Marketing is all about videos these days. People are more interested in watching videos than reading long pieces of text. Over 99% of marketers who use video content for marketing say they’ll continue using it in 2021.
Explainer videos are a type of video content that is widely used by agencies and businesses today. These work as an excellent marketing strategy for any business as it exhibits the idea or message creatively to the target audience.
An explainer video is essentially a brief video, usually 60-90 seconds long, that explains a product or service in a simple yet compelling, engaging manner in clear language.
An explainer video can be an ad, demo, testimonial, or even a video that answers customers’ queries about a product or service.
Usually, viewers are most engaged during the first 10 seconds of watching a video. Therefore, it’s important to create explainer videos that are captivating and attractive enough to convince its audience that there is something in store for them.
In this article, we dive into the details of explainer videos, their importance, and what steps one must follow in order to create a high-quality explainer video.
- Why are Explainer Videos Important for your Video Marketing?
- How To Create Engaging Explainer Videos for Your Brand?
- The Best Platforms For Explainer Videos
- To Conclude
Why are Explainer Videos Important for your Video Marketing?
Businesses use app explainer videos to portray their brand, personality, as well as a culture without making the viewers feel bored with what they have to offer.
It’s tough to convey one’s emotions or personality through the medium of text. This is why businesses switch to videos to show their work & visions by incorporating visually appealing and entertaining animation & motion graphics along with live-action clips.
Moreover, a video portrays the actual tone of the brand while letting the digital marketers choose the way they want it to show. But, if you present information in a text, it is possible that the readers may interpret it in an entirely different tone than the way you intend it to be.
Explainer videos convey the message more effectively and boost the conversion rate by around 20%.
Below are the key benefits of using explainer videos for video marketing purposes:
1. Explainer Videos Catch Attention
The first 8 seconds of an explainer video are quite crucial and it must be engaging & meaningful enough to grab the viewer’s attention. The first few seconds must be simple to understand yet compelling.
2. Helps the Website Rank Higher on Search Engines
Videos are equally powerful as SEO articles in boosting the search engine rankings of a website. So, if you post explainer videos on your homepage or landing page, it enhances the search engine rankings of the website.
3. Helps Achieve Increased ROI
An explainer video marketing a product or giving a demo about it results in a higher return on investment (ROI) than text. According to Wyzowl, 78% of video marketers claim that video has helped them boost sales.
4. Showcase an Elevator Pitch
An elevator pitch refers to a short summary of your brand explaining it in a simple way. Explainer videos play a huge role in creating a powerful elevator pitch as these are short yet successful enough to lure customers into buying a product or service.
How To Create Engaging Explainer Videos for Your Brand?
1. Set your Goals
Before creating an explainer video for your marketing, it’s important to identify and set your goals for it. You must know what you wish to accomplish through your explainer videos.
Some of the common goals can be boosting your sales or conversion rate, generating leads, or launching a campaign.
To set your goals, you must:
- Identify your target audience
- Know what problem are you trying to solve
- Know the way how your product or service works
- What tone suits your target audience?
- How are you better than your competitors?
2. Write the Video Script
Writing a powerful script for your explainer video means laying a strong foundation for your video. A script plays an important role in creating a successful explainer video.
So, you must actively participate in writing a script for your explainer video even if you’ve hired a video marketing agency for the production of your explainer video. The reason behind this is that nobody understands your brand or audience as much as you do.
Follow these key practices to make an excellent explainer video:
- Keep it short & precise – Write the script in a way that your audience gets attracted to in the first 8-10 seconds of the video, or else you would lose their attention.
- Explain the problem – Identify the problem you can solve and explain how you will do it to your customers.
- Introduce your brand – Introduce your product or service as the most viable solution, in the first few seconds.
- Offer a call-to-action – Provide a call-to-action with your video. This may be in the form of a URL, sign-up page, or for downloading your app.
