Videos are becoming increasingly crucial for businesses to promote their brand and lead potential customers into the sales funnel. Explainer videos are among the most influential of the different types of marketing videos. 96% of people watch an explainer video to learn about a product or service.
Below, you will learn how to create a compelling explainer video for your brand or business.
What is an explainer video?
Explainer videos are short videos that explain your company’s product or service. Good explainer videos also effectively promote your brand and show potential customers what you do, who you are, and why they must do business with you.
Explainer videos are typically used on home pages, landing pages, essential product or service pages, and social media. Can also use them for presentations, events, and crowdfunding campaigns.
Some benefits of creating an explainer video include the following:
- Improved SEO search rankings
- Longer engagement from viewers
- The increased conversion rate in your sales funnel
- Creation of content that can share easily
Why should you create this type of video?
Some reasons why you should create an explainer video for your business include the following:
- Increase brand awareness: Your brand personality can come out in your explainer video – the tone of your script and your visual style can reflect who you are. When you create a compelling explainer video, you provide helpful support to viewers who recognize your brand authority.
- Educate and inform: Whether teaching a new skill, imparting knowledge, or telling a story, good explainer videos – including simple animations – aim to teach and inform. Explainer videos also help consumers understand why they should choose you over a competitor.
- Selling or promoting a product or service: Good explainer videos allow people to understand your product or service better, so they see the value when they buy it.
- They help viewers retain information: Our eyes can process images faster than other sensory inputs. If the information is memorable, people are more likely to consider your offer when buying or sharing the information with others interested.
- Create easy-to-share content: You can share the video on other video-sharing platforms like YouTube and Vimeo by using keywords to help people find you and embed the videos to make them easier to share.
How do you choose the right explainer video?
There is no correct or incorrect method to decide what type of explainer video you want to invest in, and there are no set rules or science behind it. Explainer videos are creative, and there are no limits to creativity!
However, there are some points you can make to make an enormous impact on your audience. For example, would you choose a live-action video with real people or just a cartoon animation for a testimonial video?
For a good reason: the latter. If you use an animated 2D testimonial video, viewers might like it, but they won’t take it seriously, which defeats the purpose of a testimonial video!
Related: 7 Types Of Animated Explainer Videos You Can Use For Brand Development
How to create an explainer video (step-by-step guide)
When creating an explainer video, you should follow several steps. These include:
1. Research the topic
To create an excellent explainer video, it’s essential to do some research beforehand to ensure it’s as relevant to your audience as possible. You need to know the topic inside and out to make the most of it.
Research can include:
- Tracking conversations about the video topic on social media.
- Conducting surveys to find out what customers want to see in the explainer video.
- Using Google Analytics to get valuable metrics on the topic.
In your research, you should be guided by a few principles:
- You take something that can be very complex and simplify it so that it provides a clear solution.
- You provide a step-by-step solution to a problem. If you find a problem many people have and create an explainer video that only solves that problem, you have a winner on your hands.
2. Choose the type and style of the explainer video
The type of explainer video depends on the purpose of the video, such as whether you’re trying to explain a product or service or if you’re aiming to make a sale.
Types of explainer videos
- Animation: Animated explainer videos cover abstract or intangible topics, such as software. They’re also suitable for simplifying or explaining complex processes or topics.
- Whiteboard: If your budget is small and you want to keep things simple, a whiteboard explainer video may be just what you need. In this increasingly popular format, a hand, person, or animated character draws (and erases) on a white background to illustrate points in the video commentary. This style can be simple but memorable and effective.
- Professionally shot live-action video: A live-action video is shot with a camera instead of an animation. It works great when you want to show a step-by-step process for a physical product or people-oriented service. Real people in a video can help create an emotional connection with viewers.
Video Styles
- Instructional video: These videos can be defined more narrowly as tutorials for students and more broadly to inform business customers about products, services, and processes.
- Sales: Good explainer videos for sales should inform viewers about a product’s or service’s benefits and lead them down the sales funnel.
- Casual/Informative: This video style provides instruction or information about a product or service, using humor, simple methods of addressing, and simple, clear presentations that help make the content easy to understand and digest.
3. Write the script
The script is the heart of your explainer video. Even if you have a lot of great visuals, they will only work with solid ideas presented well in a script. Even if you hire a production team to create the explainer video, it makes sense to write the script yourself because no one knows your customers and their problems and preferences better.
Although ideas and stories are important, remember that explainer videos are a visual medium. Your script should include essential visual elements made explicit in the storyboard. Remember that you’ll probably create multiple versions of the script, so get something down on paper and go from there.
