5 Ways Animated Explainer Videos Increase Inbound Marketing Effectiveness

When we say video has become an essential part of our daily lives, we’re not joking. We watch online videos every day on our computers, phones and even Smart TVs. According to YouTube, the number of hours people spend watching videos is up 60% year over year!

Text-only-based websites have become outdated, and we’re not the only ones saying it: Google is! The world’s #1 search engine gives high priority to video content, which has 53x more chances of appearing on its first page than does a text-based website. According to Cisco’s trends analysis, by 2018 video will make up 79% of all Internet traffic, up from the current 66%. Businesses must be prepared since the online video boom isn’t going to slow down anytime soon.

In line with this phenomenon, animated explainer videos have become the icing on the cake of any online marketing strategy. Every day more and more companies (big brands and start-ups alike) are using video in their marketing campaigns, due to their brilliant performance on conversions and click-to-rate metrics, among many other marketing benefits.

What is an Explainer Video?

An Explainer Video is a short video that explains a business idea through a visually animated story. If a picture is worth a thousand words, video is worth millions – providing an entertaining means of allowing visitors to better understand your products or services.

Here’s a recent explainer video we developed on Cord Blood Banking, a fairly complex topic made simple with the use of an explainer video:

There are all types of explainer videos available – from simple whiteboard videos to complex 3-D animation. Here’s an overview of the types of explainer videos.

Why do explainer videos make a difference in an inbound marketing campaign? Let’s follow the usual steps of inbound marketing to see how an Explainer Video can boost your marketing efforts using some real data:

Explainer Videos Attract Visitors to your Website

One of the main problems of most online businesses is how to attract new online visitors to their sites, in other words, how to rank on the first pages of Google. We know that videos or pages with videos have a far better chance of being ranked on the first page of search results over text-based pages. Simply put, they’re easier to digest and share – making them the perfect content for improving your overall ranking.

Videos are a not-so-secret weapon for SEO. Google’s philosophy has long been to find the most useful and interesting online content for them, and they recognize that searchers love videos that can entertain and educate. This is why Google wisely rewards websites with video content by ranking them higher. The search engine considers video as one of the most interesting forms of online content and aims to satisfy its users by often showcasing videos first in search results. It’s no wonder why Google bought YouTube, the video-driven social network that’s also the world’s #2 most utilized search engine.

Another advantage of explainer marketing videos is their shareability. Video is the easiest online content to grow on social media, with 12x more chances to be shared than links and text combined. Twitter users share 700 videos every minute, and on YouTube, over 100 hours of video are uploaded in the same amount of time.

According to Facebook, more than 50% of people who come back to Facebook every day in the US watch at least one video daily and 76% of people in the US who use Facebook say they tend to discover the videos they watch on Facebook. By having an explainer video on your site, your ability to be found and shared by a targeted audience is vastly improved when using videos.

But wait, there’s more.

Explainer Videos Convert Visitors into Leads

Ok, now that you’ve increased your visits with an explainer video, how can you turn those visitors into leads? Explainer videos allow your brand to deliver the perfect pitch every time. And time is a key element. The average human attention span on a regular text-based website is about 8 seconds, lower than the attention span of a goldfish! In order to grab your visitors’ interest, you have to deliver your message quickly and effectively. It’s not just about attracting them, it’s also getting them to stay long enough to understand your business proposition.

An explainer video placed above the fold on your landing page results in visits increasing from that initial 8 seconds up to 2 minutes on average. That’s a 1500% boost in engagement! And it’s enough time for the video to convey your message and drive your audience to take action. Using an effective call-to-action within your video can drive visitors to subscribe to a newsletter, register for a free trial, request a consultation, or download an eBook. Videos turn visitors into qualified leads.

Are those leads actually going to purchase your product or service because of an explainer video?

Explainer Videos Turn Leads into Customers

We’ve already made clear how animated marketing videos attract visitors and turn them into leads, so now we’ve come to the resulting numbers that matter most to any online business: sales.

An explainer video is an asset with the ability to reduce potential customer loss by increasing and keeping the visitors and leads numbers steady all the way through the inbound marketing journey. But how does it do it? Well, the engaging power of an explainer video can reach your audience on so many levels! Here are some examples:

• Great storytelling and visuals make your potential customers remember your business proposition: on average people recall 10% of any visual data 3 days after and up to 70% of audiovisual information (Western Ontario University research). The facts indicate that 64% of visitors and 85% of online shoppers are more likely to purchase a product or service if they can watch a video explaining it beforehand.
• Lovable characters will make your audience connect with your brand on a deeper emotional level.
• E-mail marketing is another marketing strategy that can get boosted by video placement: click-through rate gets a 100% increase on average and even e-mails simply with the word video in their subject line increase their open rate from 7 to 13%.
• Half (52%) of marketing professionals worldwide mention video as the online content with the best return on investment.

Explainer Video Case Studies

Crazy Egg, the service created by Hiten Shah and Neil Patel, increased conversions by 64% and made $21,000 of extra monthly revenue when they placed an animated explainer video on their landing page. This is their video:

Explainer Videos Turn Customers into Promoters

So, here we are at the final stage. You have customers that have already bought your product or service, and they loved it! So, how can an explainer video help to make them your promoters?

If customers like your product or service (and why wouldn’t they, right?), they’ll probably share your explainer video on social networks too like Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube, spreading the word out there to their friends and colleagues (don’t be shy and request them to share it as well).

An explainer video is the most shareable piece of content online, and that’s what makes it the perfect asset for your customers to promote you through their social media channels. As an example, here’s an explainer video that reached nearly 45 thousand visits on YouTube only:

Explainer videos are an asset in converting your customers into a community, too! We recognize that word-of-mouth marketing is one of the most effective means of online marketing – and providing a video for your customers to share about your business empowers them to share and support you quickly and easily.

Get Quote For An Explainer Video

While the investment is much more than an article, an infographic, or even a complex white paper, an explainer video can be utilized across mediums, and across several pages and landing pages on your site. This compounds its ability to drive and convert visitors – providing an incredible return on investment.