So you want to leverage the power of animation to launch your new product or service...welcome to the club! As my British friends would say, animation is "litrally" the best way to distill a complicated message down into an easy to understand story. OK, my British friends never said that, heck I don't even have British friends, but you probably pronounced 'litrally' in your best fake British accent. I digress.
Animated videos, on average, increase the decision making process by 80%, and 97% of marketers say that animated videos helped their users to get a better understanding of their product or service. If you're reading this, this probably isn't news to you, and you just want to get the deets on how to make your videos more effective. Having produced explainers (and other various animated formats) for over a decade, and being currently caffeinated beyond repair, am ready to spill my secrets so that you too can be the master of your animated domain.
My job as a producer (and your goal as the marketer) is to get the viewer to the end of the video, and the best way to do that is to keep your script brief. I get it, your product has a lot of features and benefits, and you're really proud of it, but you'll be even more proud of the leads you convert by K.I.S.S.
An animated explainer video's main function lies at the top of the funnel, a carrot-dangle, to drive awareness and interest, pushing the customer downwards to further qualify your product or service. After watching the video, you essentially want them to put up their hand and say "OK, i'll bite...tell me more". As such, you don't need to list every pretty little thing your product does or fixes, just stick to the biggest pain points, and logic will do the rest.
The optimum length for an explainer video is 60s - 75s, which will run anywhere from 120 - 160 words when delivered by a professional voiceover artist. SPOILER ALERT, choose your words carefully, there's none to spare - remove every word that doesn't serve a purpose. I've found the biggest opportunities to shorten scripts come in removing repetition, where a marketer thinks doubling down on a statement will make it more impactful...hot tip....it doesn't. Instead, use the power of animation (and storytelling) to visualize the problem in a creative way that doubles the impact of a statement, without extending the run time.
Most marketers are joyfully blinded by seeing their product or service visualized through animation, that they overlook one the exercise's key functions, brand storytelling. While the quality and relatability of a voiceover artist's tone, cadence and delivery are regularly scrutinized, all too often marketers ignore the quality and substance of their illustrations and animation.
DO NOT SETTLE for stock illustrations and basic transitions to tell your brand story. My heart hurts for animated videos that were created from a library of photoshop vectors, slapped together with basic transitions - you might as well throw a star-wipe transition into your CTA as the cherry on top (sorry, I lost myself there for a minute).
Here's some helpful suggestions I've found help stories stand out:
Pick a colour pallet (primary, secondary and tertiary), and keep all your assets in that family.
Minimize assets to avoid clutter, the less information your viewer has to process, the more they'll remember
Find clever transition points that connect scenes and create match cuts (google it) to keep the story moving.
Alright, if you've made it this far, you're officially ready to apply the above strategies to the following formula. While all animated videos will present slightly differently, the following script structure has been tried, tested and proved true - please use it, and solve beautiful problems with it, your bottom line will thank you
Now before you click away, be sure to watch the video below which summarizes our secret recipe for explainer videos 👩🍳✨
