How to simplify your complex sales message with a video

If you’re reading this article you probably have some kind of very complicated product or service you’re trying to market and sell. Most likely it’s a hard-to-understand financial product or AI-based service. When people ask you what you do at parties, you are used to seeing eyes glaze over accompanied by polite nods. When you’re in front of clients you spend a ton of time just trying to explain what your product does. And by the time you’re done with that, the meeting is over, and your prospect needs to “do some more research.”

This is all because your message isn’t simple enough. So here are 5 ways to simplify your sales messages into a relatable, effective, and engaging pitch that will have prospects drooling to do business with you.

#1 – Use an analogy

One of the best ways to simplify your message is to develop a really memorable analogy that illustrates either your client’s problem or your solution. Analogies are great for getting everyone on the same page because you explain it via a situation that everyone can relate to. You level the playing field.

For example, which explanation of anti-virus software is easier to understand?

Version A: Our anti-virus software scans your computer for viruses, malware, worms, and trojans. If the software detects malicious code in your device, it will pull malware definitions from the cloud to neutralize the threat.

Version B: Our anti-virus software is like a checkup for your computer. If your computer is sick, our software will automatically treat and remove the virus.

You may already have a analogy you use to explain your complicated product or service. But you’re using it after you spend a lot of time describing what your product’s features and benefits are. Start leading with the analogy, then following it up with more detailed features and benefits sans analogy. You’ll notice higher engagement.

#2 – Effective sales messages tell a small story

Whenever Don Hewitt, the legendary creator of 60 Minutes, was asked about the secret to the program’s success, he answered with four words: Tell me a story. Hewitt said 60 Minutes doesn’t do stories about issues; it does stories about the people who are swept up in them.

He said, “Even the people who wrote the Bible were smart enough to know: ‘Tell them a story.’ The issue was evil in the world. The story was Noah.”

So, what do you do? Pull a page from 60 Minutes’ playbook. Tell a small story about a big issue.

Instead of making a 3-5 minute video about all of your product’s features and benefits, tell a 1-2 minute story where your product or service is being used. In most cases, showing your audience a use-case is way more effective than listing out facts and figures. Your story will cut through their analytical brain and appeal more towards their emotional brain. They’ll actually want to see how the story ends (read: watch to the end of the video where your call-to-action is conveniently located)!

#3 – Speak to your customer’s internal problem

Let’s continue with the anti-virus example.

Yes, your anti-virus software removes viruses from your customers’ computers. That’s the benefit. But we can go one level deeper. Why don’t your hypothetical customers want viruses? Let’s list a few of them out:

  • They have sensitive data that, if leaked, would be disastrous for them.
  • They need their computer in tip-top shape because they use it for work. And if it’s not working properly, they could lose their job.
  • They hate the feeling of being a victim. They want to be protected to feel safe.

As you can see, these customers have many different internal reasons why they don’t want computer viruses. Here’s where knowing your audience is critical. Because with the right data about your audience persona, you can make a highly targeted video aimed at your target customers’ internal problems. The empathy you demonstrate will earn your prospects’ trust, way beyond your competitors that are all talking about their features.

#4 – Sell the outcome, not the process

Guess what? Your clients are not buying your product or service. They are buying what it can do for them.

Ok, while this is cliché and well known, it bears repeating—sell the sizzle, not the steak. So many times you are caught in your day-to-day and forget that clients really don’t care about any of the cool stuff you do. They only care about it working and making them look good.

For example, if we use the anti-virus software example again: your clients don’t care about how your software detects the malicious code, they just care about making their computer better. You may have the best detection algorithm on the planet but no one cares about the algorithm itself, they just care that the software now finds viruses 2 times quicker.

When you find yourself talking about your features, try to remember clients don’t really care. They only care about what the features do for them.

#5 – Stop trying to be cute

Sometimes you just need to take a very straight-forward approach. What does your product or service do in the plainest of language? Forget the flowery descriptions and attempts to be overly clever.

Sometimes “I make smiles” is harder to understand than, “I’m a dentist.”

We don’t recommend building an entire video campaign with plain language. But this is a good reminder to not over-think things. Don’t get in your own way trying to do what all of the business books tell you to do. Sometimes it’s the folks that can say what they do in the fewest of words that win big.

Bonus – Test with strangers

Not sure if you’ve successfully simplified your sales message? Test it with strangers – NOT family members. Strangers are best for testing because a) they don’t care about hurting your feelings and b) they have no base of knowledge so they’re coming in cold just like your prospects are.

After showing your script, storyboard or first cut of video, ask questions like:

  • Tell me about the problem we solve?
  • What do we do for our customers?
  • What is this piece trying to tell you?
  • What was the most confusing part?
  • What was the least confusing part?

