How to Create Animated Marketing Videos that Resonate with Your Audience

Animation has a special place in our hearts. As kids, we spent countless hours in front of the TV enjoying our favorite cartoons. And today (if you're like me, at least!) you can appreciate animation as one of the best types of video for learning new ideas and discovering products.

As a digital marketer, you want to leverage this dynamic and fun format to bring visibility to your brand and interact with your users. But to successfully add animation to your video marketing strategy, you need to familiarize yourself with the basics of this content.

As we want to help you with this task, we've written this guide to tell you all the essentials about animated video production. Going over some practical tips about engaging your viewers and making your message resonate in their minds.

When producing marketing videos, you will have more than one opportunity to make important choices and use your full creativity. But the final quality of your piece builds on a solid foundation: your understanding of the video's ideal audience.

Knowing your audience doesn't just involve learning about their hobbies here and there—you need to become obsessed over your future viewers! To do that, put yourself in their shoes and start thinking about what aspects of their experience will draw them to your video.

Some of the crucial areas you need to explore involve:

• Where they come from. Be aware of their background and the problems your prospects face in their day-to-day.

• What other solutions they’ve tried. Your brand will not be their first point of contact to meet their needs. They've probably turned to other providers in the past, so it's helpful to know who they are and what they do.

• The ideal place they dream of. Your audience doesn't want just any old solution, but something that helps them lead happier, easier, or more creative lives. Explore these aspects of your targets' psychology so you can frame your story effectively.

After conducting this research, it's time to create your unique message through a script and storyboard.

Composing a Persuasive Script

The moment you approach a video production company, you need to have a pretty good idea of how you want your story to unfold. Effective marketing videos do much more than pitching a product, so you want to take the time to outline key scenes to introduce your brand’s solution.

For purposes of your script, you want to think of at least four elements to include in your video:

• The hook. To engage audiences from the get-go, you must activate the right motivation in their minds. For that, you can rely on various resources, such as insightful questions, which involve viewers personally with the content. Striking data points, on the other hand, help drawing the most curious among prospects.

• The characters. Introduce viewers to people who think and feel like them. Through their example, a character’s discovery journey will be the best guide to convey your message.

• The problem. As in any good story, you need to create conflict. Put your video’s characters through situations that are similar to what your audience goes through every day (e. g., work piling up, no free time to themselves), so they can connect with them.

• The takeaway. After setting the basic context of your story, you must show your characters testing your solution. Only by going through all this development will your product look plausible and useful to your prospects.

Visualize Your Ideas Through a Storyboard

Once you have a clear structure for your story, you need to work on a storyboard to specify how it will develop visually. This step is crucial, as it allows you to translate your ideas into real scenarios and see if they really work.

To create a functional storyboard, you don't need to have every single scene drawn on paper, like in old cartoons. Focus instead on how you want to see the piece’s crucial moments represented. These include your product’s introduction, the characters’ reactions, and how they look when testing your solution.

By designing a good storyboard, you will have an objective framework with which you and your colleagues can agree on the video's essentials before moving into the production phase.

How to Customize Your Video to Your Target Audience

Having outlined the essential moments of your script and storyboard, you must now focus on making your piece's style and feel fit your audience's outlook.

The first aspect to work on is keeping the language simple. As your video will compete on social media among other popular content, you need to make it approachable and friendly to audiences. So, stick to professional but plain language, avoiding convoluted or highly technical wording.

Also important is to design compelling characters that resemble your viewers. Your video's characters are not guinea pigs to demonstrate your solution. In their values, tastes, and appearance, a character ideally resembles your targets, so you should strive to make him act and look like them.

Branding Strategies for Your Video

Yes, we've mentioned several times that you shouldn't make your animated video overly promotional. But still, you have many options to fully customize your piece and make it worthy of your brand.

To do this, you don't need to reinvent designs from scratch, but use the features of your brand identity wisely.

• Using your brand designs. Include your logo, tag lines, and other brand designs in strategic places in the video. For example, the logo can either be placed along with the product or in the video’s corners throughout. Tag lines are best placed in the final frame, where viewers can see them as the video ends.

• Coloring your piece. When used right, color is not only vital to bring the video to life, but it also promotes brand identification. Therefore, try to use your brand colors in strategic places, such as the characters' clothing, your product, and other images.

• Adding a call-to-action. Lastly, indicate to viewers the best communication channels and actions to gain more information. Keep it simple: a short phrase like "Start your 30-day trial" or "Want to know more?" accompanied with your social handles will do.

Promoting and Distributing Your Video

Having put a lot of effort into creating your animated video, it would be a shame if it didn't reach its intended audience. However, one of the advantages of this type of content is that it easily adapts to different formats and social platforms.

Just to give you a few good ideas, you can use your animated pieces as:

• Trailers on landing pages. Instead of filling your pages with text, video gives viewers an extra incentive to find out more about your brand and offerings.

• Regular feed posts. Coupled with a short, informative copy, your video will be great content to engage your Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter audience with likes and comments.

• Social media stories. Repurpose your piece for use as ads in social media stories. Instagram users, for example, are allowed to use up to 45 seconds (three Story Cards) per ad, which gives you enough time to showcase your video’s highlights.

Summing Up

Persuasive storytelling, striking visuals, audience research to personalize pieces: these are the elements that make animated videos powerful additions to your marketing strategy.

But the best thing about this class of content is that it can be adapted to any message. Just as you can use it to promote your brand and products, you can also create more didactic videos, where you take viewers through a new learning process in a playful and interesting way.

Animation can open up a whole new world of options for starting a conversation with your prospects. What will you use it for?