In 2024, companies continue using videos to reach diverse marketing goals.
Live behind-the-curtain videos on social media help businesses build trust and make audiences feel connected. Explainers on a home page lead to better conversions from visitors to registered users. Tutorials distributed by email boost customer loyalty and bring in more purchases from old clients.
However, video production requires significantly more resources than photos and vector graphics, so companies often look for ways to optimise marketing costs by leveraging new formats and less expensive video genres.
Animated content by a video production studio might be an excellent solution for you if you want to improve conversions in a budget-friendly yet effective way. This article explains why animated commercial videos work and what types of content will be helpful for your business in the coming months.
What are Animated Marketing Videos?
In 2024, spending on video advertising is expected to reach over $191.3 billion, making video marketing the fastest-growing advertising area. Animated videos use artistic techniques such as 2D, 3D, cutout animation, whiteboarding, and others. Videos of this type do not feature actors and real-life locations or situations. Instead, they are highly flexible in visual storytelling and translating abstract concepts into videos with the help of voiceover.
Although, in most industries, live-action videos dominate content marketing strategies, brands widely use animated videos to present intangible products, teach audiences, or amusingly tell their brand stories.
Here are some advantages animated content provides your business:
Visualise the Invisible
You can sketch and animate anything, costing you dramatically less than shooting actors and adding special effects to your commercial movie. If you want to promote a digital product like a SaaS solution or social media, motion graphics will help you translate customer benefits into clear visual metaphors.
Evoke Emotions and Positive Associations
Animated videos can easily immerse viewers and create certain moods using colour palettes, artistic techniques, shapes, styles, and symbols. Animated characters are often easier to read than that of complex human emotions. Therefore, they can easily create the impression you intend to leave with your audience. Animation allows you to bring your creative ideas to life by making objects or abstract concepts simple to understand.
Be Memorable
Animated videos allow you to create any universe you can imagine, and that’s the reason why each animation looks so unique. While social media is dominated by live-action content and most commercials online are based on photos or videos featuring real people, you can stand out from the crowd with animated content and have your content stand out against other animations, too.
Content Repurposing
Artistic techniques that video production studios use for animation impact how much you might spend on marketing later. For example, when it comes to 3D, each new video featuring the same characters will cost you less money per minute of content. In turn, 2D might be a faster and more flexible solution that allows you to repurpose its elements to create visuals for your website, blog, or social media and save budget.
The Key Types & Objectives of Marketing with Animation: What to Choose
For digital businesses, due to the non-material nature of their projects and products, animated videos are the only way to showcase and explain what they offer to customers. However, other companies can benefit from animation, too—mainly if they use the right type of video for the proper sales funnel stage.
Marketing videos additionally distributed through YouTube can give you a significant awareness boost since over 95% of youngsters claimed to use it more than other social media platforms.
International businesses can also consider dubbing YouTube videos to further grow their global reach.
Below, we will give you some examples of what animated content works best for specific communication goals:
Awareness Stage
Best choice: promo video and e-learning content.
At this stage, you need to introduce your product to your audiences and capture their attention immediately. Animated videos let you easily set the right atmosphere, impress viewers, and get them involved in your visual story. Here, you’ll show potential customers that you understand their problems, and your product will help them to resolve the issue.
Promotional videos are often aimed at letting viewers visit your website, and e-learning series are all about product placement.
Interest Stage
Best choice: corporate video and video explainer.
When your potential customers have already learned general facts about you, it’s time to provide them with more helpful information. At the Interest stage, a user often visits your website or social media page in search of details about your company and product.
An animated explainer video, where you describe your solution and its benefits, is a perfect format to apply. Another option is to strengthen your brand image by telling your corporate story. A corporate story will leave a huge impression on potential customers, so animation is a good choice for a unique look and emotional storytelling.
Decision Stage
Best choice: tutorial and testimonial video (animation + live-action frames).
The decision stage is about giving a future customer more proof that your product deserves their attention and will genuinely work. To obtain user trust, the use of live-action videos featuring your employees or current customers will be more effective.
Show viewers how your product works with a screencast or product testing stream or share video reviews by your clients. To save on video editing expenses and to make your videos more digestible and pleasing to the eye, you can integrate existing videos of any quality into stylish animated frames, add subtitles or comments, and start your video with a short, animated introduction.
Loyalty stage
Best choice: onboarding video and brand animation.
Let’s motivate your existing customers to opt for your products in the future, promote them among their colleagues, or upgrade a product. You need to establish a trustworthy and friendly connection between you and a customer to reach any of these goals.
An animated onboarding video is a tool to boost loyalty right after a client’s purchase by making the process of using new products exceptionally clear.
In turn, brand animation is content that reminds a user about old and new features of your product or provides them with product-related advice. Such videos, distributed through newsletters, blogs, and social media, are excellent for building your brand’s community.
Teaming up with a Video Production Studio
If you’ve never used videos in your content marketing strategies, you’re lagging behind —Over 93% of all brands across the world use videos in their communication on a regular basis, and this rate has a tendency to rise!
The good news is that many animation styles are cost-effective, and this makes it a safe option for you to experiment with. For example, whiteboard animation is cheap and easy to produce with a video production studio. However, artistic technique is not the only element that affects the production budget, timelines, and overall success of your animated video campaign.
Final thoughts
Looking for visual solutions that will draw extra attention to your product or company?
Animated videos are a first-class choice for startups and market leaders since they allow them to stand out, make their communication significant and emotional, and have the potential to be repurposed.
While working on your first marketing animation, invest your resources in finding a reliable partner. Make sure that the video production studio you plan to work with has examples of similar videos in their portfolio and matches your corporate values and workflow. Consider that a great story needs insights regarding your target audience and product.
Most importantly, always be open in communication with your partners, and don’t hesitate to give them your feedback.
Cast Voice Actors for Animation
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