The Best Explainer Videos: Key Traits, Benefits and Examples
Differentiating your brand in our fast-paced and competitive world can be very challenging. Attention is an expensive commodity, but crucial for delivering your company’s message to your target audience.
One way to win the battle for attention is by having an excellent explainer video that grabs your prospect’s attention and quickly conveys to them why your product is the solution to their problems.
But making a great explainer video is no easy task, and knowing where to start can be difficult. That’s why we’ve put together this article where we will cover what an explainer video is, what benefits they have, and what qualities make up the best explainer videos out there.
What Is an Explainer Video?
An explainer video is a short video used by a company to explain and highlight its unique offering in a compelling and efficient way. It’s usually a part of a marketing or sales program, and is often also found on the company’s homepage.
6 Benefits of Explainer Videos
Explainer videos have many benefits for your business, and we think they should be part of every marketer’s toolkit. Let’s have a look at six ways that explainer videos can improve your marketing and communication:
Bring Clarity to Your Product
No matter how complicated your product is, every topic is explainable in a fun and interesting manner through an explainer video. One of the most significant benefits of animated videos is that we learn and process information better from video than from regular text. A good explainer video will help your prospects understand your product better.
Clarity is essential to stand out in a saturated marketplace while simultaneously making it much easier to capture the true essence of your brand and deliver it to your potential customer. Which in turn leads to higher conversion rates.
Sell Without Being Salesy
Selling without sounding like an annoying salesperson can be tricky, but explainer videos do a great job at it. The three primary goals of an explainer video are to explain, educate, and entertain. The truth is that you don’t have to hard sell anything if you do a good job at explaining your unique offering in a way that resonates with your target audience.
When you enable your prospects to truly understand your product without them feeling like they’re being sold anything, the chances of them becoming customers is much better as they’ll feel like they’ve come to their own conclusion, and not gotten persuaded. In short, explainer videos spark interest and act as a powerful selling tool.
A Powerful Attention-Grabber
Video is undoubtedly one of the most attention-grabbing content forms available. People are way more likely to stop reading a text than they are to stop watching a fun and interesting video.
Videos are more engaging and captivating than other types of content. The fact that your prospects are more likely to watch a whole video than read a text to the end, combined with the added attention it grabs, makes explainer videos very efficient for delivering your message.
Fits Anywhere in Your Sales or Marketing Funnel
Whether you’re delivering a sales pitch to a high-profile prospect or just sending out your weekly newsletter, an explainer video does a great job entertaining and informing. Explainer videos help you shorten your sales cycles and increase your sales velocity. Because an explainer video is so efficient, it allows you to deliver your sales pitch in a mere 90 seconds.
Easy To Share
When you’re presenting your business to a potential customer, it’s crucial to offer content formats that they can easily share with the stakeholders in their organization. This is especially important when dealing with mid-market and enterprise prospects, as there will often be multiple parts working on the deal.
Explainer videos allow people to share your offering with their colleagues in an interesting and straightforward way. Add to that the opportunity to break down complicated product concepts in a fun, short, and concise manner, and it becomes clear how much an explainer video can improve your sales processes.
Boosts Traffic to Your Website
Video content improves your search rankings. Video in general is becoming increasingly popular, and including explainer videos on your website is a great way to boost traffic and improve your overall SEO. Because explainer videos are so engaging, users stay longer on your website to watch the entire video. Google loves this and recognizes your content as more valuable if users stay on your page longer than average.
Different Styles of Explainer Videos
One of the things you need to decide when creating an explainer video is which style to pick. There are two fundamentally different styles of explainer videos: animated and live-action, each with different strengths.
Animated Explainer Videos
Animated explainer videos are the most popular. With an animation, no idea is impossible, meaning you can communicate anything you desire and create an engaging explainer video. Animated videos are perfect for explaining complex and abstract products, such as tech products and software.
Not only are animated videos engaging and fun to watch, but they are also easily updated. This is valuable for any company, as the product will always get updated at some point, and not having to reshoot an entire video saves time and money.
There are many different ways an animated explainer video can look, including 2D animation, 3D animation, motion graphics, and whiteboard animation. Any idea, no matter how wild, is executable with an animated video.
Live-Action Explainer Videos
A live-action explainer video can be an excellent choice if you want to connect with your viewer on a deeper and more personal level. Just like the animated counterpart, a live-action explainer video accomplishes the same goals of explaining your product to your prospect. However, some products or services can be challenging to explain with a live-action video, especially if they are more abstract.
