How To Turn Curious Visitors Into Valuable Customers With Explainer Videos

As part of their marketing efforts, companies pour all their creative resources into producing content to reach ever-wider audiences. As a result, brands have to come up with compelling ads, landing pages, and posts to distribute on their social channels.

But it’s one thing to attract new crowds and quite another to convert visitors into customers. For that, you need unique pieces that both engage prospects and gives them relevant information on what to do next.

Among all types of content, there’s one that’s had spectacular benefits for brands facing this challenge— explainer videos.

Included in your video marketing strategy, explainers can give your audience key insights into what makes your solution good and unique. But their success lies in several aspects you need to understand well and master.

So, in this piece, we’ll take you through five of the explainer videos’ most crucial elements. Plus, we’ll tell you a bit about what you can do with these pieces to increase conversions.

Harnessing the Power of Storytelling in Your Scripts

Explainer videos are effective conversion-boosting tools for very different reasons than classic ads. Whereas the latter seek to promote your product directly and loudly, explainers take your audience through a discovery process by means of a story.

When writing your video’s script, you need to think of two essential elements to reach and connect with your audience:

The problem. Pinpoint the main challenge your targets face. Maybe they waste a lot of valuable time in the office. Or the technology they count on is obsolete. You need to identify your audience’s critical pain points and dramatize them with a riveting story.

The solution. Don’t leave your prospects ruminating over the problem: it’s equally important to showcase your product as the tale’s hero. Help your audience appreciate your solution’s features and benefits by demonstrating how they’re useful for overcoming the problem.

How to do it: Explainer videos work differently than blog articles and eBooks. As you will most likely use voiceover in your piece, you need to make sure that the script is very clear and simple to understand for your listening audience.

Rewrite awkward phrases to reflect the natural way your viewers speak. Specifically, avoid using confusing wording and express yourself in terms very familiar to them.

Using Effective Characterization to Mirror Your Intended Audience

Once you’ve zeroed in on your targets’ problems and how your solution comes in handy, it’s time to get even more creative: design likable characters that embark on the journey!

Introducing animated characters helps you convey your message through the lens of people that resemble your prospects in their wants and needs. Through their example, characters excel at three key purposes:

Sympathizing with your viewers. If you are going to put your characters through similar situations as your audience, then they must have vivid reactions. Your characters should experience frustration, fatigue, joy, or any emotion that your viewers can relate to.

Demonstrating your product. Help your audience better grasp how your product works by showing the range of activities and areas where the characters use it.

Telling a success story. Ideally, your characters should undergo a significant transformation thanks to the introduction of your solution. Illustrate in your video how they end up leading happier, easier, and more productive lives.

How to do it: To create compelling characters, you need to customize them according to your viewers’ interests and hobbies. The best stories out there feature characters that resemble their specific audience’s tastes, style, and life ambitions.

Grabbing Your Audience’s Attention with a Hook

When crafting your explainer video’s script, keep in mind that the first seconds are critical. If, after a few moments, your audience isn’t drawn to your message, they’ll likely stop watching it. And you surely don’t want them to miss out on all that your brand has to offer!

This is why you need to start your piece with a great hook, some of the most popular being:

Personal anecdotes. To share ideas that would otherwise seem dry and uninteresting.

Jokes. To break the fourth wall and bond with the viewer through laughter.

Thought-provoking questions. Whether personal or philosophical, these are useful for triggering the user’s engagement.

Stats. Shocking percentages, numbers, or ratios (“9 out of 10…”) are persuasive insofar as they place facts in perspective.

By leading your pieces with one of these hooks, you will elicit an emotional response from viewers and motivate them to discover more about your offerings.

How to do it: Your hook should not only be told but illustrated. For example, if you’re leading your piece with a question, show how the characters analyze alternative answers. Or if you want to use numbers and stats, video styles like motion graphics are perfect for visualizing data.

Understanding Your Video’s Color Palette (and Other Branding Techniques)

When your goal is to increase conversions, you need to implement features in your video to help new visitors identify and retain the piece as part of your brand.

Effective branding involves more than just using your logo here and there. You want your piece to stand out as your own artwork, expressing your brand’s unique values and ideas.

Throughout your piece, you want to add the following elements to personalize the characters, background, and overall esthetic composition of your video:

Your brand’s basic color palette (on the video’s sceneries, character’s clothes, and fonts).

Your logo and taglines (in non-intrusive places, such as the video’s upper or lower right corners, and in the final frame).

Jingles and music (to set the tone of your piece).

How to do it: Popular video-sharing platforms offer huge opportunities for fully customizing your videos and channel. YouTube, for example, gives you the option to create custom banners and thumbnails where you can add your color scheme and logo.

If you want to repurpose parts of your piece for, say, Instagram Stories, you can take advantage of the great number of filters, stickers, and fonts available there.

Implementing Subtle-but-Clear Cues to Prompt Users into Action

You’ve created an interesting, motivating piece that represents your brand in all its elements. But what should viewers do once they’ve watched it?

You shouldn’t have your audience guess the next best course of action. Rather, add clear CTAs so you can let them know where they can find more and better information to discover more about your brand or product.

Many types of CTAs can be adapted to all kinds of purposes. For example, you can use them for:

Lead nurturing (“Start Your Free Trial” or “Sign Up”).
Closing a sale (“Join Us” or “Shop Now!”).
Product discovery (“Request a Demo” or “View the New Features”).
Social sharing (“Like the ideas? Share with Your Friends”).

Using short and direct cues like these will prompt curious users to take action.

How to do it: In explainer videos, CTAs are best reserved for the final frame of the piece. Make sure they are eye-catching: use bright, contrasting fonts and colors that are easily readable.

Wrapping Up

Explainer videos are fantastic assets to your marketing strategy because they bring your prospects closer to your brand by means of charming, informative animated pieces(See here for more information).

These videos work wonders in terms of social media selling, where audiences love to be engaged with visually appealing content and inspiring stories. But you also want to have them on your website and landing pages, where visitors come looking for useful information about new products.

As customers come closer to your channels, will you have a memorable explainer video to share your message with them?


Author Bio: Victor Blasco is an audiovisual designer, video marketing expert, and founder/CEO of the explainer video production company Yum Yum Videos. Besides running the business, he’s a lifelong student of Chinese philosophy and a passionate geek for all things sci-fi.