We’re not asking, “would you buy from us?” because the odds that these random strangers need your product are very low. We simply want to test if the message is being transmitted.

keep it simple

K.I.S.S.

When crafting a sales video that works, it’s important to focus on the significant few, not the important many. Keep it simple, silly! Stay strong and resist the urge to throw everything in. Think about those billboards on the interstate that try to say so much, you don’t even know where to start. You don’t want your sales video to overload or worst of all, confuse your audience. You want to simply move them to the next step in your sales process.

5 things to look for when hiring a video marketing agency

You’ve decided to engage a video marketing agency instead of a video production company. Awesome! You’re making an excellent choice.

So how do you determine which video agency to go with?

Here are five things to look for when hiring a video marketing agency:

#1 – Great creative

There are a lot of agencies out there, so the first and most important thing to look for is great creative (ie. the idea behind the video). Why is the creative, the story, so important? Great stories appeal to the deepest part of our emotions. After all, customers buy based on emotion, not a list of features and benefits. In fact, 95% of purchasing decisions are subconscious.

A great way to figure out if the agency you’re considering has great creative is to compare their work to the other agencies’ work and ask yourself: “Do any of these other agencies have very similar work in their portfolio?” If the answer is yes, beware. That means that the agency you’re looking at is drawing from the well we call, “Default Creative.”

“Default Creative” is any idea that has been done so much, it’s almost in the public domain of video ideas. Think interviews with executives paired with stock footage of cities at night with traffic sped up, or close-up shots of a carpenter sanding something in slow motion. Or an animated video that starts with an announcer saying, “Meet Bob,” with an animation of a man waving at the camera.

What you want to see is work that is unique. Different. Work that takes risks and speaks to the client’s brand – not some arbitrary artistic urge the creative director had.

Finally, ask yourself, do you like the work? Don’t discount your personal tastes! Just because an agency won awards (most of them are paid for anyway) or is famous for a particular campaign, doesn’t mean they’re right for your brand. You should be a fan of the agency’s work going into the engagement.

#2 – Communication

We’ve all been there. You’re on a deadline to deliver a project and the agency you’re working with is nowhere to be found. Ugh. The thing is, it’s impossible to determine if an agency is going to be great at communication until you work with them, right?

Well, not really. The pre-sale communication with the prospective agency should tell you everything. Here are some things to watch out for:

  • Do they follow up with you after a call with next steps?
  • Do they set vague ETAs like, “later this week,” or specific ones like, “tomorrow by noon?”
  • Do they make you lead conference calls/meetings or do they start by setting the table with introductions and a goal for the meeting?
  • How is their email etiquette? If it’s messy now, it’s going to be terrible once the project has started.

#3 – Results

You’re making a video to reach a goal, period. That could be increasing the number of qualified leads, lowering your total cost of sale, reducing price objections, and so on.

When looking at the agency’s portfolio, is it focused on the results the video helped achieve, or is just a bunch of videos laid out on a “portfolio” page?

It’s important that your agency presents their work based on effectiveness – not the kind of camera that was used or how many days it took to shoot. Case studies should be based around the client’s goal, the agency’s solution and the results that were gained out of the project. If any of these elements are missing it could mean that the video didn’t accomplish its goals or worse, there were no goals to begin with and the video was a shot in the dark.

One word of caution – not every video needs to be viral or have a high view count. So don’t judge a video’s effectiveness on that criteria alone. Look for what the video’s goals were and how close it came to meeting them.

#4 – Are the “thinkers” full-time?

The “thinkers” on your project should be full-timers because they’re going to be with you the entire project – through thick and thin. You want access to these folks because they’re the owners of all of your brand knowledge and have a vested interest in seeing the project succeed. If these folks are freelance, they may have divided attention and in the end, you’re not their client – the agency is their client. You want the “thinkers” to have skin in the game.

The “thinkers” on your project are usually the tandem team of the account lead and the creative director. The account person will be your brand steward inside of the agency. They will learn your brand and your preferences and hold the creative team accountable – so you don’t have to! The creative director will oversee the development of art & scripts, and maintain quality throughout the engagement. After all, there’s nothing worse than receiving creative work that’s off brand and unusable

In addition to the “thinkers,” make sure your agency has invested in full-time project management people too. This will signify that delivering great work is in the agency’s DNA. Without strong project management, you could be in an endless cycle of missed deadlines and/or timelines that are constantly changing on you.

#5 – Employee reviews

Go over to Glassdoor and read employee reviews. This will give you a real sense of the agency’s culture. You can discount overly positive (probably the agency’s family) and over negative (probably a fired employee) reviews. Focus on the reviews between 2-4 stars. These are probably based in reality. Watch out for any reviews that imply the agency is engaging in any untrustworthy behavior.

