Using animation as a marketing tool is a great way to engage with your audience and put your product or service on display. Whether it’s an instructional video or a product reveal video, animations provide a flexible visual medium to get the point across. To make your own marketing animation that sells, here are a few tips to follow.
Table of Contents
Brainstorm and planning
You could always rely on other sources to create professional marketing animation, but you will have to work on the idea by yourself. Before you get started on your video, you need ideas – and a lot of them.
Remember, your video should market your product/service. Sit down with a pen and paper, set a time limit of 5-10 minutes, and start putting down as many ideas as you can. Once the timer runs up, go through all the ideas and start eliminating those that don’t sound good. Once you’ve reduced your list to a few ideas, choose one to make your video.
Write your script
Once you’ve decided upon an idea to work on, start writing a script for it. While writing the script, ensure that your words are clear and simple to understand. Your script must also have a specific tone that is visible throughout the script. Take some time to decide upon the tone you wish to include in your video.
Follow the AIDA formula to create a script that will guarantee results. AIDA is an acronym for Awareness, Interest, Desire, and Action. Have a hook, the main content, and finally, a strong CTA (Call to Action). Make a draft, read it once by yourself, make edits and then have someone else read through it. If any changes are needed, make them before you move further.
Storyboard
This is a crucial step and should be treated so. Storyboarding is the step where you create a bridge between your script and your animation. In this process, you create a visual guideline that provides a sequence for you to follow while creating your animation.
Capture the essence and tone in your storyboard, create a link between your script and each board, and revise through it a few times to ensure that your animation holds a strong marketing purpose. Once you’ve made your storyboard, you can start working on your animation.
Creating the animation
This is where your script and storyboard come to life. Creating an animation while following a storyboard makes the job a lot easier, as you’ve already done a chunk of work and now only have to link one frame or board with another. Use software that provides a lot of different elements to include in your video. Don’t make it bland, but don’t fill it up with a ton of elements either.
What you truly must showcase is your product/service itself and use creative elements to make it more interesting for people to look at your product/service. You could create a voiceover video, which is a great option if you have the resources (condenser microphone, audio mixer) for it. Otherwise, you can even work with a text-based video.
Just ensure that you don’t stuff the video with text or you’ll end up giving more instruction and taking away your audience’s attention from the product/service itself.
Use colors that pop and make your video a more rich and attractive visual to watch. You can even opt for motion blur, added textures, and other such graphical additions to make your videos even more interesting to watch.
Rending and revising
Once you’ve got your video ready, you’ll have to render it and get it ready for evaluation. Watch it once fully by yourself, note down any errors or elements that don’t fit well, and then get feedback from a few more people.
Look at the video from a marketing perspective – does it market your product/service effectively? Does it follow the AIDA formula? Does it attract the audience, constantly engage with them, and finally give them a strong CTA? Is it boring anywhere? Once your animation clears all the questions, it’s ready to be uploaded.
Conclusion
Now that you have learned about all these steps to follow, you will be able to make an awesome animation video. Always keep your marketing purpose in mind. It’s great to make your animations creative, but only till it contributes to the marketing aspect and doesn’t steal the attention from the product/service you wish to display.
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