Animated marketing videos play a critical role in promoting your business, and selling your products/services effectively. For an effective marketing strategy, it’s important to make engaging and unique animated videos that trigger emotions.
If you are a big fan of Disney or Pixar or if you have ever cried during an animated feature film…you know what I mean. The same thing can happen when you use animation in your marketing efforts—tugging at our heartstrings and grabbing our attention better than before! Ultimately this emotional connection converts a viewer into a paying customer.
More often it’s easier to create effective animated marketing videos in one-go if you have a better understanding of basic human psychology along with a few other things you need to consider.
Whether you have been thinking about incorporating animated videos into your marketing strategy or already have, below are 5 things keys you should keeping in to produce highly effective animated marketing videos.
- Storytelling is critical
- Animated marketing videos should trigger emotions
- Brand association is the secret sauce
- Make shorter yet engaging animated videos that grab attention
- Animated marketing videos should present a problem-solution
1. Storytelling is critical
When thinking about animations, the first thing that comes into our minds might be those classic fairy tales or a square sponge — not to mention talking animals, fairies, princesses, and animated objects.
The art of storytelling applies to more than fairy tales. As it turns out, storytelling can actually alter our brains and even change the way we think and act. When you include storytelling in animations, it cements users’ brand associations, strengthens brand loyalty and helps them remember your brand.
You can blend both the art of creativity and the science of storytelling to enable a strong association between your brand and your prospects — yet most marketers struggle with it. In animations, the story is king so make sure you incorporate storytelling to create effective animated marketing videos.
2. An animated video should trigger emotions
Throughout history, humans have built associations with different visuals — colors, movements, and facial expressions. The human brain connects what we see to certain feelings — red suggests danger, a broad smile indicates happiness. It’s essential to create effective animated marketing videos that elicit the emotional responses you want to evoke. This is why it’s important to be mindful of color schemes, movements, and characters’ expressions that communicate an array of feelings.
Videos have the potential to not only connect to your viewers intellectually but can trigger emotions, resulting in empathy. With empathy comes greater brand awareness, employee compliance, and customer loyalty.
The emotional response adds far more significant influence on a consumer’s intent to buy. It keeps the viewers engaged. That’s why content developers hire professional animators to stretch the bounds of their creativity and better connect with their audiences.
Much like not every human can have the same intensity of emotions, not every animated explainer video has universal appeal. For example, Nike’s popular 3D animation video, The Last Game, produced as a World Cup promo in 2014. It didn’t manifest the same level of emotions among non-soccers lovers likely because they weren’t interested in football. The bottom line – create effective animated marketing videos with your target audience in mind.
3. Brand association is the secret sauce
It’s well-established that videos are among the favorite type of content for everyone. Videos make up 80% of consumer data traffic today. This fact implies that there’s no way your target audience can miss an animated video made to promote your app.
If you are planning to make a webpage to promote your app, go for it. That’s certainly a great idea for many reasons but bear in mind that the human brain retain under 10% of what we read and above 75% of what we see in a video. If you build a page about your app, you should definitely include an explainer video!
Here’s what you can do to help you improve brand association:
Create a buyer persona
Before you create an animated marketing video, conduct in-depth research to define your buyer persona or personas. You can gather essential information including age, preferences, job, favorite brand and income levels, etc. If you create an animated video speaking to your buyer persona, you can better build trust and humanize your brand.
Integrate brand colors & branding material
Make sure you integrate brand colors and other marketing aspects including your logo and typography. Theyc can work to strengthen brand recall. The brand color palette should take center stage when creating explainer videos because they will help better cement the association between your brand and your core target.
Be authentic
Beyond just telling a story, animated videos should be authentic. Don’t overpromise because that exposes you to underdelivering and people appreciate honest, transparent brands.
Execute social strategy
Go social with your animated videos. Craft and execute a social media marketing strategy for your explainer videos to strengthen brand awareness. Promote your videos on all major social media platforms, including YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.
4. Make shorter yet engaging animated videos that grab attention
A video conveys much more than an image. A study a few years ago even went so far as to say that a minute-long video is worth 1.8 million words. Interestingly, the human mind can process visuals 60,000 times faster than the text.
We know that animated videos are engaging, but longer isn’t necessarily better and length matter. Try to keep your videos as concise as possible, ideally under 2 minutes. The first 8 seconds of your animated video can make or break it so make sure you open with a strong hook such as addressing one of your audience’s main pain points or asking a compelling question.
The more you understand the audience’s needs, the more you will hold their attention and this stands true for the animated videos.
5. Present a problem-solution scenario
Effective animated marketing videos that address the everyday issues of your target audience are more relatable and memorable. Oftentimes, a smart approach is to create a video using a structure that leaves an impactful message on the viewer, i.e., problem-solution.
A variation of the problem-solution format may include multiple problems or a comparison of characters in which one of them fails to fix the problem while the other wins. The presentation of the solution afterward helps the audience know more about the particular product/service. While this is a sure-fire tactic, determining an insightful issue and the set of your target audience’s pain points is crucial.
In conclusion
To produce highly effective animated marketing videos, start with a thoughtful script leveraging the power of storytelling. Use brand colors and assets to better establish a connection between your message and your company. Trigger emotions by addressing the customer’s pain points using real-life examples and present the solution. And pay attention to length. Sometimes, less can be more when producing animated videos. And, of course, putting all this together isn’t always easy, which is why companies like Gisteo exist. After producing close to 2,000 of these, we’ve learned a few tricks over the years to help ensure your success!
Now that’s how you can produce highly effective animated marketing videos. What tactics do you use when making an animated video? Let us know in the comments section below.
