Video production 101: creating effective explainer videos

Explainer videos

You have a brilliant product or service. Your audience has a problem. Your business will solve it. But how do you make your audience aware of your offering? 

An explainer video or animated explainer is the most effective medium in communicating a product or service. It highlights predominant features and benefits in a quick and concise video that can leave your audience with a clear visual overview. Any brand can do create an explainer regardless of industry, product or service. With the right animation studio or video production agency, an explainer video can become an invaluable piece of brand storytelling.

What’s in an explainer video? 

An explainer video often sits alongside a hero video, one that generates brand awareness and introduces the idea of why your product or business exists. Once this video piques interest, an explainer follows to highlight key features or how to use the product or service. Key points to consider:

• Benefits and features (but mostly benefits)
• What specific problems are you solving?
• What are the key benefits you’d like to highlight?
• How does your product or service work?
• Length – keep it under two minutes
• What tone would you like the video to use and does it reflect your brand guidelines?
• What’s your call to action?

What is an animated explainer?

Audiences are time-starved and need brands to communicate as efficiently as possible. If they’re shopping around for similar products or services, an animated explainer is the best way to get your message across quickly and succinctly. Animation can simplify complex features, taking viewers on a journey that’s otherwise difficult to do in live action. They can illustrate pain points and address problems which your business can solve – a persuasive and effective way to explain why they need your product or service. 

Is an animated explainer right for my business?

Any brand can reap rewards from an animated explainer. However, SaaS, science and tech industries can benefit a great deal, indeed any company with products and services that are otherwise difficult to demonstrate live.

Take a look at this hand-drawn animation we created for soil improver Carbon Gold. To explain the science around the biochar, we took viewers underground to illustrate its effects on roots at a microscopic level, which would be impossible to show in live action filming. 

Whatever your business goals, an explainer is very effective in generating leads. Often placed on a landing page, a website homepage or on a social channel, these videos boost conversion rates by as much as 144% when added to a website. 

What is a whiteboard video? 

A whiteboard animation is a video of images and text drawn onto a white background, accompanied by narration. Often referred to as scribe video, doodle video or hand drawn video, a whiteboard video brings your message to life. It provides engaging content that’s memorable and custom-made, and best of all, if you use the templated software solutions with the cutout image of the hand, production costs are lower than animation. The software and clip art style imagery means that turnaround time can be shorter and your whiteboard video can be easily adaptable should you need to update it at a later stage.

What is a stop motion explainer video?

One of the most engaging forms of explainer is a stop motion video, commonly employed in Facebook ads for food and lifestyle brands. With our offices in the HQ of Aardman Animations we know all about stop-motion as we see snapshots of the filming of the new Morph movie. Stop motion involves photographing objects over and over again, making minimal adjustments every time they’re repositioned. These are then combined into a video sequence. Though they can be powerful and effective, they require a lot of time and patience, which makes stop motion videos costly.

What is a ‘how to’ tutorial video?

‘How to’ tutorial videos are a form of explainer video that highlights a specific problem and helps your customer to solve the problem at hand. This saves viewers time and can help build trust and loyalty amongst your audience. Over time, the more ‘how to’ videos you create, the more problems you solve. By providing helpful content, you’re nurturing potential customers so when they’re ready to purchase, you can bet they’ll turn to your product or service. You’ll also see which is the most popular video and so where in your business process your customers need help.

Explainer video examples

For UX analytics platform, Actual Experience, an animated explainer was the only way to highlight the benefits of its digital platform. It’s a complicated proposition, analysing customer experience of networks in the cloud and they needed to explain their offering in just two minutes. Skylark created a conceptual 3D world that visualises the customer experience, showing all the connectivity from internet to application. These videos were then used as a sales tool by the new business team to give new leads an overview of the service.

Both live action and 3D animation were employed to create this explainer for learning and training platform, Kallidus. Multiple staged scenarios shared the screen with 3D animations of the app in use.

Creative explainer video production services

Ready to get started on your explainer video? Skylark Media is offering a free 1 hour video marketing consultation to help you frame your video strategy. Email us [email protected]