Vass, the founder of PropCheck is 2 months out from releasing his revolutionary web app but was stuck between a few choices of how he could market his company. Currently, he was averaging half an hour convincing new people to sign up to his property app and needed to make the process more efficient with marketing.
Vass narrowed his choices to Brand Strategy, SEO performance or our service, a video campaign.

We quickly discovered that SEO performance wasn’t the right choice, as the majority of the customers aren't even problem aware. The choice between Brand Strategy and a video marketing campaign was more difficult. A brand strategy targets long term growth and stability while a video campaign focuses on aggressive growth and sales now.

Vass came back to us, as he knew that beginning the company with aggressive sales allowed for more strategic long term growth. More money brings in more choices.‍

Firstly…what do we even say?

This video was going to be Propcheck's first impression to a majority of potential customers, it needed to come off trustworthy and not salesy, most video commercials start like a bad door salesman using lines like "have you ever felt problem X". We were going to be better than this.

Instead, we created a summarising sentence of what Propcheck stands to achieve. The line we developed was “PropCheck is an automated property data platform designed to help you make smart decisions now”.

We made a clear statement of what PropCheck promises to be, and left it to the client to ask themselves if it’s relevant to them.

The last 3 words, “Smart decisions now” were pivotal to our video, it became the spine of the message we wanted to push across. We call these short words “The Brand’s Creed”. Similar to Nike’s “Just do it” or Apple’s “Think Different”. Creed is something that when injected with enough meaning and stories, influences customers purchasing decisions in dramatic ways.

“Smart decisions now” spoke directly to Vass’s audience, real estate agents and property developers. 

(1) - These customers need to make high-level decisions that are very costly to get wrong. 
(2) - They are time poor so they demand a certain level of immediacy in everything they use.

The first objective - make potential clients' problems aware…CHECK!

The third objective, make Propcheck feel like the right choice. Humans don’t just make logical decisions, we are not robots. How we feel is more important than what we think when it comes to making a decision. 

If this explainer video felt boring then the target market would assume PropCheck is boring as well. 

So we started our visual design, with fun colours and bold text. We took inspiration from Google Maps' colour scheme, which had cheerful yellows and greens. 

It was fun… but also childish and unprofessional. The colour scheme screamed this service is for children which could not have been further from the truth. It was at this moment we realised mixing fun and professional feels like mixing oil and water, they can easily contradict each other if not balanced correctly. 

After going through many colours in the rainbow, we settled on something that resembled a blueprint, with thicker lines and modern typography to help the animation feel easy and beginner-friendly.

Sounding trustworthy

The typical Aussie voice over style is to overemphasise every word noun and verb, they have energy, yet feel humanless. If you go onto Fiverr or any voice actor agency, you’ll hear everyone is the typical radio announcer voice. This sounds salesy, and it’s the first way to lose someone’s interest in a video. You’re beckoning them to use the skip button. The same also goes for choice in music, using safe corporate music is a surefire way to lose interest of viewers.

We worked with a voice-over artist who could deliver a range of styles, and with our direction, was able to produce something that comforted first-time viewers.

Most explainer videos go for this kind of music…

This music screams “trust us” we’re a salesperson.

This is the music we used for Propcheck.

We're inviting the customer to dance with us

Give the video energy with kinetic animation

We created a visual experience of what it’s like if you used PropCheck. We designed the majority of our frames to look like the web app is working right from your screen, as though it’s a screen recording. It painted a clear picture to the audience, of what it would be like if THEY used PropCheck.

The Result

The video premiered on the 12th of April, it lives alongside Propcheck's website for new visitors and is actively used in marketing campaigns. This video became a salesman that never sleeps, ready to inform and excite potential customers day and night