A Step-by-Step Guide to Making the Best Animated Marketing Videos

So, you’ve got a product or service you’re passionate about, which you know will sell well, but you just don’t know how to sell it.

Well, don’t fret, because that’s where this complete guide on how to make animated marketing videos comes in handy. Once you’ve read this comprehensive article, you’ll be well onto your way in unlocking an powerful, eye-catching marketing tool that will help you sell your product/service to anyone in only a few minutes.

• Step 1: Outlining Your Video
• Step 2: Creating an Effective Storyboard
• Step 3: Choosing The Best Style for Your Animated Marketing Video
• Step 4: Producing Your Video
• Step 5: Share with Your Audience

Step 1: Outlining Your Video

Going into any project, especially animated marketing videos, without a plan is a recipe for disaster. And just like any project, animated marketing video production needs a solid outline—a plan. You can’t simply open iMovie or Adobe Premier without any direction and just hope that you’ll end up with a slick, professional-looking video.

So, let’s figure out how to take your burgeoning, vague ideas and make animated marketing videos for your business.

It all begins with a solid outline, and a solid outline begins with…

Figuring Out the Four Ws

Before you start creating your animated video, you need to figure out the why, what, who, and how of your video.

Why Are You Making this Video?

You’ve obviously got a great idea, a great product, a great service to share with the world. But more and more, it is harder to get eyes on what you’re trying to sell.

Especially when those eyes are inundated by a million little distractions all at once, and seemingly everyone and everything is vying for limited attention online. You need something that grabs people immediately — the human attention span is only eight seconds, and that’s why video is so much more effective than plan text. Something that is easily digestible, short, and concise. That’s why you’re producing an animated marketing video.

You’re making this video because a short, concise, stylized explainer video; a well-animated video that catches your audience’s eye is proven to be an incredibly effective marketing tool in a digital age where everyone is facing information overload.

You need to stand out from others. Well-produced animated marketing videos for business do just that. And you don’t have to start from scratch. Explainer video companies, like Explainify, can take the guesswork out of production, with the track record, and the analytics, to know what works.

What is the Video’s Message/What is the Video Trying to Achieve?

You need to figure out, in the best, most dynamic way, what you’re trying to say. What is it about the thing you’re trying to marketing, that can wow people? That makes them stop, and want to watch your animated video? What makes them want to copy the link and share it with others? What is the thing that makes you, your product, your message stick out? What makes it so important, so vital, so urgent? Figure that out, and translate that to the screen.

If you’re stuck, Explainify has examples of branded explainer videos that can work for your brand.

Who is Your Target Demographic?

This seems self-evident, and, well, if you’ve got a strong product, or message, it very well might be. But you need to figure out whom it is you’re talking to — your audience. This will dictate a lot about your animated marketing video: how it’s shot and produced, its tone, and more.

What Actions Should Your Target Demographic Take, and How Should They Take Them?

And arguably most importantly, you need a call to action. It isn’t enough to simply tell your people about something. You need to embolden them to act. Whether it’s buying your product, or supporting a worthwhile cause, the best animated marketing videos stick their landing — they call their audience to action, and if you’re lucky, they can go viral. It’s not enough to simply hope you’ve done enough to sell something. If you effectively set up a call to action, you’ve guaranteed yourself so much more than just one hit or sale from your animated sales videos. An effective call to action is the crescendo of your whole video.

How Should You Deliver Your Message?

The how of delivering your message will come soon, we promise. The how is figuring out the best way to present vital information to your audience, and later on in the article we’ll cover that. Once you figure out the purpose of the explainer video, who your target demographic is for your product and your animated marketing video, what your call to action is for your audience, and how they can go about that call to action, you can start to actually write the script for your video.

That’s right. A script. This is your incredible product or service, and no one knows it better than you. So once you’ve figured out the message you want to convey to your audience, you need to distill that message down to its very essence, and write a short, concise script that conveys to your audience in an easily digestible way what you’re all about.

If the idea of writing a script is overwhelming, Explainify can help. We’ve got years of experience not only with these types of explainer videos, but in the difficult process of bringing your ideas to reality. Our team knows just the right types of questions to ask, and just how to highlight all the relevant details, to translate your vision into a brilliant script that will help make your animated marketing video a hit with your audience.

Once a strong, concise script is written, you’re absolutely killing it. Good job. And that script leads to…

Step 2: Creating an Effective Storyboard

So, you’ve outlined your vision, and your script could win whatever the best animated marketing video equivalent of an Oscar is. But you need another outline: a storyboard.

In animation, a storyboard is a visual outline that helps you — and the animator — figure out what a scene will look like.

As you can see in the example, a storyboard breaks down roughly what a scene will look like — major “beats”, so to speak, of the scene, and, if the video calls for it, types of shots, and brief descriptions of what each shot may look like.

With Explainify, we can take care of all of that. Even if you know nothing about how to make animated videos or you’ve never made a storyboard before, our team will work with you in whatever way best fits your project.

Do you want to just rid yourself of the headache of trying to meticulously plan and animate your marketing video, and leave it in the trusted hands of a company that knows how to create animated videos? We can help. Do you have a grand scope and vision, and know exactly what every single frame, shot-by-shot, ought to look like, and you just need someone to execute? We’ve still got you.

Everything from “I’ve got no idea what I want this to look like,” to “Okay, I want it to be like the Citizen Kane of cartoons, but, with puppies, and lasers,” and anything in-between is possible.

And once your storyboard is complete, well, you’re ALMOST ready to make your animated marketing video. But before you can do that, you need to pick a style that works for you.

