Nowadays, video content has become the ultimate tool for any company wanting to stay relevant and keep potential customers interested in what they say. This is especially true for animated explainer videos, which provide a lot of flexibility to connect with customers in exciting and engaging ways.
However, following the animated explainer formula can only get you so far. If you want an effective explainer video that delivers results on an ongoing basis, you must also brand your content appropriately to truly leave a lasting impression on your viewers and increase awareness.
To help you do that, we’re going over three core elements any high-quality animated explainer needs to contribute to your branding strategy meaningfully.
The Core Tenets of Explainer Video Branding
While you can implement many branding techniques and strategies in your animated explainers, we’ll focus on the three most crucial characteristics of effectively branded explainer videos: their buyer persona, animation style and visual design elements.
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1. Build around your buyer persona.
Even before you start planning your explainer video, you need to fully understand who its intended audience is; your ideal buyer persona.
A solid grasp of that will help you determine the best approach across all production and design choices. In essence, to make a piece that genuinely stays with your customers long after watching, you should base the video’s pace and tone on their age, location, gender, etc. The more you know the demographics of your target, the better you can adapt your explainer video to their needs and wants.
Take this explainer by web hosting company Green Geeks as an example, clearly targeting a younger segment of their audience:
Not only is this video’s protagonist a young man, but the accompanying narration is very casual and friendly. It perfectly reflects the company’s intended viewership: young people looking for eco-friendly hosting services.
By making design choices tailored to its buyer persona (like the type of language of the script or the visual appearance of its protagonist), the company is far more likely to deliver its message successfully while leaving a more lasting impression in its prospects’ minds.
2. Pick the right animation style.
Generally, going with animation is excellent for explainers as it makes it easier to take your brand’s logo and design assets and incorporate them into your video as natural extensions of the onscreen action. But there are a few animation styles that particularly excel at this.
Character Animations: One of the most popular styles for animated explainers, 2D character animation, like the one used in the previous example, revolves around a character (or set of characters) that mirrors your customer’s experience. By putting your viewers and their stories front and center, you are making a piece that can resonate with them on a personal level.
Collage Videos: Intermediate styles combining live-action and animated assets, like collage videos or animated screencast explainers, can be perfect to further your branding strategy. After all, contrasting grounded, real-life videos or images with playful elements that showcase your company is always memorable.
Whiteboard Videos: Another go-to for many businesses for simplifying complex topics into an engaging visual narrative. With this style, you get to use traditional branding elements like your company’s colors and logo to feature at crucial moments of the story, organically reinforcing your branding message while also driving viewer attention where you need it, thanks to the contrast with the traditional black-and-white of the style.
3. Take advantage of your visual design assets.
The visual design aspect of your explainers is vital for branding. Just like Tiffany is characterized by their shade of blue and McDonald’s with that stylized “M,” your company’s color palette, typography and logo represent your brand and are there to make customers instantly recognize you.
Implementing these elements in your videos is a great way to subtly increase brand recognition. Making your logo pop out at crucial narrative times or just using your brand’s colors to bring some vibrancy to the video are tried-and-true ways to make your company’s image a living, breathing element of the explainer you are creating.
Having said all that, you also don’t want to go overboard with it!
It’s normal to think you need to be bold with your design elements, prominently featuring your colors and logo to increase awareness. But splashing your logo front and center every five seconds is a surefire way to have your viewers rolling their eyes.
Instead, look for organic opportunities to implement them seamlessly, and you’ll have a far more effective branding piece.
Wrapping Up
Explainer videos can be a fantastic tool for any business. But to truly stand out from the competition and make your audience instantly think of you when they have a problem to solve, you need to implement branding strategies in your video.
It takes more than slapping your logo at the end of your explainer and calling it a day.
The good news is that now that you know more about the crucial elements you need to brand your video effectively, your next piece is bound to be great. Now it’s time to start working and take your explainer videos to the next level.
Victor Blasco is a digital marketing expert, Co-founder and CEO of Yum Yum Videos and Yum Yum Digital.
