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
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