E2b Teknologies, based in Chardon, Ohio, is a software publisher and reseller that provides solutions to distribution, manufacturing, service, and other businesses. The company develops e2b Anytime apps, specialized applications for accounting, e-commerce, supply chain management and other purposes. It is also a reseller of enterprise resource planning and customer relationship management software from Sage, Epicor, Intacct, Sugar CRM and other publishers. The company’s calibration business provides an ISO-accredited calibration and repair service for calibration, test and measurement instruments.
To extend its marketing efforts, e2b Teknologies implemented an inbound-marketing initiative. “We no longer do any cold calling,” according to the company’s marketing communications coordinator, Jeanne Lee. “Our focus is now on blogs and search-engine optimization. Video plays a huge role in SEO and software is not the most exciting industry. So we wanted to have some fun with video in our marketing program.”
The Challenge: Addressing Business Frustrations through Video
E2b Teknologies had recently implemented a new CRM system internally and understood the many challenges that businesses may experience during the process. “With our old CRM system, we were experiencing the frustrations that everyone has in their business with CRM; for instance, when it takes forever to load or when it is difficult to quickly find information,” Lee says. She took up that theme as the topic for a video that promoted the Sugar CRM solution.
The Solution: GoAnimate’s Simple, Inexpensive Platform
The first step in creating the video was to find a platform that was easy to use and that would produce the results that Lee sought. She went online and searched via Google, where she discovered GoAnimate.
“We didn’t even compare GoAnimate to any other animation sites,” Lee recalls. “We all decided it would be worth a shot after we watched one of the GoAnimate overview videos that showed how it could be used for business. I liked that I could produce the video in-house and GoAnimate looked pretty simple to use.”
In creating her video, Lee says she particularly liked the freedom she had to import her own logos, graphics and music into the GoAnimate platform. She used GoAnimate’s text-to-speech function to create the dialog for her two characters; and in the future she plans on doing actual voiceovers that she will upload to the platform. The humorous animated video, called “CRM Software Hell,” ran just under two minutes when it was completed.
“It took me only a couple hours to create the video,” Lee says. “It was an inexpensive and easy project; and we can pump out more videos as we need them.”
While working on the project, Lee was most surprised by the control she had over the scenes. “You really can create something, even if it doesn’t exist among the assets,” she says. “For example, you can pan it or zoom out to change the perspective. Having all the extras allows you to make the videos more realistic.”
The Results: Improved SEO and a Key Re-Tweet
Lee posted her video to YouTube and linked to it from the company’s Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+ sites. After posting the video link to Twitter, Lee was excited to discover that the company whose product she featured in the video, SugarCRM, re-tweeted the link on its own site, which had more than 7,200 followers at the time. It was a sign that the CRM developer found value in Lee’s efforts.
Her next project is a video about Anytime Collect, an accounting software solution for managing accounts receivable and collections activities. “We plan to stick to humor for this video, playing on the pain points AR professionals experience in the collections process,” Lee says. “I hope to produce product demos that will have animated people performing the demonstrations, instead of the bland screenshots we now have.”
Overall, Lee has been pleased with how easy GoAnimate is to use and its low price. “We don’t have days upon days to spend working on video,” she notes, “and I was looking for something simple, easy and quick. It seemed like such an easy thing to do with GoAnimate—and it was.”
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