above-mentioned examples and how these 4 Indian Companies leveraged the power of video to Attract, Engage and Delight their customers and in the process achieved tremendous success in business. Even when their products weren’t supposedly “interesting enough”.
Thinking of where to start, why don’t you check out “the most impactful 2019 trends of Video Marketing” and decide what’s the most quickest way to go video.
Author: Jaljeet Ajani is a results-driven Digital Marketer from Mumbai, India. He loves Creating Content in all its forms be it text-based, images or videos. At the moment, Jeet is working with a friend towards building Synclarity – an Inbound Digital Marketing Agency that’s focussed on helping businesses to grow and achieve measurable results.
