ROI on animated explainer videos… explained

We’ve all heard the phrase “a picture speaks a thousand words” right? Well, a single minute of video is actually worth about 1.8 million words*, which you’d definitely struggle to fit on your website’s homepage in text form – not to mention clients don’t want to have to use your website as bedtime reading for weeks to get through it all! 

So, what’s all the fuss about using video content in my marketing strategy?

Straight text is great for books, but if you’re trying to sell someone a product/service or gain interest in what you’re offering, facing someone with a wall of text big enough to excite President Trump is most likely not going to have the success or interest that you’re looking for. Not only are people put off by large amounts of text and the time it will take to read it all, but readers only retain about 10% of information when consuming text compared to 95% of information remembered after watching a video*. This creates a better-informed customer, and a much tidier website if the video is located on its homepage. Not only will your website look like it’s up to date and not resemble Windows XP every time it crashed (ah, those were the days), but having a video on your homepage makes a website 53%* more likely to appear on the first page of Google search results. This is important because the first page of Google captures 71% of clicks (and reportedly up to 92% in recent years) with the first 5 results snapping up 67.6% of all clicks*. Google’s second page of search results only receives less than 6% of all website clicks*. This just goes to show how important it is to have a good SEO strategy to get your rankings higher up the page.

Not only is a video much more appealing, but it can also help to increase credibility and trust from the customer. This is supported by 64%* of customers being more likely to buy a product online after watching a video. Real estate listings which include a video receive 403%* more inquiries than those without. This mentality isn’t just limited to B2C organisations either, as 96%*of B2B organisations use some kind of video in their marketing with 73% reporting positive effects on their ROI*. As tempting as it is, you don’t want a full-length feature film explaining your services either as 60% of viewers will stop watching within about 2 minutes* – so keep it short and sweet.

So now you’ve got me interested, what were you saying about animation?

Ah yes, animation. We like it, if you couldn’t tell (quite a bit actually), but only because of how powerful, versatile and creative it is.

Animation is the easiest way to convey a complex idea, as the only limit to what can be produced is creativity (and budget, no such thing as a free lunch pal). While animation can seem like something only Hollywood can afford, it can often be cheaper and more effective in explaining your ideas than an expensive video production where a crew and actors need to be hired along with locations, set and props. Generating images digitally also doesn’t have the restrictions of reality, so literally anything can be shown to customers in an animated explainer video. Not only are animated videos generally more visually appealing than video productions, but animated marketing videos increase conversation rates by up to 20%*. On top of this, companies require 37% fewer unique visits to their site to gain marketing response or leads when using animated videos*. This is most likely helped by the fact that 90% of information transmitted to the brain is visual and that visual images are processed 60,000x faster than written text by the brain*.

Let’s move on now as you’re probably interested in ROI judging by the title of this blog and aren’t interested in babblings about the wonders of animation (although it is pretty cool, and you should definitely get one).

How will an animated explainer video affect my ROI then?

Well, to put it simply, an animated explainer video will increase your sales and/or public interest. A wonderful example of this is General Electronics when they removed all of the text-heavy articles from their website and replaced them with explainer videos. This led to a huge increase in sales within the following four months and some of the videos reached up to two million views.

To have a successful video and a high ROI you need to have a goal to begin with. The idea of what the outcome should be needs to be around from the beginning so that the animation can be fit for purpose and have the best effect on client/ intended audience. A brilliant case study regarding this is when BlackRock used an interactive video designed to increase 401k contributions. There was a single goal and the whole project was designed solely around that one goal of increasing those contributions. Viewers made choices throughout essentially showing the financial benefit of contributing to the 401k rather than a daily coffee for example. Although it sounds like a bit of a gimmick, 70% of viewers interacted with the video with 50% of those who engaged increasing 401k contributions. Need I say more?

The most integral part of having a high ROI from an animated video is to know what you want the intended outcome to be. With a set goal and intended outcome in mind, the animated video produced will have a positive effect on sales etc. A good way to incentivise people to watch all of the video is to have some kind of reward at the end of the video so that people keep watching. This can be anything from a fun fact to a voucher, and although it may seem unnecessary, it will make people more likely to watch the whole video and allows the whole message to get across.

Right then, so how do I measure ROI from an animated explainer video?

This is entirely dependent on what the goal of the video was. Some common goals include: Increased sales; brand awareness; lead generation etc. After distinguishing what the goal is, you then need to decide on a metric to be able to measure the success of the video, and in turn the ROI. Some goals are easier to measure than others, but for sales you’d be looking at revenue, number of orders etc. Leads are also easy to track, but some other goals such as brand awareness are a little trickier. Many companies have specific goals so your metric will likely be tailored to that specific video.

Once you’ve decided how you’re going to measure ROI on a shiny new animation, it may be valuable to you to work out a monetary value if applicable to your goal. This is an easy way to see how much more profit an animation has made you. Sales is the easiest one to measure as it is simply looking at how much they have increased since getting an animated video and working out the additional profit.

That’s all fine and dandy, but what comes next?

If you’ve made it this far (first off well done), you’re clearly interested in what an animated explainer video can do for you. As mentioned before, they are a brilliant way of expressing a company’s brand identity, values, services/products and ethos all at the same time in a way that is enjoyable and easy to process. Now that I’ve drawn you in, I can see that you’re thinking about the overwhelming possibilities of an animated explainer video and the wonders it’ll do for your company. If that’s the case, give us a call, come for a coffee and we can chat about how to bring your company to the next level. We look forward to meeting you.