Besides that big red flag, look out for potential issues that could conflict with how you do business. If you expect your agency to dedicate lots of time to your account, be weary of employee reviews that talk about working on a ton of projects every month. The person leaving that review may have intended for it to be positive, but through your lens it’s a red flag.

That’s it! Keep these five things in mind when hiring a video marketing agency and you’ll be setting yourself up for success.

How to keep your video project on track

We’ve all been part of projects that start strong and then slowly putter out. When it comes to your video project, you want to make sure it stays on track and keeps moving forward (as do we!). To avoid the slow putter out, there are six things we recommend you do to ensure a successful video marketing project.

There are certain moments that projects are more likely to get off track. When brands hire us to create a video for them, we see three main peaks of excitement.

Excitement Stage 1: Signing the proposal. Our teams have had great conversations leading up to this point. We’re aligned on goals and ROI for the project. Our team is excited to dig in and start researching, developing a strategy, and brainstorming creative. Your team is excited to get an effective new tool to use in your sales process. We’re all ready to dig in. Let’s do this thing!

Excitement Stage 2: Production day. Shoot days are fun, plain and simple. Both our team and yours love seeing the idea we’ve been working so hard on come to life. Plus there are guys in black t-shirts with walkie-talkies whispering about stingers and C-47s, a craft services table, and a general hustle and bustle around getting the best shot. It’s a long day (a standard production day is 10 hours, and 12 is not uncommon), but full of adrenaline. Also Red Bull.

Excitement Stage 3: The first draft. After the shoot itself, seeing the first draft is the exciting culmination of all that strategy, writing, and production. We love presenting first drafts and hearing reactions. Clients love seeing the actual product for the first time. Everyone is pumped and ready to start using this puppy!

Notice that there is not an excitement stage for the delivery of the final video. It’s counterintuitive for sure. Isn’t that what you bought? Don’t you want to start using it? And yet, we tend to see a noticeable decline in momentum and excitement after the first draft presentation. This is not because clients are unhappy with that draft. On the contrary, the ones that lose the most momentum are the ones who had very few notes on the draft. When it comes time to finesse and finalize, projects often slow down and sometimes go off the rails.

There are a few things you can do to keep your project momentum moving once the peak excitement phases are over. Importantly, some of these steps need to happen before that first draft is delivered. Keep them in mind throughout your entire project.

Don’t go off the rails: How to make a successful marketing video

  1. Make sure your key stakeholders are involved from the very beginning. No matter who does the initial outreach to our team, we always ask to speak to the key stakeholders on the project before we send a proposal. The reason for that is that we want to ensure that everyone on both of our teams is aligned before serious work gets started. Surprising your boss is one of the biggest pitfalls we’ve seen clients make.
  2. Align your whole team with the strategy and creative idea. After we present and get approval on the video strategy, it becomes our North Star guiding every choice we make. If your team has any doubts about the strategy, creative idea, or script, let us know as soon as possible. While it requires brainpower, time, and extra conversations, at the end of the day it’s much easier to change words and ideas than to reshoot expensive video scenes.
  3. Come to the shoot. Yes, we really do want you there with us. We’re nice, I promise. This is especially important if your product or service is complex or technical (like most of our clients). While we take the time to understand your product or service, you are the expert. Having a member of your team present to ensure that we capture everything correctly can prevent complaints from your product team down the line.
  4. Remember that the video will not exist in a vacuum. The videos we or anyone else make do not appear on a black screen with no context. You need a video for a very specific purpose, be it pitch meetings, a company town hall, or a landing page. Keep in mind that the video does not need to have all the information about the product or service in it. For a video that will be used in a pitch meeting, for example, the video’s purpose is to break the ice and engage with your potential customers. Then your salespeople will do what they do best and make the sale. It is the salesperson who will share features and benefits, and tailor the pitch to the company or industry. It’s asking too much of a video to do everything or be everything to everyone. Keep that context in mind when deciding what needs to be included in the video.
  5. When you ask others for feedback on the video, share the strategy behind it. People at your company who are outside the core video project team (or your in-laws, neighbors, fellow commuters on the train) can provide valuable feedback on the video if and only if they understand what it will be used for and what its purpose is. If our goal for the project is to create a 15-second video teasing a new product before launch, feedback that the video is too short and not descriptive enough is bad feedback. Passing on that note blindly could push the project off the rails. Remember the old adage about a camel being a horse designed by a committee?When we discuss a piece of feedback like this, our team may push back and remind you of the original goals and strategy of the video. What were we looking to accomplish in the first place? Does this feedback make the video more effective? We don’t do this because Joanne in HR doesn’t have a point. The video doesn’t have long descriptions of the product, but it’s not supposed to. This leads to a lot of back and forth between our teams and slows down the process. See also: your video will not exist in a vacuum.
  6. Trust yourself and trust the process. Great work, be it video or anything else, requires boldness. A lot of people around you may be scared by that, and that’s a totally appropriate response. It is scary. Anyone in a business leadership position has experienced pushback on great ideas because they’re different. Because it’s work. Because it’s not what everyone else does. But guess what. That’s exactly what makes it a great idea, and why you have to try.The same applies to videos. You may hear someone on your team poo-poo the video not because it isn’t good, but because it isn’t what you’ve done before. Or it isn’t what’s standard for your industry. If you hear that kind of feedback, GOOD! That means we’ve done our jobs. Your prospects are bombarded with content all day, every day. To stand out, your content must be bold and it must be different. Stand behind the work you’ve commissioned and don’t let the naysayers convince you otherwise.

