I love to share examples of great work in video production and marketing. I found a great example today. It was created and executed by our friends at Google, by their life sciences team within Google[x] which just became an independant company, Verily.  

The bar has now been set and the importance of video now confirmed by the fact that at the launch of their new independent company, their marketing team launched with a great explainer video and a small website.

This video has only been out a week, is hosted on a YouTube channel with only 1 video and it already has 49,134 views and 690 subscribers.  They must be doing something right! So how did they do it? Pull strings with their friends at Google? I doubt it.  They played by the same rules that everyone does.

But now that they have done it, let’s see what we can learn from them.

Here is their explainer video:

 

A good explainer video should do the following, let’s see how they did.

1. Connect with your audience, letting them know you understand their situation

They use emotion and are creative in the way that they relate to the audience and keep their interest. They stayed away from technical jargon and made it easy to understand. It communicates what they are about and then leaves you wanting to find out more about what they are doing.

2. Communicate your brand message, specifically how you can solve or improve your audience’s situation

Marketers tend to get hung up on the sales pitch of their product. It’s not about closing the sale in an explainer video, it’s about demonstrating how you solve or improve the world. This video does that. It confirms that they understand their audience, communicates their vision for how they are going to solve for it and shows how they are going to achieve this in life sciences.

3. Communicate competitive differentiators and benefits

They didn’t communicate their competitive differentiators or benefits and didn’t provide any tangible proof of improvement for how they are actually executing on the vision. It would have been good to communicate to the audience how to become a part of the vision or what it means for them in the near future.

An explainer video is a great way to open the conversation and help communicate industry placement and differentiation.

4. Present tangible proof, customer, ROI or other

Nope, I don’t see any real-world examples about what they have done so far.

5. Call to action, what to do or where to go for more

A pretty weak call to action with just a URL. This could definitely be a stronger message.

6. Have a marketing plan for execution

This video didn’t get almost 50,000 views in a week without a marketing plan. To get the message going, they contacted industry writers to share their message (Bioscience Technology, STAT News, USA Today, The Verge, Tech Crunch, Fast Company, PMLiVE, and many other writers). These writers were provided the rich media video to sweeten the request to write about them (although not all used it).

Tip:  Online writers love rich media content as they know it helps their rankings, user interest and credibility. Especially if the company is doing something significant in the industry and their video reflects that image.

Video provides a great way for your message to get picked-up by writers that might otherwise write about something else.

 

Did it hit the mark? It did on many points.

Even if they didn’t check everything off the list for an explainer video, Verily could have achieved the purpose of building awareness and building excitement for future announcements, we shall see.

It gets me excited about health prevention. I’m looking forward to seeing something more concrete that will benefit my health.

Some takeaways that we can learn from Verily:

Explainer Videos are Effective

50% of marketers agree that they are the most effective types of videos. Second only to customer testimonial videos, according to a survey in Sept 2015 conducted by Accend2. Punctuated by the fact that this new independent business launched with an explainer video. This should beg the question, “Why don’t I have one for my business?”

Explainer Videos are Not Difficult to Create

With a good script, some creativity and key video footage, a great video can be created to connect and communicate with your audience. With a good video partner, this can be very easy.

To be Effective, a Marketing Strategy is Needed to Achieve Success

For Verily, this included a website and PR promotion for industry articles. It’s important to have a plan for execution or a great video may never be watched. This might also include paid media promotion to push awareness. This plan will be unique depending on the audience, the company’s current placement in the industry and goals of the campaign.

 

At DigiVid360, we specialize in creating healthcare videos. As you can see in this example, video is an excellent medium for communicating information. Especially difficult information. It’s also a great way to stand out from the crowd.

A great explainer video is a good start but you will also want to make sure you have a plan in place for getting the most out of a great video. There are lots of different types of videos that could be created that each achieve specific sales and marketing goals.

We take a marketing-first approach that plans for execution at the beginning. A video marketing plan will prioritize the right videos for you to create. This ensures your success from the beginning.

If you are interested in creating successful videos for your company, contact us today. We offer a free consultation that includes a video marketing strategy and the types of videos that would work best for you. Then, we’ll help you create them using top-level videographers and editors and help launch them for the world to watch. We will make adding video to your marketing plan easy.

Author:

Sean Bollinger

DigiVid360
6619 N. Scottsdale Rd Ste D

Scottsdale, AZ 85250
United States