Animated Explainer Video Company

What are explainer videos? Are animated explainer videos effective for your business growth?

These are short animated marketing videos used to explain about the company, products, services or any complex topic. These videos are mostly animated instead of live-action since that is how they started out initially when tech giants like Google decided to use animated explainer videos to talk about their products and services on landing pages. It wasn’t until recently that the live-action explainer video came into the picture. Most of these videos you see have some variation of the following structure: hook, problem, solution, and call to action.

Animated explainer videos for business work so well that the Salesforce-owned social performance management platform, Rypple, managed to increase conversion rates by 20% using them on its homepage. This is also the average increase in conversion rates that companies normally see when they use explainer videos on their website.

What are the different types of animated explainer videos?

Our explainer video production company produces seven types of animated explainer videos for your business across the customer lifecycle. These videos are used to attract, convert, close and delight your customers.

Brand Videos: These animated marketing videos for business are used to improve brand awareness by educating and entertaining the audience without any direct reference to your offerings. This empowers the audience, increases the engagement, and makes them curious about your brand, driving the quality of traffic, and conversions up. This type of videos have the highest probability to go viral since people tend to share them aggressively.

Commercial Videos: These animated explainer videos are used to create brand awareness and recall on the social media platforms. They are also known as 30 second explainer videos. They are extensively used by brands to drive referral traffic to your landing pages.
Product Explainer Videos: These animated marketing videos, as the name suggests, are used to explain products to the target audience on your landing pages and increase your conversion rates. They are also known as 90 second explainer videos since they tend to be on the longer side compared to commercial videos.
Corporate Videos: These animated explainer videos are used to communicate with the audience in an authentic fashion - by educating, entertaining and even inspiring them. Companies use these videos to tell their employees and prospective customers about their story, vision and mission, policies and even events. These videos help them build an emotional connection with the audience.

Customer Testimonials: This type of animated explainer video production helps to establish social proof for your company which makes your audience trust you more. It improves the likelihood of your audience making the purchase.
Demo & Training Videos: Still using training manuals to support your employees and customers? Switch to animated demo videos. These videos can get your customers up and running with your products and services in no time. Animated training videos help increase employee efficiency and engagement. These explainer videos are a great way to delight your audience and increase the retention rates.
Internal Communication Videos: These animated explainer videos are used for a range of internal communication purposes ranging from recruitment, onboarding, to updating shareholders with the latest numbers. They can help you increase the transparency with your employees while getting rid of the fluff in the information you’re communicating.

How many animation styles are offered by our animated explainer video agency?

We majorly produce four styles of animated explainer videos for your business growth. Certain animation styles are more effective for specific application of explainer videos as described below:

Whiteboard Explainer Videos: These videos are great for education. They are extensively used for, brand awareness, internal communication and employee training videos. Whiteboard animation is the most affordable style for your explainer videos. Our explainer video company over the period of 10 years has developed this unique formula to design affordable custom animated whiteboard videos.
Cartoon Explainer Videos: There are times when you need the subject of the video to be a human representing your target audience. This type of animated explainer video production is great for explaining your product or service with a human touch. Our explainer video agency specialises in all kinds of cartoon videos services that is 2d explainer videos, isometric explainer videos and 3d explainer videos.

Infographic Explainer Videos: This type of explainer video production is best suited for representing abstract concepts, business ideas or factual data in a simple yet engaging manner. Infographic videos are extensively used for explaining complex products. This is the most minimalistic form of animation videos. Our animated explainer video company uses 2D, 2.5D and 3D animation techniques to produce innovative styles for your business.
Mixed Media Animation: When you want your video to stand out from the clutter and be more relatable for the audience, mixed media animation can help. In this art style, we mix live-action images with motion graphics animation. They are extensively used in demand generation for product explainer videos but can work across almost all stages of your customer’s life cycle. In our experience of more than a decade as an animated explainer video company, we've noticed that these explainer videos are best suited for healthcare and real estate industry.

Is your business ready for an animated explainer video production company?

That said, before going ahead and getting an explanatory video made, you need to ensure that your company is ready for it. Animated explainer videos should be used as conversion rate optimisation tool (CRO), which means you should have enough traffic coming to your landing pages or enough social media followers for video to optimise it. For example If you rank in the top ten results on search engines for some of your keywords, getting a landing page video will have an impact on your conversion rates. An average landing page video is up to 2 minutes long which costs roughly between $5400 - $10,000. So you need to make sure that you have enough funds set aside to hire a great animated explainer video company for your business.

