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      When VCs are hunting for the next Google, Facebook, or Twitter, some entrepreneurs create lengthy PowerPoint’s that leaving investors bored and make them feel their pitches unrealistic.

      Your pitch deck is a great snapshot of your company story, so you need to prepare your company’s financial or business model compelling and eye catchy to get the deal done.

      Silly question it may sound, but do you think that an investor would benefit from seeing a visual presentation of your business model? Or is “visually less” and keeping to a text based investment proposal, more?

      Out of ten, six VCs tell that they are bored to read text; they skipped text and missed some potential startups. In reverse case startups with 2 minute, explainer video has a great chance of winning VCs mind.

‘No’ to Text’s: (Explainer videos have the Power)

      You’ve finished developing your product or service and you’ve ready to dive into your business venture.

      Then ask yourself,

      Why would VCs listen to your pitch?

      How do you set yourself apart?

      How to make investors to sit up and take notice?

      Because, every VCs Inbox is overflowing with pitches and investors see hundreds of companies, entrepreneurs, and products everyday.

      There is always heavy competition. If your presentation with boring text and is not attractive, then? Even a strong business model will find itself pushing at a closed door.

      We may all feel that hearing someone’s talk is more personal experience rather than reading a bunch of text.

      We cannot ignore the real fact that there are many VCs out there who aren’t interested in reading, instead they would like to watch. VCs hate anything that puts them to sleep, and texts often do.

      Investors are more apt to remember your pitch if you give them the basis in a way that they can relate. “Tell them a story.”

      “You should always have a fully refined, bulletproof story.”

      Having an effective pitch is more important than ever, as venture capital remains relatively scarce and within the first 30 seconds they will decide whether to continue listening or turn to Twitter and ignore you.

      Then even a strong business model, justified with hard textual data will find itself pushing at a closed door.

      Video presentation of your business is something of real value, makes tangible impact and that’s something different investors don’t see everyday.

A Sure-Fire way: Animated Explainer Videos

      Investors file the most business plans in their trash folder, when they receiving that as lengthy and boring. Creating your points as visual as possible can be a sure-fire way of beginning a path that will lead you to venture capital firms.

      Imagine this situation. You spent hours for preparing a well-polished slide deck, which covers even a minor detail of your business. The moment when you start launch your presentation in front of VCs, you hear they saying,

      “Jack, I have to catch a flight. Can you tell me what you’ve in 2 minutes?” The way you handle this question will decides your success. How do you handle this situation?

      Win this situation with a 2 minute explainer video. Investors like teams that have a product ready to show, start out with a demo, and get straight into who it is for.

      Entertaining explainer videos are less time consuming, less eye straining, easier to understand and gives astonishing life to your product.

      Animated Explainer videos,

• Gains the viewer’s interest
• Simplifies complex business ideas
• Offers solution for the problems
• Memorable
• Triggers conversion rates
• Increases popularity
• Budget friendly

Statistically a well-scripted explainer video is more conveying, entertaining, funny, and most importantly informative and engaging way that text would never be able to do.

In the context of raising business funding from investors, the pitch via video saves your time and money without substantially reducing the positive impact that can be experienced during a well-executed ‘in person’ investor pitch.

A promotional video is very effective, especially when you are trying to raise investment for a particular product that requires a visual presentation of it and is hard to describe in the written medium.

Presenting video pitch is also assures a potential investor of your credibility by visually demonstrating your individual character and creativeness behind your business proposal.

      If you concur with the maxim, A Picture speaks a thousand words, then extrapolate and imagine the power of video and immense number of words and tedious explainer texts it can save.

      With the advent of Web 2.0, messages are effectively communicated to your customers through videos on your website. There are countless researches and whitepapers explaining, the power of explainer videos on the site boosting the conversion rates off the charts. The Explainer videos when produced and presented in a proper sense, produces results in an unprecedented way.

      But the sad part is since the Explainer video production has become more of a norm, most businesses produces videos of less quality which more often confuses, even leads them astray from the core intentions of the visitor.

      In the first case why does most of the explainer videos are stale and boring?

Too long and tedious videos

      Long Videos are bad; the quality of a video can be gauged by two factors,

• The total number of times the video has been watched fully.
• The number of times a particular video was rewatched.

      So most of the time visitors don’t have enough time or patience to watch long tedious videos.

      Information Overload, Dumping too many facts into a single video.

      One feature at a time, Most of the bad explanatory videos cramp and confuse the watcher with information overload which more than often confuses the visitor.

Bad multimedia quality

      One common aspect of all the bad explanatory videos is its bad audio and video quality, which in turn reflects badly on the services.

