The Fundamental Guide to Using Explainer Videos for Business
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Recent data shows as many as 2.26 billion people have watched digital videos as of 2021 and the number doesn’t seem to decrease in the future years. That’s why more companies take a bold step in investing in video content as a part of their marketing strategy.
Cisco predicts that 82% of global internet traffic will come from video platforms as of 2022. Moreover, 86% of businesses have already used video as a part of their marketing strategy because most people consider making a purchase after watching a video about it. The big numbers prove that a video is a powerful tool that affects viewers’ behavior.
One of the most recognized video types for marketing is explainer videos. They are proven to be very impactful in engaging audiences and increasing sales. Furthermore, 73% of customers make purchases after watching explainer videos about the products.
This article will mainly talk about explainer videos as part of marketing strategy. Keep on reading to know the fundamental guide to using explainer videos for business. Before that, let’s cover the basic things first, shall we?
What is an explainer video and why is it so powerful?
An explainer video is a type of video that aims to explain or describe a product, service, or other ideas. Many use explainer videos for many occasions, from educational to business purposes.
In a nutshell, explainer videos use illustrations, graphs, typography, voice-over, and other aspects to break down complex information to become easily understandable, even for people who are new to the topic.
Just like any other advertising video, explainer videos tend to be short and straightforward. They’re typically 45 – 90 seconds long and focus only on delivering the main information and features of a product. So, that’s why they’re less likely to bore the viewers.
Companies often use explainer videos as their marketing strategy. Moreover, explainer videos become one of the video types that many companies have been investing to make one.
Explainer video styles
Explainer videos are mostly in the form of animated videos. That’s why there are a lot of options for animation styles to make an explainer video.
Here are animation styles mostly used to make explainer videos:
- Whiteboard animation
- Motion graphic animation
- Kinetic typography animation
- Paper cutout animation
- Digital cutout animation
- Cartoon animation
- Silhouette animation
- Animated music video
- Live-animated video
- Stop motion animation
- Animated stick figures
- Animated infographic
- Screencast animation
- 3D mechanical animation
- Flipbook animation
- Claymotion
To sum up, watch the compilation of explainer video styles below:
16 Different Styles of Animated Explainer Video for Your Marketing Strategy
How to start using explainer videos for business
Now that you know the bottom line about explainer videos, it’s time to go beyond the basics. Using explainer videos as a tool to market your product requires several essential steps to make it work, just like what you expected.
Here are the things you need to implement before making an explainer video that works wonders for your business.
1. Pre-production
There are several actions you need to take prior to producing an explainer video. These pre-production steps are helpful in running the production smoothly.
Set goals
Setting goals is essential in a project, including in marketing projects. When it comes to an explainer video, usually there are three main goals that can be achieved: to improve brand awareness and conversions, to educate, and to entertain.
However, many businesses use explainer videos to improve brand awareness and conversions. Although some of them also use it for video conferencing purposes. Therefore, you should set goals on how broad audiences you want to reach or how high conversion rates you want to achieve.
Research target audience
Another important step that can’t be missed is audience research. It’s so crucial that every time you start a project, you have to do this step. Target audience research is great for choosing and shaping the marketing strategy.
Typically, target audience research includes two main factors: demographics and psychographics. Demographics research includes age, location, gender, occupation, income level, and education level.
Whereas psychographics research includes attitudes, lifestyle, behavior, interest, and lifestyle of target audiences. Make sure to cover both aspects to find out the target audiences’ behavior and come up with the best marketing strategy for your marketing.
Plan project
Make a timetable for your marketing project. Set a deadline for each step, including the pre-production process, content planning, and assign people to certain responsibilities. You may need collaboration tools for this.
Next is budget planning. This is one of the most crucial steps in any project. If you want to create an explainer video by yourself or with your team member, make sure you have all skillful team members and equipment ready.
This may include illustrators, designers, video editors, scriptwriters, and more. Also, make sure your editing tools can make a business-class video. In other words, you have to buy the full package of editing software or sign to full subscription if using an online-based editing tool.
However, if your company can’t produce a professional explainer video, then you need to take another route. You can team up with a video production company to get an excellent result of an explainer video.
Collaborating with a video production company can be an effective solution. You can discuss ideas and get input from experienced and professional people.
2. Video production
After all the pre-production steps are all set, now it’s time to go further in the production process. This step may only be necessary if you decide to create your own explainer video.
Nonetheless, let’s find out how to create an excellent explainer video for your business:
Scriptwriting
The first thing you need to get done before producing an explainer video is developing the script. The video script is useful for guiding the whole production process. Usually, in the making of an explainer video, you’re more likely to create a storyboard.
A storyboard represents your overall video that is portrayed shot-by-shot in the form of illustrations or pictures. The person responsible for the storyboard will give descriptions or notes on each shot about what’s happening in the video.
In order to develop storyboards, you have to come up with a storyline. What kind of storyline you would like to portray through the video. The best formula for a storyline should include problems, solutions, product features, and call-to-actions.
Producing video
When you have your storyboard ready, it’s time to work on the video production. To be in this step, you should already decide on what type of animation you like, whether it’s 2D, 3D, whiteboard animation, or so on.
The most crucial thing about producing a video are skillful team members and professional editing software. In order to make illustrators and animators express their creativity optimally, they need to use editing software that has essential features. Therefore, supporting your creative team with full-featured editing software is very important
3. Post-production: optimize video performance
There’s only one step left in the post-production process to optimize your video. This is a crucial step to making your explainer video perform well in cyberspace. There are several ways to optimize your video performance, as follows:
Optimize video SEO
The first thing to do is optimize your video SEO. When it comes to SEO, we can’t miss discussing the keywords. Therefore, embedding the right keywords are vital to make your video visible and searchable in SERPs.
Simply put the keywords on the title, description, and tags of your video and make it adjust well with the overall text or paragraph.
Moreover, long tailed-keywords are more specific to target narrower audiences. It’s recommended to optimize your SEO, especially for new businesses. It’s because long-tailed keywords are less competitive so you have a higher chance to compete with bigger companies.
Add your video to a landing page
Most big companies have at least one video on their landing page. Video on a landing page can also optimize your website’s overall performance.
Many believe that Google prefers websites that embed video on their page rather than those that don’t. Websites that include a video on their page can boost traffic by up to 157% from search results.
Go to social media
Posting your video on social media as a part of the campaign is a must strategy to reach a broader audience. As we all are aware, people spend a lot of their time scrolling from one social media to another.
When you expose your video to many social media, it means you have a higher chance of getting more people to watch your video.
Another thing you can’t skip while posting your video on social media is to make sure to put links that refer to the page where audiences can make a purchase. This way, customers are just a click away.
Analyze performance
After posting your video on many social media platforms, always monitor their performance to find out which platform contributes the best to your video performance.
You can find the data on the analysis page of each platform. Also, check on what keywords work best for your video.
If you think your video’s performance isn’t performing as you expected. Then, try to check on the keywords you’re using.
Take away
Explainer videos are very powerful for many purposes, including as a marketing strategy. They’re proven to be effective in engaging viewers and increasing traffic. It also affects viewers’ actions to finally press the buy button.
In order to achieve your target, some fundamental steps need to be taken, such as doing audience research, planning, and video planning. Nowadays, there are many video production companies that you can work with in case your team isn’t capable of making an explainer video.
