What comes immediately to your mind when you hear the phrase explainer video? Obviously, it would be about videos that describe and educate you about something, right?
Well, while you may not be entirely wrong in thinking this, there’s a whole lot more to it. A whole other arm of digital marketing in and of itself, it’s one of the most important tools in having your business noticed.
But you probably already know that, which is why you have come here, right? So, the question then goes:
- What is an explainer video, and why do B2B companies need it?
- How To Make An Explainer Video That Sells – 6 Steps To Success
- 1. Choose a video style first
- 2. Work on a stunning script
- 3. Record the narration & make suitable changes
- 4. Manage graphics and video elements
- 5. Edit and arrange video professionally
- 6. Publish and track performance
- 4 Crucial Tips to Keep in Mind
- 1. The shorter the video, the better
- 2. Keep it simple to understand
- 3. Focus more on values, less on features
- 4. Use professional help if needed
- Bottomline
- How To Make An Explainer Video FAQs
What is an explainer video, and why do B2B companies need it?
An explainer video is a brief, effective video that highlights your business’s product or service and its salient features. It demonstrates what they do and why prospective customers should care about it. Considered the video version of an elevator pitch.
Explainer videos are mostly about making it easier for the audience to easily grasp and relate to a complex notion or subject. Ensuring that consumers understand what a product does is the most crucial step in marketing it.
There exist numerous kinds of explainer videos that you may utilize depending on your business objective and aims. Whatever explainer video format you use, the objective is to describe your service or product while addressing the question “what’s in it for me?” from your audience’s point of view.
Did you know that more than 4 out of 5 marketers say that video content helps them increase the time that visitors spend on their website while also bringing in a greater number of leads and helping them understand the product better?
Explainer videos are also a very useful way to learn about a business. In fact, 96% of people have viewed an explainer clip to understand more about a service or product. What’s more, 85% of prospective buyers have a higher probability of purchasing from a company that provides an explanation video.
There are two key reasons why instructional videos have become so popular. To begin with, this style of content is simple to create and inexpensive. Secondly, as per a recent explainer video roundup by bread beyond, numerous B2B marketers and advertisers make explainer videos to convey marketing messages in a fun and engaging way while also enhancing conversion rates.
Boosting conversions is by far the most common digital marketing goal among B2B marketers. A conversion takes place whenever a user takes the required action on your business’s website. As a result, it is safe to conclude that the conversion rate is one of the most important indicators of the effectiveness of a B2B firm’s overarching marketing strategy.
The succinctness and ease of instructional videos are effective devices of communicating the brand message of a business on its part and providing customers with an inside look into a service or product.
These videos can also assist you in simplifying complex information into bite-sized portions so that your user audience can easily consume and understand it. And the better the job you do at promulgating your brand’s message, the better your user base understands your service or product and puts their trust in it.
Further Reading: How to Sell B2B Products and Services with B2B Marketing Videos
How To Make An Explainer Video That Sells – 6 Steps To Success
1. Choose a video style first
Before embarking on your video strategy, consider the style that you are going to employ for your video. There are numerous styles that you can choose for your explainer video. Given below are a few options that you can consider for weighing against your brand tone:
- Animated explainer video
- Screencast video
- Live-action video
- Whiteboard video
The style you choose completely depends upon the brand tone and voice you want to adopt. While you can certainly change this, it is recommended not to explore and experiment too much.
Further Reading: Animation or Real People in Your Online Video: Which is More Effective?
2. Work on a stunning script
A beautifully composed video script is what the success of an explainer video is built on. In most circumstances, having an “outsider” revise or even draft your script is beneficial.
Employ somebody that can look at your organization from a new perspective and describe your product or service in a manner that everybody can follow.
If you are gunning for outside help from video and ad agencies, most of them will require you to fill in a creative brief first. The creative brief makes you think about your organization as a whole and focus on defining what is truly important.
Make sure that your creative brief attempts to answer the following questions to get you started:
- What does your service or product do?
- Who is it meant for?
- What kind of issues does your service or product solve? How?
- How can a user get started?
Once you are done answering these, start composing your script while keeping the video style you chose in the previous step in mind. Keep referring to both of them frequently while writing, and they will help you create a truly original script and stay on the right track.
3. Record the narration & make suitable changes
Before you can record the narration of your script, it is important that you choose the voice of the video. While any voiceover can work, it is crucial to select a tone that is not only dulcet but also resonates with your demographic and reflects the right attitude about your brand.
After you have finalized a voice talent, try to record the script in a professional studio or within a room that has sufficient noise cancellation, along with the required hardware and recording software. After you are done recording your script, replay it again for speech typos and abnormalities and edit them accordingly to do away with mistakes, speech typos, and anything else that is of no need to you.
While editing your audio file, make sure to also remove any background noise and the sound of the inhalation and exhalation of the voice actor. This will ensure that you are finally left with only the narration and nothing else.
4. Manage graphics and video elements
While a polished voiceover is important to an explainer video, it is of equal significance to have titillating and pleasing video elements.
Again, how you go about this step, much like you do while creating your voiceover, depends completely upon the kind of video that you wish to make.
The important thing to remember here, however, is to not let your creative faculties take flight and focus on getting the job done with visuals that illustrate the script properly and complement the voiceover.
A lot of businesses also include snippets of video chats with customers in their explainer videos to lend it a personal touch. Figuring out what to feature in your video can be a little browbeat at first; however, you will find that once you have gotten the hang of it, the later videos will be a cakewalk.
5. Edit and arrange video professionally
Once you are done assembling the raw materials, it is time to finally compile your video. Choose a video editor and then get to work on it. Ensure that your video editor is easy to learn and has features that let you process your video’s special effects in a snap.
