People process visuals faster than text, especially when the image is moving, which means animated content in particular, grabs the attention of consumers in less than 1/10th of a second. Using animation can help a complex message to be displayed as a story, which helps your audience to visually follow every aspect of your message and retain it. In fact, 90% of information transmitted to the brain is completely visual, so animation as a marketing tool becomes even more legitimate and justified.

In this blog we are going to look at 5 different ways you can use animation to supercharge your marketing efforts.

1 – Explainers

Whether you are sharing information about a product, service, concept, or idea, an explainer video is the ultimate tool to educate your audience. A staggering 96% of people have watched an explainer video to learn more about a product or service and 44% of video marketers primarily use animated explainer videos and for good reason.

As mentioned above, animation can take complex topics and introduce them more simply to your target audience. It is also perfect for visually presenting concepts, which might be difficult, impossible, or too expensive to film. This makes animation a great vehicle for explainer videos.

If you need to show your customers how to navigate around your website or how to use your app? Using an animated explainer could be so much more engaging that watching a live video of a person simply walking through the steps. Using an animation would also allow you to distil the navigation into the key steps rather than re-creating it verbatim, so if there are changes in the future small amends can be made to the animation rather than needing to re-shoot footage.

Looking for educational content such as how the heart pumps blood around the body or what happens to the earth’s crust during an earthquake? These concepts would be difficult or potentially dangerous to film. However, using an animation to explain these concepts makes the process much easier.

Do you need to show your clients how a piece of machinery physically works? This might be difficult to film, but using animation allows you to show exactly what’s happening and the benefits that your machinery could bring to them and their business.

Using a concise explainer video on your website and social media can also increase your conversions by as much as 80% so it’s worth thinking about how you can utilise animated explainers for your business.

We produced this animation for EIT International as part of a series of explainer animations for the pharmaceutical world. The aim was to explain more about the products and services that EIT International provide for their clients.

2 – Product Demos

When asked how they’d most like to learn about a product or service, two-thirds of people (66%) said they’d prefer to watch a short video and using animation can open the possibilities even further.

Animation allows you to show exactly how products work, in any scenario that can be created. This also includes getting inside the product to show what might be happening, such as the effect that medicine might have on the body. It’s also possible to use animation to show a step-by-step process of using a particular piece of software, so customers can follow the steps to learn in the future.

The benefit of using animation for product demos is that you can feature the key elements of any service or product. This approach allows you to zero in on the benefits and features that may not be obvious but might help to alleviate a customer’s pain points and help them to achieve. Animated product demos can also be used to educate your internal team, giving them the knowledge required to successfully promote your products or services.

We worked with GripCore to create this 3D animated explainer for their Doorco products. Using animation allowed us to strip the elements of the door apart showing viewers the different elements, which combine to create a door of high quality and strength.

3 – Training Content

Although training your internal team is an essential part of every business, it can be expensive with 85% of every dollar spent on classroom training is spent delivering it. Creating animated training videos offers the ability to create personalised training content for your business that can be re-used year after year.

Using animations means you can use concepts that might not be safe or possible to film, such as the scenarios required for health and safety training. It also offers the opportunity to show scenes that might not be filmable, such as inside the body or under the ground.

One of the key elements of training materials is that they need to be up to date. Whether this is ensuring product training videos relate to the latest product model or health and safety training adheres to the latest government guidance. Using animations means training videos can be easily updated to have longevity. There is no need for expensive re-shoots if there are changes needed to the content, often making it a more cost-effective solution.

This animation created for Residential People trains viewers on how to use their platform.

4 – Supporting Customers

Keeping customers happy is important to all businesses and providing them with support to successfully use our products and services is a key part of this. Customers often like to learn themselves rather than ask for help, so customer service videos are key.

43% of video marketers say video has reduced the number of support calls they’ve received, so creating video content to answer customers’ most frequently asked questions or pain points can be smart. A reduction in support calls and emails can also free up time internally, which will allow your team to create even more helpful content that your customers will love.

Animation is perfect for customer service videos, as it can be easily updated as products or services evolve. Using animated video can also present all details in a short time, where written content is likely to be ignored or missed. In fact, readers retain 10% of information when reading, while video viewers retain 95% of a message when watching a video.

In this 3D photo-realistic animation we produced for Oscar Acoustics we were able to show exactly how the ISO Mount Type 3 can be adjusted for different heights. A crucial aspect of using the product.

5 – Awareness

Whether you need to increase awareness of your brand, a particular change that you’ve recently made such as going carbon neutral or your approach to something like how your approach your team’s mental health, doing this with an animation can be a sensible choice.

Using motion tracked graphics can help text be more interesting and stand out, whereas using an illustrated or cartoon style can help to bring a different mood to your message.

When we wanted to take part in International Day of Happiness, we created this illustrated animation to show the things that make our team happy in a simple and clean way.

Let’s Get Animating

Thanks for reading our top 5 Ways to Supercharge your Marketing with Animation, we hope it’s helped you see why animation might be the perfect fit for your next video project.

Why not book a call with our team to see how we can help you create animations that work.