How to make a smashing explainer video that engages your audience AND meets your expectations
What is an explainer video?
An explainer video is a short, online marketing video used to quickly explain your company's service or product. You'll often see an explainer video on a website's home page, a landing page, or a complex product page. It's known that you can boost conversion rates sky-high (almost 150 percent in some cases) by having a memorable explainer video on your website.
Keeping the video between 60 to 90 seconds will help the viewer focus on and understand your product quickly whilst retaining lots of new information. Can you imagine trying to explain cryptocurrency to your grandpa? Your simplified video will help him understand. If he doesn't identify with it, then you've lost your audience, wasted your effort, time, and money.
Tips and tricks
Our expert team has put their heads together and covered everything you need to know about creating a successful explainer video, why they are so essential, and how you can help your client understand.
Step one: First things first, put yourself in the client's shoes
Before you even start thinking about the script, we've come up with some critical questions you should ask yourself, your team, business associates, the current customer.
What is the purpose of the video? Is it to increase awareness, create more leads, reach a broader audience, form part of an advertising campaign, generate sales, or even simply inject some humour into someone's day?
Who is your target market? You need to understand who you are selling your service or product to because this will determine the language, style, and messaging. You might want to take the time to survey your customers so that you can understand their concerns, what causes a meltdown or confuses them about your service or product.
It's essential to understand why you do what you do. Are you solving a problem? If so, what is the problem? How can your product or service make your solution better than your competitors?
Lastly, what are your competitors doing? It's essential to understand how you differentiate from your competitors. This information is important so that you have a grassroots understanding of what's happening in your industry.
Step two: Create an awesome script
Now that you have identified your goals, you'll need to write your script. Before you become overwhelmed, our trusty team has got some well-practised advice for you.
A simple and well-structured script contributes 90% to the success of your video and here is how:
Introduce the problem that your product solves by addressing the pain points of your target audience. That will help the audience identify with the problem and keep them watching.
Present how your product solves the problem and makes your client’s life better and easier.
Use a clear call to action and guide your viewer to taking the next step. Perhaps by inviting them to check out the product on your website or contact you for further information or a demonstration.
Communicate with your audience in a familiar way, like you know them, by speaking in the second person and using words like you and your.
Don't use technical terms that your audience won't understand, and keep the language clean and simple. Why use eponymous when you can say, namesake?
Keep in mind the tone that you want to use. Most explainer videos use a friendly, conversational tone to retain attention.
Try something unexpected and inject a little bit of humour or your brand personality to make the video more enjoyable.
Step three: Highlight the Benefits
While you are writing the script, you'll need to keep the focus on your audience. Whilst we are all very proud of the technical aspects of our new products, at this stage, your audience doesn't give two hoots! They are only interested in how your product will solve their problems and make their lives easier. Theodore Levitt, a Harvard Business School professor, once said, "People don't want to buy a quarter-inch drill; they want to buy a quarter-inch hole!" So, sell them the hole and address their emotions.
Step four: Repeat and share? Make sure that your audience enjoys the explainer video
As you know, there is a whole host of incredible technology on the market that can help you with animation, video production, music, and voice-overs. Exceptional quality has become standard, so don't attract attention by publishing poor content.
Your visuals, in theory, should be secondary to your narrative and should support and strengthen your story.
Step five: Listen to the voices
It's important to have exceptional sound quality, so ensure that you invest in a professional voice-over. You don't need the dulcet tones of Michelle Pfeiffer or Denzel Washington. There is plenty of talented professional voice-over artists that sound just like them. Your audience is real people and enjoys being entertained.
Step six: Strive for KISS
Always strive for KISS, the well-known acronym for Keep It Simple Stupid.
Ensure that the video is kept between 60 and 90 seconds long.
Make sure your message is clean, simple, and doesn't miss the point.
Don't tire your audience with a busy voice-over and a lot of rambling words. As a good rule of thumb, 150-words per minute is just right.
It's not rocket science
As long as you take the process step-by-step, the above tips will help you make a massive difference to your next explainer video. However, if you still find the whole process daunting, have other priorities, or you'd simply like to find out more, we would love to help.