Getting animated explainer video production done for social media is an entirely different ballgame when compared with those made for landing pages. Firstly, you need to consider whether you’ve run text or image campaigns on social media before or not. If you’ve run campaigns, you need to analyse how those campaigns have performed and whether you’re consistently posting on social media or not.

The idea should be to get higher CTR and engagement using animated explainer videos driving maximum ROI for your marketing investment.

An average social media video is up to 60 seconds long which costs around $4000 upwards. Also when you start using social media videos it's important to use them consistently to see great results. If you have enough funds set aside to get atleast 12 videos made for a year, please go ahead and contact an animated explainer video company.

How to go about your animated explainer video production process?

Creating an explanation video is a complex process starting from an important question: “Is it wiser to go for an animated explainer video company, an explainer video software, or simply use templates?”

Each choice has its own merits and demerits associated with it. Let’s talk about using software for your animated explainer videos. The best part of using these software is the ease with which you can make a video and sometimes you can even export free online explainer videos. These tools allow you to drag and drop characters and animate them in a few simple clicks. You can use the software’s templates as well.

However, it can be a handful sometimes and you may find it difficult to reproduce your ideas precisely on such softwares. Moreover, creating videos on these softwares is free but downloading them in good quality without watermarks can be expensive. While you’re still saving some time, your budget should be about $500.

Using templates for animated explainer videos is more expensive than using a software, but your videos are of higher quality. An average video template cost starts around $50. But you would need a video animator to edit the After Effects template (costing $50/hr on average). The After Effects animator should take around 20-30 hours to edit your template or you can go to an animated explainer video company for editing your video. Adding the cost of voice-over ($50-$300), an average video would then cost you a total of $500-$1500.

Also while choosing your explainer video template make sure you check the backgrounds and character should be relevant to your storyline.

Some companies, however, have a proper animation style guide and need the characters, environment, music, and animation a certain way. Businesses that need a highly customised solution should go with an explainer video agency. These softwares and templates limit you to animation, but with custom animated explainer video production, you are free to go for live-action or a mix of both the worlds.

There are a lot of tasks involved in the process of creating custom explainer videos starting from script writing, voiceover, storyboarding, graphics and animation. For this reason, most businesses prefer to get them done by a custom animated explainer video company.

Here’s a quick run-through of all the tasks involved in the animated explainer video production process:

Writing a Script: The first task that needs to be done for your explainer video production is to write an awesome script. It is one of the most crucial steps in the process since it builds the foundation of your video. Clueless about how you would go about writing the script? Read this blog written by our animated explainer video company to learn how to make an awesome explainer video script! This step is normally taken care of by the Story Lead (scriptwriter) and is overseen by the Creative Director.
Making the Storyboard: Once you have the explainer video script ready, you would need to work on making a detailed storyboard. A storyboard is a blueprint of the video which acts as a representation of what the video would entail in terms of dialogues, visuals and transitions. It is made of black and white sketches organized in the sequence in which the scenes would appear in the video. The Creative Director is responsible for this step. Our video animation company specializes in explainer video storyboard and we were first agency to introduce this to the industry.

Creating the Graphics: Now that you know what every scene would look like in black & white form, it is time for you to go ahead and add colors to complete the graphics accordingly. It is in this phase that various elements of the video such as colors, fonts, focus elements are decided. This step is taken care of by the Art Director. The Creative Director works closely with him to ensure that everything goes according to the concept. For 3d explainer videos the graphics are first done in 2d format and then created in the 3d animation software based on the instructions in 2d graphics.
Animating Everything: With the visuals done, you can now work on your explainer video animation down to perfection. While you’re at it, insert the background music and composite all of it. If the video requires a voice-over, that too is added in this stage. This task is done by the Animation Director with the Creative Director ensuring that the video remains true to the concept. Our animated explainer video company has a large repository of voiceover artists across different languages and accents.

What is an ideal explain video duration and the best practices followed by best animated explainer video companies?

We recommend to increase the duration as you go down the funnel. Top of the funnel videos like animated commercial videos start around 30-60 seconds and bottom of the funnel can go upto 2-3 minutes.

Write a script that keeps your audience hooked while explaining everything well. Even the best graphics and animation can't save you if you have a weak story. You need your message to come out clearly using the storytelling format. If the audience has to think a lot to understand what you intended to say with the video, it wouldn’t perform well. Need help with writing a good script? Learn how to create a killer explanation video script with this blog from our awesome explainer video company!

