The Benefits of Animated Videos For Startups And Small Businesses

Innovation and competition in business are no more restricted to local space. It has long ago gone global thanks to the advancement of telecommunication and education combined with a large group of risk takers across the globe. Irrespective of location or region, market or economic condition, start ups and small business have been growing at a remarkable rate. You think, it’s a hype? Of course, not!

Let us look at some average stats here that will ascertain what we are trying to understand. In US alone, the past year saw about 300 million dollars pumped into bio-pharma that took the lead and other tech-enabled small business. In spite of the Brexit fear, UK saw a phenomenal increase of start-ups of 80 per hour. There was an increase of 16.8 percent compared to 2015 in African tech startups which raised funding in excess of US $129 million in 2016. India an emerging consumer market is riding high on the start up wave and has also seen progress from the previous years.

Right now we are in the first quarter of 2017, where the demonetization sentiment has still not died down. There is still a lot of excitement and opportunity in the world of start-ups, small business and one-person firms. So how do they manage competition among stalwarts and cut across to increase sales. What marketing and promotion strategies can they choose investing in the most cost-effective but result-oriented plan? The expected segment which will see venture capitalists funding are Education, Healthcare, Mobile Apps, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning & Chatbots, IoT, SoT & Networking, and Fintech.

As a marketing tool, explainer animated videos play the role of helping start up businesses give a curtain raiser introduction. This flow in the marketing plan continues in a way that it helps them connect with consumers, engage with them and convert them into buying customers. A 90 second to 3 minutes (at the maximum video) can be made either by the company by the many available DIY tools or by a professional team for a cost around 1.5 to 2 L. This is definitely 3 to 4 times less than what a film production made for the same idea can cost. First excite the audience and then fine tune them to be lucrative prospective or real customers.
So let us understand how animated videos as a marketing trend can do wonders for the small businesses.

The Benefits of Animated Videos For Startups And Small Businesses

1.Shoots up the online visibility
Small businesses and the start ups have a myriad of factors to look at before they can get a firm foothold in the market place and break even as a profitable venture. They have to analyse and use the best cost-effective marketing strategy to get maximum visibility in market place. Today’s majority of consumers buy online and it is essential for them to gain maximum visibility online. Animated videos help to boost their visibility online. It attracts customer traffic like no other because video is a media which can get the customer hooked to until it plays if it is presented effectively.

2. Facilitates branding
Animated videos leverage the ability to demonstrate the truth in most simple, straight forward crispy yet sometimes entertaining manner. It catapults the brand’s trustworthy image to a much more elevated level that what many of the earlier marketing trends could not do. It creates an emotional connect with viewers and they are happy to be associated with this brand in some way or other. Thereby, it assists the start ups to empower its brand among its funding community as well as potential and existing customers or shoppers.

3. New springboard for attractive presentation
Animated videos help in doing away with boring power point presentations which are required to explain the start up idea either to the investors (VCs), partners or customers. It also helps a great deal in reducing the time taken to explain and run through data in these otherwise lengthy presentations. Marketing videos also come across as aids to showcase the vision/mission of the company, business idea, new operations, internal communication etc. Feazt is a food tech start up which used marketing videos on their social media pages and website’s home pages to their benefit. It converted several onlooker customer and passer bys of their product to 700 real paying customers.

4. Information retention faster through video
Many research studies reveal that people retain what they see better than what an average person hear. i,e. 50 percent of what is viewed is retained over the ten percent what is heard. This fact when used by a business with an explainer or animated video means that referral marketing by word-of-mouth increases their reach among potential consumers from the existing. If the customer likes the brand they’ll definitely share the video.

5. Easily Shareable
The explainer video should have a solid script and captivating visuals telling the story intended crisply. It may be put up anywhere on the internet and not necessarily the company’s website. There are video hosting websites too which facilitates posting product videos along with any other. YouTube and Vimeo the popular names that is known today. The explainer makes a complicated product or service to be introduced very easily. Now that every site is smart phone responsive, this makes it more shareable. So the start up is hitting more than one bird with the same stone. It turns your existing consumer to be brand ambassadors – a role that they enjoy with each share.

6. Reduce bounce rate
Marketing videos can do what plain text on the website or other similar online broadcast platforms of the start-up business cannot do. If the content is boring a viewer leaves in 5 seconds, however if it is interesting and gains viewer attention they remain there as long as 5-6 minutes easily. This also means that by that time the viewer would have believed in your existence as a long timer unlike a new comer and your capability and prowess as a brand.

7. Social media’s affinity to video
It is just over a year that Facebook the number one social media announced its Facebook Live Video feature which allows to create, upload and broadcast video content. This is enabling the small businesses to shoot their own animated videos and present them as broadcast which will go in as Live Feeds to their interested customers and the real ones if required. Other social media platforms are also using this feature in great deal. A chat messenger start up , Chaatz claims that it saw close to a 30% increase in the number of people who went on to try and download the app after viewing the marketing video on its social media pages.

8. Improve SEO due to multimedia content
Now the search engine is optimized to rank sites with multimedia especially animated videos along with just text keywords. Hence if the start up or small business sets up a well-thought out and planned SEO strategy by including good impacting videos embedded with suitable keywords into their places of broadcast they can get a good ranking in searches on the Search engine and boost SEO well to their benefit.

9. Increase conversions
As many of the above listed benefits are utilized through marketing videos, people start visiting company’s websites, officials and make enquiries. Many of them easily turn into conversions because animated videos when used for explanations make the whole process of understanding, deciding and buying look easier. The only catch point is that the creative team should be responsible to conceive, design or relay the idea well with a good intro, problem perception, solution and a call to action in the allotted short time of 60-90 or even 180 seconds in the video.

10. Circulating in the email campaigns
Essentially using animated videos either in the subject title or content in email campaigns to potential consumers causes traction in customer interest. Feazt has utilized this opportunity as well. It was yet to be launched in the capital; however there were quite a lot of customer enquiries from the city when it sent out email campaigns with video content, comments its excited sales executives. The click through rate (CTR) has highly changed for the good over the years with an animated video in content.

Forbes states that seventy five percent of office executives watch a work-related video once a week. An apt marketing video help to demo the start up as a unique service provider compared to competitors. It hands out the opportunity to increase the brand’s awareness and credibility. Hence it is very important that a marketing style like an explainer video is used to woo investors for funds, customers for sales so that the start up company makes a mark in the market place at the earliest after its launch. A start up or small business need not think twice before jumping on to this marketing bandwagon, both in terms of investment and return on them. It gives 400 percent increase in ROI! This is not only unimaginable at the onset with any other movement but also the most desirable to make use of.