If you follow these tips throughout your video project, it’s more likely to go smoothly and you’re going to be happier with the final product. And of course, our team will be here guiding you through the process and doing our best to both keep your project moving and help you create an effective video that your team can’t wait to start using.

How we became a video marketing agency named Umault

It took me 9 years to figure out the difference between a video production company and a video marketing agency. I hope this 5 minute read saves you some time. You’re welcome!?

Now in case you don’t have five minutes, here’s the difference between a production company and a creative agency: a video production company is handed an idea from a creative agency or client and then adds their creative spin on the concept. They are mostly implementors of the agency’s or client’s idea. Someone else develops the idea and then hands the script and storyboard over to the video production company.

Why did this take me 9 years to figure out?

Let’s go back in time…

Starting a video production company

I launched the aptly named Guy Bauer Productions in 2010, smack dab in the middle of the Great Recession, despite having no professional experience or formal training. My first project cost fifty dollars and entailed editing some dude’s puppy videos to music. I found the gig on the freelance site guru.com. After the client left me a five-star review and a nice writeup on the site, I had the start of my professional portfolio. From there, I landed a seventy-dollar job, then a hundred-dollar job, and so on. Cut to 2015, and we’re doing $100k+ projects for Fortune 500 companies, and we have ten full-time employees.

How did this happen?

For years, I tried to figure out the roots of my company’s success. What was it about our videos that made people line up by the dozens? At the time, I thought it was because the video quality was great. But when I look back, the actual technical quality (lighting/composition) left much to be desired. Other video production companies could make better-looking videos for a similar price. Was it that I was a great businessman? The name? Our logo?

What was it!?!?

Who handles the concepts: My not-such-a-discovery discovery

One day, it hit me like a ton of bricks. Our videos were creative. They were different. They told cohesive, heartfelt stories. Some made you laugh; some made you cry. And our clients were getting results. They were getting unsolicited emails with praise from customers. Or getting promotions. Or best yet, increased sales!

It was the ideas for the videos we were selling—not the video production itself.

But since I was an amateur to the video marketing business, I had no idea this was happening. I just assumed it was the video production company’s job to come up with an awesome idea. And because I didn’t know the idea, or creative (as they call it in the business) was the real value driver for our clients, we didn’t position ourselves as a creative agency. It really wasn’t until I got into watching Mad Men when I thought to myself, “Huh, we kinda do what Don Draper does. And he works at an agency, not a production company!”

In 2018, we started a journey of re-thinking everything. We re-thought our staff (which was made up of 85% production people), re-thought our positioning, and re-thought our name.

Video marketing agency: strategy and concept first

The problem with Guy Bauer Productions was that it was positioned as a video production company that could also come up with the ideas. We were discounting our main value proposition: the well-thought out video concept.

Umault is the polar opposite. It’s a creative agency that can also do the production. We are doing what we’ve always done: taking our clients’ goals and messages and distilling them into an entertaining video. But we’re putting the strategy and the concept first. Because without a clear story that ladders back to a clever strategy, you can spend all the money you want on production (eg: Star Wars prequels), and still fall flat.

So here we are. Our name is Umault. We’re a hybrid of a creative agency and a production company. Our mission is to create the kind of videos that truly excite audiences. Videos that simplify complex messages into entertaining yet strategic spots, that look beautiful and deliver real results to our clients.

Oh, and in case you’re wondering about the name Umault, Umault is a play on the umlaut (you know, the ¨ mark). The umlaut is used over a vowel in German or Hungarian to indicate a different vowel quality. The umlaut pulls forward what was always there into a place of greater prominence. Umault does the same for our clients’ brands, products and services.

So that’s the story behind the formation of Umault. And no, we don’t make $50 puppy videos anymore. Sorry. BUT if you have a software defined storage solution and are struggling to close deals, tell us more!

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