Animation in Digital Marketing: Your Guide for 2024

Animation in Digital Marketing

In 2021, TikTok ascended to become the number one platform most influential in impacting consumer behavior.

How can we substantiate such a claim?

Consider this: 37% of users discovered a product on TikTok and immediately proceeded to purchase it (TikTok).

Additionally:

What does this signify for you as a brand selling… stuff?

Well, in the long run, video ads were winning all along.

Ever wondered the reason?

Animated video marketing can impact branding, create an emotional value proposition, better communicate product benefits and instructions and so on.

Ask yourself:

  • Where do you stand on using animation and video in marketing?
  • Does your content strategy pack all the necessary video power to educate, persuade and flood your digital marketing funnel?
  • Also, do you have a content creation process to help you create animation?
  • Do you have any video ideas that also align with your branding and sales goals?

Let’s expand your knowledge about the applications of animation in marketing.

What Is Animation’s Role In Marketing?

The answer is two forked:

  • Positioning your brand
  • Conversion for better sales

Positioning: Using Animation For Greater Branding

Using animation in digital marketing helps in achieving the desired brand positioning. It helps create perceptible brand attributes.

Animated videos have been a part of traditional marketing since ages. Videos propagated through mass media have effected change in consumer attitudes, behaviours, unsurprisingly, sometimes, even elections!

Notably, 64% of consumers claim they purchase goods after watching branded content on social media. Source.

Successful branding happens when you convey your unique selling point to your customer. Therefore, your message’s delivery has to be right in tone, clarity, context and feeling. Moreover, branding is not always about having the perfect product, but “showing” that you have the best solution.

Animation does this for you.

Our brains perceive animated content as entertainment. Thanks to all the cartoon we watched growing up, our brain sheds its sales armour while processing animated marketing content. In fact, the thinking-machine also allows nostalgia to occupy a rent-free space in our head when watching animated content.

This is why animation is super effective in splashing brand attributes on your consumer’s brain– it communicates feelings better. animated logos, branded videos, gifs, explainer video demos, product explainers etc are a few means to do this.

Thus, it’s a no-brainer why you should put forth the idea of using animated digital marketing to your C-suite.

Conversions: How Marketing Animation Makes Selling Easier

Scientists say that our brain processes visuals 60,000 times faster than text. So, it’s absolutely no wonder when:

  • Landing pages with videos increase conversions by 86%. (techjury)
  • 76% of users make buying decisions based on their discoveries on social media​. (TechReport)
  • 64% users purchase a product after they watch a branded video. (invideo)

Conversions happen when your customer believes that your brand can solve their crisis. They prefer mediums that help digest information effortlessly.

Animated videos have the visual charm to ease pains from your customer’s minds. The facilities they offer coincide with such preferences thus increasing conversions.

How Can Animated Videos Help With Storytelling?

The one-word answer is storytelling.

Plays, puppet shows, theatre are some precursors of motion picture used for storytelling.

However, one can’t use them to sell products anymore.

A great story hooks the reader or the viewer so well that it evokes emotions sending them to a state of utopia or dystopia. My point is that a great story shackles the defences of the brain and conveys the point the creator wants to make.

Similarly, in animated videos, a good story offers a captivating brand experience influencing viewers to become prospects and customers. You can turn every online touchpoint- social media, email etc- your customer interacts with to tell a story about your brand.

The right mix of music, imagery and a good narrative can put your product into the hands of the customer. For a first time user, branded videos that tell a compelling story, influence them to explore your brand.

Also, using storytelling in animated videos can help in practising the maxim, “Show, don’t tell”. Videos can deeply embed and convey what the viewer would miss out on if they fail to take action.

Tips To Create Animation for Marketing

Are you still with us? Great! Now we’ll elucidate tips on how you can go about creating animated marketing videos.

Start With Social Listening

Of course, you can brainstorm your way into identifying your customer’s pain points. However, your inherent bias may cloud your judgement.

