Here’s what you need to make a Whiteboard animation video like a pro
Is your product complex? Is your home page full of big chunks of text trying to explain it? Haven’t you considered a video strategy yet?
Nowadays, video is not optional anymore. It has proven to be the most effective kind of content on the web: 81% of shoppers go online to research before buying a product or acquiring a service, and video often helps seal the deal!
An explainer video can help you elevate your brand and make it distinguishable from the crowded content on the web. Bear in mind that one-third of online activity is spent watching video, so it’s most likely your potential customers will rather watch an explainer video to learn about a product than read a text.
However, each type of marketing video has different benefits and caters to different products/services. Whiteboard videos are very versatile and they’re perfect to explain complex information in a straightforward way.
As they provide a great educational power without losing your audience’s attention, whiteboard videos are especially suitable for IT solutions, software companies and business to business (B2B) campaigns which are products that need a little more time to be fully explained.
All that being said, not just any whiteboard video can deliver those benefits.
In this article you’ll learn how to do it right: maximize engagement, increase the time people stay on your home page, and improve conversion rates. Like a pro!
The best tips to make a perfect whiteboard video
- Write an engaging script
An amazing whiteboard video, as any great explainer video, needs a story. Yes, you can just show your product but it won’t be really engaging. If you want your video to resonate with the intended audience, your viewer needs to feel related to it.
How do you do that? The simplest way is to think of a story in which a character has a problem and your product is the hero who will help him/her to solve that problem. This kind of marketing plot has three moments:
- First, you need to show what problem your product solves. This way, you will quickly grab your audience’s attention and keep them interested till the end.
- Second, you’ll need to show how your product can improve that issue. In general, at this moment your logo will appear.
- Third, just sell! Tell your target audience why your product is the best choice in the market to solve their problem.
Does it sound too complicated? Let me show you an example. Our explainer video production company, Yum Yum Videos, created this video for an IT company. Check it out and you’ll easily identify these three moments:
In this video we explain the audience’s problem in the first 50 seconds. Then, after the logo appears, we explain how this software can solve it and at the end we provide some stats to prove why the product is better than its competitors. Crystal clear, right?
2) Know Your Audience
Gather some demographic data about your audience such as gender and age. Plus, do some research about their probable job position.
Don’t forget you’re telling a story, so you need characters to drive it forward with their actions.
One of the characters will represent your audience. He or she is the one who will show your audience’s pain points. Try to create your character according to the data you’ve researched so that your viewers feel related to him/her.
3) Why So Serious?
Remember that humor is one of the best ways to engage people. Even if you’re dealing with a B2B product you can add some hint of humor to make it more entertaining.
Try to think of what kind of videos you or your friends share on social media. Probably, most of them are funny.
But how do you create a funny whiteboard video? It’s very hard to give you a specific piece of advice about this because it depends on your own story and characters. A good way to begin is by getting inspired by watching amazing whiteboard videos. If the UK Parliament can keep it fun I’m sure you can do it too:
4) The Three Classic Elements
The first thing you can’t forget about is the white background. This clean and simple style is the basic element to create a classic whiteboard video. With a colored background maybe you’ll create a fabulous video but it won’t look like this style.
Above that, you should add a hand that will draw the story. Nowadays, it’s a digital image that the real artist designs and moves to make the drawings come alive. The idea is that these videos mimic a real learning situation and that’s why the audience is prepared to hear and watch new information.
In fact, using this style there’s an average 15% increase in remembering information compared to ordinary talking head videos.
The hand will be holding the third classic element: the black marker. And it’ll look like this:
5) Brand Your Video
But wait, how can I brand a black and white video? Simple, just add some colors! You can use your brand’s colors to highlight some parts of the design.
But, be careful. Don’t go too far! If you color everything you’ll lose the style you’re trying to aim for.
Take a look at the video below. The company’s logo is blue so they decided to highlight the main character’s eyes with that color. That’s very clever because emotions are expressed through its eyes and the audience’s attention is guided to the main character in an engaging way.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BoyhBR7wNZA
6) Connect Your Drawings
You may be asking what I mean. Well, an outstanding whiteboard video should be planned as a whole, like a huge drawing that you’ll explain scene by scene.
A real whiteboard video shows a continuous and interconnected drawing, not individual ones. Of course, sometimes you’ll need to clean the whiteboard and start from scratch but try to do this as few times as possible. You don’t want to break the story into too many pieces and lose your audience’s attention.
As these lines will guide your audience from one drawing to the next, developing the action in front of their eyes, this is a very engaging technique that sets apart high-quality whiteboard videos from the rest.
Check out the end of the UK Parliament’s video earlier in this piece. In that case, drawings are interconnected by the Parliament sketch.
Get to work!
I bet that now you know what to look for in a great whiteboard video. There is a lot of template marketing video software that you can try but you‘ll probably won’t get the features we explained in this guide and your marketing results would be disappointing.
Try to do some research on the market and look for a professional explainer video company that can deliver the quality we’ve been talking about in this article at a good price.
Now you know what to ask for so get to work!
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