What is an explainer video?

Whether you’re part of a budding start-up, an influential business mogul or an established corporate, you’re likely to need a short video to explain your product or service and its potential benefit to potential customers with ever decreasing attention spans.

What?

An explainer video, as the name suggests, is a video that explains.

An explainer video is a form of visual marketing through which a business develops a video to help customers understand the business or its products and services. Topics may include explaining various products and services, the basic working of the organization, schemes introduced by the business, the process or how products, services or machinery work.

Why?

The main purpose of an explainer video is to get a business’s target audience to understand, in reasonable detail, the features and benefits of a product or service. Explainer videos may even be used by organizations like governments, schools, and entertainment companies to explain programmes, plans and phenomena. Videos have become the most engaging form of communication in today’s day of instant gratification. Audiences on digital channels are not taking the time to read paragraphs of information but they are watching short videos to better understand a product or service that may be useful to them.

How?

Creating video content requires more time and effort than most other pieces of visual content. Here are the steps to create a video:

1. Come up with a concept for the video. For example, will it be straight explainer video which simply explains the product? Will be it be humorous video which engages the viewer while explaining the product? Is it a video that compares your product with another to show the benefits?
2. Write the script. This is by far the most crucial part of the process. The script is the difference between your video being watched or skipped. Make sure that the writer understands your target audience and your product as well as the competitive scenario. Key points should be made quickly and in an engaging manner. The need for the product should be established towards the beginning of the script. Try to keep the script to under 200 words so that your video can be between 30 and 90 seconds.
3. Decide on the art style and visual treatment. You can reference other videos before deciding on what your art style should be.
4. Storyboard the video. Create a PowerPoint type presentation where each line of script is matched to the visual that’s planned.
5. Animate or Shoot the video.
6. Record the voice over if it’s an animated video. Sometimes, the voice over is recorded prior to beginning animation since the animation can be matched to the voice.
7. Complete the sound post production – make sure the voices are of professional quality, add sound effects and background music. Music can be composed or you can use a suitable stock track.

It’s a good idea to hire a professional explainer video company to develop your video. Here’s what professionally made explainer videos look like: https://rippleanimation.com/US/work.php.

A good explainer video can do wonders for a brand, while a bad one can damage its image beyond which even the best of marketing is powerless to redeem. If you intend to hop onto the explainer video bandwagon in the near future, you might want to get in touch with the experts in the domain. Till then, cheerio!

If you think you need a video, contact Ripple Animation at v@ripplemedia.co to get a free quote.