Words are powerful. For years, marketers used them to trigger an actionable response from their target audience. But today, words aren’t enough to spur potential customers to action.
Text alone does not persuade people. Add a visual element and you change the game in your favor.
Just think about how brief the interaction with your audience has become. As the average attention span continues to shrink significantly, people are also becoming more selective.
How can you adapt to the reality of micro-moments and capture their attention before it starts shifting? Visual content, which is processed 60,000 times faster than text, might just be the missing piece of the puzzle.
A pivotal part of this strategy is to leverage the power of the single most influential tool for connecting with your audience today: animation.
Read on to discover why and how you can introduce it into your marketing arsenal.
Digital Marketing and Animation Go Together Like Yin and Yang
In digital marketing, you reap what you sow. You can master your next content marketing strategy in theory and even add a visual element to it. But it won’t get you the results you expect if it’s not:
- Delivered in a format that is relevant to your audience
- Wrapped up in an engaging storyline
- Designed to appeal to short attention spans
Animation helps you tick all these boxes. Is it in line with any business, though?
The main reason why this tool has been at the forefront of many marketing strategies in recent years is that it can put all business ideas into motion. In what follows, we take a look at a couple of ways to incorporate animation into your online marketing plan to stand out from the crowd and actively engage with your audience.
Explainer Videos
Are you looking to introduce a new product, highlight your value proposition, and hook a potential customer—but you’d rather make it quick and memorable?
Explainer videos—which enable you to reveal a business idea through a visually animated story—are a short and efficient way towards achieving this goal.
Take MuleSoft as an example. Application Programming Interface (API) isn’t a new concept, but chances are this topic caught your attention much more often recently due to a sudden surge in popularity. To help you cut through the complexity of studying what an API does, MuleSoft seized the opportunity to go further than the textbook definition: they used an animated video and a waiter analogy for describing the concept better. So, let’s see what format makes this fairly complex topic stick for you:
- The text-only definition that outlines API as a set of routines, protocols, and tools for building software applications.
- The explainer video that makes you think of an API as the critical link to communicate your order to the kitchen and deliver your food back to your table.
Without further ado, entertaining and informative video content is one of the best marketing assets at your disposal. It doesn’t only help to get your message across in a lighthearted manner, but it can also effectively skyrocket your business. In a study conducted by Wyzowl, 97% of organizations said that explainer videos helped them increase the user understanding of their product or service, while 81% reported this tool enhanced their sales.
JotForm knows very well how to reap the benefits that come with animated videos, too. In order to ensure that their product relaunch strategy was effective, they produced two types of video content: live action and animation. Both showed great potential in their previous experiences, but what happened on the day JotForm decided to run them side-by-side?
“By noon, the animated video was far outperforming the live action one, with a 20% higher click rate,” they explained.
In brief, you can count on animated explainer videos to be the secret weapon in your next online marketing campaign.
Animated Logos
They’re eye-catching, easy to remember, and very effective if you want to revive your brand identity.
Standing still doesn’t do much for your company in the era of aesthetically pleasing interfaces. Today, a logo isn’t just the silent vocabulary of colors, shapes, and typography—it should be part of a highly interactive dynamic identity. You either stand out or fade into the background.
Think of Google, for instance. It’s not a shocker if the first idea that popped into your head is: the world’s most popular search engine. But there is a high possibility that your next thought includes the doodles that are displayed temporarily to mark a special occasion and breathe life into Google’s logo every now and then.
An animated logo is your chance to bring a dynamic, original, and versatile vibe to your company’s story. Raising the bar to motion graphics also helps you enhance brand awareness, evoke the right emotions, and set yourself apart from the competition.
Don’t forget—first impressions matter. And your logo holds the power to make it or break it.
You Know What Animation Can Do for Your Digital Marketing Strategy—Now What?
Eager to start your animation journey? On your way towards visual storytelling, it’s important to take care of the basics first. This means you have to create an enchanting story that matches a clear set of objectives, outlines your company’s personality, and sends the right message, to the right people, at the right time.
Remember: Keep it simple, but noteworthy.
