7 Tips to Using Animation in Inbound Marketing
Are you wondering how to empower your brand online and build a robust digital presence? Here we consider how animation and explanatory videos can help you achieve it.
Inbound marketing is one of the most important forces driving business success in the digital world. It aims to promote the company through relevant, engaging, and compelling content and evoke the prospective customer’s interest in the brand’s products and services. There are so many different methods and approaches to inbound marketing. However, there is always a place for animated content in almost each of them.
Animated videos, GIFs, and infographics – all of them can become part of your inbound marketing strategy in its various aspects and forms. In this article, we’re considering how businesses can leverage animation and video explainers in their digital marketing.
Social Media
There is no big secret: the animation is one of the most engaging content types. It’s more likely to grab our attention and stop the eye in the news feed on social media. Using animated videos and GIFs in social media content is a great idea for any type of business and industry. It makes the content look fresh and exciting. Animation adds more life and engagement to the content.
Spicing up your brand visuals with animation and a pinch of humor is not a one-off practice but a strategy. Mix beautiful static visuals and animated videos on your business profile and see how the magic happens. People react to this kind of content much more actively: they leave likes, share it with friends, grow engagement around these posts and your brand, consequently.
Digital Advertising
I used to say that advertising is dead today because modern customers strive to experience something very authentic and original without adding any “spices” and “sweet talks” that are very common in advertising. My fault. I rethought this approach. Yes, there was a moment when customers boycotted online advertising (especially on social media) and expressed distrust of brands interfering their social media activity with intrusive and irrelevant ads.
However, online advertising is now experiencing a kind of resurrection and rebirth. And a huge part of this process happens thanks to the incorporation of animation into it. Cartoony animation videos and motion graphics perform much better than other visuals in digital advertising. They deliver more value to people than any average ad. They bring fun, entertainment, and laughter that have become even more important today in times of challenges, uncertainty and reimaginations.
Customer Onboarding
Customer onboarding involves educating customers about using products and services and greeting new visitors on a website or in a mobile application. You can’t even imagine how much animation can contribute to this process and increase customer engagement until you try it for your business. Lovely and fun greetings with animated heroes (or even brand mascots) and animated texts can be a pleasant surprise for those who use your product or service for the first time. Also, animated explainer videos can be more effective in product user onboarding by describing the product features and peculiarities in a more easy-to-understand, visual way.
Customer Education
Today, we see the rise of social enterprises, aka brands with a double mission: financial growth and social impact. While the first goal is quite obvious and understandable, many may wonder what another one means. Businesses with a social goal behind their products and services aim to empower, help and educate our society in general. The aspect of education can be implemented with the help of animated explainer videos. They allow transferring information easily and quickly. It’s a kind of fun education that is much easier digestible.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is the practice that allows businesses to engage with their customers via emails. However, to achieve the quality interaction that brings new customers using email marketing, you need to create really engaging emails. Animated videos incorporated directly into emails can make them more interesting and effective. You can do it by placing the clickable GIF or the video cover (image) with the link behind it leading to a real video. From our experience, GIFs with the scenes from the video perform the best.
Whether you’re going to present a new product/service, update customers about the upcoming event, or introduce a new product feature, an animated video incorporated into the email can help you do it extraordinarily and creatively.
The Company’s Homepage
Do you want to tell your brand story, showcase your manufacturing process, introduce your team or present your product? An animated explainer video set in the website background is an excellent way to do it. The homepage is the first place people go to learn more about the company and its offering. You can make it even more memorable and outstanding by adding a cartoony animation or motion graphics.
Product Landing Page
If you aim to present your product in a way that makes people want to buy from your brand, consider adding a product explainer video to your landing page. In an animated video, you can zoom product details, show hidden components, demonstrate the product in action and explain everything in an attractive narrative. This kind of video can serve you even better than a product description or long tutorial.
Conclusion
Animation can contribute to every aspect of your inbound marketing, from social media marketing and advertising to product presentation on a landing page. In this article, we have considered how businesses from different industries can use animated videos and motion graphics in their digital marketing campaigns. We hope these insights will help you set a robust online business presence and amplify your marketing effort.
