As a viewer watching an animated marketing video, you should come away feeling like it was an easy watch.
The core aim of the marketing team is for you to be left with a clear knowledge of the video’s message, a strong sense of the company’s brand identity, and understand the content that was being conveyed, with minimal extra effort.
But, as any marketer or animator will tell you, this is the ultimate in ‘deceptively simple’.
The creation process for animated marketing videos requires a huge amount of careful thought and precisely designed content. Such clarity of communication isn’t achieved by accident, after all.
When brands get this right, however, the results can be absolutely magic.
What’s more, the striking design and fun-filled characters ensure that the message is delivered in a way that is both clear to understand and utterly memorable.
The result? Brilliantly high engagement, increased conversions and strengthened brand identity. Tick, tick, tick.
What makes animated marketing videos so engaging?
Obviously we’re slightly biased, but there’s a reason why animation is increasingly being featured in brands’ advertising campaigns.
Animated marketing videos are renowned for their trademark compelling storylines. Beyond the usual high metrics that video-based content unlocks (videos achieve an average 1,200% more shares than text-based content), animation brings even more impressive engagement results to the table.
The unique features of animated marketing videos, which give them their remarkably high levels of engagement, are:
- Their bold design and visual appeal
- Their deceptively simple feel, and clean, neat finish
- Their carefully crafted narratives and sophisticated use of storytelling
- Their creativity and use of colour, illustration, moving elements and audio to stand out
- Their ability to relate to audiences and achieve emotional resonance
- Their inherent versatility, and ability to be used across different digital channels, product and service types, industries and target audiences.
What are the key elements of creative animated videos?
Animated videos include numerous multisensory components. In order to ensure the content hits all the high notes engagement-wise, these key elements all need to work together in harmony.
This means all the elements joining forces to aid the reader’s understanding of the brand message being communicated, in a way that is as crisp, seamless and easy to follow as possible.
The key elements of creative animated marketing videos include:
- Strong visuals
- Consistent branding
- Compelling storylines
- Relatable content with emotional appeal
- An engaging script and clear voiceover
- Personable characters
- Music and sound effects
- A final call to action (CTA)
How to measure success: analytics and animated video performance
Once your animated content has been created and published, you could simply sit back, relax and watch the viewing numbers rise.
Or, if you want to keep evolving your content and ensure your marketing campaigns are the best they can be, deploying analytics is the next step in the process.
Analytics are one of the most effective and accurate ways to measure the success of marketing campaigns, including animation and video content.
There are a wide range of analytics platforms at your disposal, including
- Google Analytics
- The dashboards for your social platform of choice
- Specialist engagement tracking platforms (such as HubSpot or Jotform Enterprise)
To perform analytics and assess your animated video performance, you will need to ensure these platforms are set up, and that you have the type and volume of data required to measure success.
So, once your platform of choice is set up, you can start to collect key data from your marketing campaign, as the animation is shared across different channels and audiences.
From there, there are numerous analytics approaches that you could undertake, to gauge how well your marketing campaign is performing.
You can measure the success of animated marketing videos through:
- Website traffic - and how much this has increased since the release of your animation
- Website engagement - through figures like bounce rate and retention time
- Click-through rate - how many viewers physically clicked a link or button in your video or any accompanying text
- Conversion rate - the percentage of viewers that followed your CTA and completed the intended conversion
- Social media engagement or interaction - such as the numbers of likes, views and shares
- Your ROI - if your CTA involves viewers making a purchase
- Audience growth or numbers of customer acquisition
- Lead generation figures
- Benchmarking against your competitors
- Email engagement - using figures like the click-through rate, open rate, or the number of users of any tracking URLs you have included
- Customer feedback
- A/B testing - either testing different types of videos, two slightly different versions of the same video, two different videos, or how well the same video performs across different digital channels
Then, whichever approach or combination of approaches you choose to follow, you can assess how well your video achieved the KPIs that you planned for it.
From there, you can compare how well the videos perform against different iterations or campaigns, then adjust the content that you create accordingly.
Case studies: real-world examples of successful animated marketing
Volkswagen - The place you want to be
Although an older advert, the style and fun, lighthearted energy remains timeless.
This advert from Volkswagen personifies its iconic Beetle model, and shows the car going on a trip to the Volkswagen Service.
It’s an unembellished advert, in the style of a classic children’s cartoon. In fact, there’s no script or voiceover content. Instead, the core message is delivered through the cheerful cartoon car characters, the futuristic servicing machines (with their white-gloved hands, a classic cartoon favourite), the accompanying music, and the simple yet effective strapline, ‘The place you want to be’.
McDonald's - launch of the new mobile app
To launch its new mobile app, McDonald’s devised an animated advertising campaign that is, at first glance, quite a step away from your usual food promotions.
You might think, how can a restaurant successfully promote its food through animation?
Well, this animation includes nods to some of the most well-known, easily recognised films (including the likes of King Kong and Star Wars), recreating them in the McDonald’s brand image. Then, these famous characters can be seen treating each other to Maccies’ famous burgers, through the fast and convenient app.
It’s a simple concept, executed seamlessly, to great effect.
MUBI - hand-curated cinema that attracts attention
Sticking with the theme of movies, MUBI is a curator of hand-curated cinema. So, when we were asked to create an animation that would promote their services, we decided to pay homage to some of the best moments in cinematic history.
The Matrix, Star Wars (again!), Clockwork Orange and many more are all recreated in a minimalist animation style, following MUBI’s distinctive brand colours.
The animation is another great example of a simple concept, which elegantly represents everything that the brand stands for. It’s a celebration of cinema, a reminder of all the great films that are at our fingertips, and leaves viewers in the mood for a movie night.
Conclusion
Animated marketing videos are an invaluable addition to marketing campaigns, which offer benefits ranging from strengthened brand identity to increased audience outreach, and complete creative flexibility to versatility across all digital channels.
What’s more, with the right analytics approaches in place, you can continuously assess and evolve your animations, ensuring fully optimised marketing campaigns.
Why work with an animation agency like OK Social?
At OK Social, we specialise in the creation of professional brand animations that audiences stop, notice and remember.
OK Social is a motion graphic studio, trusted by some of the country’s largest brands to deliver bold, dynamic, innovative and crisp animated content. Our client base includes the likes of Ford, Deliveroo, Coca-Cola, the BBC and many more.
We offer the full scope of animation services - spanning short social posts to in-depth explainer videos - plus a huge variety of animation styles and techniques. Our talented team of animation specialists work with each client to create completely bespoke content, which is firmly on brand and precisely geared to fulfil all the campaign’s KPIs.
If you’re keen to find out more about the power of animated marketing videos, or to enlist our team to give your upcoming campaign the competitive edge, don’t hesitate to give us a ring.
