Just another protein supplement? How we made our homepage video to clarify our message

Content by: Guy Lawrence

By Guy Lawrence

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We’ve recently added a video to our website to help communicate our message, the process was so smooth that we wanted to share it with you. We decided to outsource the production so we could continue working on our business and not get tied up into an area that we didn’t fully understand. Sounds easy right? Believe me, if you are staring at a blank canvas and wondering what direction to take, the choices you make along the way are crucial to the end result.

If you are a small business and thinking about enhancing your website, or just plain curious, we thought you might like to know the steps we took to make this happen.

Stu and I were very aware we needed to help clarify our message and a funky video for the homepage was our goal. We truly believe that 180 Natural Protein Superfood is so much more than just another protein supplement which is a tricky message to communicate in a saturated market. New visitors could easily mistake us for… well… just another protein supplement.

Over the past few months, we’ve been chipping away in the background to create this video and I think that we have finally nailed it. There’s enough ‘in your face’ buy buy buy sales pitches on the internet today and that was something we certainly didn’t want to be a part of!

Step 1. Take action

Simple I know! It’s so easy to talk about things it’s not funny. Taking action is a different matter though. Before we started to make this video we were pretty clueless on the direction to take with it. This in itself was a major hurdle. Procrastination kicks in and all of a sudden we are telling each other we will look at it tomorrow. The classic human response!

Don’t fall sucker to this. The trick is to take action, any kind of action. Get amongst it and the rest will follow. I wrote a post on the power of intention and how it’s helped grow our business here.

Step 2. Clarify your message

The next step was to write down all the points that we wanted to emphasise. This gave us clarity on what we were wanting to say. Even though I do most of the writing on the blogs, Stu and I felt we needed an outsider to write the script so there was a fresh pair of eyes and a new perspective for it.

For the script we used David Miller of Launch Copywriting. David is a great guy and we were very happy with his work.

We simply sent him our written thoughts and had a chat for 15min, then David took care of the rest. He turned it around in under a week and we felt he got the script spot on.

Step 3. Choosing a style of video

After taking action and committing to a script, we then had to decide on the style of video. We did entertain the idea of having me in front of the camera talking through the script, but we felt images were the way forward to keep our message as clear as possible (Stu keeps telling me the cartoon version of me is a vast improvement!).

So we started to trawl through different videos and ideas that are floating around online and kept coming back to this one (I’m also a big fan of Tim Ferris) :-

Step 4. Finding the right people for the job

If you have never dabbled in video before, this can be a headache. I highly recommend using Elance, as this made the process so much easier.

Basically Elance enables you to put your project requirements on their website and allows people to bid for your work. We outlined our video wish list and used Tim’s video above as an example.

Honestly, this was really helpful. All the individuals that made a bid for our work had to show us their portfolio along with the project costings. We had over 20 pitches within the first week! This gave us a real feel for what was out there before making a decision.

The bids ranged from $150 to $20,000! After looking at all of these, the reality is you can get a quality made video from $1000 to $5000 depending on the style.

We also emailed the company that did Tim Ferris’s video for a quote, but they never got back to us.

Step 5. Production

We settled with breadnbeyond who are a company based in Java, Indonesia. Once the script was sent to them, within days they had sent back different styles that we could choose for our video. The example below cracked me up laughing, but we decided against it as we felt it was like a scene from South Park.

180 nutrition video

After settling on our graphics, the voiceover came next. I simply sat in a quiet room and spoke into my iPhone. When I was happy with it and there was none of my Welsh mumbling, I simply emailed it to them.

A week later we had our video! The guys at breadnbeyond were very professional to work with and communication was excellent every step of the way.

Not just another protein supplement

So there you have it. If you are running an online business and you are thinking about a video, from our experience I’d highly recommend it. They say a picture is worth a thousand words, and I feel a video is worth even more. It’s allowed us to be clear about who we are and clear up the confusion about our point of difference. If you have watched the video then hopefully you will think we are not…well…just another protein supplement!

Did you find this helpful? Did you enjoy the video? Would love to hear thoughts below.

Guy Lawrence

This article is brought to you by Guy Lawrence. Guy is a qualified fitness trainer with over 10 years of experience in the health industry. Guy worked at the UTS Fitness Centre in Sydney Australia where he specialised in exercise nutrition and obtained his Certificate in Exercise Nutrition and Certified... Read More
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4 Replies to “Just another protein supplement? How we made our homepage video to clarify our message”
Amanda Vella says:

LOVE!! Love the video and love how transparent you are about building your business. Makes me so HAPPY to be a customer of yours.
Look here: https://pinterest.com/illuminateyoga/
Amanda
P.S: Esp. loved the Welsh factor. ; )

180nps says:

No worries Amanda… Glad you liked it! I really enjoy doing the posts and it’s great to hear from others who enjoy them too 🙂

Hey Guy,

Thank you for writing about us on your blog — it’s a very happy moment for us right now seeing the video we made published on your site.

Saw this when browsing on Bing search today — very happy, can’t tell you more than that 😀

Andre
from your beloved breadnbeyond.com

180nps says:

You’re welcome Andre!:)

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