By Libby Esterle, Senior Account Executive
I recently had the opportunity to work with one of our awesome clients, Greater Cincinnati Water Works (GCWW), on a comprehensive integrated marketing campaign to introduce and launch its new online customer care portal and account management system, myGCWW.org. In addition to creating a bevy of materials such as: a communications outreach plan, new branding elements (website sliders, icons, logos, etc.) and copy for social media posts, E-blasts, ROBO calls and Interactive Voice Response (IVR) messaging for GCWW’s phone system, we also helped manage the production of a video tutorial.
Designed to walk GCWW customers through how they can take advantage of the new customer care portal, the conversational, dynamic video tutorial was an integral part in helping 15,000 customers register their accounts within the new system in the first month following the launch.
The best part? Happily, and just about one month following the launch, the video has been loaded 6,154 times—pretty impressive! So, following are just a few reasons why the entire process was so successful:
Dream Team. Shapiro, Cochran and Bailey got nothin’ on us! From our client contacts at GCWW to our friends at Reslv, the video production company we worked with, we made a great team. We began by developing a step-by-step action plan, video script and storyboard to keep everyone on the same page and moving ahead. This also helped to ensure we met our deadlines and produced a product everyone was happy with. In addition, everyone came to the table with creative and thoughtful ideas, resulting in a great video.
The Voice. When it came time to select voice-over talent, Reslv provided us with many options to choose from and even helped guide us in the right direction. We began by having everyone listen to both male and female voice clips and then we narrowed it down by choosing our top 2-3 “voices” for each gender. We then met as a team, discussed our favorites and finally settled on one. For this video, we ended up going with a male, as it just seemed to be a better fit, but having the opportunity to listen to several options and collaborate as a team to choose the final voice talent was a valuable experience.
Ch-ch-ch-ch-Changes. Turns out, Bowie was on to something. Despite a strong script, great voice talent and excellent animation, we still found ourselves making improvements during the final production phase– and that was ok. Ok, because everyone understood the need for the improvements and, as a result, was more than happy to accommodate in order to produce an engaging and dynamic video that would hold the viewer’s interest.