Animation is a unique communication strategy to showcase your business, service or product. Here at Browndog, we can create bespoke animations or help bring your branding to life with beautiful logo idents and motion graphics.
A great marketing strategy will have a variety of content types, aimed at engaging with your audience on a range of platforms. Bringing animation into your content collection is an excellent way to capture your audience’s attention and keep them engaged for longer – as we all know that video content captivates the mind at a considerably higher rate than plain text.
We asked our lead animation Designer, Heather the top reasons why you should be using animation in your marketing collateral, and here’s what she said…
1. You can share high volumes of information, quickly
It’s been scientifically proven that we find information easier to digest in visual forms compared to written. This is likely because the brain processes visuals 60,000 times faster than text, with the human eye able to register 36,000 visual messages per hour*. As marketers we should capitalise on these statistics and create a balanced mix of text, graphics and motion. *Source
Sometimes it can be difficult to explain complex ideas simply in a text format. Combining moving illustrations, text, music, and voiceover is a brilliant way to quickly engage with your audience and get your message across.
Fun characters, colourful shapes and clever transitions can bring your information to life, giving the audience a better understanding of what your message is. Animation has also been proven to boost conversion rate, with visitors up to 100% more likely to spend time watching them on your website.
Animation is not just for campaign messaging and promotion, it’s also a highly effective way to give training and help users to understand how to use your product or service. Many people learn through visuals, so instructional animations have proven to be highly successful for businesses in recent years.
The average consumer in 2022 is exposed to more than 5,000 messages per day, so it’s important that the first seconds of your animation quickly grab your audience’s attention. When we work on your animation project, we’ll guide you through best practice and give advice on style, duration and messaging.
We recommend that a branding or product animation runs between 1:30 -2 minutes, which allows your story to be told in a concise way (whilst still allowing time for the other 4,999 messages that your viewer might see in their day).
2. Raise brand awareness
Sometimes explaining the scope of your business can be tricky, especially when you have so much to offer! Through the use of animation, you can tell your audience what you do, why it’s important and how they can get involved. Similarly to telling a story through words, animation is about evoking feelings and promoting an experience, rather than selling a product or service. A great example of this is the Spotify animation:
Spotify used their music, bright colours and smooth transitions to promote Spotify Premium. The 30 second animation contained no voiceover or words, and clearly got across that ‘zen’ feeling of coming home from work and closing out the noise, to relax with some music. This animation was a much more cost-effective way to raise brand awareness and promote Spotify than if it was created using traditional live action video.
Animation is an effective way to spend your marketing budget and engage with your audiences to raise brand awareness. Working together, we tailor your animation to include your logos, fonts, colours and styles to visually embed your branding. From new product launches and services, to awards accreditations, and seasonal campaigns, it’s the perfect medium to promote your business.
3. It’s timeless
Compared to video and film, animations can be constantly re-adjusted to suit your business and revise its messaging. If you change your branding or update your services, a video can go out of date pretty quickly, leaving you with footage that is no longer useable and needs to be re-shot.
Animated video is a more cost-effective approach, as it saves the time and money needed to arrange filming and the possible use of actors. We can continuously update your animation, or re-purpose bits from it to use separately.
4. Increase engagement
Our consumption of video content has been on the rise in recent years, with 82% of global internet traffic estimated to come from video in 2022. The rise of social media platforms such as TikTok and the introduction (and favouring) of reels across Facebook and Instagram have heavily contributed to the way that consumers absorb information.
This obsession with consuming video content has led marketers to consider how they interact with audiences and it’s more important than ever to engage in a way that resonates with them. Text and static images are no longer enough to grab that 3 second window that we have to stop a scroller in their tracks and watch a full clip or video.
Using moving imagery, captivating colours and intriguing sounds is a way to gain attention and provide information in a fun and entertaining way. This encourages engagement from your viewer and we’re now seeing statistics that show visitors are 100% more likely to spend time on your website if you have video content. Furthermore, if your goal is to encourage your visitors to complete an action such as fill out a contact form or make a purchase, the average visitor is 64% more likely to do this if they’ve watched a video on your page.
Bulb used this 30 second animation with bright colours and funny illustrations to drive brand awareness and show themselves as the biggest green energy company. Did you know that your visitors are twice as likely to share a video than any other type of content? This is likely because it’s such a quick way to get the point across and requires minimal effort from the recipient to understand the purpose.
Make it easy for your audience to engage with your content and take your desired action.
5. It’s accessible
A huge plus to using animation, is that we can tailor it to be EDI (equality, diversity and inclusion) friendly, and accessible. For those who struggle to see; we include voiceover and music, and those who struggle to hear; text and images tell the story. We can also ensure that your animation is representative and diverse.
When content is accessible it becomes inclusive for all. It helps you to reach a wider audience so that more people can engage with your content and it improves SEO by making it easier for search engines to index the information on your site through text rather than video or images. Providing transcripts for videos can send stronger signals to search engines about the nature of your site and its content.
There are lots of considerations when you’re creating animations and video content. That’s why we work closely with clients to guide them and offer best practice advice.
For instance, when choosing fonts you should use those that have been designed to include large spaces between letters for easier readability; you should avoid flashing animations in text because they may draw readers’ focus away from what they are trying to read, but it can also cause seizures for some, in extreme cases.
Choosing the colours to work with is not always as simple as picking the one that looks nice or goes with your brand; you need to use colour correctly to provide contrast for readability or to highlight important points. Too much colour can be distracting, so it’s important to strike a balance.
Are you ready to start your animation project?
If you’re still looking for evidence that animation can help your marketing strategy: when Dropbox added an animated explainer video to their homepage, they saw a massive 10 million new customers and a £35m increase in revenue. If that’s not a reason to create animation for your brand, we don’t know what is!
