Arnaud Gilbert 
Explainer videos can be a key piece of your marketing strategy. Video is a compelling way to communicate with your audience, and you can have fun with explainers, including making them animated in 2D or 3D.
If you aren’t sure where to start with an explainer video for your company, the following are some of the important things to know.
Table of Contents
1. What Are They Used For?
Sometimes, you’ll hear explainer videos referred to as a modern elevator pitch highlighting a product or service. When you have a well-done explainer, it is concise and focused, with a highly specific purpose. That purpose is the communication of the value of your product quickly.
An explainer video is meant to grab attention, and it can be displayed on emails, landing pages, and YouTube. They can be used to drive organic traffic and also for paid advertising.
The core goal of an explainer is to explain concepts or relationships that might otherwise be abstract with graphics.
Specific reasons in more detail for explainer videos include:
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- You can show your products in a first-hand way. This might include giving a walkthrough of a product or showing the benefits of using them.
- These videos give you a chance to show your personality and brand values and convey whatever it is that your mission is.
- You can use your explainer videos to demonstrate how you’re going to solve problems for your customers. It can help increase your brand awareness and your conversion rates if you can cohesively outline how you’ll solve a problem.
2. Where Are They Featured?
Explainer videos can be featured across multiple platforms, which is just one of their many benefits.
Social media channels are a great place. You can publish your videos across all of your social media, or maybe you repurpose them a bit to better fit the requirements of specific platforms. You can use targeting and remarketing options so that you’re best reaching people who have an interest in your products.
Explainer videos can go on your website, such as on your homepage.
As mentioned above, you can include them in your emails. Your email marketing is going to help you get more leads, so when you add explainer videos to these emails, they’re more appealing, and you can redirect traffic to your landing page. All you have to do is embed your videos in your emails as an image that can be clicked, making sure that when someone does click it, they’re taken to your landing page.
Explainer videos can cross over to in-person marketing too.
For example, you can use your videos at conferences, trade shows, and similar professional events. You can loop them, so they’re constantly playing, but just make sure you include captions or subtitles if you’re doing this.
3. Types of Explainers
Explainer videos usually come in one of four major formats.
Animations are a good way to showcase otherwise abstract concepts, and they’re good for being more creative in how you tell a story. Animation also gives you a lot of versatility. We frequently see animations used as explainers for software or services, but you can really use them for any kind of business.
Live-action explainers include real people, so you’re creating a human connection and also communicating a message that’s relatable.
A screencast video is a bit different but still falls into the larger category of an explainer. These are used for showcasing technology primarily.
Then, there are whiteboard videos where you can talk about a larger topic but break it down into the context of smaller parts. Then at the end of the video, you have the ability to zoom out and show how everything you’ve talked about fits together.
4. Should You Outsource the Making of the Video?
If you want a high-quality, effective explainer that gives you a strong return on your investment, you should consider outsourcing the work to a professional video production or animation company. Yes, you pay more upfront, but a low-quality explainer video is going to be bad messaging and bad for business.
If you make it yourself, you’ll have control over the creative elements and your budget, but it’s not an easy undertaking.
5. The Benefits
We’ve touched in different ways on the benefits of an explainer video, but below are more in-depth reasons why you should consider integrating them into your business.
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- These videos save time. You can wrap up the basics of your business, your brand, a product, or service in three minutes or less. You’re saving time for everyone involved, including your sales team.
- They’re easy to share on multiple mediums, as we talked about above. You can get a lot of mileage out of investing in an explainer.
- You can use an explainer to build brand recognition, and people like to buy from brands they’re familiar with.
6. Creating a Compelling Explainer
Some of the things to keep in mind when it comes to creating a powerful explainer video include:
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- Know your target audience. Whether you’re making the video in-house or you’re going to hire someone to do it, you’re still going to need to have a deep understanding of your audience. If you don’t know who your targeted audience is, then you’re more likely to create a video that explains things they already know, leaves out important information, or just isn’t effective. You may need to do comprehensive market research before creating a video.
- Make a short and concise script. A well-written script is important to communicate your message. Keep your script short and crisp.
- Make sure that your explainer video isn’t just listing the features of your product. Your audience can find this information elsewhere. Your goal instead is to highlight the benefits or the unique selling point.
Finally, focus on being entertaining. If people aren’t compelled to keep watching your video, then it’s of no use to you. You need to make sure your audience is paying attention enough to actually have your messaging come through.
