What to Look for In a Great Whiteboard Video?

Even after a decade of popularity, whiteboard videos remain the go-to style when you need a marketing piece that explains and promotes complex products and services.

The style is just hard to beat when it comes to clarity and simplicity, as it can convey intricate marketing messages in a compelling way. After all, having your story's visuals take shape and animate in front of the audience's eyes has proven to be a great way to keep people engaged!

However, as effective as the whiteboard formula can be, not every whiteboard video hits the marks for your video marketing strategy. There are many elements that need to be in place to make the whole piece effective.

In this article, we’ll walk you through these elements and tell you all you need to make whiteboard animation videos your audience won’t soon forget!

1. The script

Like any type of explainer, whiteboard videos need a story that will tell your brand’s message and, at the same time, keep it as short as possible.

The basic structure for whiteboard videos intended to bolster your marketing strategy usually has three key moments.

If you have a hard time drafting these moments, start by imagining a story in which a character has a problem, and your product is the hero who will help them solve it. That character needs to represent your target audience (taking into account demographic data such as gender and age), and they should experience these three key events within your videos' tale.

If you want to see these principles in play, check out this video we created that involved a complex software implementation and how this three-step structure allowed us to make it simple and engaging:

2. The Storyboard

The main goal of a storyboard is to visually describe how the story is going to be developed throughout the video. If you hire a professional company, the storyboard is made by the creative director, and it's one of the most important steps of the whole video production process.

Here’s a fine storyboard sample of the previous video:

3. The three classic elements

The first thing you can't forget is the white background. This clean and simple style is the key to keeping your video easy to understand. With a colored background, you might create a fabulous video, but it won’t look and feel like this style and won't enjoy its benefits.

A great tip is to use your brand colors to highlight some parts of the design — just a hint of color to brand your black and white video.

Above that, you should add a hand that will draw the story. Some years ago, it used to be a real artist who drew everything in front of the camera. Nowadays, it’s a digital image of a hand that a real artist designs and moves to make the drawings come alive.

The hand will be holding the third classic element: the black marker.

4. Animations

When it comes to content marketing strategies, whiteboard videos need very detailed work. In fact, it’s one of the hardest explainer video styles to do justice to.

On whiteboard animated videos, drawings and characters need to resemble a hand-made drawing made with a magic marker or a stylish pen. That’s why so much relies on the artist’s shoulders.

After the design step, a professional digital artist will animate everything -from the character’s movements in the scene to their facial expressions- to make the drawing come alive.

5. Interconnected designs

Even if you could design individual scenes (and there are quite a few lame whiteboard videos like that online), interconnected designs are what make the difference between an ok and an amazing video that will let your brand shine. After all, a real whiteboard video is built from a continuous and interconnected sequence of drawings.

Sometimes you’ll need to clean the whiteboard at a point in your video, but try to do this as few times as possible. You don’t want to break the story into too many pieces and lose your audience.

Why is this important? These interconnected drawings hook your audience's attention. They follow the action as it develops on the screen. If you want to see how drastic a difference active, quality animations can make, just do a quick search for any static whiteboard piece and compare it with something like this:

In this 3-minute-long animation, every scene is a part of a huge design that prompts the viewer to keep watching until the end of the video. Also, note that there's no wasted effort. The idea here isn't to add motion and connections just for the sake of it. Each transition has a purpose and meaning behind it.

Wrapping up

So, what makes a whiteboard video stand out even in overcrowded marketing environments like social media platforms? That’s right, engaging scripts, detailed characters, and interconnected designs.

As long as you take the time to get these three basic building blocks right, you'll have a much better handle on what makes this style special, which should improve the quality of the finished piece.

Now it’s time to take this knowledge and put it into practice! Start drafting in your head what an awesome whiteboard video for your brand would look like, and break it down to these key elements.

Not only will it make your job easier, but it will help you keep your focus where it's needed and help you produce a far better video!