Use a professional voice-over artist to record the audio for your videos. A good way to know that you have the right voice-over artist is to how well his voice fits your video emotions. In a happy video, a sad sounding voice-over doesn’t fit in well. You need to make sure that the voice-over is in sync with the video. It should portray the same emotions your concept does. Our animated explainer video company has a pool of professional voiceover artists across different languages and accents.
Entertain while educating your audience. Purely educational content is difficult to consume and the audience might find it repulsive.
Don’t use cut-shots while moving from one scene to the other in your explainer videos. Instead, use engaging transitions to keep your audience engaged and hooked to your video.
The music you use in the video sets up the tone of the video. Make sure that you give the right signals with your video music. The background music and sound effects should convey the same emotions your video concept does.
Get rid of the fluff and use minimalist visuals in your animated videos. These are more impactful and are easy on the eyes.

When to use Live-action vs Animated Explainer Video Company?

We believe to every live-action there is equal and opposite video animation. The idea is to stand out from your competitors and also focussing on video objectives for your selection.

Live-action explainer videos are a no-brainer when you’re looking forward to getting a celebrity or influencer onboard to feature in your video. Animated explainer videos, on the other hand, can be used in almost every other situation.
For IT-related products and services, going for animation is a no-brainer. While you could still use live-action for your saas explainer videos, animation can represent it better.

For physical products, you can go the mixed media animated explainer videos way and combine live-action footage with animation to keep things real while transcending physical boundaries.
When you wish to communicate with someone with the help of human emotions, the same way you would in person, live-action videos are the perfect choice.
When you need to explain complex educational topics in an engaging manner, you could either go for pure animated explainer videos or mixed media animation. Infographic explainer videos have historically worked well for representing business ideas, abstract concepts, or factual data.
Live-action explainer videos are expensive. At the cost of making a basic live-action explainer video, you can make a great animated explainer video with perfection.

How to choose your video partner from the best explainer video companies around?

While choosing your animated explainer video company the first thing you should focus on is the quality of videos the company has produced in the past. You could check their attention to detail in terms of music, transitions, the visuals etc. Check if they are following basic principles of animation and color theory as the first step.
Keep an eye out for how that animated explainer video agency communicates with you. Notice how promptly the company responds and how clear the communication is from their end. Are they transparent about everything? Did you get all answers? Notice everything. It is very similar when you are hiring a new candidate for your company

Make sure that the animated explainer video pricing is within your budget and can be developed within the time-frame you need it made.
Check how experienced the animated explainer video company is in your industry and the animation style you want for your video. Their portfolio should be a good place to start. However, it is always good to ask for more options when you connect with them on call or email.
Make sure that you’re comfortable outsourcing the task to an offshore animated explainer video company for lower pricing. If you’re used to working with local businesses for your videos, it is best to find someone locally instead of outsourcing it.
No association has ever been successful when the values of the partners don’t resonate. Make sure that the animated explainer video company you wish to go for holds the same values as you do. Trust is a feeling that is easy to come, working with people that have similar values.

How much does animated explainer videos cost and what factors affect pricing?

The cost for best 2d explainer videos varies from $3000 to $10,000 and $8000 to $25,000 for 3d explainer videos. There are different factors which affect the price of an animated explainer video company:

Animation Technique: The most important factor is your combination of animation style and technique, any style can be done using 2D, 2.5D and 3D animation technique. The cost of an animated explainer video production is directly proportional to the man hours which is dependent on the animation technique and style you choose for your video.

Video Duration: The duration has a direct impact on the animated explainer video production cost. It is not directly proportional though, as the duration of the video increases there is high probability of asset reutilisation and better efficiency. That is the reason when customers come to us for video series we give them discounts from our savings.
Feedback Time: Your response time can also have an impact on the cost by almost 30% from your animated explainer video company. We have seen clients from big companies take more time to respond to our updates because of their decision making hierarchy, which makes our process inefficient and cost goes up by almost 30%.
Delivery Time: On an average it takes around 4-6 weeks to complete a 60 seconds animated explainer video production. For expedite delivery extra resources have to be pulled in which makes the process inefficient and also there is a loss of opportunity to earn more. It can impact the cost by 50-100% sometimes.
Video Topic: Complex topics require more research and ground work increasing the time in pre-production for the animated explainer video company where the resources are more expensive and thus the cost of such animated explainer videos goes up.