Just before the pandemic began, Jonathan Roque signed on as a digital marketing and content strategist at Zapiet, a UK-based team that offers store pickup, delivery, and shipping tools for Shopify.
“We had created a marketing campaign and everything, but when lockdown started, a lot of businesses had to do curbside pickup or local delivery,” he said.
That’s where the company soared. In just 10 days, Zapiet experienced a year’s worth of projected growth.
“We were a small team, so we had to scale fast,” Roque says. Zapiet’s marketing team needed a way to onboard new customers and reduce the burden on customer support. That’s when they turned to ScreenPal.
Finding The Right Tools In a Pinch
A journalism major in college, Roque already knew video was a powerful storytelling and teaching tool. He experimented with other video creation platforms and ran into issues with graininess and dropped audio.
“We wanted the videos to feel like one-on-one support calls with customers,” Roque noted. That meant the recordings needed to be high-quality and distraction-free.
When his manager found ScreenPal, everything fell quickly into place. The two scrapped their entire marketing plan for the year and spent three months creating video tutorials for all their new customers.
They used the screen recorder to produce several video tutorials weekly.
Roque especially liked having the ability to pause while recording and resume from the same spot. “That was super helpful because I had to pause to look up something,” he shared.
The screenshot tool also helped Roque communicate quickly. When he needed to send his team an update, he’d snap a quick screenshot and use the Image Editor to add helpful text or arrows.
In the interest of speed, the team kept edits to a minimum, then uploaded them directly to YouTube and embedded clips in helpdesk articles.
Creating Video For the Future
Roque’s team doesn’t need to churn out tutorials at such a dizzying pace anymore, but he still makes videos often. All thanks to positive feedback from customers.
“They proved to be successful for us, so now we’re making more strategic videos focused on new features,” he says.
He’s also showing peers how to make videos of their own. “It was a learning curve at first because I was so new to making videos,” he explained. “But it was awesome because I was able to explain it in a way that I understood it. So that meant that others would understand it.”
Before the pandemic, Zapiet occasionally hired professionals to produce big-budget promotional videos, but now video is a regular, affordable part of their marketing and communications strategy. Customers worldwide can find the support they need without having to send emails or hop on a phone call, and the support team has a manageable workflow once again.
“The lockdown was a good growing pain for us because it enabled us to grow at a much quicker pace,” Roque says. “It was sad to see everybody shut down, but it was nice to be able to help them continue their business.”