1 minute explainer video for Startups and apps

I have worked with startups a lot, and the one mistake i see repeated, over and over and over, is the lack of visitor education – or explaining to visitor, in other words the lack of an explainer video!

The majority of big startups, or startups in incubators, have a marketing manager smart enough to know the importance of such videos and thus use them at the home page, or landing ads pages … But small startups have somehow a blind spot concerning marketing – maybe it’s better to outsource their marketing -, they build these great startups and yet can not figure out the most basic marketing necessity!
The necessity to explain to your visitor/ clients in simple terms the features and use of your service or app!

This can be done easily with : …..

a 1 minute Explainer video

As i explained not long ago in a linkedin post, this is the #1 mistake most startups are committing!

Some tech companies experienced amazing growth, thanks to the 1-2 min animated videos they put on the homepage, the growth comes from the fact that the visitors convert into users/ clients x times more then when the visitor lands on a page with text and graphics.

Not convinced? Let’s do a test, Check the below explainer video by AnimationVids.com :

And now, try to put yourself in your customer shoes, and try to answer these questions:

1. Would you prefer to stay on a website 15 to 20 minutes or get the information condensed in a 2 min video?
2. Would you stay on a random website 20 minutes just to understand what exactly they are offering?
3. Would you prefer a video of a person verbally explaining an offer, or see a 1 minute explainer video like the one above?

It’s important to keep in mind – the goal is for the user to understand what your product does, as fast as possible. Show your explainer video to a person in your target audience if they can tell you what your product is all about, after watching your video, you’ve scored a home-run!

Now that we have agreed on the necessity of an explainer video, the other questions that you would need to ask your self:
1- What type :  list of different types of explainer videos.
2- What budget you are willing to invest in the video:
article about the cost of explainer video , or explainer video cost estimator

 

 

 

Psychological Advertising : Is The NRA behind Zombie golden age ?

Emotional Appeal,  is a method of persuasion that’s designed to create an emotional response. They are considered fallacies, or errors in reasoning, because they manipulate emotions.
That means, these persuasion techniques will trick your brain into believing certain things are good for you, by manipulating the emotional part of your brain.
Emotional Appeal in Advertising, have a huge role, the method is used in the majority of televised advertising.
I won’t explain this here, but you can see the article below, which present the main types of appeals , and how they are used:

Advertising : The Rational & Emotional Appeal

In short, advertisers have been targeting our emotions for a long time, they create an emotional response toward something, and they wire us in a certain way without even knowing,  it’s not something new.
But if you reflect about this fact for a while you realize that the Movies and more specifically TV series can and are probably used in the same way.

And i can’t find a better example than the rise of the Zombie entertainment and a possible association with the NRA.
The mass school shootings in the USA are pushing a lot of people to ask for tougher gun laws, but somehow that is not happening due to opposition.
When the president of the US, feels he is powerless towards changing the gun laws, that means a lot:

Of course there’s the gun lobby, which have a huge role in the political opposition, but there is something else …
Politicians can not go against their constituencies,  whenever there is a certain amount of people asking for tougher gun laws, there is another amount of people asking for the opposite …
Many, people feel safer with a gun in the house, but why do people feel safer with a gun?It is most likely because their brains are ironically associating owning a gun with being safe, so how did the brain manage to do this association in a country where there are no armed conflicts???!!!
The answer comes from Hollywood, action filled movies often portrayed people having the ability to defend themselves mainly to the use of a gun.
But with greater opposition to opposition to guns, a stronger influence is required to make those influenced defend more aggressively gun ownership, and to influence those who were neutral in this matter.
The stronger influence, would be by making your brain think that everyone needs guns, and what better way than pump in your brains the unconscious feeling of insecurity of a zombie apocalypse?
This makes you associate a high emotional value for gun ownership, and would help block gun control laws.
This is the ideal advertising method, for huge companies that have enough cash to finance big budget movies and tv series.
Think about it …. could the NRA secretly funding Zombie movies and series?
Zombie movies/series might have something to do with Umpqua Community College shooting, the shooter Christopher Harper-Mercer seams to be a big fan of zombie movies according to an online dating profile.
As you see below, he mentions hobbies: killing zombies, and food: Brains !!!

What is Growth Hacking? define growth hacking!

