Why Use a Motion Graphics Explainer Video? 5 Advantages of Motion Graphics Explainer Videos for Your Brand

Explainer videos come in different styles and forms — some present content on a whiteboard, some showcase animated characters and their backstories, some use live footage, etc.

When designed properly, an explainer video can easily achieve its set goals, regardless of its type; however, when it comes to practicality and ease of implementation, there’s one that wins over almost all other formats. This is the motion graphics explainer video.

In today’s blog, we’re going to focus specifically on motion graphics in explainer videos and outline the benefits of motion graphics explainer videos in comparison to other types.

What Is a Motion Graphics Explainer Video?

As the name implies, a motion graphics explainer video is a video that uses moving objects, icons, or other animated elements to illustrate points and visually explain ideas. Motion graphics are widely used in marketing to animate still images and objects like graphs, charts, and dashboards. This can be done in 2D and 3D.

The ability to create a fun and exciting visual environment for motionless — and sometimes even boring information — is one key component of what sets apart motion graphic style explainer videos from other types of videos:

Motion graphics focus on illustrating facts and complex concepts that need to be broken down into simpler bricks. It sets in motion large data sets, and adds dynamics to dry statistics while keeping viewers engaged all the way through.

Motion graphics is a type of animation which is used often in the video industry to describe videos that don’t have animated characters.

To give you a better understanding of the difference in the concepts, we have provided the following two explainer videos:

• Google Workspace — a motion graphics explainer video that guides viewers through the main elements of Google suite.

• Med Mart — a video that uses animated characters to promote an app for planning medical treatment and cosmetic procedures.

When it comes to the animation itself, the decision whether to use animated characters in a video or not is normally made in the pre-production or script writing stage, when you define the objectives you want your video to meet.

Judging from our experience, however, 90% of explainer videos that have animated characters use them as moving design objects rather than independent personalities that a video is built upon.

Since character animation is a resource-demanding process, choosing to create a motion graphics explainer video instead can help to cut down costs, as well. Read more about character development insights in one of our recent blogs.

Since motion graphics explainer videos are best known for effectively displaying tech products or services, the industries that benefit from these types of ads the most are software/technologies, healthcare, finance, blockchain, manufacturing, and e-commerce.

Now that the motion graphics explainer video definition has been sorted out, let’s review what benefits motion graphics can bring to the table.

Why Use Motion Graphics Explainer Videos for Business?

The use of explainer videos may have several advantages for the company. First and foremost, motion graphics are versatile, meaning they can be used across all stages of your sales funnel.

As your buyers move down through the funnel, they pass several phases — Awareness, Interest, Decision, and Loyalty. Each of these phases has its own communication strategy requirements (or recommendations), and demands a particular type of explainer video to be used, in order to help move the buyer to the next phase.

The power of motion graphics lies in the ability to be used in any of these stages, regardless of whether the product is a short promo video aimed at grabbing prospective buyers’ attention or a how-to tutorial video for returning customers (read more about that in our blog here).

Unlike other types of explainer videos, motion graphics is suitable for almost any digital medium — from blogs and email to social media and YouTube ads. In some cases, it may even go viral.

Below we summed up all the advantages and reasons behind the importance of motion graphics explainer videos:

• Increase audience reach. Higher audience reach comes hand-in-hand with conversion rate growth which, in turn, boosts sales.

• Help your business stand out. When thinking about possible explainer video concepts, lots of companies choose animation videos with characters. The decision to opt for motion graphics instead, in this case, can help to differentiate the business from the competition.

• Great for warming up the audience. Explainer videos are one of the least intrusive ways to promote a brand. They are able to deliver messages that are native and engaging at the same time. As a result, explainer videos boost loyalty and ease further interactions with the audience.

• One of the most effective digital marketing tactics. According to Hubspot, videos are the second most popular type of content that marketers are currently using to increase audience engagement, and are among the top 4 content types that companies invest in today.

Five Supreme Benefits of Motion Graphics Explainer Videos for Your Business [Over Other Types]

1️⃣ Cost Effectiveness

Motion graphics are known for being budget-friendly. Compared to character-based types of explainer videos, these allow businesses to keep investments at an acceptable level. Here, you don’t need to heavily invest in character creation or animation.

Motion graphics videos can be produced by a small team within a reasonable time frame. What’s more: on average, these videos cost 15-30% less compared to the explainer videos that come with animated characters.

With motion graphics, you can always save on production costs, or invest any “left-over budget” into the creation of a more stunning and dynamic video.

2️⃣ Relatively Fast Production Process

Motion graphics let companies spare themselves the hassle of hiring numerous actors, and booking shoot locations and transportation services which is normally the case for live-action shots. In one fell swoop, you remove all unnecessary links from the production chain, speeding up the process by weeks, or even months.

