How to Create a Case Study Video in Perth
Perth case study video
As a marketer, how can you position your business as the go to solution for your dream customers? How can you reassure them that you’ve got all the answers? How can you build trust and a connection with your audience and encourage them to connect? At LP Visuals, we do that through case study videos.
In this article, we’ll outline a recent case study video project we created for Urbane Projects and through that project, we’ll show you how to create a successful case study video for your business. Urbane is a luxury home builder in Perth with a client focused approach. They provide an end to end solution, offering design and building, enabling them to push the limits of creativity whilst ensuring the feasibility of the home.
What is a case study video?
A case study video highlights a successful project, outlining its brief, your solution, the process and results. By doing so, it positions your business as an expert problem solver, who’s capable of delivering a project for its dream customer. By showing this to potential customers prior to sale, such as through your website, an email marketing campaign or on social media, businesses can improve conversions by creating a true connection with customers.
Why should you create a case study video for your business?
The purpose of a case study video is to build credibility and increase conversions.
Trust and credibility are essential for every business in the sales cycle. For Urbane, the reason they need to build trust is if you’re considering building a luxury home, you want to be sure your builder can deliver. By demonstrating the processes of how Urbane has achieved that vision for other clients, they’re able to use case study videos to gain a potential clients trust and build a genuine connection through story. It helps potential customers feel like they’ve met and chatted with the Urbane team, before they pick up the phone or walk in the door.
Take Away #1: understanding that trust and credibility are the key marketing objective behind creating a case study video is critical to planning and executing it effectively. It’s important to keep this objective front of mind throughout the video production process and this can be done by thinking about what does a potential customer need to feel reassured and ready to get in touch?
How to select the right project for a case study video?
Selecting the right project for your case study video is critical to a successful case study video project. Failing to choose the right project will result in incorrect positioning of your business, an inability to share your key messages as desired and poor marketing results. The keys to selecting the right project for your case study are to choose a project that:
Is a project your business would like to do more of;
Matches the scale and style that your dream customer is looking for; and
Presents your business well in its ideal niche.
Another way to select the right project is to consider the projects most commonly discussed with new clients, or that you’ve received the best feedback for. If you need help selecting the right project for your case study video, chat with your videographer or video production company and ask their opinion on if it’s the right fit for your business.
For Urbane, the reason we chose to film at the Dune was because:
The team was very proud of the project and would be happy to do more work that was similar in nature;
The home matched the style and scale of an ideal Urbane customer; and
It was in City Beach, an area Urbane is looking to build more homes in.
Take Away #2: to select the right project for your case study video, choose a project that matches the scale and style of project that your dream customer is searching for, as well as something that positions your business in one of the various industries or niches it works in.
What content should you include in a case study video?
For us, this always comes back to your customers. Who are they? Where do they live? What do they like, dislike and value? What are they looking for in your product or service? How do you make their life better? By considering potential customers as the foundation of the key messages for your case study video, you will ensure that all content included in your video is essential.
Key content to include in a case study video could include:
The client and their brief for the project
The solution your businesses provided
Key features and results of the project
While audiences prefer to watch a video than read paragraphs of text, this doesn’t provide free reign to create a twenty minute video waffling about how amazing the project was to work on. Our other top tips for developing the key messages for your case study video are:
Ensure the content is presented in a logical order
Focus more on outcomes than technicalities
Assume the audience is a new potential client who doesn’t know much about your business
How did we embody this process when we worked with Urbane? We first started by understanding their target customer and through a simple questionnaire we were able to understand not only who they are, but why they buy. Urbane’s ideal customer is middle aged, living in Perth, likely with kids, one or both partners have an established career and they want a unique home that embodies their lifestyle. We were able to reverse engineer these characteristics, and design a video that encouraged the audience to connect through the following key messages:
Urbane’s philosophy ‘Design + Build + Live’ which encapsulates their support throughout the entire journey;
The importance of listening and creating a client specific, lifestyle focused home for each client that is truly unique; and
Understanding site specifics and design preferences to ensure every home is created for longevity.
Take Away #3: to create the key messages for your case study video, understand your target customer and reverse engineer their interests, questions and concerns through the lens of your project by focusing on the why as opposed to the what.
How to decide on the style of your case study video?
Case study videos should be focused around one thing: building credibility with your target customer. So, while the number of video styles and techniques are endless, it’s important to only choose those which meet the objective of the video (trust). For us, that means a focus on personal interviews with b-roll to match.
Conversational interviews are the best way we’ve found to build trust and credibility because they feel organic, human and relatable. We all intuitively understand when we’re being sold to, and personal interviews are key to avoiding that feeling. We typically capture these interviews by chatting with the key people who worked on the project, in a conversational manner. We have a set of questions, but these are only used as a guide and the interview follows more of a natural sequence, with the interviewer simply discovering what the project is and why it’s so special.
