Explainer videos are a great way to show off your product so your audience can quickly understand. These videos often speak directly toward your audience’s pain points and clearly show off how your product can solve them.
And they’re not limited to only marketing and sales videos. You can also use them to roll out a new internal system, explain a policy, or onboard employees.
If creating one sounds a little intimidating, don’t worry.
In this post, we’ll walk through what makes a high-quality explainer video, how to create your own explainer video and the best explainer video examples you can use for inspiration.
What is an explainer video?
An explainer video is a quick, engaging video often used as the modern-day elevator pitch for a company’s product or service.
Successful ones are concise, focused, and have a very specific purpose: to communicate the value of your product in the shortest amount of time.
The explainer video style is designed to grab people’s attention and ultimately convert them to try or buy your product or service.
They are often displayed on landing pages, in emails, and, more commonly, as ads on YouTube.
Top types of explainer videos
Explainer videos tend to leverage four common storytelling formats: animation, live action, screencast video, and whiteboard drawings.
Each one has pros and cons, and the best explainer videos know when to leverage each to best tell their story. To help you decide what’s best for your audience, I’ve laid out the common benefits for each:
1. Animation:
Animated explainers are great for communicating abstract or intangible ideas and are also great for creative storytelling. They’re the most versatile options for explainer videos, but they can also be expensive to outsource. But there are also plenty of animation tools available if you want to make one on your own at a reasonable cost.
Typically an animation video is used to explain software or services.
2. Live action:
Few things can beat a relatable person, communicating a relatable message.
That’s the benefit of creating live-action explainer videos.
Including people in your videos can build a connection between the viewer and the message you’re communicating, so any time there’s an opportunity to use live action, take it.
3. Screencast video:
Screencast video is ideal for showing software in action. This is a powerful method to use if your goal is to provide people with a clear look at a product before they try or /buy.
4. Whiteboard drawing:
A good explainer video keeps your attention throughout the video. And there’s a certain appeal to having content created right before your eyes through video animation.
Use whiteboard drawings when you need to communicate a bigger topic within the context of its smaller parts. The ability to zoom out at the end of a whiteboard drawing to show everything within context is a powerful tool.
Production techniques and tools
Before you roll up your sleeves or hand off your project to an external company, let’s take a step back and make sure the right people are making your video.
The biggest factor in this decision is often budget, but I suggest you start by considering the level of impact you want the video to have.
This will help gauge a rational size for your investment. Is this video going to lead your marketing efforts for a campaign? Will it live in a prominent place, such as on the landing page of your website? The greater the desired impact, the more you should consider higher investment levels.
On the flip side, if you’re simply looking to dip your toes into the explainer video world, then you might want to consider rolling those sleeves back up and making this yourself to save some money.
If you’re a little unsure how to proceed, I’ve laid out the pros and cons of the two most common options for creating an explainer video.
Option 1: Hire an outside company
Pros: Video production companies have the talent, skills, and experience to create the best explainer videos. Good companies work with you to make your video exactly how you want it.
Cons: It’s going to cost you. The average cost for a custom 60-second explainer video is roughly $8,000.
Summary: If there’s a lot depending on this video, you should hire an external company to produce a “knock their socks off” level explainer video. This will cost you, but the payoff will likely be worth it.
Option 2: Make it yourself
Pros: You have complete creative freedom and more control over the budget.
Cons: You’re limited by your own skills, time, software, and hardware. If you’re looking to get into video creation, I recommend trying out Camtasia. It’s designed for people new to video production and it’s free to try!
Summary: If the stakes are low or you’re willing to try your hand at video production, then build it in-house. You have more control over the budget and complete creative freedom.
How to create an effective explainer video
Step 1: Start with the end in mind
Let’s return to the elevator pitch analogy and imagine ourselves standing next to a potential customer with roughly one to two minutes to get across the value of our product.
That’s not long.
Given the time constraints, the best way to craft your message is to first take a step back and look at why you’re even saying it. The goal is to figure out what you want the customer to do when the conversation ends.
- Should they sign up for your service?
- Create an account?
- Visit your webpage?
Make sure you first set a clear end goal before you go any further.
One way to help establish this goal is to write a purpose statement. For example, a purpose statement might be something like “to drive current users to upgrade” or “to increase the number of trial sign-ups from people in their 20s and 30s.”
The most helpful purpose statements include an actionable phrase and an audience.
Once you establish a purpose statement, the next step is to determine your audience.
Step 2: Determine your target audience
Explainer videos are short by nature, and if you don’t speak to a specific audience, your video is doomed to fail.
