From the course: Freelance Work Strategies for Video and Motion Graphics Creators

Honing your elevator pitch

From the course: Freelance Work Strategies for Video and Motion Graphics Creators

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Honing your elevator pitch

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- Let's drill down into developing your brand identity for your business. The first thing I think is really important is honing your elevator pitch and the term elevator pitch comes from basically what you would say to somebody in a short trip in an elevator so not the tallest building in the world, let's just say it's a six-floor trip, okay? So your mission statement is really important in this. We talked about what you do, but also why you do it. And you also want to talk a little bit about the essential services, how you do it. What I like to think of it as is building blocks. So one size doesn't really fit all. I have a couple of different pieces that I put together depending on who I'm speaking to, who the audience is so to speak in the elevator. One of the things you wanna talk about is the why, going back to that mission, why you do this work, what your passion is, but also what sets you apart, why are you different than other people. And then really I wait 'til they ask a followup question to get into the how I do it. So for example, I like to tell people that I'm a short form, nonfiction produce for large live events, primarily for nonprofits. So what I do is I tell stories that make people cry and write big checks. They always laugh at that and they understand then what I do so it's a little bit almost like a tagline that explains a little bit more about what I do and why I do it. So if they're still interested, then I can give them a little more detail. Well, this past month I had six of my short mini docs airing at an event for 20,000 activists to help inspire them about getting involved with this organization. So that gives them some idea, some visual of what that looks like, what my work looks like when it's out there. And only if somebody is still interested, then you can delve into your gear and your tools and your platforms and software that you know and all that sort of thing. I find that actually these days a lot of clients actually don't really wanna know about that, perhaps a little bit more if you're an editor, but if you're a motion graphics artist, they're probably not even gonna really ask you necessarily about After Effects or other plugins and things that you're familiar with. They just wanna know, "Can you get the job done?"

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