Bad scripting

      Scripts play the heart and soul of a video; most of the bad videos have confusing scripts, with no aim or natural flow what so ever, which does more harm than good in confusing the watcher.

Lack of humor and life

      Bad videos universally lack life, enthusiasm and the human touch to it. Most of the time a monotonous automaton like voice reads it over which questions the very existence of such videos.

Videos laden with technical jargons and lack of Authority

      Most of the bad videos are scripted with technical parlances understood by only a select erudite few; Difficulty in comprehending creates doubts in the minds of the visitors and hence they bounce off from the website without converting.

      Below listed are the ways to can make your explainer videos awesome.

Scripting

      Just like the movies, the success of an explanatory video depends on the way the video is scripted. Most of the videos out there exist without a proper beginning, an end and a core message. The best way to go about planning for scripting is through questionnaires like,

• Is this video really needed?
• What is this video for?
• What compelling message does it communicate?
• Who is this video intended for?
• What are you trying to achieve?
• Nature and tone of the video?
• Can it be made into a single short video within 90 seconds?

Embrace K.I.S.S. (Keep It Short And Simple)

      As the Bard himself has put “Brevity is the soul of wit”, keep your videos as short as possible. A typical person who is browsing the Internet has been continuously bombarded by thousands of facts and persuasions and they really don’t have the luxury of time to watch a video of epic proportions (length).

      The best strategy would be, just fix on a single subject matter be it a feature or an offer and create a video on it. Ideally the best industry standard is creating multiple numbers of short pithy videos, which would work wonders for you.

      When it comes to the length of the video, 90 seconds seems to be a magical number, which is neither too long nor too short.

Humor

      No one really likes watching videos, which are blunt, mundane, and monotonic read by an automaton. The best way to spice up your video is add humor naturally. Humor helps greatly to increase the stickiness factor and also helps improving the retentivity of the video with the user.

Music

      Just like humor, one other way to beat the monotonous and boring nature of a video is adding pertinent, natural music on the background, which greatly increases the viewing pleasure of the visitor.

Voice Over

      Voice of the narrator is the soul of your video, No wonder voice over artists like Mike Myers earn $700 million on providing voice over for animated characters. It doesn’t mean your narrator must have a ravishing voice, No, in most cases be it male/female narrators with a neutral accent, and clear pronunciation and intonation is more than sufficient.

Call To Action

      So back to square one, the question, why would you or what is the reason for the video, is it going to be a subscription, purchase of a product, sign up for a demo or contacting you? How would you want the visitors to convert into your customer? Ideally by placing a call to action button to help them finish their goals.

      If your startup company needs to deliver a message in an exciting, engaging way, an explainer video can be one of the most effective ways to target an audience. Explainer videos are short (typically between 1 to 3 minutes in duration, more on why below) and simplified, and are designed to explain your business, products or services to customers with exciting audiovisual content instead of trying to get your message across with boring text.

      One of the key benefits of a well-produced explainer video lies in its power to convert. Recent reports claim that anywhere from 64% to 85% of website visitors are more likely to buy a product on a retail site after viewing a video. Without question, explainer videos increase sales and leads, and startup businesses that incorporate video marketing into their marketing strategy see higher click-through rates, higher engagement rates, and higher conversion.

      Another benefit of startup videos are that they’re highly shareable across a wide range of platforms. 68% of video viewers share them, so going viral is more likely with explainer videos. When producing your explainer videos, keep in mind that videos that are 15 seconds or shorter are shared almost 40% more often than videos that last 30 seconds or longer.

      With all this in consideration, it’s important that you choose the right production company to produce your explainer videos, especially if you’re a startup. Below are some key questions that you should ask prospective production companies which will help you make the right decisions:

Pricing vs. Value

      How much of the explainer video production process will the production company actually handle? A complete explainer video project entails project research, script writing, storyboarding, voice-over recording, video production, sound design, and marketing. If you want the production company to spearhead all facets of the process, than they need to be highly skilled in each area. If the production company is expected to handle only some of the above-mentioned areas, then their cost should reflect that. The cost of a startup video can range from several hundred dollars to several thousand, so it’s important to know what’s included in the price.

Experience in Getting Messages Across Effectively And Quickly

      How much experience does the production company have in reaching your target audience? According to recent research, 20% of video viewers will click away from a video within the first 10 seconds. One third of those viewers will click away by the 30 second mark, and 45% of them will be gone within a minute. Explainer videos need to be able to grab the attention of viewers quickly, and hold onto their attention spans for as long as possible. Your production company has to have experience in the fine art of delivering the goods quickly.

