An explainer video is a short video that explains what your product or service does and why people should buy it. Instead of forcing prospects or customers to search through pages of text for answers, explainer videos offer a more engaging way to increase brand awareness, bring in more leads and close more sales. If you’re thinking about creating an explainer video for your company, here’s what you need to know:
Focus – Before you begin, it’s important to establish the purpose of your video and who your target audience is. Also, decide on the tone you’re going for and what you want people to do after they see your video. It’s a good idea to find a few explainer videos that you like (be it for the messaging or the animation style) and share them with your writer and animator to serve as creative inspiration.
Length – Think less movie, more commercial. Explainer videos should be no less than 30 seconds and no more than 2 minutes long. Any longer and you risk losing your audience before they even see your call to action. Attention spans are short and your video must be engaging from start to finish so your audience sticks around.
Script – The script is arguably the most important part of your video. It needs to tell a story, engage the audience and convince them that they need your product/service. It’s also important to include a call to action at the end. Don’t make the mistake of doing it yourself or leaving the script in the hands of the animation company. You can create the basic outline of what you want to say, and then hand it over to a professional writer (or your PR firm) to make it shine.
Animation – The animation of the video is also key; the last thing you want is for your video to look low budget. Hire an animator with a good portfolio of explainer videos under his/her belt. Not skimping on quality here will result in more shares of your video later. Animated explainer videos, such as this one from CrazyEgg, enable you to unleash your creativity. They are often used for explaining services or software where a physical object is not the focus.
Live Action – Instead of animating, you could go the live action route, having real people star in your video. This can add a personal touch to a people-oriented service and forges an emotional connection with your audience, such as seen with this one from Tonx Coffee.
Voice-over – The voice-over is an audio narration of your video script. The animation company will usually handle this for you, presenting you with a few options to choose from. Select a voice-over artist with a clear, yet engaging style.
Kinetic Typography – You can also opt out of using voice-over and instead rely on displaying the text of your script on the screen in a visually interesting way like this one from Spotify.
Music – Determine what type of tunes you want playing in the background of your video and your animator will provide a few samples for you to pick from. Try not to select anything too busy that will take attention away from the script, but will instead compliment it.
Sharing – Once you have a kick-butt explainer video, now what do you do with it? Put it on your website. Create a landing page. Post it to video sites like YouTube and Vimeo. Share the link via Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Send it out to your email list in a newsletter. Just get that thing out there and let it do what it was designed to do: convert more leads.
A good explainer video doesn’t have to cost a fortune, but unless you have some expertise when it comes to writing and video production, it’s better to call in the professionals. A low budget explainer video can do your brand more harm than good. But if executed properly, your explainer video could result in a huge return on investment.