Social listening is the process of listening to conversations happening on the web. Carrying out social listening can help you know your audience’s needs and wants. You can do a deep dive into:

  • Forums
  • Online boards
  • Quora
  • Comment spaces
  • Social media

Using the conversations happening here, you can empathise the pains and frustrations your ideal customer faces. This helps in building buyer personas and characters for your animation. Additionally, social listening helps recreate in your animation the environment where your characters face their problems.

Move to Script Writing

Any video marketing you do must be scripted before creation. Even if you excel at improv and theatrics, writing a video script shall make your conversation and narrative flow naturally.

Animated videos are still stories that you have to pen and paper first. Writing video scripts helps you to stick to your goals when developing the animation.

Use Story Boards

Once you develop a script that rivals Spielberg, you can begin painting a picture using storyboards.

Storyboards are a visual representation for your concept before developing the entire animated video. Regardless of what animated marketing videos – explainer videos, demos, commercial videos – you create, a storyboard charts out the narrative beforehand.

Creating The Animation

Several steps encompass the creation process; creating an animatic, character modelling, rendering and composition and creating sound effects.

Throughout these steps this is what happens:

  • In the animatic, static storyboards are turned into moving pictures that narrate the entire story. Dialogues are recorded, the characters are voiced over with and temporarily placeholder music is attached. The storyboards are mapped and compiled on a timeline.
  • While creating the animatic, the characters and objects involved in the story are endowed with physical characteristics. The characters are turned into a digital 3-D sculpture.
  • Next, the creator uses the animatic to develop the entire animation.
  • Subsequently, animators begin galvanizing the lacklustre animation. They begin beautifying the animation using lighting, motion blurs, colours, textures. This is when the entire concept falls in place to give the look you aspired for when writing your script.
  • Finally, engaging music that sets the tone of the animation replaces the placeholder music. Each piece of animation is put together. Final tweaks are carried out and the animated video is promoted.

Animated Video Marketing Ideas

Various forms of video content have different forms of application and help in achieving different goals.

Explainer Videos

Explainer videos help you overcome the short supply of attention. Animated explainer videos are killer content in explaining more about businesses, products, sales pitches, product ideas, etc.

They make audiences understand who you are and what you do using engaging animated stories.

Product Demo Videos

Finding it hard to show how your product works through text content?

Product demo videos help in articulating how your product works and stealthily communicating their benefits as well.

69% customers find product demo videos to be helpful. wyzowl

Survey Monkey uses animated marketing to develop product demo videos. These videos explain the tool’s ease of use, how it integrates with platforms such as Slack, etc.

We’d bet you can’t beat the experience such videos offer using blogs, white papers and sales letters!

Customer Testimonial Videos

Have you ever thought about using video marketing to power up your social proof?

Genuine customer testimonials always provide an edge when competing for clients and customers.

Wyzowl points out that 79% of customers watch a testimonial before they begin their communications with a company.

You can amp up your persuasion by incorporating creating customer testimonials videos. Here, your existing customers can explain how your product and services were a game-changer for their business. In order to offer empathy, they can also describe the problems they were facing before you turned the tables for them.

Corporate Videos

What story do you articulate about your brand?

Corporate videos help you explain to your customers about your brand’s vision and corporate values.

Moreover, the look and feel you portray through your corporate videos reveal the voice of your brand as well.

Also, these videos communicate your company’s culture and purpose.

Thus, using animated digital marketing content in your corporate videos can also help you attract talent. It helps you establish, in prior, the culture and values you emanate.

Training And Educational Videos

Instructional videos and similar education content make use of advancements in animated marketing to communicate instructions and training material better.

Often, traditional training methods to train your employees and clients can fall short of your intended goals. People would like to return to easily digestible guides when the product is complex to use. This is arduous in traditional learning.

Such frustrations can be relieved using animated instructional and training guides.

Branislav Nikolic

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