Step 3: Choosing the Best Style for Your Animated Marketing Video

So, with the help of the Explainify team, you’ve not only figured out the message you’re delivering to your audience, but you’ve storyboarded it, too. You’re finally ready for the how — the how you’re going to deliver it.

The thing is, within animated marketing video production, there’s many styles, and they all serve their own distinct purpose. So, let’s break down how to make animated videos, and figure out what works best for you.

Animated Typography Videos:

Animated typography videos are exactly what they sound like — type, or text, in motion, to form videos. The style is straightforward and paired down, while still being more engaging than simple narration over, say, static text, or a “talking heads” style video where a real person is simply in frame, talking to their audience.

With the style of your animated marketing video being so paired down and minimal, this lets the audience focus on the power, and significance of each word you’re presenting, so these types of videos are ideal for getting a message across to your audience — and reinforcing the importance of each and every word. These videos are great for PR or news videos. Why? Because it gives power to each individual word, and lets the audience reflect upon their significance, and make the connection of how much power words can hold.

2D Animated/Cartoon Videos

2D animation, or cartoon marketing videos, are simply fun to look at when they’re done well. Almost everyone grew up watching cartoons, and there is a universality to cartoons — one can connect with a generic animated character and see themselves in it. 2D animation — created by animating individual images in a sequential order — can give a great sense of place, progression, space, time, and movement. Wondering how to make a cartoon video work for your brand? For example, if you’re trying to motivate an audience to come to your gym, you can create a fun, simple video showing your cartoon characters working out. These types of videos are very useful for how-to style videos as well.

Animated Infographic Videos

Infographic videos include pie charts, bar graphs, and other types of information. Animating your infographic is a fantastic way to breathe some life into somewhat dull data.

Animating your data is a great way to, as with many of these styles of videos, catch the eye of your audience, and keep them engaged. It’s a great way to show to your audience, your boss, or your investors the growth sales figures.

But more than that it can also be a great way to translate very important data to a general audience that will help back up a message you’re relaying to your audience. Unsure how else you can make animated infographics for your business?

If you’re trying to argue about the importance of saving an endangered species, or about the threat of a housing market crash, and you have empirical data prove your points, using animated infographics to make your data tangible, helps drive your point home that much more clearly.

And now that we’ve covered the styles of videos you can, it’s time to actually make the video.

Step 4: Producing Your Video

You’ve come this far, and now it’s time to actually put the video together. This is where you can get even more help from Explainify in making the best animated marketing video for your business.

There are a few simple things to consider in animated marketing video production, and this checklist can apply to multiple parts of the production process. You can also mix and match approaches to your video production.

So, first, and foremost, you need to figure out how hands-on you want to be.

Do you want to hire an in-house team or do the work in house, do you want to outsource your video, do you want to use a DIY approach, or do you want to mix and match?

Having an in-house team is a great asset because, simply put, you keep things in house. If you have the team size, and trust, to get things done, that’s amazing. You can also develop a strong identity and unique, easily-identifiable style to your animated marketing videos. An in-house team is especially useful if you plan on doing many animated marketing videos — or any kind of video production.

An in-house team can be very expensive, though, as you have to not only provide them with software and hardware that can cost a lot of money, but you have to pay them an ongoing salary, and unexpected headaches and delays can and will happen.

The alternative, if you’ve got the budget, is to outsource your video. This is a great technique for one-off videos, or if you don’t have a team on your staff that specializes in explainer videos for businesses. The burden of creating the video is out of your hands, of course. And Explainify is a proven company that helps make your visions into a reality.

You can also go for a DIY — do-it-yourself — approach if your budget is tight, or you have the skills to do so. It can also be a great way to start to learn how to make animated videos. There can still be a costly investment in hardware and software, as well as a time-sink, and possible frustration if you’re learning and cannot execute on your vision. But that doesn’t mean a DIY approach isn’t without its benefits.

Knowing how to create animated videos isn’t all that goes into production. You need to also consider scoring the video and narrating it too. And similar approaches can be applied to these parts of the video as well. Do you want to work in house to come up with music for your video, or maybe use a royalty-free website, or even record your own music? Do you want to hire a professional voice-over artist, or do it yourself? And, again, you have to consider things like software, and hardware, and so on.

Do you have a professional recording studio, or access to one? Do you have knowledge of sound mixing? A quality microphone, or sound-proofing? Questions like these are ones you have to be able to answer, to help you decide what is best for you, when scoring, and recording voice-over, for your video. Because if one part of your video seems amateur, like a blown-out microphone, it can really ruin all of your hard work and reflect poorly on your brand. That’s why it can be advantageous to leave brand and product explainer videos to experts like Explainify.

Well, you’ve got your video done, finally. But what to do with it now?

Step 5: Share with Your Audience

It’s not enough to simply have an animated marketing video and let it sit on your hard drive. You need to get it out in the world, and get eyes on it. Whether it’s a product, an idea, or a message, you have an audience in mind. And that audience needs to see the video.

So you need to consider things like keywords, search engine optimization, and so on. You need to think about the best ways to get your video out there. Do you have a budget for promoting your video? Can you construct your script, the title of your video, and so on, to make sure it’s easily digestible, relatable, and has viral potential? All of these things should be considered throughout the process of making your animated marketing video — right from the outlining process to scripting to actually animating the video itself. And at Explainify, also know what it takes to maximize your animated marketing video’s potential.

Well, that about covers everything you need to make the best animated marketing videos. We can’t wait to see your final product.

If you need help along the way, get in touch!