The 8 Types of Animation Your Business Needs in 2020
Animated video is one of the most effective ways to capture (and keep) attention, regardless of the subject matter.
It’s a versatile, engaging and exceedingly affordable way to communicate with your market.
But it’s also uncharted territory for many business owners, entrepreneurs and marketers.
The good news - animation is accessible, budget friendly, and explained in detail below to give you a better grasp of how it can help your business.
Explainer Videos
Undoubtedly the most popular type of animated video, the explainer does exactly what it say on the tin. Explainer videos are great for communicating complex, confusing, dry or abstract ideas in an engaging format.
Explainer videos have been used to great effect when showcasing how apps, services and concepts work.
They’re often used as the centrepiece for a brand’s website and social media efforts because they tend to contain all key messages about a product or service.
Enboarder - Animated Explainer Video
Product Demos
When your product is intangible or difficult to explain (like an underwater autonomous mapping submarine!), demonstrating the way it works in a clear and engaging way can be tricky.
Animated product demos walk your customer through every step of how your service or product solves a problem. They can even depict the internal workings of a product - showcasing scenes that are otherwise impossible to capture.
Animated product demo - YDT Underwater Autonomous Mapping
Event Promotion Videos
When you have an event coming up, its success will depend on convincing your target audience it’s worth their time, energy, and money to attend. Yes - the natural call is to cobble together a showreel of the most photogenic people and/or parts of your last party.
But why not add a bit more pizzazz to footage your audience might have already seen?
With animation, you can craft creative transitions or add information for prospective attendees. . If it happens you’ve got no footage - or you’re hosting an inaugural event - you can always use animation to showcase what attendees can expect.
Animated event promotion video - ZOTAC Masters
Social Media Videos
Every day, Facebook generates more than 8 billion video views. Worldwide, one billion hours are spent watching videos on YouTube every day. For scale, that means people watch a cumulative 114,155 years of video every single day.
And let’s not forget Instagram, home to influencers and aesthetic brands, which has over 1 billion active monthly users.
These platforms provide a powerful opportunity to connect with your target audience, so long as you have an ad worth watching.
With low production costs, limitless visual opportunities, and aesthetic difference (most Instagram pictures are of the ‘real world’), animated social media ads have the potential to strike a chord. Plus, animation is flexible and can be reformatted for use across platforms - it’s also a low-cost / high-production-value proposition for brands looking to make a bang on a budget.
Animated Social Media Video - Magari Coffee
YouTube Pre-Roll
Those 114,000 years of videos on YouTube we mentioned are almost all preceded by an ad. It’s the perfect place for you to get your content in front of viewers. But given there’s so much content to view on YouTube and so many ads to view, you need to make sure yours stands out. You also want an ad that’ll be cost-effective, to keep your return on investment as high as possible.
YouTube pre-roll fills both needs. You don’t require anywhere near the budget that live-action ads do. And the range of styles, character designs and transitions available in animation hooks viewers until the very end.
Animated YouTube Preroll - United Bank
Website Marketing Videos
Having videos on your website propels your business higher in Google’s search rankings. They’re also a great way to introduce your website visitors to who you are and what you do.
You can set an animated video as the homepage of your site for extra ‘wow’ factor, or even put an animated video as your site background to provide some movement on the page.
Then there’s the tried-and-tested winner of hosting an animated video that explains the benefits of your product or service.
Animated Website Video - QSR International
Training Videos
Training videos can be difficult to create since you’re tasked with taking a relatively tedious or delicate subject and making it interesting enough to watch. Showing someone the right way to fold a shirt or process an order may not stick with them - but having Olaf the Snowman (so long as Disney agrees) do the explaining for you can make a training video that much more compelling.
Animation can also make it easier to broach delicate subjects – like racism, for example. Where it may not be okay to show examples of sexual harassment between two people in a live video, it can be achieved easily by using animated characters or shapes, making the subject easier to explain and discuss.
Choosing the Right Animation Style
Finding success with animated video is all about choosing the right animation style for your project. Using an animation style that doesn’t match your message is like using the filming techniques from The Wizard of Oz to make a wrestling promo video.
Traditional and stop-motion animation carry a nostalgic, almost whimsical feel most of the time. By contrast, 2D, 3D, and motion graphics can be a little more neutral, depending on the art style you ask us to employ.
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