Source: Wistia

What the heck is an explainer video?

Shortly after a small virtual storage company started a few years ago, they hit a stall point where they were no longer acquiring a decent number of customers. They were having a hard time converting people on their home page because no one knew what they did. And they were faced with the challenge of marketing a product to solve a problem people didn’t realize they had.Then they released a short explainer video that condensed their massive techy talk pitch into a fun, witty, and enjoyable video. This video propelled DropBox onto a trajectory that saw them acquire a huge heap of funding, 50 million customers and a 4 billion dollar valuation. They even had Steve Jobs knocking on their door looking to acquire their company. It’s one thing to have a great story, but it’s an entirely different (and much more difficult) thing to communicate that story and vision to potential investors, partners, and customers. And that’s exactly what Dropbox did. Everyone blazes through websites, extremely skeptical that what companies are offering will actually be of any benefit to them. Think about it. Just in the past 5 minutes, you probably went to a site, weren’t interested and bounced off. So, what’s the quickest way to make people understand what you do and get them interested enough to convert them to customers? Show them your story, don’t just tell it to them. And the best way to do this is to add an explainer video.

The explainer video is a short video that businesses use to quickly introduce themselves, explain what they do, and tell how they help solve their customer’s problems. It’s a very quick, memorable way to make an impact on your audience and help provide the viewer with the important information they need to make a decision. This is vital to your site’s conversion.

Attention spans aren’t long these days, and after years of research and experience, we’ve found that 90 seconds or less is the sweet spot for most. If you don’t say what you need to say and get people excited about you and your product quickly, you’re dead in the water. Just ask Kevin O’Leary from Shark Tank.

And because you only have 90 seconds (which translates to a measly 150–240 words), your video should not include every detail you want to put in. The details have to be limited to the most important things you need your customer to know about your service/product.

5 Benefits of Explainer Videos

1. Increase Conversion Rate

According to Internet Retailer, up to 85% of people are more likely to buy a product if they first saw an explainer video. This helped Rypple (who recently sold to SalesForce) increase conversion rates by 20%. CrazyEgg added an explainer video to their homepage and increased conversion rates by 64%!

2. Better Google Results

Websites with video are 50 times more likely to be ranked on Google’s first page. What do you think people will click on first: the text link or the ever-inviting video thumbnail? That’s right. The thumbnail! In fact, your video is 41% more likely to get clicked than a text listing. Now that you’re on the front page of Google, more people will watch your video and be totally stoked to buy your product. You earn money. Sales are good.

3. Your Perfect Pitch Every Time

There’s nothing worse than not knowing how to tell people what you do in a way that they get it immediately. An explainer video helps you give your perfect pitch all over the world at any time of the day. You don’t even have to be there! And if you choose the right explainer video partner, you may just end up with your perfect company story that you can use in pitches, on your website, email marketing and more.

4. Easily Shareable

Now that you’ve got your perfect pitch, you can easily share your story with the world. 70% of internet users are watching online video, so go ahead and captivate them with your awesome business! It’s now way easier to share because you have a video you can upload to Wistia along with YouTube, Vimeo and more, that can easily be sent to anyone and viewed by thousands, and if you really strike internet gold, millions. You can also bring it with you to meetings, conferences and more. You’ll never have to worry about messing up your pitch again.

5. ROI

Explainer video companies can produce videos at much better rates than agencies. Take advantage and watch a small spend turn into a great, gigantic return. Dropbox spent $50,000 to tell their story through an explainer video. It resulted in 5 million new customers and over $24M in revenue. CrazyEgg stepped up their revenue $21,000 a month. What will your success story be?

Once your video is finished, don’t just post it and pray. Host and track analytics (like the ones in Wistia) so you can study your audience, make better videos and measure the results. You get real-time audience feedback with video heatmaps — see when someone hits rewind, pause or skips a section of your video. All of this data is extremely helpful in making sure your video is doing the right thing for your business.

Our next Explainify guest post will walk you through exactly how to craft your best pitch so you can tell your awesome story, increase conversion rates and dominate!