Think about the people that you most want to target with this video.
The goal here is to get the right people on the elevator, so you can tell them the right message.
Choose a specific subset of your total customers; a group that is strategically picked for the purpose of this video. You can’t target everyone and you shouldn’t try to.
A broad message is often a muddled message, which means fewer people taking action after your video.
Step 3: Craft your narrative
After establishing your audience, it’s time to craft the narrative. You have roughly ninety seconds to introduce your product or company, the problem your users are facing, and how your product can solve it.
This is a lot to cover in a short amount of time, and I recommend breaking it down into more manageable chunks.
Start by focusing on the problem. Take the time to dig into customer data, make customer calls and get to know the biggest problems facing your users. These problems are key to your message, as they’re the reason your potential customers are even looking for a solution.
Once you have a firm grasp on the problems, it’s time to focus on solutions. Here’s where you start crafting the narrative, and the key is to focus on solutions, not features.
Think of it less as a chance to show off your feature set and more of a chance to communicate how your product will make them better at what they do.
Focus on telling a relatable story about the problems they’re facing, then introduce your solution and show how it will improve their life.
Step 4: Record or shoot your explainer video
This step depends on the type of explainer video you want to create and which production method you choose. If you outsource the production and editing, your main job oversee the project to ensure that it meets all the requirements and guidelines you laid out above.
If you’re recording your own video, however, you’ve got a fair amount of work left to do. At a high-level here are the basic steps required to create an explainer video on your own.
- Write a script: Creating your script will help you sound more professional and ensure you don’t miss any points you need to cover.
- Create a storyboard: If your video will have multiple scenes and formats, it can help to sketch out a basic storyboard to visualize what will be on screen during your narration.
- Record your voice-over: Now you can take your script and start recording that narration.
- Gather your visual assets: If you’re simply doing a screencast explainer video, you can record your screen and your script at the same time. Otherwise now is the time to bring in any graphics or product videos you may need.
- Edit your video: Whether you’re using a template or starting from scratch you can start building your video.
- Add music and sound effects. Many explainers include a soundtrack in the background to keep the audience engaged throughout the video.
If you want in-depth training on how to make your first video, check out the TechSmith Academy to learn the basics.
Step 4: Share your video with the world
After your video is all set, now it’s time to share it with your audience. The best thing about an explainer video is that you can share it across multiple channels.
Here are a few places of the top places to promote your new video:
- Paid ads: Put some money behind the video to guarantee it shows up in front of your audience on the channels that matter most
- Organic social media: Every few months reshare your explainer video to your audience so new followers can learn more about what you do.
- YouTube: If you write a solid title and description for your video, your explainer video can easily show up anytime someone types in your brand name.
- Your product landing pages: There is some debateas to whether videos help or hurt your landing page conversions, but allowing your audience to choose how to consume the content is never a bad idea.
After you share your video, the real fun begins. You can track performance on each channel and use those insights to prepare for your next video project.
9 examples of successful explainer videos
Check out these examples to get some inspiration on style, scripting, and narrative flow for your own explainer videos as part of your sales, training, or marketing strategy.
1. OLIPOP
This quick overview video from OLIPOP proves you don’t need complexity to create a great explainer video. In less than a minute, you learn what the product is, how it’s different from other sodas, and what the main benefits are.
2. TheraBreath
TheraBreath does a great job of using quick scenes and movement to keep the audience engaged and tell the story. And they use a different persona to show off each benefit.
3. Chomps
Chomps does a great job of visualizing what the product does. This is more of a highly-produced video, but they clearly state the why behind the product in a way that’s easy to understand.
4. TidyCal
AppSumo (the makers of TidyCal) starts off by clearly stating what the app is and why it matters. Then they use simple screen videos to show off how it all works.
5. Glide
Glide doesn’t get too complicated with this explainer video, but it does a great job of using animation, stock videos, and simple narration to explain a complex topic.
6. Help Scout
Help Scout clearly understands the problem that their feature solves and does a great job leading off with what the customer actual cares about rather than focusing on themselves.
7. Sprout Social
This video from Sprout Social has a great mix of visual elements and tells a compelling story to try out the feature they’re explaining.
8. Airtable
At the core of the video Airtable is showing of screen recordings of their product. Nothing too fancy about that concept, but they do a great job of mixing in different visual elements and music to make you keep wanting to watch.
9. Blue Buffalo
This example proves you don’t need a voiceover to make an explainer video work. Blue Buffalo does a nice job of mixing music, on-screen text, and visuals to explain what their app is and how it works.
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