A buzz word that have been repeated a lot lately and that started to surface beginning 2013, the word is “Growth Hacking” and it’s variations like Growth Hacker , to growth hack etc…

As the Manager/ founder of an advertising company and a pioneer in viral marketing, i was obviously curious…
especially when having worked in advertising for almost 10 years and managing my own firm for close to 8 years.

So i started researching the different strategies used in Growth hacking, and to my surprise the only thing new was the name … I mean these strategies … we have been using since ever, and it’s mainly basic and advanced marketing techniques!

But then again, there’s always a reason behind the use of a name, Growth hacking is not target at selling goods or products, it is simply the techniques used to Grow the user base of a website or mobile application.

Growth hacking include any marketing strategies that can be used to achieve this goal, from guest blogging to advertising through ad networks or even contacting the press!

It is a general term that groups different strategies from SEO optimization to press relations …

In short, it’s not a new discipline, it’s simply a categorization of some strategies that can be helpful to grow the userbase of a company.

growth hacking trend

Imitating Success – celebrities teachers for society!

I just watched a speech by Jack Gleeson (video below), an Irish actor, best know for playing Joffery Bartheon in the HBO television series Game of Thrones, speaking at the Oxford Union (most prestigious debating society,  established for 190 years, aiming to promote debate and discussion in Oxford University)

Jack mentioned several interesting ideas that i would like to talk about and weigh in.

To start with Jamie Tehrani from Durham university theory: Evolutionary psychology behind fascination with celebrities

Imitating success:The theory centers around the Anthropological notion of Prestige (high social status – admiration or respect)
This prestige is bestowed upon individuals who possess certain adaptive skills like “superior hunting technique”
This prestige is bestowed upon the individuals so that the community can learn from them through imitation.
My opinion: I think in this case, the prestige is not bestowed but earned, it might be true that the others will imitate and will respect this individual, but it’s not due to a prestige by itself but by the survival instinct and the hope of having a better life.

The side effects of imitating success:
The successful hunter might have a ritual, and the people who want to imitate him adapt a ritual as well as the hunting technique.

According to Tehrani theory we have a evolutionary and psychological instinct to imitate celebrities, thus the celebrities have became a social role model, normal people are interested in knowing what they wear, what car they drive, how they live etc…(see: celebrity brand association – marketing wise).

Celebrity worship syndrome: complete dissolution of the self in favor of another: form of religious hysteria.

Celebrities teachers of society ?
Have celebrities became the teachers of society? can we influence the masses through celebrities?
Will we start imitating the town drunk, who posses prestige due to an original fame which faded away a long time ago?
During the last few decades, this celebrity or prestige is granted on the basis of a none adaptive skills – or no skills for that matter, the actor, singer, reality TV star … the majority of these people have nothing of value to offer to the masses.

Max vabor theory of charisma, Celebrities have a charisma that is accepted by us as a willing domination (not challenged like the police authority etc …), that’s why politicians often require celebrity endorsement or celebrity status to feel legitimated in the eyes of the public (called gentle charisma).

Chris Rojek a professor in sociology says: “Celebrities are informal life coaches. By watching them, people learn how to groom, learn how to wear their hair, learn what to say, learn what opinions are sexy, learn what’s right-on and not right-on. They’re assimilating all sorts of life-skills,”

And thus the logic of: Influencers  outreach in advertising.

Can celebrities be used to guide society/ manipulate society ?From what we have just learned, a couple very important question are raised:
Can celebrities be used to guide society?
by ensuring that everything covered by the media and published by them is according to a best behavior or certain global good agenda for the country & humanity?
Can celebrities be used to manipulate society?
Guiding society is surely not happening, all the screw ups the celebrities are doing is definitely not guidance material, if there’s something they are spreading it’s misguidance: several divorces, frequent flashing of private body parts, singing almost naked … Unless you want to believe this is all a part of a corruption plan  some secret organization have for humanity! But in authoritarian countries, the celebrity could be and are used to manipulate societies!

Not everything you read on the internet is true

I am sure you came across this saying before, i know i did, but it wasn’t until recently that i really realized the amount of wrong information that are available on internet.

