If your organization is considering adding a business animation to your arsenal of marketing tools, your thinking is in the right place. A business animation aka animated explainer video can be a game-changer in many ways.
Below we’ll cover just six reason why business animation is so effective.
1. Animation can be more engaging
Video in is generally better than forcing your audience to read text. There are countless statistics outlining why video marketing is such an important and growing trend, but video style still matters. No offense to the creators of this video below, but their pitch for producing talking head style productions kind of reinforces our point that these videos can be…BORING!
Obviously, there are a lot of great examples of live action explainer videos that are indeed entertaining (who can forget the Dollar Shave Club example?), but a well-done animation is often a more engaging approach. People love watching cartoons…and it’s not just kids. The Simpsons, for example, is the longest running scripted TV show in US television history, still commanding millions of viewers per episode. There’s just a je ne sais quoi about animation that grabs our attention and keeps us watching.
2. Business animation can seem less pushy
An animated video can be a more light-hearted way to get your sales message across without resorting to shouting “Buy me!” You can use entertaining storytelling techniques to more subtly pitch your benefits and explain why your viewers should go with your business, product or service vs. forcing a hard sales message down their throats. Heck, if you really want to feature a pitchman, you can consider using your our animated cartoon spokesperson like we’ve gone with our lovable little Gisteo Guy:
3. Cartoon characters can be more trustworthy
With cartoon characters, you generally don’t risk alienating a percentage of your audience nearly as much as you do when using professional actors. As humans, we tend to pass judgments on other people- their race, their clothes, their hairstyles…It’s just in our DNA to do this when we watch video with real people. For some reason, however, a character seems to have a likability factor that not all (real) people can achieve.
So if you have a friendly character in your video, your audience is more likely to trust your brand and open themselves to being introduced to new ideas or products. Our Gisteo Guy appeals to a wide range of viewers, for example, but if he was a real person, he probably wouldn’t have the same charm. By the way, he’s an animated character who happens to look like a human but that’s not even a requirement in business animation. Think of Tony the Tiger, for example who has been Kellogg’s brand mascot for years. Who doesn’t like a friendly cartoon tiger? Why not do the same with your business animation and use animals or more abstract characters? Check out the talking lion at the end of this example:
4. With business animation, the only limit is your imagination!
Live-action productions can be limited by sets/locations, lighting, actors, weather, post-production requirements and much more. With an animated video, you can come up with any storyline you like and bring it to life with much greater ease than with live-action. Want to show a crazy story about a businessperson forced to swim with sharks? Not a problem. Feature a character flying through the air after getting a new superpower? Easy! The possibilities of what you can do and the types of stories you can tell are literally endless with animation.
5. Animation is a diverse technique
When many people think about animation, they naturally think of cartoons or Pixar-style animated movies. While these types of techniques are certainly common (and reflective of styles we produce at Gisteo), there are other approaches that use animation with a decidedly less “cartoony” look. Check out these motion graphic style animations we’ve done to see what I mean.
6. Animation helps you stand out in a crowd
Although business animation is more popular today than it was a decade ago, it’s still a fresh, unique way to stand out in your marketing. It can be an entertaining differentiator for your brand that you can leverage in all sorts of ways- on your website, in social media, in email campaigns, at conferences…and more.
At Gisteo, we make business animations
So now that we’ve gone over just a few reasons why business animation is so compelling, you might be asking, how do we get a business animation made? No problem. Gisteo has you covered. Contact us for more information and we’ll get your project started in no time…and at a great price.
