Technology buyers who are looking into a solution value insight on the buyer’s journey. That’s something video can deliver faster than any other medium. That’s why I’ve been advocating getting down in the weeds with a “delightfully nerdy” style of explainer storytelling — most recently here and here.
Typical messaging about superior product features and benefits seldom delivers “aha!” moments because it aims at completeness, not surprise or delight. Video animation and motion graphics, on the other hand, can deliver insights with surprising completeness.
“It’s like this. It’s not like that” explainer storytelling
Cirba is a Toronto-based solution provider of software for optimized VM placement in data centers. Among the insights they want buyers to absorb is that there’s a lot more to “optimization” than moving VMs around in response to real-time events. Optimization involves many variables (policies, licenses, utilization patterns) that can only be accounted with sophisticated analytics that maximize efficiency and cost savings while reducing risk. As “messaging” that sounds uninspiring, doesn’t it? Animated video, on the other hand, can bring the message to life — even though it ventures far enough into the weeds to bring up the notion that what’s behind all this are some basic principals of robotics theory.
Let me make one thing perfectly clear
You’re guaranteed to make a standout video if you can build it around a concept or feature that has not been clearly illustrated before. If it has moving parts, animated video is the best way to explain it.
In discussions leading up to the introduction of Brocade’s new SLX 9850 Router, storage and network execs were most intrigued by the architecture of the new “Insight” hardware-software combination. Because it drew so much attention, making this architecture perfectly clear became the main challenge of producing this video. Hearing from product management that “the new architecture piece (Insight) especially is getting a lot of raves because we hadn’t illustrated it that clearly anywhere else” was gratifying, not least because we strongly believe that the most important goal of videos for high-tech sales and marketing is to make it clear why someone should learn more about a solution.
