Imagine this: You need to buy a house because you have to shift next month. But you don’t have time and budget to invest in building a new house from scratch.
What will you do?
Buy a ready-made house right?
Brokers productized house building decades ago because clients wanted to own a separate house for them. So it was easy for the customers to purchase the ready-made house and save money on plot + building cost and save a lot of time.
Nonetheless, not everyone was purchasing the readymade houses. If you want a house in your style, you can still call the broker and he will arrange man and material for you to make a house from scratch.
Now imagine this:
You want to make a video for your brand but you are not able to think through it may be because you do not have much time to give a mind share to the video creation process. But you know that video is a necessary thing and you must do one as part of your digital marketing
You know all the stats that after watching a video the conversion chances of your customer increases by 18 times. Still, you are procrastinating because you do not have enough time and money to spend on video marketing.
We have heard from a lot of our entrepreneur friends and acquaintances that they want to do video marketing for their company but are not able to take a final call due to two reasons:
Reason #1. Video marketing budget is quite high
It’s a myth though but unless you don’t do yourself you don’t know. A video marketing budget can be as less as few thousand rupees [Production and promotion included] to no limit on the higher end.
Obviously cost cannot give you a guarantee on virality.
Reason #2. My team doesn’t have any clue about video marketing
I have seen many of our clients not knowing the ‘V’ of video marketing but have few viral campaigns in their bucket. And trust me, there are not more than 10 people in India who can claim that they are experts.
But then how these ‘not knowing people’ make their video viral?
Just read on and you will find the answer.
Which is good:
Readymade videos or Traditional Customized Video?
Before I start writing about ‘How’ here is a quick recap about who are ‘we’ and what are ‘Readymade videos’.
Stagephod.com is a marketplace for companies to create digital videos. We started around 2 years back and are doing decent now. Read our complete story about how we started from zero and reached 1 crore in 15 months without any marketing budget and no marketing team.
Readymade videos are pre-made videos which can be bought instantly (over the counter). These videos highlight a human emotion rather than a product feature. If your product/ app/ brand represents same emotion as shown in the video, you can buy and use that video for your marketing purposes.
This is just a definition but from my school time, I was not convinced with the definition alone unless I got to know the background and the solution or benefits of the defined term. Here it is for you…
Problem as we perceived
Video marketing has its own set of challenges. The major one being finding a decent media agency or a production house. In the traditional method of choosing one, you are forced to hire one based on their previous work and their quoted price only.
We solved one part of the problem around 1.5 years back by giving concepts for free. Companies can check the tailor made concept first and then can decide whether to go ahead or not. Our experiment was successful and we were able to close the deal with 450+ clients in less than 25 months.
During the above process, we also came across few clients who were not able to visualize the end product at script level. Though they hired us but they were susceptible till they saw the final video. This made us think that client will be much happier if she can see the product first. And if she likes it, she will be more than happy to pay.
But as usual, thoughts/ideas always make sense, the practical execution is tough.
The idea – Readymade videos
So this thought got planted at the back of our mind. As we watch almost every digital video (one of the perks of starting this business), we observed that most of the videos are ‘emotion’ based (and not directly ‘product’ based). Brands love to play on simple emotions – happiness, trust, care, safety, rage.
During our expedition, we started realizing that most videos can be used interchangeably with other brands by simply replacing their name and logo which ultimately will not harm the harmony of the video at all.
For example: check out this video from Vicks
The emotion they covered is “Care” and as Vicks wants to be identified with this emotion, they endorsed this video. Any other brand who wants to play on Care could have used this video.
Then we saw similar pattern and other examples with the same format of videos. This set us thinking that, can we create a pre-made video with an emotion and pitch to different clients who are targeting a particular emotion in their branding? If they like the video, they can add their brand and use it.
Bug of Ready-made videos was born.
Benefits for a company/ organization/ startup/ brand?
You must be wondering “Okay, your story is good but what is in there for me?” Why would a company or a brand prefer ready-made videos over traditional customized videos? Well, here is why…
Cost effective – When we produce ready-made videos, we club multiple videos together and optimize the cost. How? Because video production cost of x number of separate videos will be x times of the cost of doing multiple videos but when with prior planning, you can reduce the cost. We transferred this saving to client and hence these videos cost less in comparison to customized videos
Decide on the end product (video) and not on a script – In traditional videos, you have to decide the quality of script or video maker’s past work which obviously has some amount of uncertainty involved. In the case of Ready-made videos, you first see the finished product. If you like then only you pay. So there is no risk and no uncertainty involved.
Time Saviour – In the traditional production, you hire a production firm -> explain your thought process -> the production team writes script -> you recommend addition in the script -> the script is finalized -> the production team makes video -> editors edit the video. Then the final product comes out. For example – if you want to make a video for IPL match happening in April-May, you have to start the process by December-January.
But in the case of Ready-made Videos, you watch the end product first which takes one to two minutes and make a purchasing decision in the next minute. A whole lot of three months work is concluded in few minutes.
Challenges and execution
As they say – Only thinking and not doing gives you mental experience which has no practical learning and hence it is of no use. So we decided to execute what no one has done ever. The major challenges were these 2 Ms…
Money: Video making requires money. It requires a team and requires equipment. It is near impossible to make a video on zero budget. We could not make high-quality videos to start with. So, we started with few concepts we had in our mind and made basic and medium quality videos.
Market: When we discussed the concept with our friends, we got some obvious questions like – how big is the market? What if you will not be able to sell these videos? How many companies will prefer a standard solution and not a customized service? These were the hard hitting questions but we did not rely on logic. We had an intuition that this will make our client’s life easy and we must attempt at least.
Launch and Result
When we saw a clear problem in front of us and we tried to solve it . We made 15 videos to start with. The idea was that companies can buy these videos over the counter if they like (we just need to add their brand name and logo in the end) or if they like the concept but are not satisfied with the production quality, we can re-shoot the entire video with better production quality.
Obviously, not to mention that the product sale was on first come first get basis. A video product can be used by one company only. When we launched, we were able to sell 6 videos within one week. With this kind of response, we were planning for our second set of videos.
The biggest learning for us in this entire process was that as an entrepreneur, your intuition is like your friends and logic is like Indian relatives :). Relatives question and they are susceptible but practically their opinions do not matter. But your friends will stick with you for a longer time without being judgmental.
You don’t have to think about the concept, you don’t have to involve in the production process and you don’t have to wait for month long time. Click on this link, watch the video. If you like the concept just buy it. Simple!
We have tried to answer some of your questions in our FAQ section.
The article was originally published in LinkedIn Pulse here
