This is a guest post by Juan Mendez, the content editor of Yum Yum Videos, where the team has created hundreds of animated marketing videos. He’s also a music and film buff.
The world’s not about 90s’ salesy advertising any more. To succeed as an online marketing business today, you need to truly commit to your audience and establish a unique personality for your company. In other words, you need to build a personal brand that resonates with your audience. And when I say “personal,” I’m referring to developing a relatable personality — even if that’s for your brand.
You must show your audience empathy — that you care about their problems and that you have exactly what they need to solve them. Make them trust your brand by being yourself and showing it to the world. Leverage what makes you different and better than your competition.
There are many types of online content that could give you a hand in achieving this, but there’s one in particular that helps you to build your brand like no other: I’m talking about animated marketing videos!
1. Create a buyer persona (and then animated characters from it)
The first step to building a trustworthy personal brand with an explainer video is getting to know your target audience, and then creating a buyer persona (a detailed representation of your audience) with that insightful information.
Learn as many things as you can about your audience. Then, use these insights create a fictional character to represent an average person from your target audience. You should determine:
- How old they are on average
- Where they come from
- How they dress
- How they talk (language, accent)
- What kind of places they usually visit
- Which are their favorite websites
- Which are their favorite brands
- Any other insightful and / or valuable information
The resulting virtual character will have a name, an age, a personal background and a job. He or she will become your buyer persona.
Once you have your buyer persona ready, you will be able to craft your main animated character to resemble your target audience. This spurs immediate identification and trust within them, because they get the sense that the animated video was made especially for them. Get a glance on how this works:
Custom characters also add a powerful human touch to your company and bring out emotions that remain attached to your brand for a long time.
See how the construction professional in this explainer video comes alive, portraying the average potential customer of this particular insurance service and matching his personality and mood to the brand:
2. Apply your brand colors and style
Colors are great branding elements that can’t be overlooked. Integrating your brand’s colors and style to your products, website, landing pages, and social networks will help boost your brand image — applying them to a video makes a greater branding impact.
The engaging power of animated explainer videos helps you define your brand identity and identify with your target audience.
Whether it’s a provocative red, a healthy green, a playful orange or a responsible blue, your brand colors should be a central marketing compromise when making an explainer video because they speak directly to your target and frame the entire perception on your brand. Check how the main warm colors of the brand’s logo and packaging (red, orange and yellow) are used to create the animated world and cute characters in this TV ad:
3. Choose the right animated video style
There’s not just one, but many styles of animated marketing videos, and many of them — such as whiteboard animations, cartoon, and motion graphic videos — use character animation. Character animation is a great resource to develop your personal brand, because it allows you to easier communicate your story with great visual quality without the need to hire filmmakers or actors.
The style of your animated marketing video will reveal your brand personality. If you want to present your brand with some humor and a more human approach, you can use a character animation video.
Sometimes your company needs something more sophisticated instead, so you can choose to go for a more elegant and serious mood in your video. It all depends on how you want to introduce your brand to your potential customers.
Here’s a fun educational animated video that will help you learn the most popular marketing video styles and their different purposes:
4. Make it social
If you want to get close and personal with your audience, you need to conduct a great social marketing strategy beyond crafting your videos. The good news is, online video is the most thriving and cost-effective content on social media!
On a recent survey, 52% of marketing professionals worldwide chose video marketing as the online strategy with the best ROI. Nowadays, video promotion relies on those videos being shared in social media. Luckily, Facebook’s newsfeed video visibility grew up by a 360% last year.
Mark Zuckerberg himself stood for this surprising lift, and Twitter developers found that video generates way better engagement than before, holding a share rate of 700 video-tweets per minute.
Twitter’s latest announcement also revealed its will to stand for video marketing. After releasing a beta version of Promoted Video Ads last year (allowing video embedding and video analytics for the first time), the microblogging platform recently launched its own native video service aiming for short quality videos; a direct hit on YouTube’s ground and an outstanding opportunity for video marketers.
I believe it’s time for marketers to invest video marketing in their social media campaigns. Here are a few tips for using marketing videos as a part of your social media strategy:
a. Be consistent: Don’t forget to be consistent and helpful when communicating with your potential customers: Answer their questions, clear their doubts, and supply them with useful advice. Reply to everyone and keep your responses on-brand.
b. Be coherent: You need to be coherent with your brand image in your social channels when making your explainer videos. You can’t present your brand as a serious company in your videos, and reveal a completely opposite knee-slapper side on Facebook because that wouldn’t portray a cohesive brand identity.
Create an integral branding campaign in which your website, social strategy and content marketing approach are part of the same brand story. Fortunately, custom marketing videos are great tools to make that happen. Add them in your social media strategy and use them in your Tweets, Facebook posts and Pins to engage new visitors and leads and eventually turn them into your customers and brand promoters.
c. Keep social videos short: When making marketing videos especially for your customized social media strategy, make sure you make your videos short and engaging. According to the folks at Wistia, One Market Media, and Reel SEO, that’s what social network users look for in these kinds of videos. In fact, 30-second videos are watched completely by 85% of average users, while two-minute videos are completed by less than 50% of them.
This 30-second-long animation, for example, got nearly 45 thousand views on YouTube only. What’s the secret? It’s short, simple, fun and effective:
5. Be yourself
Finally, build trust with your potential customers by being yourself. Be authentic and unique to stand out. Choose the best marketing content and set it up to boost your online business.
Are you ready to build your personal brand now?
If you want to learn more about explainer videos please download Yum Yum Videos’ eBook “Explainer Videos – The Ultimate Marketing Tool” or visit their Explainer Video Academy to get more useful video marketing content.
