In the quick-paced digital age of today, grabbing and holding the audience’s attention is more crucial than ever. For this purpose, explainer videos are well-liked and have been gaining a lot of fame. If you are interested in knowing what an explainer video is and how it helps your business to grow, you’re at the right spot.
We will go into the realm of explainer films in this comprehensive tutorial, examining their function, traits, and myriad benefits they provide. Get ready to learn everything you must know about explainer films and how they can take your marketing efforts to new heights, whether you’re a business owner, marketer, or simply intrigued by this compelling visual tool.
What Is An Explainer Video?
An explainer video is a brief film that seeks to explain how something operates in an easy-to-understand and interesting manner. They are frequently used as marketing videos to highlight the advantages of a good or service and to increase sign-ups or sales.
They work well to convey ideas, concepts, or organizational procedures like health and safety training and guidelines. They are also useful for instructional and educational purposes. A marketing-based professional explainer video would normally be 45 to 90 seconds long, have a quick conversational screenplay, and employ eye-catching visuals to draw in viewers.
Let’s Take a Look at Explainer Videos Types
Explainer videos tend to leverage some common storytelling formats. Let’s have a look!
Live-Action Explainer Videos
This style of explainer video uses people and things to describe the product or service offered by your business. The live-action explainer video is more difficult to execute, but wonderful when done effectively. It involves a lot of imagination to keep things engaging.
The presenter in this explainer video typically guides the viewer along a visual journey while describing the company’s product and service. They frequently serve as the company’s founder or CEO and emphasize their vision and objective.
Live Streams on Social Media
These are essentially live-action videos without editing capabilities. Although having unedited footage, flaws and all, humanizes your brand and demonstrates that you have absolutely nothing to conceal.
Here’s how to broadcast live video on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. After the video is over, you do have the choice to save it to your account.
Animated Explainer Videos
Animated explainer videos are the most widely used choice because of their visually appealing nature and relative ease of creation—no expensive productions are needed. The instructive nature of explainer videos makes them more aesthetically appealing than those with a man talking while standing in a room.
Animated explainer videos come in a variety of forms and serve a variety of purposes:
- Infographic: These mimic the look of an infographic while outlining the salient aspects of your company through the use of graphs, charts, and creative iconography.
- Chalkboard: This overdone yet well-liked animated explainer film format, which includes writing on a chalkboard or whiteboard, is well-liked because of how simple it is to produce.
- Product Simulation: This design, which includes actual screencast footage of your product in use, serves well as a high-level summary of a piece of software or a digital platform.
- Character-Driven: This explainer film includes endearing cartoon characters that should stand in for your potential customers to describe your product or service and how it can help them with their difficulties.
- Motion Graphic: This style of explainer video, which is typically 3D animated, tries to communicate the tale of your product or business using symbolic items to capture the audience’s attention without using words.
Whiteboard Explainer Videos
An explainer film called a “whiteboard video” uses hand-drawn and wiped animation on a whiteboard. This video style has gained popularity since it is simple to use and inexpensive to produce, making it one of the least expensive types of explainer videos.
Crowd-funding Explainer Video
The crowd-funding explainer video is another well-liked type of video. These explainer videos can be animated or live-action, and sometimes they combine the two. Almost all crowd-funding videos are explainer videos by nature, but they frequently take longer since they need to include additional details about how they intend to use the money they gather.
An effective crowd-funding explanatory video may make or break a campaign and raise hundreds, if not thousands, more funds when done correctly.
How to Make an Explainer Video?
Not all explainer videos are made the same, and to produce a high-caliber piece, each component—from the plot and design to the music and editing—must be in perfect harmony. Let’s see how:
Start With the Results in Mind
Let’s picture ourselves opposite to a prospective customer with just a few minutes to sell them on the benefits of our offering. It’s not that long.
When you have time constraints, step back a bit and reconsider why you think what you are selling is the best. This is one of the best approaches to producing your message. Understand what you want from the customer after this conversation.
Do you want them to subscribe to your service? Make an account first? Go to your website. Before moving on, make sure to clearly define your final objective.
Writing a mission statement is one technique to achieve this objective. A goal statement might read, for instance, “to motivate current customers to upgrade,” or “to boost the number of trial sign-ups from individuals in their 20s and 30s.”
The most useful purpose statements have an audience and a practical phrase. Finding your audience comes after you’ve established your mission statement.
Know Your Audience
Since explainer films are typically brief, they will fail if they don’t speak to a certain audience. Consider the demographics you wish to reach with this video. Get the appropriate individuals on the platform so you can deliver the appropriate message through your professional explainer video.
Select a subset of your total client base that is very important for the objectives of this video. You shouldn’t aim to target everyone since you can’t. A message that is too general is frequently confusing, which results in fewer viewers acting on your video.
Craft Your Narrative
The next step is to define your audience before developing the narrative. Remember you have approximately 90 seconds to put forward your business, your products/services, how these products/services may help the customers, and the issues they face. As it’s a lot to convey in such a short span, you should cut it up into small and more digestible portions.
