Chalk Talks: Crushing Your Next Product Launch with Video

Launching a new product can be a challenge. Not only do you need to educate your internal team on the product launch, but you also need to create killer sales tools and make sure that you’re driving a ton of excitement in the space so that when your product does launch, you’re driving rapid adoption with new and even existing customers.

I’m Jesse Ariss, and in this Chalk Talk, I’m going to talk to you about how you can use video to create a killer launch!

So now if you’ve ever been involved with a product launch at all, you’re probably familiar with some of the key challenges. As a product marketer, I’m always concerned about how can we communicate the value of our product? This is about what the product does for your customer more so than actually what the product does itself. Video’s a great way to do this. As well, there are so many stakeholders involved with a new product launch. Video is a great way to keep everybody informed throughout the entire process. And then finally, what good is a product launch without some incredible testimonials from some of your customers? I’ll talk to you in a moment about why I believe video is the ultimate medium for some of those case studies.

So let’s say you’ve decided to use video for your product launch. That’s a great start. I would say the next step is understanding what kind of video specifically you’re going to want to use!

Where to Start with Video

Let’s start with the explainer video. The explainer video is a two, maybe two and a half minute long video that is really high level, and it talks about what your product does from a value point of view.

So let’s use the explainer video to say “Here’s how I can help the problems that you’re having.” Let’s not get too much into the actual weeds of what the product looks like or some of the specific functionality. This is really high level stuff. We’re going to save the actual functionality for the second piece, which is the demo video.

Now the demo video can be longer than the explainer video. We see successful demo videos at around four, maybe five minutes, because you know if a customer’s watching a demo video, then they’re a lot more involved and interested at your product at this point. With the demo video, let’s still try to keep things high level, but use actual footage for your product. Try not to use illustrations or conceptual imagery because if people are watching a demo, they want to see what this product actually looks like.

I wouldn’t go too deep on a specific industry or set of features. You’ve got a great sales team behind you and if a customer wants to learn more, they’ll be more than happy to give that customer an in-depth demo.

Putting a Friendly Face on Camera

The next video that you’re definitely going to need for your product launch arsenal is the testimonial video. This is a video of a customer who’s used your product, talking about some of the values that product has brought to them. One thing I would emphasize with the testimonial video is don’t get too hung up on production quality. As a matter of fact, some of the best testimonial videos that we use and that we have were actually filmed just with a phone or webcam. They’re very rough, raw and authentic. There’s nothing more powerful than a face of someone who’s a happy customer, talking about how that product that you’ve created has really driven home some of these values and made their life easier. Again, don’t focus too much on the production value. You’re looking for raw authenticity. And the final piece of video content that you’re probably going to need is the whiteboard video or the chalkboard video, like the one you’re watching.

This is a great opportunity to get someone, say, from your development team or maybe the product manager or product marketer to stand up and talk about what they they’ve invested into your product. So maybe it’s the product manager talking about why they made a certain decision for a particular feature. This adds a real human element and shows that you’ve got a great team behind this product.That human touch goes a really long way in driving a lot of trust and excitement around your product.

Okay, so you’ve got this supporting video content, now what? You’re shaping up at this point to actually have a pretty incredible launch. The next step is around internal education. So there’s so many stakeholders in product launches today. How do you get them up to speed quickly and make sure that they’re on the same page?

Using Video Internally

The way we do it is after every meeting we have, I’ll record a screen capture of my PowerPoint presentation with a little video capture of me in the corner walking the people through what I’m talking about in that PowerPoint presentation. The reason I think this is really important is because first of all, let’s face it. If you send someone a PowerPoint in their email, what are the chances they’re going to open it? Probably pretty slim. But if you send someone a video with a little personalized face? Okay, now I’m going to click on that, now I’m going to watch!

The second thing is that it really allows for you to be super clear with what you’re trying to communicate. So say it’s messaging. There’s no longer any ambiguity around what that specific bullet meant or what that image represented and how it was supposed to be said. Again, video is a really great way to communicate this information and if you’re using a tool like Vidyard for example, you can actually see if that sales rep or if that marketing person actually watched that video, and you can follow up as needed.

Getting Personal

Okay, so you’ve got your content, you’ve got everybody trained, and now you’re ready to go with your epic launch. How do you use video in this launch? Well, of course, you can repurpose some of the video you’ve already created, and you can update blogs, you can send out emails, you can put it on your social media.

These are some pretty traditional channels, but what I would recommend is taking that a step further and sending something like a personalized video to your customers or potential customers. A personalized video is a video where it actually has an element of personalization built right in. So it would say something like their name or it could have a picture of them, or maybe it would have their company name, and that would show up in the thumbnail and actually be right in the video itself. If you played your cards right, some of the content you created before can absolutely be repurposed to be personalized. That’s definitely a trick you should keep in mind.

We found that when sending a personalized video versus just a normal email, you’re going to see open rates and click through to open rates as high as four or five percent. So if you want to make a splash and make a loud noise when you launch your product, definitely keep personalized video in mind.

The last thing when it comes to the launch is while you’re doing all this, your sales team should be sending one-to-one videos out to their prospects as well. Now these are personalized, but they’re personalized in a little bit of a different way. These are personalized in the sense that more like these internal education videos, it would be someone, it would be the sales rep, for example, with a talking head talking to that customer and specifically talking to them about how your new product can address some of their concerns, and it really lends itself back to some of those values. Definitely these two approaches to personalized video, as I mentioned, should be run in parallel and is a great way to drum up a ton of excitement around your product launch.

Pulling it All Together

So, here we are: You’ve got all your supporting video content. You’ve got your really cool explainer video. You’ve got a powerful demo video. You’ve got a testimonial that just is so authentic. You’ve got a whiteboard video. You’ve educated your team. You’ve created personalized videos that you know your customers are going to open. You’ve created a ton of excitement.

Really, this is the full package. This is what it’s all about when using video for product launches. So I hope you’re as excited as I am. I’m Jesse Ariss, and this has been a Chalk Talk!

The post Chalk Talks: Crushing Your Next Product Launch with Video appeared first on Vidyard.

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