It is often better to simply build an initial draft of your project before taking it to the involved stakeholders for review. This ensures that your finished piece has the right input and that you don’t have to make revisions to your video after finishing it.
6. Publish and track performance
After you are done creating the video and having it validated by all your stakeholders, comes the time to share it. Now, it’s obvious that you should want it to have an inordinate number of views and even better conversions, which is where comes the part of monitoring your videos’ performance.
Before you do that, it’s important to decide where to host your video so that you can track the required performance metrics of your video. Another important aspect to consider is the flexibility allowed of placing the video at a place where it can garner the attention of the maximum eyeballs.
4 Crucial Tips to Keep in Mind
1. The shorter the video, the better
When it comes to creating video, succinctness of script is the best policy. In the words of popular writer and director Helen Klein Ross, “… the less you say, the more likely people are to remember.”
This is because humans can normally read only up to 200 words a minute. While people can do better still, it is not your goal to cram every trivial bit of information in there lest you wish to not let your customers understand your product.
Deciding the right length of the video can be tricky for different goals of explainer videos, but more often than not, there is a specific duration that hits the spot. According to data by The Next Web, there is an ideal length for specific video formats, which are mentioned below:
- Creative ads: 15-60 seconds
- How-to videos: 45-90 seconds
- Testimonial videos: 60-120 seconds
- Crowdfunding videos: 2 minutes and 30 seconds
While it’s evident that the exact length of every other explainer video will vary according to a number of factors, make sure that you more or less stick closer to the time durations mentioned above.
Even so, there exists an optimal video length for explainer videos for marketing purposes and it lies somewhere between 60 and 90 seconds. You can mostly condense the gist of your explainer video in this timeframe and deliver your message effectively while building upon engagement.
2. Keep it simple to understand
It’s understandable that you wouldn’t want your explainer videos to be boring; however, remember that its primary purpose is to educate, not to entertain. In order to keep your video simple and to the point, it is necessary to practice brevity and keep it simple.
A good explainer video focuses on four main things, namely the problem, the solution, how it works, and a call to action that instructs people what to do next.
This is because the lesser the information that you provide people at once, the more they are able to assimilate it. What’s more, it also creates an aura of mystery toward your product or service and prompts them to explore your offerings more. Focus on a maximum of two takeaways to optimize retention and make sure to have a clear CTA.
3. Focus more on values, less on features
Whenever brands create a new product, the urge is to wax lyrical about its features as much as possible. However, this is where many brands stumble with their explainer video efforts as they mistake it for an advertising conduit.
Your explainer video should therefore concentrate on one thing and one thing only, benefits to your customers.
Instead of filling your explainer video with every new feature included in your latest product or service, it is better to inform customers how they stand to benefit from them.
This helps them make up their mind sooner and also provides you with good quality leads.
4. Use professional help if needed
Nothing can kill a video sooner than bad audio. If you aren’t sure of the quality of the voiceover or any other auditory aspect, enlist professional help. Think about the kind of tone that most complements your video and the gender of the voice.
Other things such as the age of the voice and baritone are also important factors. The voice that you finalize doesn’t have to be of the same demographics as your target audience, but it should be one that they find appealing.
Bottomline
As per a few studies, it seems that the ideal explainer video focuses on making prospective users aware of its uses in a concise manner so as to maximize retention.
Of course, there are several other important factors too that you ought to bear in mind to create highly effective and engaging videos.When discussing explainer videos, in general, there is a sweet spot between “yawn” and “wow!“. And if you find that and complement it with the best practices mentioned above, you will certainly get amazing results.
Author Bio
Kashyap Trivedi is a passionate Content Creator and Digital Marketer. He likes to talk about recent trends in marketing, advertising, and customer experience. When he is not working you’ll find him playing tennis or meditating.
Hero photo by Malte Helmhold on Unsplash
How To Make An Explainer Video FAQs
When it comes to making explainer videos, there are a variety of software options available. One popular option is Adobe After Effects, which is used by professionals in the graphic design and video editing industry. After Effects allows users to create highly-detailed animations and graphics, making it ideal for creating explainer videos. Another popular option is Powtoon, which is a more user-friendly option that is often used by businesses and individuals who are new to video creation.
What should be in an explainer video? First and foremost, it should be clear and concise. It should also be visually appealing, with engaging graphics and animation. And finally, it should have a strong call to action that motivates viewers to take the desired action. When done right, an explainer video can be an incredibly powerful marketing tool.
To make an explainer video in Powerpoint, you’ll need to start by adding some basic elements to your slide deck. Begin by adding a title slide and an introduction slide. Then, add a series of slides that will walk your viewers through the main points of your presentation. Be sure to include plenty of visuals, such as images, charts, and infographics. As you create your slides, keep your audience’s attention span in mind and try to keep your explanations clear and concise.
Here are the steps on how to make a 2D explainer video:
1. Determine the key points that you want to communicate.
2. Come up with a creative and engaging way to visualize those points. Depending on your message, this could involve animation, infographics, or live-action footage.
3. Once you have your visuals sorted, you need to add a voice-over that brings everything together and tells your story in a clear and engaging way.
4. Finally, add some subtle background music to put your audience in the right frame of mind and you’re done!
Making an explainer video doesn’t have to be expensive. In fact, there are a number of ways to make one for free. One option is to use a free video editing program like iMovie or Windows Movie Maker. With these programs, you can create professional-looking videos without spending any money. There are also websites that offer high-quality stock footage & images that you can use in your videos. Finally, you can record your own voiceover using a microphone and free recording software.