These interviews should be supported by b-roll of the project, in a style that makes sense for your industry. To determine the style of your b-roll, consider the way in which you want your brand to be presented, is it artistic? Reliable? Exciting? Minimal? Dynamic? By reviewing example videos and considering how these would be interpreted by your ideal customer (based on their values, likes and dislikes), you can brief the videographer or video production company as to your ideal style.
In our project with Urbane, our video production style was based on two key factors: customer desire and Urbane’s approach. We understood that each potential customer came to Urbane for an artistic architectural interpretation of their lifestyle. As a result, all of our interviews and b-roll were filmed to position Urbane as the artists delivering this vision for their customers.
On top of that, we knew that Urbane was a relationship based business. It’s owned and run by Steve Gliosca, who works directly with all clients from design through to build and completion. These factors made Steve our key interview for the project, enabling potential customers to build a relationship with him before they walked in the door. Urbane is also a business built around collaboration and to show this, we also interviewed Tim Davies, Owner of Tim Davies Landscaping who was the landscaper for the home.
While filming, the stunning home and its beautiful location did most of the hard work for us. Editing this story together we wanted to create a slow, natural feeling video. Every custom home is a representation of both client and builder, and it was important for us to focus on this in the edit. We used light music, minimal colour and simplistic editing to reinforce the minimal and premium feel of the Urbane brand.
Take Away #4: opt for an interview based video that’s conversational in style and uses b-roll which reflects the nature of your project, industry and customer desires.
How long should a case study video be?
The ideal length of your case study video depends on a multitude of factors:
How important is this purchase to your client? The more important, the more time they’re willing to invest in watching your case study video.
How many key messages do you have? If you have one simple key message a shorter video may be better, but for multiple messages more length may be required.
What is the average cost of sale of your project? The more money someone needs to spend to engage your business, the more trust and credibility is required prior to the sale.
Where are they watching the video? It’s always best to follow best practices of the platform you’ll be releasing your video. Instagram audiences have a shorter attention span than those watching via YouTube for example.
How interesting is your project? If there’s lots to discuss, longer videos may suit better, but if it’s a simple project there is no point in making longer content if it won’t be engaging for your audience.
Take Away #5: consider the importance of purchase, key messages, average cost of sale, release platform and how interesting your project is when deciding on video length.
How to repurpose content with a case study video?
Whenever you’re creating a case study video project, it’s critical to consider content repurposing. When we’re filming and editing a video, the majority of material doesn’t end up in the final video, not because its not good content, but because it wasn’t the right fit. As a marketer, you should always consider how you can repurpose this leftover content to make sure you get value for money from your video production. To do this, consider secondary release platforms or marketing objectives and identify extra content that could be made to assist with these.
Urbane’s secondary release platforms are Instagram, LinkedIn and a quarterly email marketing newsletter. As a result, we created a variety of shorter videos and still photos that Urbane could use. These assets enable Urbane to discuss the project more than once in their marketing cycle and discuss specifics, technicalities or results whenever they like.
Take Away #6: when creating a case study video, consider your key and secondary release platforms, as well as secondary marketing objectives to determine what content repurposing options exist for your video.
Urbane Case Study Video: Marketing Results
It's safe to say we’re pretty happy with the results on this one:
30,000+ YouTube views in a single month
2,000+ Instagram impressions
And there’s much more to come as we optimise our marketing and post the remaining repurposed content over the next few months.
How to create a case study video for your business?
By showing a real world example of Urbane’s design + build + live philosophy, we’re able to build a relationship with potential new clients before they ever make contact. Through our project with Urbane we’ve shown that the key take aways for creating a case study video for your business are:
Understanding that trust and credibility are the key marketing objective behind creating a case study video is critical to planning and executing it effectively;
Choose a project that matches the scale and style of project that your dream customer is searching for, as well as something that positions your business in one of the various industries or niches it works in;
To create the key messages for your case study video, understand your target customer and reverse engineer their interests, questions and concerns through the lens of your project by focusing on the why as opposed to the what;
Opt for an interview based video that’s conversational in style and uses b-roll which reflects the nature of your project, industry and customer desires;
Consider the importance of purchase, key messages, average cost of sale, release platform and how interesting your project is when deciding on video length; and
Consider your key and secondary release platforms, as well as secondary marketing objectives to determine what content repurposing options exist.
Thank you for reading this blog and if you’re looking to create case study videos for your business and need a video production partner who understands both marketing strategy and cinematic video, we’d love to chat with you.