4. Design a storyboard
You have a good script for your explainer video, but if you only use it to create it, you risk that the finished product will look different from what you imagined. You can use a storyboard to make sure the visuals match what you have in mind.
Using software like StudioBinder, you can create a storyboard to visualize a project before you create a shot list, avoiding problems that can arise during production.
Shooting the explainer video is much more likely to stick to the script and be effective when keyframes are laid out in a storyboard.
5. Record audio
When creating an explainer video, you must consider the audio elements.
For the best presentation, it’s a good idea to hire a voice actor. At Upwork, you can find top independent voiceover professionals with experience and a focus on different types of work. Therefore, you may need professional help to record the audio.
6. Create the visual elements
To create the final explainer video, you must create several visual elements. These can include moving brand logos, animations, still images, live video footage, infographics, and more. Different software and expertise are required for the different visual elements. Therefore, you must have a plan for creating these elements and can provide them during the editing process. However, don’t worry if you need to have all the knowledge and software needed to create visual content.
7. Add music and effects
Of course, you can use visual elements for an explainer video. It would be best if you had background music tailored to your audience (e.g., something upbeat and current for a young audience) and sound effects accompanying the actions in the video (e.g., a rushing sound when something is erased on a whiteboard). Music and sound effects contribute significantly to the mood of the video.
Creating original music for a video can be expensive. The best news is that there are several free and low-cost royalty-free options for music and sound. Freesound and Musopen offer a variety of free music and audio tracks. YouTube also offers free background music options for video creation. AudioJungle boasts more than 1.5 million royalty-free audio and video tracks, starting at $1 each. If you want more input, Audacity offers a free multi-track audio editor and recorder that lets you create your music and soundtracks.
8. Edit your video
Once you’ve created all the visual elements, recorded the audio, and added the music and sound effects, the editing or post-production phase is where you put it into a finished explainer video.
How you edit the video depends on the type of video you shoot (e.g., live-action or animation). The editing process might start with organizing your video and audio files with logical names and placing them in well-organized folders.
Once you have your files organized, you can start editing the video. If it’s a person explaining the video and describing the process being shown, you can start with a wide-angle shot and use the best footage to get your message across.
Then work on the inserts, close-ups, and cutaways you want to use. You’ll also need to work on any soundtracks and special effects and fine-tune the video so that it’s what you want.
For video editing, you have a wide range of software packages for explainer videos at your disposal. A small selection of these are:
- Adobe Spark: This editing software claims to help you “create explainer videos for free and in minutes.” With this software, you can easily add images, video clips, icons, or speech to your videos and make changes to text, layout, images, and music.
- InVideo: This is another free product with thousands of video templates for different industries that can be customized and used to compose video elements. InVideo offers free stock music, images, and videos, or you can use your own.
- VideoScribe: VideoScribe lets you create whiteboard videos quickly and easily. It offers a drag-and-drop editor and access to a library of thousands of customizable images and music tracks. After a free trial, you can subscribe for as little as $14 each month (if you sign up for a year).
- Vyond: This online animation software lets you create professional animated videos. It offers templates, sounds, props, and much more. After a free trial, the animation editing platform offers different pricing plans, ranging from individual users to businesses.
9. Test your video with an audience
Before you upload your explainer video, test it with an audience to see if it’s effective. While the audience can be friends or family members, you’ll get more meaningful results if you use customers from your target audience and professionally managed focus groups. Did they understand what the video was trying to accomplish? Was there anything they didn’t like about it?
It may be tedious to change a finished video, but it’s better than producing something ineffective or offensive. You can also use the insights gained from video testing to improve future explainer video projects.
Some example questions you might ask the test groups are:
- What is the point of this video?
- How would you describe the product or service being explained to another person?
- How likely would you suggest the product or service to a friend?
- How likely would you buy it yourself?
- Is there anything we should have addressed in the video that we should include?
- What didn’t work in the video? What generated adverse reactions?
- How does the video affect your perception of the brand behind it?
- Would you watch more videos of this type from the same company?
10. Publish your video
Once completed, upload your explainer video to your website, landing page, or social media channels. You can also use social media ads aimed at people who don’t yet have a relationship with your brand to show them why they should.
You can even upload your video to a hosting service and embed it on your internet site or share it on social media. Since video-sharing websites usually have a lot of visitors, you can use keyword descriptions to help people find and engage with your video and brand.
Primary video streaming services include
YouTube is the top dog among providers. While considerable viewership offers the opportunity to find new customers, you can also get lost in the content constantly appearing on the platform.