Compared to animation videos, motion graphics are faster to produce, as well. Here, designers don’t spend time animating or drawing characters, or working with the photorealistic CGI, etc.

3️⃣ Plenty of Reusable Content

Motion graphics explainer videos go in hand with the development of a wide range of visual and textual content, such as graphs, illustrations, text copies, etc. Once the motion graphics explainer video for business is wrapped, all these assets can then be repurposed and used in different mediums or application areas.

Explainer videos can be transformed into mini-video clips — snacks* — and used on social media ad campaigns. Important messages and statistics from the video can be picked out and posted on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, etc.

Infographics can also be repurposed for SlideShare presentations or ebooks, while text copies combined with explainer video visuals become a part of the email marketing funnel.

* Snacks — 10-30 sec. long video ads that are designed to be absorbed quickly (by the audience).

4️⃣ Good for Explaining Complex Products

When your product presentation includes lots of product characteristics, graphs, charts, etc. you want to make sure that an audience clearly understands what they are presented with. This need becomes even more important if we think of the communication gap that commonly exists between tech and non-tech people, and the necessity to bridge it.

Motion graphics contour data and complex graphs, determining their start and end points and, thus, help non-tech savvy viewers consume the information more linearly — without the need to jump back and forth between different sets of data to get an idea of what’s going on.

5️⃣ Industry Standard

Digital and tech markets have always been perceived as those that don’t quite fit within the standards of traditional advertising. On one hand, it can be hard for tech startups to clearly convey product values using traditional advertising ‘tools and tricks.’ On the other hand — and more importantly — it is more expensive considering the fact that tech products require a higher level of expertise when it comes to content creation and promotion.

The evolution of new advertising tools is inevitable in this case, and the emerging role of motion graphics explainer videos is direct proof of that. For some businesses (and brands) motion graphics explainer videos became the best fit and the most effective way to present products or services.

Summary

Motion graphics are a great tool that can effectively present a company and its offerings. Being perfectly tuned to the demands of the digital world, such videos are able to support marketing activities on all platforms — a professional business community such as LinkedIn, or a content-oriented social media platform like Instagram.

To make the most out of the use of motion graphics explainer videos, lay out all your marketing objectives in front of you and plan all the pre-production steps in advance. Here are also a few pro tips that will help you make an informed decision regarding your motion graphics explainer video format:

• You can still trigger strong emotions using motion graphics. Even in cases where there is a need to reveal a story or use emotional triggers, motion graphics can still be effectively used. Take a look at the Apple WWDC 2013 Keynote video to get an idea of how this can be done.
• Not all explainer videos can be done without animated characters, though. If you want viewers to relate themselves to a specific character in a video, then it would often be impossible to do so without introducing an actual character in a video. The best way to do this is to find a studio that can create a suitable concept for the video, which will determine whether it makes sense to opt for motion graphics or not.
• Pay attention to the animation studio’s expertise. Before starting to work on an explainer video, make sure that the 3d or 2d animation production you’ve picked for the job has the appropriate know-how, as you don’t want your explainer video to look like an amateurish PowerPoint presentation.

Also, pay attention to the relevance of the expertise you get. Be precise in your expectations when asking for examples of motion graphics explainer videos:

• Show different video examples and explain what you like about them. You might like the visual graphics, animation, general look and feel, etc.
• Don’t say “I’m looking for an explainer video,” but rather “I want to know whether you’ve had an experience creating cartoon animation videos for the insurance industry.”

We hope that the information from this blog was useful and you’ve received the answers to the question of what a motion graphics explainer video is. Don’t forget to download our free ebook to get all the information you need to create the best motion graphics explainer video.

Examples of Motion Graphics Explainer Videos Made by bluecarrot.io Team

🔹 Auka (Settle)

Auka (now Settle) is a person-to-person Google cloud-based app that allows users to send payments between different bank accounts and different banks.

The main challenge with the explainer video for Auka was to adequately deliver product value to the target audience. Though the end clients of the app are bank clients, the actual product audience is the bankers themselves who are expected to adopt this product and encourage their clients to use it.

Our goal was to create an explainer video that is simple yet concise enough to engage EU bankers — an audience that is mostly conservative and risk-averse.

Keeping the audience in mind, we also decided to avoid adding any characters in the video or make it excessively showy. An explainer video briefly describes the key steps for using the app — employing both restrained and modern visuals for that purpose.

🔹 Route 4 Gas

Route 4 Gas (R4G) is a gas transmission planning platform that helps traders book transmission capacities within the European Gas Transmission System in real time.

The Gas transportation industry has a cumbersome structure that is, at times, difficult to comprehend even for gas market players. The Route4Gas explainer video had to include lots of schemes and graphs, with all information being laid down in a plain and understandable way.

To make that happen in the pre-production stage, we decided to choose motion graphics for this project, which worked out perfectly.

Are you considering creating a video? 🥕  Check out what Blue Carrot has to offer

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