Related reading: Video Brief Template: How To Write A Winning Creative Brief For Video Production
5 Key Traits of a Really Good Explainer Video
Making a great explainer video can be challenging, but here are 5 key traits of a really good explainer video:
Conveying and Interesting Script
Your script sets the tone for the explainer video and is responsible for delivering your company’s message in a meaningful and concise way. Getting your script down first is crucial, as it will set the length of the video and impact visuals.
Intriguing Storytelling
Storytelling enables you to deliver your message and convey to your potential customer that you’re the solution to their problems. Great storytelling is done by packaging your information in a way that makes the listener receive and makes sense of it.
Exciting and Engaging Animations
Well-done and smooth animations are crucial for a great explainer video, as they are usually what keeps the listener engaged. The animations set the tone of your brand and also focus the viewer’s attention on what’s important.
High-Quality Voiceover
The voiceover is the salesperson of your explainer video and will be the deciding factor for your video’s success. The voiceover should deliver your message in a fun, memorable, but most of all conveying way, to ensure that your explainer video reaches its maximum impact.
Converting Call-to-Action
At the end of your explainer video, it’s essential to have a converting call to action. This could be visiting a website, contacting the sales team, etc. The call-to-action should not sound too salesly as that could break the recently gained trust. It should also inspire your prospect and make them want to make a change.
Related reading: 5 Calls-to-Action You Should Be Using In Your Videos
Pitfalls To Avoid In Explainer Video Production
There are many pitfalls you need to avoid in explainer video production that can destroy the effect of your explainer video.
Poor Level of Quality
Sacrificing quality is never a good idea and especially not for an explainer video. A low level of quality could be anything from sloppy animations to ugly fonts and alignment, which will undoubtedly limit your video’s success. While high quality doesn’t ensure that you deliver your message, it makes your brand look more appealing and keeps the viewer engaged.
Not Having a Specific Target Audience
A great explainer video highlights a problem that the company can solve. If you don’t have a specific target audience, you can’t focus on one exact pain point. Instead, you should make it as clear as possible to reach your desired prospect, and tell them how they will benefit from your product or service.
Being Too Generic
Your competitors most likely solve the same problems that you do, so creating an explainer video about what you do and what problems you solve won’t cut it. You need to make your company stand out and find your unique approach to reach your target audience and differentiate yourself.
Hook That Doesn’t Spark interest
It’s commonly said that you have about 10 seconds to capture someone’s attention when presenting a video. This means that you need a hook that sparks interest and is shown early on in the video. Remember, your target audience most likely understands how the type of product you’re selling works, so don’t waste time explaining it in detail.
Wrong Call-To-Action
Even if you create the best explainer video ever to exist, your benefits from it will be severely limited without a great call to action. Many companies simply show their logo or slogan at the end, when you instead need to take advantage of the viewer’s recently gained inspiration. They need to understand what to do next, so your CTA could be anything from a demo request to a contact form.
3 Explainer Video Examples to Be Inspired By
To find inspiration and ideas for your own projects, check out the three explainer video examples we’ve gathered below:
Apple
To kick things off, tech behemoth Apple is industry-leading when it comes to awesome explainer videos. This time it was about their mission to make every Apple product carbon neutral by 2030, and they deliver this message in an inspiring and exciting way. The animations are top-of-the-line, and the high-quality voice acting combined with a catchy script is what makes Apple’s videos so great.
GRG
Glacier Restaurant Group wanted a recruitment video that would connect with Gen Z and millennials – so we made one for them. Using the animated explainer video style, we were able to get creative with our ideas and create something that really suited the target audience. The breathtaking illustrations with the energetic voiceover make this explainer video both engaging and inspiring.
SwiftPass
SwiftPass is a mobile payment company that offers a wide range of financial services. With this explainer video, they can turn their otherwise complex software into an uncomplicated and inspiring explainer video. The visuals are also great, and their team did an excellent job at combining brand colors and beautiful animations.
Key Takeaways
- An explainer video allows you to explain your company’s unique offering in an exciting and compelling way.
- The best explainer videos offer a wide range of benefits for your business, including increased product clarity and boosted traffic to your website.
- There are pitfalls that must be avoided, such as having a poor hook or call-to-action.
- Many of the world’s leading companies use explainer videos to reach and deliver their message to the target audience.
How Covalent Can Help
Now that you’ve seen examples of some of the best explainer videos out there, and read about their benefits, you may be interested in making one for your brand. But it’s also understandable if you feel a bit overwhelmed with everything you need to nail. That’s why we’re here, and we’re happy to help!
Covalent is an experienced video production company based in Pittsburgh, and we can help you create a fantastic explainer video and many other things. Reach out to discuss how we can empower your brand with unique video content.