Since Google owns YouTube, it is claimed that this connection will help your videos rank better in search results. You can also build your marketing email list with YouTube by using software to embed email signup forms in videos (the videos are politely paused while signup is performed).
Although Vimeo lags behind YouTube in terms of user numbers, it has made some excellent strides with its honest, minimalist presentations of video content.
With Vimeo, there is no cap on the length of videos uploaded, and less noise than YouTube (e.g., ads, games, and non-user-generated content). Vimeo is used by many professionals, especially in the creative and film industries.
While Wistia offers a much smaller audience than YouTube and Vimeo, it has good features for marketers. It offers excellent analytics tools that let you know where your viewers are coming from, where they click, and even where they left the video. The metrics will help you refine your future explainer videos.
Wistia also has a customizable video player that can be styled with your colors right down to the play button and provides a viewing environment that connects people to your corporate identity. For marketing strategy purposes, it also enables calls to action (CTAs) that help you collect emails or even require you to enter one before watching a video.
How can explainer videos help businesses?
- Increase conversion rates: Surveys have shown that about 85% of people are more likely to buy a product after watching an explainer video. With the help of explainer videos, business owners can track how many visitors to their website are potential customers. Also, there’s no need to manually count sales to identify popular products, as explainer videos show the number of views for each video, telling you which product or service people are interested in.
- Explain your product: explaining through written content only sometimes works because readers can interpret written content differently. But explainer videos are pretty simple and give people a better understanding of your product or service through audio-visual cues. You can better connect with your target audience by explaining why they should come to you and not your competitor in an explainer video.
- Higher ranking in SERPs: As mentioned earlier, Google rewards websites where users spend more time. Extensive text and tons of images (that are last updated in ages) rank low in Google searches, which means less attention; such sites also tend to drive away visitors. On the other hand, explainer videos pique visitors’ interest and help them make buying decisions quickly, so the site ranks higher in search engine results.
- Generate more interest: More and more companies promote their products and services on social media through images and videos. Studies have shown that over 70% of internet users watch online videos. Videos help generate interest in your business, products, and services.
- Increase traffic online: While there is no magic formula for establishing a video that ends up “going viral,” many products have become popular thanks to viral videos – even many international brands that we all buy today.
- Increase your audience’s retention: On average, we only retain about 10% of what we hear; but when we see something, we can retain up to 50% of it – so, say, experts. There’s no better advertising than word of mouth; when viewers like a video, they tend to share it, which can also help your audience grow.
- Make your pitch more interesting: A paper presentation can be tedious. PowerPoint presentations with diagrams and slogans are sometimes successful in engaging your audience. So get things moving! Make an explainer video for your pitch. You can grab the viewer’s attention immediately with a solid script, the right music, and visual elements. An explainer video is beneficial if your product or service is complicated. Traditional web content with lots of text, flash, images, colorful fonts, etc., is more likely to confuse or annoy the viewer than grab his attention, not to mention that it slows down your website loading time immensely. By contrast, putting all these ideas in a simple animated video keeps your site clutter-free AND gives the viewer the information they need to engage and convert.
- Easy sharing: Your explainer video can extend beyond your website. You can upload it to video-sharing sites like YouTube and Vimeo, using keywords to grab the attention of internet users. Smartphones can easily access these sites – so even if your site is not responsive, your video can be viewed by mobile users through these sites. People tend to watch and share videos rather than read and share large blocks of text.
- Show your personality: Let viewers know who you are; don’t just be a faceless company selling things online. And what’s the best way to do that? With explainer videos, of course! You build trust and connection with the viewer by putting a face to your name.
One essential thing to bear in mind concerning explainer video clips is that while it is possible to create a DO IT YOURSELF (do-it-yourself) video clip, the quality of an explainer video clip plays an essential duty in the success of the video. If you wish to develop an explainer video that provides the above advantages, you should deal with a professional video clip manufacturing business to produce your explainer video.
The Bottom Line
A good explainer video is short, simple, targeted, and resonates with viewers. By adhering to the steps above, you can create a high-quality explainer video to explain a new product, service, or process in a way that satisfies consumer needs, builds brand loyalty, and increases sales. With the right tools and help from experts, explainer videos can become one of your most effective marketing strategies.
If you understand and implement the above ideas, you can create a compelling video that will strengthen your brand and business. So, choose the best option according to your requirements and get ready to skyrocket your sales! For The Best Explainer Videos Contact WhiteboardvideoanimationserviceToday!