5 Mistakes to Avoid When Creating Animated Explainer Videos
Animated explainer videos can be valuable tools for quickly sharing some of the most important information about your brand’s services and products with your target audience in a way that is interesting and engaging. Avoiding certain mistakes can make explainer videos significantly more effective. Here are five common mistakes your brand may make when creating these videos, why they matter, and how to fix them!
Table of Contents
1. Making Your Videos Too Long
Most customers that view your animated explainer videos are searching for a quick introduction to a topic or overview of how to complete a task, not an in-depth look at everything there is to know about a particular topic.
Videos that are too long and take more time to watch than your viewers were planning to spend are more likely to cause them to lose interest. Conversely, covering only essential information and keeping videos to a length that is easy to digest often does a better job of meeting your marketing goals.
2. Using a Jumbled Script
Keeping your videos short and to the point involves thinking carefully about whether each fact or detail you include is necessary and truly serves a purpose. A script that is too complicated for your goals and includes too many details that do not flow easily can make your videos longer and more unclear than they need to be.
As such, make sure your video flows well and only include essential information to engage and educate the viewer accordingly.
3. Using Low-Quality Visuals or Audio
Visual features play an essential role in making videos stand out, and choosing photos or graphics that are irrelevant, low resolution, uninteresting, or contain off brand colors can be more likely to distract viewers than enhance your videos. This is a particularly important concept when creating animated videos because poor animation can be enough to cause viewers not to finish your videos.
Similarly, if you have great visuals but a low quality or unprofessional voiceover, you can quickly lose credibility with your audience. Ensure that both the video and audio quality is professional and easy to follow.
4. Focusing on Features Instead of Benefits
Sharing information about your products' features can be helpful, but most of your potential audience is likely more interested in learning what problems your product/service solves. In other words, focus more on the benefits instead of features.
For this reason, your short explainer videos should prioritize showcasing what your product or service can do for your customers while discussing relevant features only where needed to support the associated benefits.
5. Forgetting a Call-to-action (CTA)
Videos should end by telling your viewers exactly what they should do with the information they just learned, such as signing up for a demo on your website, getting in touch with your business to ask any questions, downloading a resource that has even more valuable information, or simply subscribing to your YouTube channel for additional valuable content.
Forgetting to include a clear call-to-action makes your viewers more likely to simply close your video and forget to follow up with aspects that interested them.
Getting Started with Creating Explainer Videos
Creating animated explainer videos is thankfully easier than ever. You don’t even need any animators or video production experts in-house! You can develop the script for your explainer video and then work with a third party to get the explainer video created. One of the explainer video companies we often use at Igniting Business is called FATJOE. With FATJOE, they can create animated explainer videos or even convert your blog content to live-action videos.
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About the author
Ben Seidel is the CEO and Founder of Igniting Business. Ben has been serving hundreds of small businesses with web design and SEO services for over 15 years and covering digital marketing related topics since 2012.
Over the years, Ben has been recognized on a local and national level, including entrepreneurship awards from both the NFIB and NASE and being featured in publications such as CNBC Universal, Yahoo News, Intuit Small Business, CIO.com, Mizzou Magazine, and Fox Business.