Explainer videos are an excellent technique to engage viewers with valuable content that educates and entertains. They rank well on search engines, get good watch times, and are great at directing potential customers toward your sales funnel.
This guide will cover how to make explainer videos, why you’d want to create them, and how to use them to convert viewers. You’ll learn how, with the right script and some visual flair in the form of animations or motion graphics, you can use explainer videos to educate audiences about your product.
What’s an explainer video?
An explainer video is a form of a product demo that communicates your product’s value proposition. It conveys what your product does and what makes it unique. Some do this through animations accompanied by a voiceover, while others feature a live-action demonstration. In either case, an explainer video describes the product to the target audience in a way that convinces them to try it for themselves.
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Benefits of creating an explainer video
Here are a few benefits you can expect from adding explainer videos to your video marketing strategy.
Boost brand awareness and recognition
Creating an explainer video is an excellent opportunity for brand storytelling that gives viewers a peek behind the curtain. While explaining the product, you can also describe why your company wanted to make it in the first place. This will provide users with insight into your motivations, which helps them understand and connect with your product better.
Enhance memorability and information retention
An engaging video is often more memorable than a simple ad or landing page because there’s more content to resonate with or be entertained by. If your audience is shopping around for similar products, they’re probably more likely to remember brands that provide an informative and personable video.
Educate and inform potential customers
It’s easier to advertise your product when your audience clearly understands its intended use case. Explainer videos communicate what your product is for and help them get the most out of it, so there’s no room for confusion.
Improve engagement and shareability
Online sharing is crucial to getting the message out about your product, and teachable moments or “how-to” videos are a popular and highly sharable form of content. They teach people new things, creating a memorable experience viewers will want to show their friends and family.
How to make an explainer video in 8 steps
Creating an explainer video follows a process similar to most video production projects, but with a few unique steps to ensure you deliver a concise, focused message. Here’s a step-by-step guide to help you record, edit, and publish a successful explainer video.
1. Refine your value proposition
The most important message in your explainer video is the value proposition you’re trying to demonstrate. So start by refining that message into a one- or two-sentence statement that sets the tone for everything that follows. You’ll use this statement to begin the video, so make it engaging, relatable, and relevant to the product.
Here are a couple of fictional examples:
- “Your time is valuable, and we want to help you make the most of it with TimerSaver.com, a service that assists you in optimizing your workflows with seamless automation, intuitive controls, and efficient planning.”
- “A quality education helps you build the future you want for yourself and your loved ones. That’s why the Learning Institute has launched a new feature that matches your academic goals with in-person and online programs that work for you.”
2. Select a style
Now that you know how you’ll start your explainer video, it’s time to commit to the style you’ll say it in. Which style is appropriate for you largely depends on your brand and the product you’re explaining. A disruptive fashion company might use an edgy, live-action montage of people wearing their designs. Alternatively, a project management app might make an animated video that uses a whiteboard to demonstrate how it saves steps in a workflow. Pick a video style that’s consistent with your brand, product, and target audience to keep it in line with other parts of your marketing strategy.
3. Write a script
Consider what you’ve learned so far and write a video script that describes the value proposition, demonstrates it, and convinces viewers to convert. A good rule of thumb is to keep your script to about 150 words per minute. Since most explainer videos are only two or three minutes long, your final draft should be less than 500 words long.
4. Make a storyboard
Use the draft of your script to draw up a storyboard that illustrates what your finished video will look like. Break it into chapters, sketch any visuals you want to add, and describe how you want to animate them. If you aren’t much of an artist, use a digital whiteboard tool like Figma that offers basic shapes and graphics you can assemble to create each frame.
5. Collect assets
To gather everything you’ll use in your video, you’ll need to search for visual and audio assets in an online repository or make them yourself. Many video production tools like Adobe After Effects and Vimeo’s browser-based editor come with several pre-made assets you can use, so check those first. For anything else, check online, royalty-free libraries like Envato and Shutterstock to find video animations and background music that suit your style.
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6. Record your explainer video
Not all explainer videos have a person on camera, but if you’re showcasing the product yourself, you’ll want to keep a few things in mind. Exuding on-camera confidence, understanding video storytelling techniques, and knowing how to use body language are all part of the process. You’ll also need to get together the right video and audio equipment to ensure you record high-quality content. Be patient, and ask for feedback from peers to get the best recording possible.
7. Editing
Upload your recording to a video production tool like Vimeo or Adobe After Effects and begin editing your explainer video. Drop in all the visual and audio assets you collected and fine-tune them for your style. In Vimeo, you can do this by uploading your files to the Graphics and Audio tab of the browser-based editor. From there, you can drag-and-drop them directly into your project.
Here are a few aspects to pay special attention to:
- Visual resolution: Pick a suitable video resolution that results in a crisp video that loads quickly on any device. If you have multiple recordings to stitch together, check that they all have the same resolution.
- Animated frame rate: If your motion graphics don’t match the frame rate of your video, there could be blank frames in the animations. For completely animated videos, review them carefully to look for missing frames or jerky movements.
- Audio mixing: Use a tool like Vimeo’s dynamic audio editing to check that background music, voiceovers, and narration have consistent audio levels.
- Video SEO: Add metadata, closed captions, and a clear thumbnail, all important factors search engines check for.
8. Publish
Publish your explainer video on a video hosting platform like Vimeo so you have a dedicated URL to embed elsewhere. Then, use embed codes to add it to your website, social media platform, and other video marketing channels.
Wherever you post it, accompany it with text that provides a link for your call to action. That way, interested viewers can have a seamless experience in which they watch the video, decide to learn more, and click the link that could lead to a conversion.
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Take your explainer videos to the next level with Vimeo’s all-in-one platform
Creating explainer videos helps to engage your audience with relatable storytelling that demonstrates your product in a shareable, concise format. For the highest quality content, it’s essential to select a video production tool where you can collaborate, edit, and publish your explainer video in one place.
Vimeo is a comprehensive platform for all your video creation needs. With its customizable templates and video player, you can quickly put together an impressive, branded explainer video that converts. Then, you can publish it across all your video marketing channels thanks to Vimeo’s seamless marketing platform integrations.
All these features and more make Vimeo the go-to platform for anyone aiming to create, host, and promote their videos effectively.
