Brands worldwide are struggling to grab the audience’s attention, obey the customers’ hearts, and earn their loyalty. The competition is challenging and becoming even hotter. Companies start realizing that straightforward promotion doesn’t work with customers anymore. They need something fresh and innovative. They are looking for ways to introduce their offering, providing entertainment, pleasure, and excitement to customers at the same time. So, what’s the enigma of successful marketing in the digital age?
There is no single answer. However, there are several powerful tools of engagement that may help achieve the desired: animation, video content, and storytelling. The combination of all three gives birth to a new trend of video marketing – animated brand storytelling. In this article, we will consider how animated explainer videos can become an effective intermedium for brand storytelling.
Animated Brand Storytelling: Considering the Concept in Detail
Living on the verge of different concepts, the term of animated brand storytelling constitutes a particularly interesting topic. It’s an entirely new approach to explainer video marketing that implies combining the three most powerful tools of customer engagement: animation, storytelling, and video content. Let’s consider how each of them contributes to the concept.
Animation
Cartoons aren’t just for kids, we, adults, adore them too. Heroes of cartoons stick to our memory since childhood and create strong associations even today. We remember images from cartoons all life long. Similarly, cartoony videos for business draw the customer’s attention, create a lasting impression, and instill the desired associations with a brand.
An animated video is a great way to reveal the company’s style, mood, and personality. The art of animation allows you to introduce a brand as an innovation-thinking, creative, and extraordinary company. It’s a convenient method of transferring brand ideas, values, goals, and the mission in an easy to understand and playful form.
Storytelling
Storytelling has become one of the most popular ways to communicate the company’s ideas. We love stories. They engage us and make us listen to what a brand is saying. Storytelling is the most unobtrusive way to tell people about your company, products, and services, entertaining them at the same time.
As a story continues, a brand performs the role of the storyteller who is interested not only in selling something but also in being helpful for customers and bringing them value. As known, we are more likely to trust and purchase from brands that offer us something more than their products or services. Combined with animation, storytelling allows introducing the company creatively.
Video Content
Modern customers prefer videos to learn about new brands, product features, and offers. It helps them save time and receive all the essential information within several minutes. There is no need to read long and boring tutorials about how to assemble or disassemble a product or learn how to use a service. Now, you can just watch the a-few-minute explainer video to catch a product idea almost instantly.
The video format allows fast and easy transferring information to customers. Moreover, we can use promotional videos as a part of a marketing strategy in different ways: on a website, social media, online advertising, email marketing, etc.
An excellent example of animated storytelling is a video created for OpenGear by Explain Ninja.
Benefits of Animated Brand Storytelling for Business
Animated brand storytelling has a lot of attractive benefits for brands. It helps businesses build a remarkable online presence, acquire new customers, and increase conversions. Let’s consider the most significant advantages of animated videos.
Animated explainer videos allow communicating complex business ideas in a simple format
Do you need to explain how a complicated financial system or computer program works? Do you want to share your sophisticated business vision? Or do you probably want to describe your future product’s roadmap in front of the board of investors? Animated explanatory videos are likely the best way to do it. You can create an engaging story as an example of your business solution and convenience the viewers in your ideas using an eye-catching animated video.
Animated demo videos enable brands to introduce their products and services creatively
Animation allows your imagination to fly high. It doesn’t limit you in choosing characters, images, locations, and styles that can reveal your product’s personality in full. You can place a product in unexpected contexts, involve surprising heroes, and exciting visual effects to create the WOW effect and build an unforgettable brand image. Moreover, this format allows you to demonstrate all the product’s features, show details, and describe components. All this will help your product stand out from the competition and evoke the viewer’s interest in your brand. A nice example of an animated product demo is a video created for Nike.
Animated brand storytelling helps create a lasting impression and build a sharp brand image
Although animated videos are effective and unobtrusive ways of brand promotion, many brands don’t leverage them because they think that it’s an expensive option. However, the costs of animated video production are usually lower than expected. Furthermore, many top brands like Spotify, Crazy Egg, Dropbox, and Slack share that the benefits from animated promotional videos have exceeded their expectations and helped multiply sales. They also mentioned that it was one of their most successful investments. For example, an explainer video helped Crazy Egg raise 64% conversions & $21K extra revenue per month.
Animated stories evoke emotions, entertain, and help gain customer loyalty
Cartoony videos are an excellent way to drive the viewer’s emotions and create associations with a brand. Many famous companies combine animated videos with compelling stories that help them interact with customers on a more personal and emotional level. It helps create a “human” connection between a brand and a target audience. It also allows brands to build long-term relationships with customers and earn their loyalty.
Conclusion
Animated storytelling is a powerful practice that can add more fresh air to your marketing strategy and bring a lot of benefits to a business. Combining all advantages of animation, storytelling, and video content, animated storytelling helps build a strong brand image, earn customer trust and loyalty, increase conversions, and grow the overall customer satisfaction. Hopefully, this brief overview of animated storytelling powers will inspire you to do new creative experiments and implement it for your company.
