Adding animated videos to your marketing strategy can be a powerful way to engage your target audience and promote your brand. From explainer videos that simplify complex concepts to funny video clips that go viral on social media, animation helps grab attention in our visually focused world. This guide will teach you how to use animated video content to meet your marketing objectives.
Define Your Goals and Target Audience
Selecting the most effective animated video styles for your brand takes thoughtful consideration. You need to weigh factors like your key messaging, audience preferences, production timeframes, and budget. Rather than randomly choosing animation types, follow this structured approach:
Marketing Goals
Revisit your core marketing goals and target audience profile. What exactly do you want viewers to think, feel, or do after watching your videos? How do they best absorb information and engage with digital content? Prioritize 1-2 primary goals per video.
Target Audience
Who are your ideal customers – age, gender, location, interests? What motivates them to buy your product/service? What questions or concerns do they have? What social platforms and websites do they use? What is their viewing behavior like – long form vs short snacks? Understanding your audience’s demographics, psychographics, and viewing habits will help you craft relevant stories and place videos strategically. Create customized buyer personas.
Choose the Right Type of Animated Video
With clear goals and audience insights, you can zero in on the styles of animation that will work best for your brand. Consider producing different types of videos for different purposes.
Explainer Videos
Explain how a complex product or service works, visualize an abstract concept or process, and demo product/service benefits, FAQs, and tutorials, typically 2-3 minutes long.
Product Demos
Showcase features and capabilities, highlight use cases, and allow a virtual “test drive”, often more detailed than explainer videos, 1-5 minutes long.
*Credit – Logitech
Customer Testimonials
Build credibility by showing real users, capturing authentic customer reactions, and short clips of 15-45 seconds, which can be excerpted from longer interviews.
*Credit – Revolution Production
Brand Stories
Spotlight your company values and culture, share origin stories or milestones, and animated interviews with leadership, the length varies based on the story.
Social Media Content
Entertaining, viral clips under 60 seconds, memes, challenges, teasers, announcements, interactive polls, stickers, and filters, leverage animation trends on social platforms.
Educational Videos
How-to tutorials and e-courses, animated charts/graphs to present data, visualize study findings and key takeaways, length depends on the complexity of the topic.
Animated GIFs
Short looping clips, usually without sound, are used on landing pages, digital ads, and emails, and capture attention with motion and humor.
Consider your goals, resources, and audience viewing habits as you choose video styles. Aim for memorable variety.
Integrate Animated Videos into Your Marketing Strategy
Once you have amazing video content produced, it’s time to leverage it across marketing channels. Be intentional with distribution to maximize impact.
Website and Landing Pages
Hero banners with auto-play video, modal pop-ups to capture emails, sticky header/footer videos, optimized pages for video SEO, blog post embedded videos, and calls to action to watch more.
Embed your videos on key pages to explain your value proposition, showcase products, and boost conversions. Remember, a captivating video can be worth a thousand boring words.
Social Media Marketing
Dedicated video content for each platform, carousel posts combining images + clips, using built-in video ad units, Facebook/Instagram reels and stories, YouTube channel + shorts, and interactive elements to boost engagement.
Besides increasing engagement, it also helps to reach new audiences and drive traffic to your website. Bonus points for platform-specific formats like Twitter threads.
Email Marketing
Preview gifs + links to full videos, embed brand story spotlight clips, promotional announcement videos, email-only “sneak peek” incentives, and testimonial excerpts from customers.
Use animated GIFs or short video snippets in your emails to grab attention and encourage click-throughs. People are more likely to open an email with a moving image, so give it a go!
Paid Advertising
Include your animated videos in your PPC campaigns to stand out from the text-heavy ad crowd. A visually compelling video ad can lead to higher click-through rates and lower costs per click.
YouTube bumper ads (6 sec before videos), social media video ads, targeted autoplay ads on websites, retargeting video ads across the web, and connecting video views to conversions.