To start a couple of people shared with me a pyramid of languages difficulty,

the pyramid contained few languages, showing Polish as the most difficult language, while more difficult languages like Arabic & Chinese are 2 levels easier (according to the pyramid) , when reading the blog post that contained the pyramid of languages, you realize the blogger is Polish (which lead us to realize the classification is very biased, and is done on not informed and not researched opinions!) and yet people will share not knowing that it’s a big pile of crap! Even without a simple web search to verify these information! A simple search would give you the classification below:

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikibooks:Language_Learning_Difficulty_for_English_Speakers

So a simple blog allows you to spread misinformation, and people will gladly spread the misinformation without double checking them!

Another incident also proves my point, while i was checking my linkedin requests i stumbled upon an article on the main page, it was one of these articles written by influencers (celebrities), the article was about “the rise of emotional advertising“, the writer a VP in a big advertising company (Vice President at TBWA/EUROPE), in the post he goes on and on explaining how brands are trying to engage with us emotionally these days …. All good except 1 problem, this is called a viral video marketing, and engaging emotionally have always been a strategy of viral marketing!
Thus there’s no new type of advertising called “emotional advertising” and definitely there’s no rise in this sort of techniques!
So even highly professional people and big influencers can and often do write a big load of crap, and no one will tell them … No that’s not true.

update & clarification:
Polish is a difficult language, have been experiencing this first hand since more than 7 years, but the same can be said about several other languages, thus a classification based on difficulty can not be decided based on someone’s personal preferences or a specific population personal preferences.
Emotional advertising is actually considered a category even-though all type of advertising is either emotional or rational, so the term coined as emotional advertising is simply a buzz word, used to describe the ads that push viewers to cry or tear up.

Free Hulk, Xmen, Captain America & Spider Man comic books

Nice promotional offer from Marvel, they are basically giving away the 1st issue of each of their comics series.

It’s digital file so it does not cost them anything ! and it’s a great way to hook comics fans and make them discover more comic series,

more sales!!

source: TechNews

Good marketing consultants & advertising experts

My previous post gave me the reason to write this one,
So, how to find these advertising experts, and marketing consultants?

Well, you should look for:
1- creativity, you will need creative people to find creative solutions.
2- intelligence, they should be intelligent, i don’t know how much IQ they should have, i have a 150 IQ and it seams it is more than enough.
3-pioneers not followers, people that define new realities not those that follow what others have defined, it is important that they can think outside of the box.
4-logic: find people that can logically convince you, if they can’t they are no experts.
5-manipulation: these expert should master the art of manipulating the masses or consumers to buy this product or this brand.
6-understand the way people think: they should be able to understand how population think and how the consumer see it.

This post was a bit kind of bragging 🙂
let’s put it this way, any marketing director in the top 500 companies, if he/she does not have one of the above attributes he/she should be fired, and i will gladly accept his job 🙂

How to make smallbusiness work

Only if you set your business in the middle of nowhere, you can have the argument “that it didn’t work due to location”, otherwise it is entirely your fault.
Heck i have even set my company literary in the middle of nowhere, and in a country i don’t know the language!!! , And i am making it work!

Well, let’s jump into the main subject of this post!
Some time ago, i walked by a new specialized shop near my apartment, few months later i wanted to see how it was doing, so i went into the shop had a discussion with the owner, who was complaining that business was bad!
I offered him my services, ( i have an advertising agency: MediaO2)
I told him, i will come back in a couple of days with some ideas.
Indeed, 2 days later i came back with few ideas and marketing strategies that would change the entire situation, my ideas opened the doors of his business to 2 new consumers categories: “women” and “teens & young adults”.
The marketing strategy was so interesting that it even made this cheap guy order the flyers.

Then he and his wife started interfering on how to put and what not to put, making the strategy less powerful by sabotaging several elements with their ignorance!

So these people who are struggling to make their business work, then an advertising specialist comes and gives them ideas that will potentially make their business bloom, at this moment these people should shut their mouths and let the experts take care of it !!!!

Please!!! Do i tell you how to do your job???

Every business has it’s unique situation, there is no magic formula to make business work, but there are specialized people known as “marketing consultants” , like me, we find ways to make businesses bloom, so if you are a struggling business owner don’t be cheap!! do contact my company or other marketing companies, believe me, what you will be paying is nothing compared to what you are losing due to your lack of correct marketing!
But beware of scam artists, you will know when you find real marketing consultants, also if some guy proposes a website or flyer it does not make him an advertising expert, don’t waste your money on amateurs.