Nope, we’re not going to pull out the “you now have a shorter attention span than a goldfish” card here.
Myth or not, this blog isn’t here to bust nor prove if people’s attention spans are shrinking.
Aside from the market study that says 84% of consumers purchased a product or service after watching a brand’s video, Mr. Jonathan Schabish has a point when he said:
Source: No, You Don’t Have the Attention Span of a Goldfish – Ceros Inspire
In a world that’s fast-paced and everything needs to be done in an instant (just like your noodles), how do you keep up?
Our goal is to help you and your SaaS stay on top of the game by providing real case studies — not just pulled out of thin air (unlike the fishy myth mentioned above).
To thrive in this competitive environment, where marketing teams are in a tug-of-war for people’s attention, you need explainer videos.
What is an explainer video?
Explainer videos help you make sense of complicated topics. A good one can help drive your MRR up by making your products easier to understand and more accessible. It also keeps your customers informed and entertained on their way up your purchasing funnel.
If you’re unfamiliar with the production process, you might assume an explanation video is expensive or time-consuming to produce. While that has some truth in it, you might want to check out these ROIs experienced by real companies to see if it’s worth it or not:
- A waiting list increasing up to 15 folds than usual
- A raised conversion rate of 64%
- An 8-digit extra revenue
Consider how many times entrepreneurs have been told they need an explainer video, and then ignored that advice. Pretty sure that they regret not following that lead now. But hey, it’s never too late!
Explainer Video Case Studies
Truth is, your brand can actually go on without a great explainer video but obviously, you’re missing out big time on your sales opportunities.
If the bullets above are not yet convincing enough for you to invest in SaaS explainer videos, then below is a detailed breakdown of these companies’ explainer video journeys and how they maximized their investment returns.
What you’re about to see are animated video explainers.
Despite the popularity of cartoon-ish explainer videos in the last decade, they’re fastly becoming a thing of the past. The hot SaaS videos right now are commercial-like videos that can only be produced by professional video production companies like eggcrate.
Dropbox: Got 10 million customers from their explainer videos
The $48,000,000 Dropbox Explainer Video
Dropbox is an industry leader in cloud storage. It helps you stay organized and keep everything at your fingertips by storing everything in one digital place.
Problem:
Dropbox wants to come up with an effective marketing strategy for reaching more people.
It’s a company known for its innovative new way of solving business problems, yet they did not know how to expand their customer base.
They partnered up with Google AdWords but the collaboration didn’t work. Soon they realized that their spending was up to 3x bigger than the price of the actual product itself.
Solution:
Dropbox contracted a company that offers SaaS explainer videos service, to create a 2 minute plus explainer video for their brand.
The video featured prominently on the homepage for several years, encouraging prospects to watch and to eventually sign up with the brand.
Results:
- Average of 30,000 views each day
- Increase Dropbox conversion rate by more than 10%
- Led to a 10 million increase in customers
- Revenues exceeded $25 million.
Crazy Egg: Generated an additional $21,000 in monthly revenue
Crazy Egg Explainer Video – YouTube
Crazy Egg uses heat maps to tell you where your visitors clicked, moused over, or spent time as they navigated your website. By tracking what content performs well, you can learn more about your potential customers.
Problem:
When Crazy Egg tried to communicate their message in a way that would get people’s attention quickly and keep them engaged long enough – they were having trouble doing so.
On a heat map, their approach to hooking people into their brand looks a little bit icy.
Solution:
To improve their marketing strategy, Crazy Egg hired an agency specializing in creating SaaS explainer videos. Together, they hatched a plan.
They created a short animated explainer video for CrazyEgg explaining exactly to prospects how their SaaS tool works.
Results:
- Improve conversion rates by 64%
- Earn an extra $21,000 a month
RankWatch: Drove 27% more conversions
RankWatch- The Complete SEO and Marketing Platform on Vimeo
Rankwatch is an SEO and marketing platform that shows you a variety of insights like ranking, traffic sources, location of visitors on the site, and where they convert into leads or sales. It allows you to keep an eye on your competitors.
Problem:
RankingWatch is big — and that’s the problem.
The fact that it has so many features tends to distract people from the work at hand, so they tend to navigate away after tinkering with it for a while.
RankWatch saw a 62% bounce rate on its homepage due to an intimidation factor associated with software.
Solution:
They got to pinpoint the problem:
“[We] discovered that a majority of their target audience had little knowledge of keywords and all they wanted from RankWatch was to help them do their marketing right and get high search engine rankings.”
Crackit created an explainer video for RankWatch that presented the company in a simple and user-friendly light, avoiding confusing terms as much as possible.
Results:
- Conversion rates up by 27%
- Reduced bounce rate by 35%
- Got 48,000+ ‘likes’ over a single day (yep, it went viral)
Autocad WS: Got them 10M downloads
Reaching 10M Downloads, And The Guerrilla Marketing Tactics We Used To Get There | TechCrunch
Autocad, a software package developed by Autodesk to assist architectural and engineering professionals. It allows you to access drawings and files via cloud storage.
Problem:
Using innovative technology, creating a great product and addressing a clear need is what made this device so successful– or not.
John Walker, the co-founder of the company, eventually realized that their product competes with hundreds of thousands of other apps for attention. Despite one’s belief that their product is essential, it can be overshadowed by those with superb marketing strategies.
The old adage is true: you can’t win if your competitors are faster on the draw.
Solution:
Walker stated that they have no other option but to wage war as engineers and UX designers:
“Here’s one example where we worked hard to make our app more interesting. We created ‘Andy the Engineer’ as our mascot, and the video we created for the app showed an architectural version of Andy with plenty of ‘Andy’ jokes.
That video got over 1M views, an amazing number considering we’re talking about a video for a CAD app.
It also helped us to get covered by blogs that write about Android apps, the kind of blogs I’ve mentioned before. We saw a huge difference in our success rate when trying to convince bloggers to cover us once we had great imagery and a video.”
Results:
- More than 10 million downloads worldwide
- Numerous Fortune 500 companies as customers
Explainer videos have solid ROIs
Sure, it can be expensive to create videos that you can use to market your SaaS. But it’s worth every penny — we gave enough proof.
There’s a caveat though.
Explainer videos only work if they’re done right and differently (this way, you stand out).
And it’s a bit challenging to do that today because every SaaS out there has been producing animated videos.
The better way to catch people’s attention today is through commercial-like explainer videos (like the one below) with real people who represent your target market! What’s a better way than to use people to connect with people?
Talk to eggcrate today and let’s hatch a plan. Let’s make your explainer videos look like those emotion-evoking commercials your prospects won’t ever forget about your SaaS.
And yes, it’s a new trend that a few big SaaS are setting.
