The Truth About Your Startup’s Press Strategy

Press is a great way to build a brand. But for startups, it’s not a sustainable way to build your business. Every young company wants to be featured in “Good Morning America,” the New York Times, Inc., Fast Company, Forbes, Women’s Health and more. These major publications and dozens more have featured our two companies, but we’ve found that the results have not led to a shift in the metrics that are critical to growing our businesses.

Earning coverage from magazines, blogs and TV shows might give you a huge bump in traffic, but it’s not as meaningful as getting in front of the right audience. For example, the popular app Cody received press from several major tech publications like GigaOm and VentureBeat on their launch day. They saw a traffic spike, but it was short-lived and traffic soon returned to much lower levels, as shown in the graph below.

For their longer-term marketing strategy, they regularly wrote articles for their own blog and for other websites in the fitness industry over a period of a year. You can see that their press bump (from the graph above) is now just a blip, while their content creation has paid off in spades.

Most people consider the goal of press to be getting covered. We think that it needs to be part of a much bigger marketing mix. While strategies for scalable growth are different for every company, here are a few things that have worked for us:

Blogging. Just like Cody, Magoosh initially built its brand and company by blogging. We became a thought leader in the test prep space, specifically for the GRE. We hired an expert tutor as our first employee, and he wrote one blog article a day for nearly six months. We didn’t just focus on SEO (ranking well for search engines) – we focused on writing very high quality content so that we would build a relationship with our readers. Over time, more and more of our readers would come directly to our blog when looking for information about the GRE rather than searching on Google. We grew our traffic from 1,000 visitors/month to 20,000 visitors/month in four months using this strategy.
Customer service. We both have focused on service as a way to scale; personalized service means repeat purchases forModify, and an awesome referral business for both of our companies. Many startups say they care about service, but we think amazing service should be part of your strategic marketing strategy. You’ll provide better service if you think about the “return on investment” of your customer interactions. You measure service ROI by using a Net Promoter Score or by tracking increase in word of mouth referrals. There are different ways to accomplish this. But in the end, you need to find out if customers would refer you to their friends. The answer has to be a definitive yes in order for service to be part of scaling.

So, is press useless? Absolutely not! We think you should pursue press for a few reasons:

Credibility with investors. While your customers might not be reading press about your company, potential investors will be. Press coverage helps you build a relationship with an investor before they even know you – for instance they may have read about you in TechCrunch. You can also reference company coverage as social proof that others think you are newsworthy.Candid, a site that assigns a “culture score” based on current employees’ opinions of a company, was able to meet many new investors after their public product launch.
Credibility with retailers. If you’re selling a physical product, having press can mean a lot for retailers. Next to Modify’s product, they can have photos of the various magazines we’ve appeared in. Retailers need to convince a customer who is seeing the brand for the first time that it’s a good investment – having imagery from Self, Shape, Vanity Fair and others has helped our watch sales. Having strong coverage was integral in Modify launching its Major League Baseball watches in a dozen stadiums this season.
Credibility with future hires. Future employees are often looking to work for a hot new startup, and they often read startup press. For Magoosh, getting press in education technology publications has helped attract candidates who otherwise may have never heard of the company.
Customer base expansion. Modify appeared on “Good Morning America” twice. We considered the opportunities parts of our marketing spend; both times we sold at a loss, but we were able to acquire thousands of new customers. We’ve been able to turn over 30 percent of those folks into repeat customers.

One final thing: if you’re going to pursue press, make sure to think about how journalists work. You can’t just send them information and say, “Cover me!” Turns out, they’re people too. We recommend you take Mark Suster’s advice and think about press as a process. Build relationships and create value for the people covering you, and you’ll get more — and more valuable — coverage.

This post was co-authored by Bhavin Parikh, founder and CEO of Magoosh, which provides a convenient, fun, and effective way for students to prepare for standardized tests.

Aaron Schwartz is Founder and CEO at Modify Industries, Inc., which designs interchangeable custom watches known as Modify Watches. He loves working on startup ideas and has spent innumerable (happy) hours advising friends and former students on how to grow their ideas.

The Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) is an invite-only organization comprised of the world’s most promising young entrepreneurs. In partnership with Citi, YEC recently launched StartupCollective, a free virtual mentorship program that helps millions of entrepreneurs start and grow businesses.