Script Writing Skills

      Many video production companies are very skilled in producing animation, but the real heart and art of a successful startup video lies with the script. How skilled is the production video company with developing engaging, attention-grabbing text?

Specific Experience Producing Startup Videos

      How many videos has the production company created, and even more relevantly, how many startup videos has the production company produced? You’ll want to work with a production company that already has hundreds of explainer videos under its belt.

Global Reach

      Does the production company have experience with producing explainer videos for large, global brands? Ideally, the production company that you choose should be globally known.

Portfolio

      Look over the production company’s portfolio carefully. Does the production company have a track record of producing entertaining startup videos that get to the point and are commercially successful? Ask the production company to show you its most successful video marketing campaigns, and explain why they were successful.

Stats, Please

      One of the great things about explainer videos is the wealth of information that detailed video analytics will give you. Those analytics can tell you how many people are loading the video, how many people are actually watching the video, at what point viewers click away, engagement rate information, and more. With this information, you’ll be able to fine-tune your message so that it targets your audience more precisely. So, ask video production companies for hard and fast facts about their explainer videos’ play rate, number of loads, number of visitors, engagement rate, and conversion rate.

Get References

      Ask if the production company would be willing to let you contact their previous clients for additional feedback. A solid production company shouldn’t have a problem with full transparency.

Any Questions?

      Finally, ask the production company what questions they have for you. This last question is particularly important. If the video production company is simply asking you how fast you need an explainer video, or how much of a budget you have to spend, you may want to move on. A truly engaged video production company will want to find out about your company and its desired message. The production company should be asking you who your customers are, what their misconceptions about your company might be, and what you hope you’ll be able to achieve with your explainer video in terms of marketing share and conversion rate.

      By posing the right questions – and getting the right answers – you’re bound to find a production company that will be able to create an exciting and effective explainer video that can get your startup company’s message across to your current customers and attract new ones.

      As a startup you always face a big issue, how do I really explain my complex startup idea to new customers to convince them to sign up or do any call to action. But do you know even big brands like google have such issues. Google knows the need of explainer videos in any new product they release, so they comes with excellent videos which really helps people to understand the product in a better way. This article list out the top 10 explainer videos from google which engage those targets. Startups can inspire a lot to from this videos.

Google Keep

Google Adwords

Google Maps explored

Google voice

Google Wave

Google plus

Google Now

Google wallet

Google Glass

Google TV

Google Translate

      Above videos are developed with minimum effort and plan, but it really made wonders to those products.

      Trying to explain to someone what your business does is difficult. It depends on the medium of communication you use. You could talk face-to-face, send a written description or explain with the help of visuals. As they say, pictures speak a thousand words. By that measure, moving images should speak at least tenfold that amount. This is one of the reasons why animated demo videos have become an important marketing tool.

      In fact, videos speak far more than 10,000 words. According to Dr. James McQuivey at Forrester Research, a video is worth 1.8 million words. If you wrote web content for a year, you would be lucky to write half that much! Hence, it comes as no surprise that businesses are using animated marketing videos for promotion.

      However, for those that haven’t, 2013 would be the perfect time to start. Though there are a number of reasons for that, one telling statistic takes the cake: you are over 50 times more likely to appear on the first page of Google search if you use animated demo videos on your website.

      That should be reason enough for you. To make the deal sweeter for you, here are some great reasons why an animated explainer video for your business could be the biggest marketing tool in 2013.

Add Videos, Increase Sales

      The conversion rate for an average business has increased by 51% due to the simple fact that they added a video to their website. Now, you can easily get 50% to 85% of the people who watch your animated marketing video to make a purchase from your website. Just make sure the content is engaging enough!

Videos Convince People to Buy

      You might have a hard time believing that a simple video could convince a person to purchase something from a website. Apparently, this is very much the case. Around 90% of all people who make online purchases are convinced to do so after watching a video about it!

People Love Watching Videos

      Put yourself in your customer’s shoes for a moment. You visit a business’ website and there is a lengthy text description of what they do and a complete history. Compare that to another website where a 2-minute video is embedded on the homepage. Most people would opt for watching the video than reading through the text. Over 45% of internet users watch at least one video every month, which comes out to just over 100 million! This does make an animated explainer video a must for your website.

Marketing Your Business across Platforms

      You can use videos to promote your business across multiple platforms. You can have the videos customized for desktop users, whose attention span is limited to 2 minutes. You only get 10 seconds to grab their attention or else they click away. On the other hand, people using mobile devices show more patience and can be targeted with videos of up to 5 minutes.

      These are some of the reasons why animated demo videos are the biggest marketing tool of 2013. As you can see, a 2-minute video is all it takes to convince a person that your business is worth buying from!