We’ve already gone over how animated explainer videos help you with SEO, help you with your training initiatives and help you increase conversions, but possibly the best thing they do is raise brand awareness.

However, you can’t just slap your logo on any old animated video and call it done. You need to make the right animated video to suit your brand. Here’s five things you need to do to make sure your explainer video fits your brand.

Have a Customer Persona to Create For

You don’t make an explainer video for everyone, you make it for your audience and that means knowing your audience. One of the best ways to pinpoint who you’re making your video for is to build your ideal customer persona.

If you’ve never created an ideal customer persona before, basically it entails looking at your demographics and coming up with a few different fictional people who best represent some of your average customers.

You want to give them an age, a location, an occupation, an income level, some hobbies and any other information that you think best represents who you are targeting with your video. The reason you’re creating these personas is because your branding message will be more focused if you are talking to one person than if you are trying to talk to thousands of people. You should have more than one persona, though, because your audience will have a range to it.

For example, if you were seniors care service and you were making a video aimed at people with aging parents, that would obviously be different demographic than if you were launching a new video editing app aimed at young adults.

For the seniors care facility, you might have the following personas:

• Karl, a 56-year-old electrical contractor from Albuquerque, NM who earns $65,000 annually and who has a mother living in his home who is severely immobile
• Rachael, a 45-year-old marketing executive from Rochester, NY who earns $50,000 annually and who lives in a different city than her father, who still lives on his own and still tries to stay active
• Amy, a 61-year-old small business owner from Minneapolis, MN who brings in $120,000 per year and whose parents live in their own home, but who are slowing down due to age and aren’t able to keep up with the household chores

While the photo editing app customer personas might be more along the lines of:

• Katy, a 21 year old from Los Angeles, CA who just graduated college and is looking for her first job in the computer sciences field. She loves Instagramming all her meals
• Roger, a 29 year old publicist from Tampa Bay, FL whose ideal day off is spent at the beach
• Tyrone, a 25 year old retail manager from Vancouver, WA who loves camping and nature photography

It would be impossible to create an animated video that appeals to every customer, but by having a few  who represent your average customers, you’re helping to focus your branding message in your video.

You can model the characters after them, use imagery and an overall tone that you think would appeal to them and keep your entire video concentrated on that core market. Using the examples above, the video geared toward people with elderly parents is likely going to be slower paced and have a gentler tone while the one for the new video editing app will be a lot faster paced and have an overall slicker feel to it.

Regardless of what you’re explaining, your video should target, with as much accuracy as you can muster from your data, the people who are most likely to want whatever it is you have to offer.

Use Your Colors

This isn’t to say just use colors or make your video colorful. We really mean use your brand’s color palette. Your brand’s colors weren’t just chosen at random. They were chosen for a specific reason and they help to represent your brand. Whatever shades you use, pepper the colors that best represent your brand throughout the video to put your brand’s stamp on it. And don’t forget that logo. It doesn’t need to be in every frame, but make sure you show it.

Pick a Style that Compliments Your Brand

As different animation styles cost different amounts, this decision will be somewhat influenced by your budget, but do give some thought as to which type of animation will reflect your brand best. Whiteboard animation is everywhere now and it’s good for conveying a large amount of information in a short amount of time, but if you want something that looks a bit slicker for a simpler message, you might opt for 2D animation.

It all depends on what you want to say, how you want to say it and what perception you want people to have of your brand.

You can choose from:

• Kinetic typography
• Whiteboard Animation
• Cut Out Animation
• 2D Animation
• 3D Animation
• RSA Animation
• Graphics Animation

Choose whichever one you most associate with your brand.

Make Your Video Share-Worthy

It’s impossible to say what the next viral video will be and, therefore, it’s not worth trying to create the next viral sensation. Instead, what you can do is make your video worth sharing.

The great thing about animated explainer videos is they convey a lot of information in a little amount of time. By keeping your video short (under two minutes is a good goal) and focused on a single message or goal, you’ll make it more share-worthy.  

And don’t forget your call to action. Do you want people to sign up for something? Visit a page? Use a specific hashtag? Whatever it is, let them know so they’re prompted to do it. And you can always encourage them to share the video.

Be True to Your Brand

Your brand has a brand identity and your explainer video should feel authentic and true to that identity. If your brand isn’t about being hip and slick, then don’t do that. People will instinctively know if your brand is being inauthentic, so just be honest and talk about your product, service or project. If it’s worth getting excited about, people will get excited about it if your brand comes across as genuine. Use the customer personas you created and talk to those people and you should do well.

An animated explainer video can take a brand to the next level of exposure. Whether you’re just starting out or you’re a long-established brand that has a new product or service to launch, telling people about it in a compelling way is always going to be a good move as long as you stay true to your brand identity. Click here to use our price estimation calculator to see approximately how much your video will cost. (You don’t even need to talk to anyone!)