When you make a technology marketing video to educate buyers about your solution, even if your audience is eager to learn, there’s no end of stimuli out there competing for their attention. Here are some ideas on how to make surprisingly effective technology marketing videos.
Acknowledging this, eLearning professionals try to build as much variety as possible into their courseware. The objective is to make the subject you’re teaching the most interesting stimulus in the environment.
Surprise! This really helps people learn
The part of the brain that eLearning targets is amygdala, the region that responds to interest, surprise, attraction, and motivation. The general idea is to lob new stuff at this part of the brain more or less continuously in order to to keep the synapses firing and to form new connections. If the incoming information coming in is not new, the synapses relax, and no learning takes place.
The amygdala alsohelps to contextualize the new stuff with what the learner already knows. That helps to fix it in the memory. Do you remember what you were doing last Tuesday? You certainly would if that was the day you won the lottery. Anything unusual tends to form a stronger memory.
Positive surprises that will work in your explainer videos
Just the fact that you offer an explainer video on a subject may come as a pleasant surprise to your prospect, because explainer videos are typically short and easier on the brain than other types marketing content like product sheets, white papers, and webinars. But “easy to watch” is hardly the same thing as memorable.
Here are a few tactics recommended by eLearning professionals to fire up the amygdala and start instructional content off with a bang.
- Enthusiasm
- Big gestures
- Awesome features
- Stories involving conflict (here’s a video we made about battles in the data center)
- Unusual statistics and provocative facts.
After you introduce the surprising fact, you need to show why it’s true with supporting arguments that are credible because they draw on facts that are familiar to the viewer and reflect how she sees the world.
In other words, you’re inserting something surprising into a familiar mental structure to make it stick.
Why this “surprising” strategy could be a competitive advantage
The reason I think there is a competitive advantage here is that the overwhelming majority of explainer videos out there do not start out with anything surprising. Technology solution vendors always seem to feel they need to establish the context at the outset of the video. They like to begin by acknowledging that the viewer is struggling with more data, increasing complexity, lack of automation, the risk of outages, security threats — the stuff all IT shops struggle with.
Certainly, it’s not illogical to address problems your audience is struggling with. But rehashing problems they are all too familiar with is unlikely to surprise an audience for your marketing video. So if you can come up with something surprising to kick off the video and electrify a restive amygdala — it’s reasonable to think that you’ll come out ahead in the scramble to educate your prospects about your value propositions.