Start by concentrating on the issue. Spend some time investigating customer data, speaking with customers, and learning about the top issues your users are having. These issues are crucial to your messaging since they are the cause of your potential clients’ search for a solution.
The moment has come to concentrate on fixes once you have a strong grasp of the issues. The idea is to concentrate on solutions rather than characteristics as you begin to build the narrative. Consider it less of an opportunity to flaunt your feature set and more of a chance to explain how your solution can help them become more effective at what they do.
Focus on relating a relatable tale about the issues they are dealing with before introducing your solution and demonstrating how it would enhance their quality of life.
Benefits of Explainer Videos
There are many good reasons to make an explainer video. You’ll discover some of the most significant advantages of developing one for your company in this area.
Make It Easy To Explain Complex Topics
The best resource you have at your service to help your audience understand a complex concept or a new idea is an explainer video. This is particularly beneficial for companies that have a fresh, leading-edge product idea or business strategy.
Imagine if Apple introduced a ground-breaking new iPhone that incorporated modern technology. Additionally, they publish a lengthy text document outlining all of its capabilities and describing how it differs from other phones.
Do you intend to read that document? Do you believe you’ll be able to fully understand the concept? The response, at least for the majority of people, would be no except they’re a tech whiz. An instructional video can help in this situation. A straightforward animated film can quickly and simply clarify everything a potential customer would need to learn.
Unlocks Your Creativity
The explainer video cost of making was high before digital video production and animation. Only large companies with substantial marketing resources were able to afford it. It is now something that organizations of all sorts and sizes may access.
And with animated explainer films, your creativity is only limited by your imagination. Any characters, settings, themes, or worlds are up for creation. You can draw inspiration from literature, visual arts, or anything else you think will help you engage with your audience.
Innovation is encouraged by a digital process’s ability to be cost-effective. It enables you to test things out with the ability to quickly make adjustments or revisions if something doesn’t work correctly. And if it succeeds, it might elevate a decent explanation video to great status.
Improve Brand Authority and Image
Such movies are useful for more than just educating potential customers about your goods and services. An explainer video can be used to inform and instruct your audience on important business subjects.
And you position yourself as an authority in your field when you give such enlightening and practical stuff. This improves the authority and reputation of your brand.
For instance, Google, the top search engine, enhances its reputation and authority by disseminating educational films on how to search more effectively. The “Search On ’22” video series from Google instructs and enlightens viewers on how to maximize Google searches.
In addition to this, Google has numerous additional educational videos on its YouTube channel that firmly establish it as an authority on all things technological.
Drive Traffic and Leads from Multiple Platforms
Sharing videos across platforms and directing users to your website is simpler. With an explainer video, the same thing is possible.
Instead of merely adding it on your homepage, YouTube, and other social media platforms, advertise it. It will act as a tool for generating leads on its own and assist in driving visitors and leads to your website.
Just make sure that any social media videos you produce are brief and adhere to the platform’s rules. When sharing a video on social media, you can produce just one and adjust it for each network.
Have the Potential to Go Viral
A good explainer video is educational, practical, shareable, and simple to share. It has the potential to go viral because of these features. Explainer videos provide excellent share-worthy information, and people love to share interesting and practical videos with their peers.
You’ll receive more leads than you could have ever anticipated if your video becomes popular online. Use a compelling headline, pertinent hashtags, and graphic components that increase viewer interaction if you want your explainer video to become popular.
Boosts your SEO rankings
Search engines consider how much time users normally spend on a page and how much they engage with its content when ranking web pages. The average duration a visitor spends on a page is somewhere around 15 seconds in Google Analytics, where this is recorded via Sessions.
Explainer videos are excellent for SEO rankings because of this. They are giving the ranking algorithms all the proper signals when they maintain viewers for two minutes or longer. Visitors will also be engaged with the information, such as clicking links and registering accounts, if the call-to-action is strong.
Additionally, search result sites for firms like Google are increasingly featuring video material at the top. An explainer film can serve as a worldwide entrance to your company with the appropriate use of keywords, tags, and script transcriptions.
Communicates Your Culture
An explainer video appears to be a straightforward method of demonstrating what you do. However, there is much more to it than that. An explainer film can represent the culture and “feel” of your firm and its brand through its style, format, and attitude.
Your strategy should be in line with how you want your clients and customers to view you. This could be done in a manner that exudes inventiveness and humor or in a confident professional manner. What works for a law firm probably won’t work for an independent beer brand.
A quality video production company will ensure that the strategy they employ for an explainer video is consistent with the company’s brand and philosophy.
Wrap Up!
An explainer video is a powerful tool for communicating the key idea that every company or organization must convey: what you do. It’s something that should be so simple but is difficult to accomplish in a society where quick gratification is expected online.
This fast connection was made possible by the evolution of the explainer video type and format. Furthermore, a quality explainer video will do a lot more than just give a clear and short description of a product or service. The audience will get a glimpse of who you are and your brand’s identity.
The first step is to implement our advice. Over the past few years, we have worked with hundreds of clients to produce thousands of award-winning movies and animations for a range of sectors. AFX Animators offer quality explainer video services including the 2D Animation services and 3D animation services. Give us a call to start working on your project together.
