If you work in a highly technical industry, or your company makes products with complex sales challenges, your offering of digital marketing content should include explainer videos. Even if you are familiar with the term, but there’s more to explainer videos than you may think.
What is an explainer video?
An explainer video is what it sounds like: a video that explains how your product or service works, and how it can benefit your customers. In the late 2000s, whiteboard explainer videos became a fashionable way to convey abstract concepts, from how RSS feeds work to how to motivate your workforce.
Fast-forward to today, and the explainer video is more sophisticated. Today’s videos go beyond the whiteboard, using any combination of motion graphics, live-action, 3D, or traditional hand-drawn animation.
Now that we’ve gotten caught up on the definition of “explainer video,” let’s look at some of their most common applications.
Brand Awareness Videos
If you work in Science and Technology industries, you know that it can be challenging to introduce a new product when it is complex or completely new to market. Because videos engage your customers’ senses, they can accelerate the learning process. And the quicker your customer understands your product, the quicker they will buy it.
Product Definition Videos
Sometimes it feels like no one reads anymore. That’s not exactly true, but skimming is often the approach for consuming a website. And that can become a challenge if you need to say a lot about your product.
Instead of relying on your potential customers to spend hours on a white paper, a video can be a more “user-friendly” way of explaining what you are selling. A video on your website could help potential customers figure out if you can help them before they bounce to the next site.
This type of video can also be a great marketing tool. If you think of the best explainer videos you’ve seen, did you find them while doing research? Or were they shared with you because they were actually interesting videos. Sometimes videos are made just for social video in the hopes of “viral” success. If your marketing team is heading to a trade show, a video for a synchronized presentation or an interactive kiosk is a great way to start conversations and keep customers in your booth longer. And, of course, TV is still a viable marketing channel.
Training Videos to Address Pain Points
There’s a saying in marketing that “you are not the audience.” And the same goes for explainer videos. When you’re so close to your product, it can be hard to remember what the world was like without it. But that’s what you need to do to get into the head of your potential customers.
What are the pain points in your customers’ lives or businesses that your product addresses?
Along the same lines, an explainer video could also help you with your customer service operations: By reducing time spent helping customers troubleshoot, you end up saving money.
Explainer videos aren’t just for potential customers. If you’ve got a particularly complex product, your video might be able to address the pain points of the product itself, thus reducing frustration from customers which can damage a brand.
These are just a few of the more common ways that you could use explainer videos to supplement your marketing and customer service goals. But whatever its format or purpose, a good explainer goal should always connect your complex service with the customers who can use it the most.