Every few years, b2b companies go through the exciting and expensive process of refreshing their brand. As part of the overall marketing campaign around a re-brand, video has only become more front and center to give life to the brand’s voice. But many companies don’t want to spend a hundred thousand dollars to add one corporate video to their YouTube Channel that may or may not get a lot of views, nor do they want to release a piece of content that looks cheap or uncreative.
Our client, San Francisco-based tech company Insightly CRM, was grappling with this challenge when they reached out to us about a major branding initiative they were conducting. Slow Clap worked closely with the Insightly creative & marketing teams to produce several branded content videos that perfectly captured their brand voice, looked great, and was produced affordably.
Approach
Slow Clap was approached by Insightly’s Product Marketing Manager, John Weeke, who was tasked with doing a full rebranding of Insightly’s website. He wanted to create videos that educated potential customers on key features but were more than just your average 90-second tech explainer video. He wanted these videos to be a reflection of the brand’s voice; fun, smart, and simple.
We worked with Insightly for about 8 weeks developing the script, cast an amazing actress, and put together a top-notch video production crew. Our Creative Director, Dan Lichtenberg, directed the seven videos shot over the course of four days, working with Billy Golden as producer, and Drew Eckman as cinematographer and camera operator.
Execution
In the world of video production, working with the constraint of a client’s budget is essential. So, Slow Clap makes sure that we can be nimble, scrappy, and wear a lot of different hats when we need to achieve a big production value with a small budget. Core to Insightly’s new brand was this sense of constant movement and speed. To visualize this, we made sure the camera was constantly moving to capture our wheeling-and-dealing on-camera narrator. This is a challenge to do without a huge video crew and a big budget. So, our problem-solving cinematographer, Drew Eckman, and his grip & electric team came up with an innovative technical solution, placing the camera operator on a dolly, and rigging our key light to the dolly. This meant we didn’t have to light the entire scene to get great-looking results.
“What was great about these videos, was we were really resourceful and were able to use the client’s office to save time and money. It was an efficient and tight operation.” – Billy Golden, Producer
Another way we visualized Insightly’s brand voice in video, which has a big energy since it’s a product that serves sales teams, was to have tons of activity in the background. These videos take place on a sales floor; to make it feel like this sales floor is sealing deals left and right, we used Insightly’s own employees, many of them salespeople, working away in the background. We used clever blocking to time much of this “business” to be coordinated and cross frame at strategic moments as our main actor walked through the sales pit.
Results
“It was wonderful to work with Slow Clap. The moment I realized Dan was really going the extra mile was when I asked him about a shot in the edit where it seemed like there was a lot more paper flying across the screen, an outcome we weren’t able to make happen on-set. I asked him about it, and he said he actually set-up a little green screen scene, filmed a bunch of papers, and composited them into the shot… it was well beyond my expectations.” – John Weeke, Product Marketing Manager, Insightly
In the end, we were able to provide Insightly with seven high-quality branded videos that covered the seven features of the product they wanted to highlight, but also capture the authentic brand voice.
Insightly leveraged the videos in three key ways. The first was through paid lead generation to get in front of their target market, buying YouTube pre-roll time and other paid advertising, to encourage leads to click through and start a free trial. The second was on their website, where these videos lived at the top of the page of each feature landing page. The final way the videos were used was through their outbound sales process; sales reps sent the videos to potential customers to get them excited. The videos have in total more than one million views, and paid for themselves in a matter of months, said the Insightly marketing team.
Insightly CRM
Watch all seven videos below:
