Chris Weiher is a video producer and business owner with over 20 years of experience in the industry.  Focusing on B2B videos, Chris' company, Cleaver Creative, has created animations, and videos for events, sales presentations, and commercials. He now works with business owners to help them develop their video strategies. He believes in creating a video that you’ll love and one that works for your budget. Being in business since 2008 and making hundreds of videos all over the world, he’s worked with every size of business, including Accenture, Salesforce, SAP, AT&T, ComEd, and a whole lot more! Chris will ensure you get exactly what you want with complete transparency. 

Explainer videos have a really important role to play as far as showing off what you do, in a fun, animated way. These videos are very successful for sales presentations and explaining your product or service on your website. It's become one of those mainstay products the same way you need customer testimonial videos. Adding an FAQ series that explains exactly what you do as a very simple breakdown for your customers.

If you don't want to get up in front of the camera yourself or use your voice, you can hire a voiceover artist that will tell the story. Use movie magic or software providers like PowToons for animation. Chris recommends if you're going to do it yourself and you lack creativity, watch YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram videos and borrow pieces and elements from them and see how you can build that into your story. As a business person, you either have time or you have money. If you have time, you can use apps that let you do simple and fun videos, unfortunately, there's not anything that's total plug-and-play and gives you a great result. At the very minimum find a professional to talk to and get advice from, even if you don't have the budget to hire them. 

Chris explains that the process starts with the script and then moves on to storyboarding where you create the visuals of the script, then start the animation. It's very important to go in that order because Project Bloat can happen, if people want to start making changes to the script when you've already started animation, then all the visuals have to change. Have the series of checkpoints done and be a hundred percent happy with the script. 

Your video has to reflect the company culture. It has to feel authentic and natural to you as the business owner and your brand, then you can't go forward with it. After you go through this entire process, it needs to be tracked to measure the success based upon metrics like getting feedback from coworkers, different departments, and some kind of focus group, ask your coaching mastermind or other people in your industry to preview it to see what works and what doesn't. Running it as an ad through Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and YouTube, you can track it to see if it’s actually generating leads in sales.  

In this episode:

[01:50] Chris speaks about the importance of using explainer videos.

• Dropbox used an explainer video as their m.v.p before even building their app. 
• YouTube drawing videos showing off what you do in a fun, animated way.

[03:39] When someone doesn't want to be the star of the show or gets up in front of the camera. 

• You can hire a voiceover artist that's gonna tell the story.
• Use an App like PowToons for do-it-yourself animation.

[05:44] Chris explains what to do if you’re presented with a blank canvas, but lack creativity.

• Look at other videos that you like and borrow pieces from them to build into your story.
• It needs to be creative, eye-catching, and draw people in.

[08:21] It’s important that you follow the order of the process when creating a video.

• Start with finalizing your script to prevent ‘Project Bloat’ from happening. 
• Move on to storyboarding then to animation.

[11:10] Helping clients decide on the message.

• It needs to feel right and natural to you as the business owner, or the company. 
• Having an animated character could be more humorous rather than using an actor.

[14:26] After the process of creating your video, it needs to be tracked to measure its success.

• Get it previewed for feedback from coworkers, focus groups, a coaching mastermind, or people in your industry. 
• Tracking it to see if it’s generating leads in sales.