An Entry Level Guide To Explainer Videos

Komal Chaturvedi
Komal Chaturvedi

Co-Founder & CEO, MotionGility

Everything You Need to Know Explainer Video

You want every lead and prospective customer that comes your way to know how great your products or services are. But it can be rather hard to communicate the true value of your offerings when you only have limited time to impress.

 

After all, there is a lot of information that you need to share, including product/service details, benefits, prices, and mission. Putting it all down in text form may sound useful, but we live in a world where people’s attention span is continuously decreasing and nobody has the time or the patience to read long documents.

 

Instead of going the text way, you can use the power of video marketing to impress your leads. Converting all the information into an engaging and powerful explainer video can make it easily digestible for the end-users and directly lead to more conversions.

 

Adding explainer videos to your website can keep viewers hooked on your page two times longer and increase your chances of landing higher on SEO search rankings. Explainer videos can also be repurposed on your social media handles to improve brand awareness and engagement.

 

Here’s An Entry Level Guide To Explainer Videos To Help You Understand How Impactful They Can Be When It Comes To Marketing And Brand Building.

 

What is an Explainer Video?

Explainer videos are basically short-form marketing videos that are created to explain a company’s products or services to its end customers. These explainer videos can be embedded on the company’s website, product page, landing page, or shared on social media platforms. Incorporating explainer videos can boost conversion rates by up to 114 percent.

 

Most explainer videos are 45-90 seconds long. If your videos are shorter than 44-45 seconds, it can become difficult to discuss all the benefits/ features of your products. At the same time, videos longer than 90 seconds can end up boring your audience and decrease overall viewer retention. Since you only get over a minute to explain your product/service and to entice your prospective customers, your explainer videos need to have a compelling hook and a tight script to convert new users into paid customers.

The Benefits of Explainer Videos

Explainer videos are a powerful and memorable way of communicating your brand’s value to your potential customers. With videos, you can control how much time viewers spend on each point, which can, in turn, allow you to compel your target audience to focus more on your product’s primary features.

 

Here are some of the many benefits of explainer videos:

They are short and easy to understand

The internet is full of distractions and your prospective customers do not have a lot of time to spare.

 

Explainer videos are short and crisp,  which can make it easier for people to retain all the information you throw their way while avoiding cognitive overload.

They are easily customisable according to your target audience

The great part about explainer videos is that they don’t follow a one-size-fits-all rule. You can create different explainer videos to align with different buyer personas and address the different pain points of your target audience to improve conversions. 

They improve brand awareness

Not all viewers will be compelled to buy your products or services right after they watch your explainer videos, but well-created and visual explainer videos can inform new prospective customers about your brand and improve overall brand awareness. That way, when users are looking for a product or service similar to what you offer, they will remember your brand.

They can break even the most complex ideas into simple ones

If you have a complex product that can take quite a lot of time to explain, the best and quickest way to break it down for your prospective customers is by turning it into an animated explainer video that walks the viewer through all the aspects of your products. Adding motion graphics, whiteboard animation or action in explainer videos can also be a fun way to explain complex concepts.

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What are the types of explainer videos?

Animated explainer videos

Animated explainer videos are the ones that use animation to depict a brand’s products or services. They tend to be more visually appealing and give you more room for creativity because you can quite literally animate any objects you want for your video. Many customers also find it more interesting to watch animated videos than just listening to someone else talk.

 

There are further different types of animated explainer videos that you can leverage:

a. Infographic animation explainer videos:

You can use graphs, charts, and iconography similar to image infographics to showcase the key features of your business and how it can help end customers. 

b. Whiteboard animation explainer videos:

These videos use a digital whiteboard to explain or break down concepts to the viewers easily. They are perfect for when you want to create an explainer video shows the main building blocks of your business.

c. Animated product explainer videos:

This type of explainer video usually includes a screencast of your product/tool in action. This is often used by SaaS companies in their explainer videos to showcase their software tool, how it works, and its different features.

2D Motion Graphics

Two-dimensional or 2D animation is referred to videos that have characters, objects, and icons created in a two-dimensional space. There are two types of 2D Motion graphics explainer videos that you can create:

1. Icon-based 2D Motion Graphics:

These use animated icons to make engaging explainer videos. You can either use icon libraries available online or create your own custom icons and animate them in order to make your videos unique.

2. Character-driven 2D Motion Graphics:

These videos use animated cartoon figures along with custom icons in order to tell the story of your services or products, and how they can solve all of your customers’ problems

Live action explainer videos

In these explainer videos, instead of animation, actual people are talking directly to the camera. You can also shoot real-life videos of your products and working processes to show your prospective customers what they can expect.