*Oreo’s animated ad campaign
Events and Presentations
Product reveal and demo videos, booth display and greeter screens, animated backgrounds for slides, interactive augmented reality, video booth for testimonials, share event recordings after.
With a strategic distribution plan, animated videos can amplify brand awareness and engagement at every touchpoint. Track video analytics to optimize ongoing video initiatives. Continue testing video styles and placements to maximize ROI. Animation provides limitless creative ways to resonate with your audience!
Tips for Creating Effective Animated Marketing Videos
When creating an animated marketing video, it’s important to first identify the specific goals and target audience for each individual video. Determine the main purpose and call-to-action you want viewers to take after watching. Here are some tips for getting best outcome –
Keep Videos Short
Animated videos should be short in length, ideally under 2 minutes long. With the decline in attention spans due to digital media overload, concise messaging is key. Viewers are more likely to watch a video in full if it delivers the core information quickly without unnecessary fluff. Aim to communicate your key messages as simply and briefly as possible. Here is a list of video duration for different social platforms –
- Facebook: 1 minute
- Instagram: 30 seconds
- Twitter: 45 seconds
- LinkedIn: 30 seconds
- YouTube: 2 minutes
When scripting your video content, be selective and only focus on the most vital information. Remove any repetitive or redundant phrases to keep the script tight. The shorter the video, the higher the chance of it getting watched until the end.
Use Visually Compelling Graphics
Leverage different animation styles like motion graphics, whiteboard animation, 2D animation or 3D animation to capture viewer attention in a distinctive way. Use bold colors, dynamic movements like scene transitions, camera pans and text fades, as well as visual metaphors to turn your script into an engaging story. The graphics should not just decorate the video but help move the narrative along.
Focus on Key Messages
Identify upfront the 2-3 main messages or selling points you want your audience to take away after viewing the video. All scripting and visual choices should revolve around compellingly highlighting these key messages. Remove any extra details that divert attention away from the core value proposition of your product or service.
Incorporate Brand Elements
Maintain brand consistency in your animated videos by using your logo, brand fonts, color schemes, and overall visual style. This helps build awareness and recognition of your brand over time through repeated exposure across marketing videos and campaigns.
Write Clear, Concise Scripts
The video script should complement the animations and not simply replicate the same text. Use conversational language appropriate for the visual medium. Time out the narration pace to match key storyboarding frames and animatics. Write compactly, and informatively focusing only on the most essential information. Clear, concise scripts reinforcing your core messaging will make your animations more impactful.
Including Animated Videos Is Important for Marketing Strategy
Animated videos in particular convey creativity and innovation. With 9 in 10 finding them highly effective, animation is a smart route for showcasing your product uniquely. The broader statistics further reinforce why animation is so impactful today:
- 90% of internet users say videos help their purchase decisions, so animated videos influence buying.
- 80% watch online videos monthly, giving animated marketing clips huge exposure.
- 46% take action after watching a video, so animated videos incite engagement.
- Most importantly, 90% find animated videos highly effective.
Animated videos allow brands to showcase creativity and innovation distinctively. They help promotions stand out in a crowded market by catching viewer attention with motion, characters, and visual storytelling.
The stunning success of Dollar Shave Club highlights the immense power of animated videos in marketing. Their inexpensive early promo video generated 12,000 orders rapidly, demonstrating how animated videos can cost-effectively drive conversions and sales.
Additionally, Dollar Shave Club’s YouTube videos consistently garner millions of views, proving how animated marketing videos generate significant organic reach and engagement.
Conclusion
Including animated videos in your marketing mix is a proven way to capture attention, explain complex ideas clearly, engage audiences and drive measurable business results. By defining your goals, targeting specific viewers, selecting video styles suited to different objectives, and distributing video content across channels, you can integrate animation seamlessly into your broader strategy.
Animated content allows you to educate and entertain in memorable ways that static media simply cannot match. With the right creative approach and distribution plan, animated videos can be created properly and will become a valuable component of your marketing arsenal for years to come. The possibilities with animation are endless.