Avoid using technical language that your viewers may find hard to understand. Instead, keep a conversational tone so that it’s easier for your audience to relate to.
3. Use Attractive Visuals
An explainer video must be visually appealing enough to attract or engage its audience. The best to do is to reach a graphic designer and explain your requirements properly so that they visualize every part of your topic.
Talking to a graphic designer will give you an idea of how the visuals will turn out to be, and how they will fit your explainer video. Get an idea of how the images you wish to use will add value to your video.
- Imagine overall imagery that thoroughly represents the core of your message or idea
- Use a visual metaphor to represent each sentence of your script
- Imagine different parts of your animation in a sequence and visualize how it looks
- Can you condense a huge chunk of the script that conveys very little information?
- Whether there’s a lot happening in one section of the script and you need to break it down?
- Highlight important points with brighter colors or actions
- Make sure the animation stresses the key points or messages
4. Storyboard Your Explainer Videos
This is an important part of the process of creating explainer videos. In order to make sure that your script is in coordination with the images or graphics you wish to use in your explainer, it’s suggested that you storyboard your videos. By doing this, you will boost engagement in the explainer videos.
5. Narration & Sound
Once you know what your explainer videos aim to offer, you need to decide the tone and voice-age of the narration. Remember, it is not the demographics of your audience that you must target, but give importance to the clarity and crispness of your narration.
An explainer video can consist of narration or music, or even both. However, when you think of adding sound to your videos, you must keep the following points in mind:
- Know the listening capabilities of your viewers. People who face audio restrictions might not understand a flowing narrative.
- Add a transcript button that contains the key points
- Decide what you want to tell in a voiceover and what in a text as too much textual information may make it hard for your audience to concentrate on the animation
- Give a brief to your voiceover artist about whether you want it to be straight, fast, slow, quirky or fun. The style in which the artist speaks largely influences the audience in accepting the details you present.
- Be careful with the pronunciation of certain words that need some emphasis
6. Decide The Budget
A good explainer video requires a substantial amount of time and effort from the designers, scriptwriters, and artists behind it. Therefore, it’s vital to set a budget for every task.
Here are few ways to reduce the cost of making an explainer video:
- Consider using only images, words & music instead of a voiceover in your explainer videos. Or you can even ask someone in your organization who has a decent voice. This way you eliminate the cost of hiring a voiceover artist.
- Re-use graphics – Create a library of symbols, images and animation techniques to use in your explainer videos. Keep adding whatever you think will be useful for an explainer.
- It’s not necessary to always create animations from scratch. You can find a lot from stock videos and music and pull something together.
The Best Platforms For Explainer Videos
A good explainer video can lead to successful video marketing. Now that you are aware of the important tips to follow while creating explainer videos, you must also know about the platforms where you can use these.
Below are the platforms to use explainer videos:
- Website Landing Page or Homepage – As per Unbounce, marketers who add videos to their campaigns receive a 34% higher conversion rate. Adding explainer videos to your Support Page will help your customers solve their queries at ease.
- Sales Pitch – You can incorporate explainer videos into your sales pitch to mention the benefits of your products/services and how they will help to solve their problems. For instance, if you’re promoting a new software, you can record a webcam screen recorded explainer video to demonstrate it.
- Social Media Platforms – Posting explainer videos on social media accounts is a great way to reach a wider audience. You can create short ‘How-to’ explainer videos on social media platforms or use remarketing strategies via Facebook video marketing to reach the consumers who searched for a product similar to yours.
- Email Marketing Campaigns – Adding explainer videos to your emails can largely impact the conversion rate. You can use explainer videos to explain a particular platform or its features to the users so that more people use your platform.
Tools to create Explainer Videos for your brand
To Conclude
Explainer videos are quite helpful for explaining a product, service, or brand in an engaging & captivating style. The above-mentioned tips & tricks will help you create an awesome explainer video for your audience.
Besides, you can make the most of your explainer videos by adding them to your social media channel, sales pitch, landing pages, or emails.