The Wildly Successful Marketing Secrets of Startups

Typically, startups are lean, with a limited supply of money, talent, and time, meaning they don’t have resources to throw around willy-nilly. While this can induce panicky feelings for a lot of business owners, the upside is that it automatically forces burgeoning startups to wield the resources they do have sharply and intelligently.

This balancing act can get a bit tricky when it comes to marketing, because the internet has enabled an absolutely ludicrous array of options, opinions, and ideas to spring up. Get a website up! Contact investors! Use Pinterest! Start a YouTube channel! It’s easy to become overwhelmed by the sheer scope of modern marketing and completely lose your head.

But focus! There are simple rules to keep in mind to craft the best marketing plan possible that fits your business. Any company’s product or service is built around a specific target audience, right? No matter how long your company’s been around or how much money it brings in, make sure your marketing is specifically targeted to your demographic as well, or it will flounder. While keeping in mind that your approach should be tailored to suit your audience, use these tips to make your marketing the best it can be!

Follow Mint’s Shining Example

Mint, a personal financial management service started in 2006, was built around the young professional demographic their chief marketer, Noah Kegan, thought was being neglected, and they aimed their content marketing accordingly with huge success. Behold, their secrets…Quality Content

Take a look at their MintLife blog yourself, and tell me if you don’t get sucked in by their entertaining, oh-so-easy-on-the-eyes infographics, and their friendly, direct, and helpful writing. Mint made sure to only engage quality writers and illustrators, both in-house and freelance. A lot of companies trip themselves up by going for quantity over quality and turning off many potential customers with low-grade content.

Remember that while quality content marketing may be a long game, it yields undeniable results.

Variety of Content

Knowing well how to appeal to their customer base of young internet-savvy professionals, Mint uses a variety of media to engage and hold their interest. Their blog doesn’t have just articles, but also videos, infographics, and slideshows, which keeps their site fresh and a pleasure to share with others.

Social Channels

To build up trust, Mint spread their content out to well-known social channels like Digg and Reddit and even more commendably, did it well. For the uninitiated, these social sharing sites can be tricky to navigate and come out the other end with positive feedback, especially Reddit. Mint managed to pull it off by genuinely engaging with readers of both sites. (Hint:don’t be spammy.)

Metrics

Mint also relentlessly used carefully selected metrics to track the reactions to their content, and then used that knowledge to pursue what was working and drop what wasn’t. This means they were constantly improving on what they’d done before.

But don’t make the mistake of thinking the benefits of quality content marketing is a one-way street. Content marketing benefits your company hugely as well, by allowing you to engage intelligently and consistently with your community, and make sure you are always thinking about next steps to self-improve and evolve.

Quality content marketing is infectious. Heck, sometimes I’ll sign up for a service I might not even use, just because of how appreciative I am for that company’s content. Simply signing up for their service makes me more likely to be a paying customer in the future or pass along word of it to others who may convert to profitable users themselves. The same principle applies to the pricing of e-books which (at an average of $3-4) sell for drastically cheaper than paper books. Why is that? Even if customers don’t actually read the book, the low price means they don’t have much to lose in purchasing it, and just the simple act of acquisition means you are more likely to spread the word to other potential customers.

Be Creative

Don’t limit yourself in the terms of how you interact with your user base. In a sea of businesses and other startups jockeying for recognition, why should they choose you? Stand out (in a good way) and your audience will be delighted with and appreciate your extra effort.

Be Thoughtful

Consider your future courses of action carefully. Letting your ideas incubate and then acting accordingly will benefit you much more than trying out new fads at random. Having a smart team with similar values and a solid grasp on what’s important to your company’s growth really helps with this.

Be Aggressive

Don’t be afraid to really put yourself out there. You have a lot of competition, after all, and you won’t reach your goals by being passive in your efforts.

Always Fine-tune

Pursue strategies that have proven results and prune out what isn’t working. This will keep your company a solid marketing foundation to build off of and keep operations efficient.

In the end, it simply comes down to being a valued resource, which means being trusted, reliable, smart, entertaining, and helpful.

Christine Beuhler is a regular contributor to Markerly’s blog. Markerly is a content agency that connects your brand to influencers.

3 Questions to Reevaluate Your Startup’s Marketing Strategy

If you’re like me, you’re exhausted by boring marketing campaigns, up to your eyeballs in gimmick-laden slogans, and putting your direct mail straight in the paper shredder. I just received a car dealership promotion disguised as a W-2.

