Do you struggle with creating online video? Have you considered video animation? Video storytelling is a great way to generate engagement online and will ensure you stand out from the digital marketing crowd.
By 2020, 80% of online content will be video (according to a Cisco study), so there’s no time to wait to up-skill in video marketing whether you are a business owner, a marketer or a tutor.
At the Digital Training Institute, we use tools that benefit our business and we also use them as part of our client consultancy work. I began using GoAnimate over a year ago after doing some research on engaging video tools. It didn’t take me too long to teach myself how to use it and in fact, I now teach my students and clients how to use it — such is its value.
Help You Get Creative with Types of Video to Animate
1) Promotional Video
As a business owner I am constantly marketing my business. I dedicate lots of time to providing free digital marketing content to my online community. This allows me to showcase my knowledge and expertise. Therefore promotional videos have key marketing tactic for me.
I host a monthly webinar series and I use GoAnimate to create promotional videos explaining to people why they should attend my webinar. The videos are short – usually less than 30 seconds – as I want to share them on social media – Facebook, Twitter and Instagram where most of my online community network.
Within the video, I tell them what I am promoting, why they should attend, where the webinar takes place, when it is happening and how to register – all in a short animated video!
This video was used to promote my webinar: Is Your Staff Damaging your Brand Online?
2) Tutorial Video
Do you struggle with constantly developing engaging content for your audience? Are you afraid of committing death by PowerPoint?
I’m a trainer in social media and digital marketing, so producing engaging content is a large part of my work. It’s so important to produce content rich materials that keep your students interested, while communicating knowledge in a fun way.
My experience as a tutor is that video storytelling can be hugely impactful to illustrate particular marketing strategies. I also find that my students remember video content more than other content I’ve provided in a training course or workshop.
I produced this video for my course Digital PR – Merging Old Techniques and New Technologies and this video was one part of an eight-step digital PR strategy. The video communicates how to engage with journalists when you are pitching a news story to them.
The video clearly illustrates the working relationship between a journalist and a PR practitioner, the inside workings of a newsroom and how to position your online news release for publication.
3) Conference Video
I am asked to speak at conferences on a regular basis and so I spend lots of time preparing new content for new audiences. My time slots usually vary from 30-90 minutes and so I always ensure I incorporate video into my presentation.
Video serves a number of purposes not least to give attendees a rest from listening to me but also to help keep them engaged.
The video below was part of a series of animated videos I produced as part of a 90-minute workshop at the Big Data Retail Analytics Forum in London. The event focused on how to embed a data-centric culture into your business and the audience comprised mainly of data analysts.
4) How-to Video
I also use GoAnimate videos for my Take Two video series on my YouTube channel. These videos are short, sharp and to the point and give you some quick tips on a specific digital marketing or social media topic.
Did you know ‘how to’ is one of the most searched terms on Google and YouTube and so sharing how to tips can prove extremely valuable to attract organic traffic to your website.
What knowledge could you share online using the ‘how to’ format?
Here’s one I produced on how to grow your following on Twitter.
5) Re-purposing Content
We also use GoAnimate for our client consultancy work. Much of work companies is writing digital strategy and creating digital content.
A great way to re-purpose content is to compile the key messages into an animated video. Do you have a blog post, a presentation, a speaking script or an infographic that you produced for your company? Have you considered re-purposing it into an animated video?
In this animated video we re-purposed an infographic we designed as part of The Skeff’s Tag Team campaign. The campaign was aimed at university students encouraging them to plan how to get home after a night out.
So here’s the infographic.
Here’s the re-purposed animated video.
6) Informative Video
Animated video allows you to share lots of complex information in an easy to digest format and in a relatively short period of time.
Whatever industry you work in, there will be key information and statistics that are your stakeholders or customers should be aware of.
This video is for our client Bluebird Care, a homecare company, and they wanted to share the 10 early signs of Dementia with their online community.
7) Whiteboard Animation
I find that whiteboard animation is an excellent way to communicate in videos.
Research tells us that the average attention span is just 8 seconds, so the consistent drawing of shapes and figures in a whiteboard animation video will keep the mind from wandering, focusing on your core message.
Here’s a whiteboard animation I created to promote my webinar. You can see that I have created myself in this video too using the bespoke character feature.
Wrapping It Up
Video is the most pervasive content-type online and as marketers, educators or business owners we have no choice but to embrace video storytelling. With the Internet expected to grow by 500% by 2020, we need to understand how to stand out from the online crowd.
So will you GoAnimate? Go on, you will thank me, and the GoAnimate team for it!
Want to learn more about how it works? I recently included GoAnimate in an article for Social Media Examiner, which went viral – ‘6 video tools to ignite your social marketing’. I went into great detail on how to use the tool and to date the article has had over 6,300 shares!
