The landscape of digital marketing is a living, breathing organism that continues to change year after year. With more and more brands recognizing the importance of a strong online presence, they continue to flock toward online marketing channels. Users are bombarded with online ads and sponsored content all day every day. This is making it increasingly difficult to break through the clutter and capture the attention of your audience. Back in January we published the article “Video Marketing is a Must in 2017” predicting that video content would continue to explode online this year due to its engaging nature and ability to stand out from written and static visual content. Well, here we are half-way through the year and video content has exceeded our expectations for growth with no end in sight. Video is expected to claim a ridiculous 80% of all web traffic by 2019. Furthermore, users spend 100% more time on web pages that have a video.

It’s clear that every brand should take notice and find a way to incorporate videos into their marketing efforts. The challenge for businesses with limited marketing budgets is that producing high quality live-action videos gets expensive and time consuming. A great alternative that many brands are utilizing are animated explainer videos. These are short animated videos used to quickly tell your brand story and explain your product or service in a memorable, engaging way. So this begs the question, why animation?

Feasibility
There are many moving parts that go into producing a high quality live-action video. You need a shooting location that sets the right tone for your video, quality actors that can portray your message, proper equipment for capturing audio and video that won’t bring down your production value, and, of course, experienced videographers, a director and the list goes on. You can start to see why videos are so expensive to produce. Coordinating this shooting process is a very time-consuming, labor-intensive process. That is just for capturing the footage and doesn’t even include the editing process. Trying to tackle this yourself without a quality agency or production company can be an impossible task and likely won’t give you the end product you expected going in.

With animated video, you are effectively cutting out the entire video shoot process and skipping right to the editing phase. This cuts down on time, labor cost and the headache of coordinating all of those moving parts. You will still need the assistance of experienced animators and voice over actors, but generally the cost of labor will be much less.

Limitless Creativity
Another benefit with animated video is your imagination is your only limitation. When coming up with a concept and script for a live action video, you are confined to what you can realistically get shots of. After you think of an awesome concept to portray your message, ask yourself, “Can I point a camera at it?” If you can, and can easily get the shots you need, then live-action video may be the way to go.

The nice thing about animation is that you can make virtually any concept come to life. Your story is not confined to reality. Your video can take place in outer space or underwater. Your characters can do whatever you want them to do including flying or surviving deadly situations. Animation is great for portraying abstract ideas. Maybe you want to show your audience the inner workings of a mechanical tool or electronic device. How do you shoot that? Instead, you animate it.

Another benefit of animation is its ability to break the scrolling pattern and capture attention. The majority of video advertisements you see, whether it be on television or online, are live-action. Animated videos are less associated with advertising in a viewer’s mind. Animation is fun, colorful, engaging and the first association a viewer has with an animated video is often childhood cartoons. This helps preframe the viewer with a positive attitude toward your video before they even watch it.

Consistent Content
One of the biggest challenges businesses face with digital marketing is the need to constantly put out content. While creating one quality video for your website will help with traffic and sales, consistently producing new content for your audience is what will really help you grow your business and position yourself as an industry thought-leader. This becomes tricky with video content when you consider the expenses and time constraints.

Due to the shortened production time and more affordable nature of animated videos, you are able to produce video content much faster and more frequently than you can with live-action. You can even create a series of videos that tie into each other to lead viewers through your sales funnel and warm them up for a purchase. With the intensive targeting capabilities of social media you can ensure that you are only targeting the next video in your series to people that have viewed the previous video so your audience doesn’t jump into the middle of the series and get confused.

Flexibility
Another advantage with animation is its flexibility and how easy it is to edit and make updates. If you want to make a change to an old live-action video for your brand, you are most likely going to have to reshoot, which means using the same actors, outfits, scenery and props. In many cases you are better off shooting a completely new video. But with animated video, it’s fairly easy to go back in and change text and animated imagery as needed.

If your business is interested in experiencing the benefits of animated video content for your brand, give us a call at 701-478-1111 and ask to speak with a marketing advisor, or visit absolutemg.com/contact. We have creative concepts and script writers, experienced animators and high-level voiceover actors to give you exactly what your brand needs.