As consumers, we’re inundated by more than $465 billion a year in total ad spends. The amount of money companies are spending to make us feel badly about them is staggering. But the real question is, why do companies keep competing for attention using mediocre models when they could play by a very different set of rules?

Take T-Mobile — they successfully choreographed multiple flash mobs and captured them in videos that generated nearly 100 million YouTube hits and a 52 percent sales increase. Or the CDC’s Zombie Apocalypse blog, which generated 1.2 million new Twitter followers. Both of these examples required someone recognizing the value of taking a big marketing risk, thinking creatively, and ultimately, hitting the green light.

Though I’m no sports expert, I think of marketing like baseball. You want a steady stream of base hits to load the bases. That’s your traditional marketing. But then you want to bring up your big slugger and knock one of out of the park every once in a while, because people don’t talk about or remember the base hits. People talk about the risks that paid off (and the risks that didn’t!).

Like great baseball teams and their fans, you can create an exciting relationship between your brand and your customers if you’re willing to take a risk. Here are 3 questions to get you started:

1. What’s worth amplifying?

Zappos lives by 10 core values. The third and fourth are “Create Fun and a Little Weirdness” and “Be Adventurous, Creative, and Open-Minded.” To show customers how much they embrace those values, in 2012, Zappos founder Tony Hsieh launched his best-selling title “Delivering Happiness” as a comic book. Fun and a little weird? Creative and adventurous? YES!

The result: The comic has consistently rested in the top 5 best-selling books on Amazon under Customer Service and Retail. Every copy is like a foot soldier, heading out into the world to generate connections and dynamic conversation around the brand.

Conclusion: Your core values are worth amplifying.

Sir Ken Robinson, a world-renowned education and creativity expert, developed the most-viewed TED talk of all time: “Ken Robinson Says Schools Kill Creativity.” It has generated nearly 15 million views since 2006. In 2010, a new talk called “Changing Education Paradigms,” was launched in partnership with RSA Animate, who crafted an illustrated video of Ken’s talk that generated an additional 9.5 million views.

Conclusion: Your wisdom is worth amplifying.

Starting in 2009, T-Mobile began producing choreographed experiences as part of their “Life’s Worth Sharing” campaign to promote their mission of connecting people. They orchestrated:

A flash mob featuring 350 dancers at the Liverpool Street Station
An a capella singing arrangement that welcomed home travelers arriving at Heathrow Airport
13,500 people singing Hey Jude together in Trafalgar Square.

To date, the campaign has generated close to 100 million YouTube hits, countless major media placements and incredible increases in foot traffic, Internet searches (up 38 percent) and sales for T-Mobile (up 52 percent).

Conclusion: Your mission is worth amplifying.

2. What medium makes sense for your brand?

While the goal is to create a campaign that drives conversation and ultimately revenue, taking risks together is equally valuable to your culture. It’s an opportunity to generate camaraderie and include people in something that will be “fun” to create. So look to your staff and yourself and ask what would be a blast to work on. A few ideas include: a music album, a documentary film, an animated video, wall art, a fashion show, a staged play, and a flash mob.

If you have people on staff who loved comics as a kid, or wanted to be dancers, or wished they could be rock stars, now’s the time to tap into their dreams — while also delivering for your business.

3. How will you execute your campaign?

The best way to create and realize a BIG vision is to hire a producer, agency or in-house talent. Don’t risk looking amateurish or wasting time and money; other people have devoted their lives to this kind of work. So find them, test them, and if they impress you, get to work.

You want your new partner or producer to:

Guide you in creating your vision
Hire and manage the artistic staff
Oversee regular deliverables
Capture feedback from your team
Manage the project’s momentum
Navigate emotional and tangible obstacles in the creative process
Deliver a draft for testing
Revise based on feedback
Deliver a brilliant final product you’re all proud of

Yes, there’s a tremendous amount involved in taking a creative risk, but there are people available to help you. Partner your mission, your message and your worth with their artistic talent, and give yourself a chance to stand out amongst the clutter. Don’t settle for mediocre marketing that leaves a bad taste in people’s mouths.

Risk being brilliant instead.

Working in Los Angeles for a decade, Corey Michael Blake was the face and voice behind a dozen Fortune 500 and Fortune 100 brands as a commercial and voiceover actor (his work won Belding, Addy, Cannes, and London International Advertising awards), before working as a film producer and director, as an author and publisher, and now as the founder and President of storytelling company Round Table Companies (RTC).

The Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) is an invite-only organization comprised of the world’s most promising young entrepreneurs. In partnership with Citi, the YEC recently launched #StartupLab, a free virtual mentorship program that helps millions of entrepreneurs start and grow businesses via live video chats, an expert content library and email lessons.

5 Ways to Save Your Startup From A Digital Marketing Rut

Digital marketing is sort of like milk – it has an expiration date. Despite a killer marketing plan, enthusiastic interaction with your audience may fade over time. Many small companies experience little engagement on Facebook, Tumblr doesn’t exactly foster relationships, and the lifespan of a tweet is getting shorter all the time. If you want to swim, not sink, in the digital marketing world, it’s imperative to not only have a multi-platform presence, but to do it right and stand out amongst the rest.

A well thought-out and strategic digital marketing plan is a must if you want to propel your business to success. The last thing you want is to fall into a digital marketing rut. Suffering a loss in strategy will without a doubt lead to a loss in business. Who can afford that?

Here are 5 tips to climb out of your digital marketing rut:

Go Back To Square One
Re-evaluate your company’s overall digital marketing goals. You can’t expect a digital marketing strategy to thrive if you don’t have specific goals in mind. Maybe your goal is to increase the amount of hits and traffic you receive on your site. Maybe it’s something as basic as how many positive reviews are being written on sites like Yelp. Or maybe your goal is to increase your following on social sites. Whatever your immediate goals may be, your ultimate goal is to garner sign-ups, increase subscriptions, or sell. Never lose sight of that. If you’re thinking, “but I don’t have any specific goals…not measurable ones” then now is the time to make some. If you don’t measure, you won’t grow. On the other hand, if you already have quantitative goals, now is the time to see if you’re meeting them. If you haven’t, what’s stopped you? Look at your analytics. You need input to generate output. What can you do differently if your current methods aren’t working?

Bottom line: Have measurable goals and periodically check in to see if these goals are being met. Though we all want to be successful, “success” is not a goal, it’s an outcome.

Check In With Your Customer BaseEvery good company has a target customer base or demographic. This is who they cater to. Thus, every marketing campaign your company produces should be directly targeted toward this audience or demographic. Who are you trying to market to? Minding your customer base is one of the reasons that data and analytics is so important. Using analytics platforms helps you understand trends, patterns and behaviors your customers will reveal through their data. The more your company grows and the longer it’s been around, it’s essential to make sure you know exactly who is using your services, and even to learn who’s stopped using your product. If you’re a newly launched company, ask a handful of valuable users to become case studies. You’d be surprised at how much you can learn about your product and opportunities for growth or new features by simply talking to people who already love your product.

Bottom line: Data and analytics are invaluable, but sometimes a little human connection is great, too. Don’t be afraid to ask customers for feedback. First hand opinions will be infinitely useful as your company grows.

Set Yourself Up for an Excellent Performance
The best businesses figure out exactly what works for them and their audience, then they iterate these practices. Maybe your company’s video posts are getting more social love than long form blog posts. Maybe your quick status updates are getting more attention than your visual posts are (not likely). Maybe another facet of your online presence is getting no love from your audience, and it’s time to decide whether it’s worth keeping or not. At the end of the day, what you want is engagement. In order to set yourself up so that everything you post performs as well as your most evergreen content, look at the numbers and see what’s performing best. Which channels are bringing in the most conversions? A truly successful digital marketing campaign will generate responses, start conversations, and keep your audience coming back for more. If you’re finding that your online activity is getting likes, shares, and increased traffic, then repeat the actions that led you there. However, if you’re finding that you’re losing traffic or engagement, go back and decide what kinds of content your audience seems to like best. Keeping the flame alive between your business and your audience is key to content marketing. Without them, you’re nothing.

Bottom line: Determine which kinds of content are most favorable to your audience. Create a system, and don’t let them down.

Pull Out Your Digital Map
Are you in the right place? Are you where you need to be? This is an imperative question to ask yourself when judging if your campaigns are working. After checking in with your user base and determining what kinds of content your audience likes, you need to figure out if you’re still limiting yourself by not being present in the spaces your target demographics love. You need to be in the right place and have the correct digital presence, if you want to reach customer base you’re targeting. However, it’s been said that young people are bothered when brands are unnecessarily on every channel. If you’re not a visual brand, don’t create an Instagram, or a Tumblr for that matter. If you’re content producers, but not content curators, don’t create a company Pinterest account. Think of it this way: if you want to meet someone and you’re scoping out the dating scene, would it be more fruitful to go to a bar or a library?

