The price of petrol concerns almost each and every citizen of India. However, very few understand or are aware of the various components that constitute it. At Inshorts, we partnered with data journalism platform Factly and created this 75 sec explainer video to demystify the complexities of petrol pricing for the common man/woman.
Take a look and do share your feedback.
Why are we doing this?
At Inshorts we work on the brand promise of keeping our users #StayInformed with short form content, the viewers of this video are most likely to be users who would be interested in consuming news content in the short form and hence this video helps them in discovering our app.
So far, the video has garnered more than 75k views in just 5 days and has been featured by Business Standard, Business Insider, Deccan Chronicle, Indiainfoline, India.com, Murmur app, Newslaundry, Rediff.com, Rushlane, ScoopWhoop, Scroll.in, Shifting Gears, The News Minute, Trak.in and a bunch other popular websites. We are hoping to crack a lac views in the first week itself without spending a penny in its promotion.
What next?
We are very excited by the success of this experiment and shall scale this up by lining up another 9 such videos in the next quarter. If each of these videos perform even half as well as this one, we would build a content marketing engine that would organically generate 1 million views for us (assuming each video does a lac views in its first month) and additionally continue to generate a lac views every month (assuming each video does on an average, 10k views per month due to organic search driven traffic).
How can you do something like this?
This is just another Content Marketing case study for Online Businesses on how to increase reach/brand presence by investing in creating great content. The 2 most important aspects of doing this are 1) Creating great content and 2) Ensuring great distribution.
Creating great content doesn’t necessarily mean creating the most awesome Explainer Video ever or spending a lot of dollars on design and graphics. Great content in this case means:
1) Identifying a theme that would resonate with a very high number of people or almost everyone who could be your target audience.
2) Finding something truly worth demystifying or explaining where simply numbers could do the talking and a nuanced approach is not essential because anything that is subjective will be open for debate, anything that is objective will win the endorsement of your viewer immediately.
3) Getting the basics of execution right – By striking the right balance between readability and pace, adding a soundtrack that goes with the pace of the video (not necessarily theme) and putting down a clear call-to-action (which here is to download Inshorts app). BTW Explainer videos are best made in less than 90 seconds.
In our case, we simply partnered with a great Content Creator called Factly which is a data journalism platform and churns data backed content on a regular basis. If you were to do it yourselves, look for an explainer video expert on Freelancer.com or Fiverrr (although I would personally recommend a budget of $500-1000 and not $5 for something you are going to go to the media with).
Distribution means reaching out to all the publishers/influencers who 1) Are read/followed by your audience and 2) Would see merit in publishing your video/content.
In this case, we looked at all leading News Websites of India that get figured in Alexa’s top 200 websites of India. For this video, we were looking at News, Economy, Finance and Auto websites.
We had the luxury of having a PR agency called Ad Factors to follow-up with the media for this. However, in case you do not have a PR agency, you can do the same job by reaching out to web editors directly by sourcing Media Lists from PR groups on facebook. More about how to do this HERE.
But do keep in mind that certain viral content websites are charging these days to push such videos which are created by brands. Similarly, a lot of media websites also turned down the video citing the brand connection. So it is not necessary that every news website out there will pick up such Content Marketing initiatives.
If you need more inputs, feel free to reach out to me on aman@inshorts.com
Do download Inshorts – India’s highest rated news app
Follow us on @Inshorts
asha chaudhry
the vid is super awesome aman!!!
this is exactly what the common man needs to make content more palatable and comprehensible!!
the concept is brilliant. i like the simple execution style. the math on RHS is wonderful! the animation technique is simple, yet lovely – you’ve made a boring topic like petrol so beautiful!!
and THE MUSIC IS AWESOME!
you know, they should really teach concepts in school via such factly vids…..
aman, whenever you can – do share some content marketing insights with us – would really help rodinhooders.
ps: inshorts is one of the very few apps on my phone!!
Aman Raj
Extremely flattered to hear your feedback Asha.
The credit for all the good work on the video belongs to Factly – those guys are churning some great journalism centered around Data and not Opinion. At Inshorts as well, we focus on keeping news precise and 100% factual, so that way it was a good match of values.
Look forward to sharing more insights on TRH and learning even more 🙂
Sarsij Nayanam
Hi!
I believe you guys have done a great job here.
Now, let me tell you our experience .. or lets say, a bootstrapped startup’s experience in attempting to make such content – They are just not affordable. Since past one month, I have been talking to people and agencies who have quoted rates, ranging from 2.5 L to 1.6 L, which I certainly can’t pay unless we get funded. And my experience has been so discouraging so far that I am reaching a point where I might give my dream of generating meaningful video content for at least a year. And yes, it hurts to realize that we can’t afford something which we always wanted to adopt.
But one thing was clear to me – Either I met wrong people/agencies, or they did not give me proper option to do things in my affordable limits.
I would love to get a round figure on how much did you guys spend on creating this 75 seconds video, end-to-end. Did you do it in-house, or outsourced it to someone else?
And if there are people who do similar stuff, kindly contact me. I would be glad to work with you guys, provided you are affordable to us. If someone offers us a wonderful rate of producing video content, here is what I have for them – I will be getting at least 35-40 short videos done in next 12-15 months.
Regards
Aman Raj
If you are bootstrapped and don’t have a lot of money to pay, explore the following:
1) Partnering with an existing content creator and share the spoils (and the limelight)
2) Finding an explainer video expert on Freelancer.com or Trulancer.com (India’s very own Freelancer)
3) Writing on forums like TheRodinhoods or facebook groups like Bangalore Startups / Delhi Startups and asking entrepreneurs for references of Explainer Video makers with the estimated cost
4) Finding an explainer video expert on Fiverr.com
5) Using do-it-yourself products like Powtoons or GoAnimate
Now, just finding a great designer who suits your budget is not all. What you need to ensure as the owner of this project is the following:
1 – Do you have a clear brief on a) Who is the audience of this video b) What is the objective of the video c) What is the exact content/information you wish to communicate
2 – Can your message be communicated in less than 2 mins and be understood by a person who has no background/context of your message
3 – Have you visualized all of this on paper and is the end result something that a person who is your Target Audience would like to share with others through FB/Twitter/Whatsapp etc?
Once you have convincingly answered all these questions, you can then put down all of this in a document and whenever you find someone’s work interesting and their cost workable/negotiable, just send it to them.
Taking this effort would help you a lot in negotiating with the vendor/agency/video maker since you are taking a great deal of uncertainty related to the work, right out of the window and now the vendor knows what exactly is expected of him/her.
Try all this and let us know if it worked for you.
asha chaudhry
sarsij – ixigo create their video content indoor – look up aashish chopra on trh (head content ixigo) – he shares a lot of content/video marketing insights – even has an ASK AASHISH page!
if you go through showcase you will find quite a few explainer video specialists – rudrajeet recommends blv – https://www.therodinhoods.com/forum/topics/how-i-found-the-best-people-to-work-with-on-therodinhoods