 

While these are harder to pull off and require more time to shoot, they can also build a better human connection with your audience. Live-action explainer videos usually feature a spokesperson who takes you through an entire visual journey.

 

They are often the founder or an employee of the company that focuses on highlighting the company’s goals, purposes, and products/ services.

How to create an Explainer Video?

Let’s go through the steps of how to make a killer explainer video. While it is no easy feat, with strategy, effort, and help, you can make it work.

Step 1: Draft a video script

The script of your video is one of the most important factors in making an optimum explainer video. Even if you use the most visually appealing graphics in the world, without a solid script to backup up your visuals, it will be impossible to keep the viewers hooked.

 

As a result, your video script will need the majority of your focus and it should also be the first thing that you work on. Start by jotting down your target audience’s main concerns and pain points. Your explainer video should ideally address all of these concerns succinctly and directly. 

 

The general outline of your explainer video script should follow the below steps:

 

  1. Overview of your brand
  2. Introduce the main problems
  3. Offer the solution to the problem with your products/services
  4. Briefly explain how your products or services work
  5. Add a call to action
  6. Mention how the viewers can get in touch with your company

Here are a few explainer video script best practices that you should keep in mind while creating your script:

 

  • Keep the script short and crisp — the shorter the better 
  • The value proposition and key message of your video should be shared within the first 30 seconds. You don’t want the viewers wondering for long what the video is about or they might get confused and close the video altogether
  • Address the viewers as “You” or “Your” to better connect with them
  • The overall tone of your explainer video should be conversational and casual
  • Add a touch of humor to your script to make it all the more enjoyable for your end viewers

Step 2: Create a storyboard for your explainer videos

Now that you have written a script, it’s time to visualize your explainer video through a storyboard.

 

Creating a storyboard before you even start shooting or designing your video enables you to brainstorm and figure out how you want the result to look. It not only cuts down on your production time but also helps you create more targeted videos.

Step 3: Video production

This is one of the important steps in creating a powerful explainer video. You should start your video production process depending on whether you want to create an animated or a live-action explainer video. 

 

For animated explainer videos, you need great script writers’, illustrators, animators, and voiceover artists to help your storyboard ideas come to life. 

 

But for live-action explainer videos, you will first need to shoot the required videos of your products and employees as well. As a result, you will need video shooting equipment, audio equipment, video editing tools, and experienced video editors on your team who can handle it all. 

 

Of course investing so much time, effort, and money just for a single 30-90 second explainer video can be a lot, especially when you aren’t even sure of the outcome. 

 

The alternative? Bring out the pros

 

You can partner with a professional animated explainer video company like MotionGilty that can help you create killer explainer videos in no time. Since Motiongility already has the expertise, resources, and experience in creating well-thought-out explainer videos for brands, they can not only understand your target audience’s expectations in a better way but also deliver explainer videos that give visible ROI. 

 

The obvious advantage here is that you get to work with video experts every step of the way and your explainer videos are guaranteed to turn out great.

Step 4: Plan for the launch of your explainer video

Now that you have your explainer video with you, it’s time to plan how you want to launch and share it with the world. Ideally, your plan should consist of the following:

a. Select a video host

Decide where you want to host your video. The easiest way would be to upload the video directly to your website or your brand’s YouTube channel, and then embed that video everywhere.

b. Create a marketing plan

Just uploading your video and expecting your prospective customers to find it and watch it, is never going to work. You need to take extra steps with the help of a thorough marketing plan to get more eyes rolling over your explainer video.

 

You can leverage your newsletters, blogs, and social media channels for this. It’s also a great idea to include explainer videos as part of your paid social media advertising strategy in order to reach out to more prospective customers.

c. Integrate the explainer video on your website

You can put the explainer video on your website’s home page or a landing page, depending on the main conversion goal of your explainer video.

Step 5: Measure the performance of the explainer video

One of the biggest advantages of video marketing is that you get access to tons of analytics and metrics that you can use to create more targeted videos in the future.

 

Measure the performance of your explainer video regularly and look for important metrics like click-through rate, average conversion rate, audience retention, watch time, average view duration, completion rate, rewatches, and drop-off points.

Ready to make a great explainer video?

Motiongility is an animated explainer video production company that can help you expand your business and gain new customers by creating targeted explainer videos that are guaranteed to improve conversions.

 

Our dedicated team takes the time to get a deep understanding of your products/ services as well as your target audience to create powerful explainer videos that align with your brand take a look at the videos we have created in the past and get in touch with us today.

an entry level guide to explainer videos

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