Bottom line: Know exactly who you’re looking for and where to find them. Be native, be where
your audience is. If you do this right, you should be giving them what they’re already naturally
searching for.

Differentiate Yourself
Digital marketing is a dog-eat-dog, hyper competitive world. It’s easy to see a company enact campaigns that turn out to be very fruitful and then feel the desire to use the same practices for your own business. You know…that whole FOMO thing. Though success may follow for you, too, you’re simply becoming part of the mishmash of digital marketing similarities. It’s easy for consumers to tell when one brand is copying another (Coke and Pepsi are in an eternal game of cat and mouse), but like Robert Frost said, take the road less traveled! In order for your company to exist, it has to be at least slightly different from other companies on the market. Feed into these differences.

Bottom line: As long as it works for you audience, don’t be afraid to go against the grain. You’ll never know until you try. Make it quirky, make it jaw dropping, make it easy to digest – whatever. Just make it you.

Rosie Brinckerhoff is a marketing intern at Spinnakr – a new kind of analytics that takes action for you. Rosie is a social media enthusiast and a rising senior at the University of Delaware, where she majors in Political Science and Journalism.

The 2-Second “Rule”: Or,What Your Startup’s Homepage Should Really Do

I’m not sure where it originated, but there’s an oft-quoted “rule” of marketing in startup circles that claims the first priority of a website is to explain what the company or product does.

It goes a little something like this, as captured in a recent comment on a Hacker News post:

It took me about 7-10 seconds to understand what your product is. I should be able to understand within 2 seconds.

When put this way, statements like these sound like truisms that a logical person may agree with, even repeat. But really, the whole notion that your homepage’s messaging should try to quickly explain what your product does is totally misleading. This isn’t a rule at all.

Certainly, plenty of studies show that there is indeed a small amount of time during which you must capture a visitor’s attention. But if that’s true, wouldn’t you rather say something meaningful and interesting versus spouting out a basic description of your features?

I’d suggest opting for something that’s both true to your brand and useful to your visitors. Getting straight to the point about what you do is largely unnecessary, since visitors will have some idea of that anyway.

Are most of your site’s visitors arriving with zero context of who you are and what you do? How is that even possible?

Users land on a site with a specific intent, either to purchase something or to explore a solution. The primary goal, at least of the homepage, should not be to educate all visitors on what your product does, since most will already have some idea. So a primary goal should be to move them to the next step of the decision making process.

Let’s consider the main ways in which most visitors will arrive at your site:

1. Search – the visitor is seeking something specific

2. Social – the visitor has clicked a link, typically with accompanying context from those in their network

3. Display – your copy and layout, likely with a clear marketing message, enticed the visitor to click

4. Email – similar to display, something about your messaging compelling the visitor to click

In each situation, people have a pretty good idea of what they’re getting themselves into when visiting your site. So really there’s potentially only one scenario in which explaining what you do is the top priority:

1. Randomness – most of these visitors won’t be in your target audience anyway

Optimizing for random visitors is obviously ill-advised, so we’re left with the four previous inbound channels. And all of those imply context, some level of understanding on the part of the visitor as to who you are and what you do.

So does the 2-second rule really apply?

I’d say no. Focus less on these kinds of false aphorisms and spend time understanding potential users, how they arrive at your site, and how your homepage can pull them one step further in the process of choosing your solution.

Still need help? I’m offering free 30-minute Google Hangout office hour sessions to take questions about startup branding and messaging. No strings attached. Get in touch if that interests you.

Patrick Woods is a hybrid ad man/startup guy. As director of a>m ventures, he connects startups with awesome branding, PR, and marketing strategy.

*Originally posted on Medium.

**Nibletz Media, Inc is an a>m ventures portfolio company.

Now check out 5 Rules For Naming Your Startup

The Dropbox Story: From 0 to 100 Million Users: How a Simple Video Can Change Your Business

In a short five years, Dropbox has gone from 0 to 100 million users.

That’s impressive.

What’s even more impressive is the fact that they’ve done it with one of the most simple website designs ever. Since the first year, their homepage has featured only two main components—an explainer video and a download button.

