When to Use Animation in Business
The use of animation in your marketing and for your business can be powerful when done well. Animation can help you attract new customers, engage with your current audience and build your online presence. You can also advertise your company without spending a lot of money. Animated content tends to be a very cost-effective option.
Animated content is easy to understand, and it can make your content strategy more effective overall.
There are certain principles of animation you’ll want to follow that a professional company can help you with. For example, anticipation is a critical element of animation. Anticipation is the preparation for the main action.
While there are technical elements of animation to be aware of, it’s worth exploring its implications for business and marketing and when you might use it.
The Specific Benefits of Using Animation
We’ve briefly touched on these, but some of the specific benefits of using animation in business include:
- You have a limited amount of time to grab the attention of an online audience. Internet users have incredibly brief attention spans, so animation helps you grab their attention and connect with them very quickly. When you do animation well, it makes your viewers want to follow the story. People are used to other types of marketing materials, but animation can still stand out, helping you get more attention.
- Animation brings even complex topics to life and helps them become easier to understand. You can show how highly complicated processes work with animation videos in a way that you likely couldn’t do with other types of content.
- There’s an element of fun with animation, which makes these types of videos more engaging and sharable.
- Production of animation videos is affordable. You don’t need a huge budget to bring animation to life.
So when should you use animation?
Brand Awareness
People online are constantly bombarded with content, including video content. An animated video is a good way to stand out and promote brand awareness. If you can create characters that emotionally resonate with your audience, then they might captivate enough attention to get them to stop scrolling and take notice of your brand.
Your goal with branding is always to cultivate a lasting, memorable impression. You can provide more insight into your value, personality, and purpose with animation.
You can give your customers a better understanding of who you are as a business and what you stand for.
Animations, along with evoking emotions, can create a sense of nostalgia that connects people with your brand and helps you stay in their memory.
Improving Conversion Rates
One specific application of animation in your business can be when you want to boost your conversion rates through a simplified and engaging message. Around 64% of visitors to websites are more likely to buy something after they watch a video. Visitors viewing videos stay on sites an overage of two minutes longer than those who don’t.
When you use animation for conversion rates, your audience is more likely to watch an entire video than they would be to read text-based content alone. Take this a step further with a call-to-action at the end of your video that lets your audience know exactly what action you want them to take.
Explaining Something Complicated
We’ve briefly touched on this, but if you have something complex that you need your audience to understand, an animated video is an excellent option.
If you want to, for example, explain your product, and it’s not immediately apparent how it works or solves a problem, trying to explain it just using text is difficult, and it’s not going to be very attention-grabbing. It’s difficult to get your audience to connect with a text-based explainer.
Animation is well-suited to a situation where you need to take something complex or technical and get a concept across in a simplified way.
SEO Booster
When you have animation on your business website, it’s good for search engine optimization. Search engines like Google want to see sites that have media content. Consumers want more video content, and Google’s primary goal is to deliver the best possible experience for people using their search engine. When you have websites with animated videos, it can likely improve your SEO.
Also, when you have great animated videos, it means that other sites are more likely to link back to you, which is also good for SEO.
Training and Internal Communication
While we’re primarily talking about the use of animation for marketing purposes, it’s also a great option for training and internal communication. Training can be boring and lack a sense of engagement, but when your employees aren’t well-trained, it can affect productivity, retention, and turnover. You want engaging, fun training, which animation can deliver.
Corporate internal communication can also have the same problem in that it’s boring and dry, so your employees and key stakeholders might not pay much attention. Animation gives more involvement with the information, is more interactive, and can be more stimulating for the people watching it.
B2B Communication
If you have a B2B product or service, animated explainer videos can be perfect here as well. You’re letting your B2B customers know that your brand is fun and quirky, and you’re also giving them the information they need to maximize their use of your product or service.
What to Remember With Animation
Regardless of the specific situation that you’re using animation in, you want to keep some best practices in mind. Start with a script that’s clever and compelling. You want to keep things simple, but don’t be afraid to get creative. Since animation is meant to be more fun and engaging, you want to evoke positive emotions.
You also need to adapt your animated content to your targeted audience.
Get to know your audience as comprehensively as you can. You want to learn their age range, the music they like, and visually what might resonate most with them.
Finally, even though animations are shorter and less expensive than many other types of video content, don’t skimp on the quality.
