You’ve finally got the C-suite buy-in to incorporate animated video for business into your digital marketing strategy—don’t blow it! How do you make sure you create animated videos in the most effective way possible for your marketing strategy? Seek out a professional video production company specializing in making videos to help you sidestep some common mistakes. 

Animated videos aren’t just cartoon characters. They use motion graphics in the form of text, drawings, smart transitions, voiceovers, and other audio. Animated videos in marketing create and retain attention. They help your brand generate multi-faceted marketing engagement utilizing emotion and nostalgia.

If you don’t put enough careful thought and planning time into creating your animated video, or if it doesn’t get anywhere near the reach you wanted, you may decide to discontinue this important tool. When it could be as easy as tweaking a few things, you may instead give up altogether.

Let’s review some common mistakes to avoid when making an animated video for your business.

1.  Compromising on Quality

Yes, you need to invest in animated videos for digital marketing, but not at the expense of quality. Don’t jump into animated video just to say you did. Do it right, or you’ll be sending your brand reputation backward.

Whatever industry you operate in, if you do something—anything—poorly, people will assume you do everything poorly. That’s just people being people. We have limited time, sometimes just split seconds, to form opinions before moving on. We don’t always invest in more in-depth research to prove our assumptions correct or incorrect. We just move along with that perception rooted into our psyche. Animated explainer videos lose their authority if not presented in a sharp and high-quality manner.

Avoid this costly mistake to your brand by working with a professional video production company and avoiding the remainder of these mistakes below.

2.  Targeting Everyone Yet Targeting No One

The characters in your video should represent the audience to which your product or service most relates. Who will view your video? Everyone? Since we all have a limited amount of time and money, your company’s marketing resources are best spent on your target audience—the people you want to convert into customers.

Targeting the entire world can be tempting, but you will always fall short, even with stunning animation videos. Presentations of the video to your target audience with messages that specifically resonate with them will be the most effective use of animation.

3.  Not Establishing Goals

Consider using animation videos as part of your overall digital marketing plan. It works in tandem with any offline marketing or public relations efforts you will do throughout the year. Within the context of animation video marketing, you will need to establish goals for each production. Not doing so creates a scenario in which you lose the purpose of the video. Viewers can sense this. It seems random—and your audience will not fall for it.

Be sure to establish goals in line with your company’s mission and overall marketing plan. If you don’t, your video may fail tobring in new customers or access the skyrocketing conversion rates that animated videos can achieve.

4.  Lack of Planning

On some platforms, you can get away with sharing a few fun photos to keep your audience’s interest stoked. It’s better than nothing, right? With animated videos, however, you can’t just stream a collection of images together. You need to consider the words the voiceover will use, the text that will appear, and the music that will play.

You want to start with a script that carries the audience and animators through the entire video. This textual blueprint of your animated video grounds the marketing campaign. Whiteboard animation works very well in the planning stage, as animators use it to plan out the visual aspects of a video.

Whiteboard animation also produces beautiful and engaging videos and can be an option itself due to its simplicity. 

5.  Going Off-Brand

Animated videos can play a pivotal role as one part of your overall digital marketing strategy. Make sure that youincorporate your brand messaging goals into this tool.

Opening your mind to a new marketing avenue can produce great results but can lead to getting side-tracked. Don’t fall prey to temptation and try stuffing every new idea you’ve fallen in love with into your animated video. For now, you must strive for succinctness. Animated video for business should be about 90 seconds long. The videos need to highlight the most valuable aspects of the message you want to convey.

If you’ve captured an audience’s attention with an animated video, make sure it incorporates your previously established branding to the point where it’s recognizable as your product or service. This effort will ensure your video fits seamlessly into your overall marketing plan and merges coherently across all of your platforms.

6.  Being Too Sales-y

The “why” is more important than the “how” in animated business videos. Product explainer videos should highlight benefits, not features. You only have a short time to make an impact, and a potential customer doesn’t care how your product works until they know if it will help them.

Essentially, alousy video script would say, “Here’s a two-minute animated explainer video about why we’re so great. The end.” Yet, some companies attempt only to achieve that simplistic message. Your video will reach people who don’t know you yet. They will not immediately take the word of a stranger—would you?

7.  Not Being Sales-y Enough

You still need to apply all the typical marketing principles to your animated video. Think of how you’d write a compelling blog post. Hook them with a lede. Present a problem. Show how you’re the solution. Move your audience to action.

Your company’s marketing goals should be somewhere along the lines of increasing engagement, expanding brand awareness, and increasing sales and revenue. The objectives of your animated video for business should reinforce this. 

Avoid Mistakes with Bee Video Productions

The creative and diverse experts at Bee Video Productions in Toronto specialize in video marketing—it’s all we do! Find out how our simple and predictable animation video production process can fit seamlessly into your digital marketing plan by calling us today at (647) 625-9629.