Marketing Through Education
How we helped a technology company explain their core offering to small business owners who had probably never heard the term “CRM”.
The Problem
Squirrel is a fast-growing technology consulting firm that specialises in the installation, configuration, and integration of business systems—in particular Customer Relationship Management systems (CRMs). They wanted to create a short educational video that explained what a CRM was, and why Squirrel was the best partner to install and configure one for your business.
At a Glance
- Project: What is a Customer Relationship Management System?
- Client: Squirrel Business Solutions
- Delivered: July, 2017
- Duration: 2 months
- Category: Technology, Illustration, Explainer Video
A Process For Excellence
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Discover
During this phase, our famous Empathy Forecast workshop will help us understand your audience, your key message, as well as getting everyone aligned.
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Concept
Our professional scriptwriting team will work with you to turn insights from the initial workshop into a snappy script that communicates your key points.
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Create
In this stage, we explore character development, themes, and visual storytelling, captured as a storyboard for you to review and help us refine.
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Magic
Once the words and pictures and signed off, we’ll book a date in our studio where voiceover, music, sound effects, and post-production animations come together.
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Launch
In this final step, we’ll deliver your finished product and any supporting assets, and optionally work with you on a roadmap for hosting and promotion.
Our Approach
We believe that education is the most powerful sales strategy. The goal of this video was to build authority and trust with the audience by explaining what a CRM is and how it helps a business function more effectively.
The Squirrel brand is one that is very approachable and friendly. Much like the mascot at the heart of the brand, there is an element of fun and cute in the way that “Squirrelies” portray themselves to the world. As a result, we knew that it would be important that the video reinforce the fact that, while technology can be intimidating and scary, your technology partner need not be.
Our Solution
We opted for a first-person view of the customer, so that the target audience would see themselves in the story, and the pain relayed by the narrator would resonate. The client was so happy with the video script that the final line “for all the things you didn’t get into business to do” would go on to become the marketing tagline adopted by the business.
To present the solutions that the Squirrel team offers its clients as non-scary, we peppered the technical explanations with squirrels and fluffy, friendly “cloud” creatures throughout the video. The squirrel mascot was refined further when the client engaged us to create illustrations representing each of the company’s core values.
Marketing by Education
A hand-drawn explainer video is an effective tool for educating without being patronising. While it was necessary for us to introduce some terminology, we:
- broke the explanation of new concepts into digestible chunks
- were careful to not overload the viewer, to avoid them “zoning out”,
- ensured constant motion, to give the viewer something familiar for their eyes to follow
- used colour sparingly, drawing on the brand’s colour palette
- illustrated known systems that the client works with regularly into the visuals
- simplified intimidating technical diagrams into simple sketches
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