They’ve also grown without spending money on advertising, and they’ve grown exponentially compared to the competition, despite the fact that there are dozens of similar services competing in the same space.

So what’s Dropbox’s secret? How did they grow so quickly with such a simple design, one explainer video, and spending no money on advertising?

Dropbox’s viral referral campaign

Dropbox started out by using Google AdWords as a way to reach customers. But they quickly figured out that they were spending $233 to $388 per customer acquired. That ended up being too expensive for what was a $99 product at the time.

Thus, they decided to switch to a viral referral campaign to attract more customers. This ended up being one of the keys to their success. Here’s how it worked: Dropbox users were encouraged to share the service via social media and email. If they did, they’d get extra space for free on their own account for every new person who signed up from one of their invites.

The result was that satisfied customers became brand evangelists who helped to get the word out about Dropbox. Due to the fact that they’d get something in return, i.e. free space, users liberally shared about Dropbox via Facebook, Twitter, email, and more. For every customer who was satisfied about the product, there were hundreds and even thousands of other people who were finding out about it and signing up. This resulted in a total of 2.8 million invitations being sent out over a 30-day period.

What an awesome viral campaign. It’s one of the greatest of all time, and Dropbox fully leveraged the power of referrals and social sharing.

But that’s not all that they did.

How a simple design and an explainer video helped Dropbox grow even more

Dropbox’s simple homepage design focuses visitors’ attention 100 percent on their explainer video. There aren’t any other links or any other messages that get in the way. When you land on the homepage, there’s only one thing to do—watch the video.

By focusing every visitors’ attention on the explainer video, Dropbox was able to get more people to watch and learn how the service worked. This in turn led to more sign ups because more people now understood how to use Dropbox. It’s a lot easier to click a download button when you know how something works and understand the benefit, and that’s what Dropbox was banking on with their 120-second explainer video.

The result was a 10 percent increase in sign-ups. That’s right—the explainer video led to a 10 percent increase in conversions. That may not seem like much, but when you do the math with 100 million users, that’s 10 million extra customers simply from using an explainer video. With an estimated $4.80 of revenue per customer (based on estimates from 2011), that’s an extra $48,000,000 in revenue per year. Not bad for a “mere” 10 percent increase in conversions.

3 reasons video worked for Dropbox — and can work for your business too

At this point, you may be wondering, “Why was the explainer video so important? What made it so successful?”

Here’s the answer:

Video is worth 1.8 million words: According to a study conducted by Forrester Research in 2009, one minute of video is worth 1.8 million words. It makes sense, when you think about it. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a video should be worth a couple million at least. Companies that don’t embrace video will need to hire a lot of writers.
Video leads to huge increases in conversion: Based on research from Internet Retailer, product videos increase the likelihood of a purchase by 85 percent. Additional research showed that product videos gave 52 percent of customers more confidence in their purchase decision. Using the word “video” in an email subject line has also increased open rates 13 percent and click-through rates over 92 percent. Based on another Internet Retailer study from 2012, 46 percent of people will share a video on Facebook, and 40 percent will email links. How’s that for conversion-rate optimization and viral social sharing?
Brain science shows why videos are effective: Simply put, our brains are hardwired to respond to videos. Not only are most people visual learners, but people retain 68 percent more information from video than from plain text. By using video, which stimulates both visual and auditory senses, you’ll make sure that customers understand your business 68 percent better than if they’d only read plain text.

Dropbox increased their conversion rate 10 percent by using a simple explainer video on their homepage. This 10 percent increase led to 10 million additional customers and $48,000,000 in extra revenue. This was all done with a 120-second explainer video that cost less than $50,000.

Was it worth it? Well, a $50,000 in exchange for 10 million customers and $48,000,000 in revenue is quite a return on Dropbox’s investment. If you have a business website and a product, I strongly suggest you consider investing in a simple video too. You may not see numbers in the millions like Dropbox, but you will increase conversions radically with a clear, effective explainer video.

This post originally appeared on the author’s blog.

Andrew Angus is an author, speaker, and founder/CEO of Switch Video, a video animation company that produces simple videos that “explain what you do” in an engaging and compelling format. Andrew is a thought leader in the online video industry, writing and speaking about the brain science behind making your company’s story stick. He welcomes people to reach out to him on Twitter or Google+ and can be booked to speak on Speakerfile.

Now check out these other startup tips at nibletz.com the voice of startups everywhere else.