How we define product animations
Sometimes simply referred to as “explainer animations”, product animations are a form of content that explains your product with a voiceover and 2D or 3D visuals.
They can be a literal visualisation of your product, or be more abstract. This flexibility makes animations a perfect way to explain tricky financial concepts or visualise tech, or a use-case scenario.
There are multiple ways you could frame a product animation, you could use them to:
- Introduce your product to the market
- Explain the technology behind your product
- Demo multiple applications for your product, or the tech behind it
There are variations from this list too. You can create the environment of your choice with animation, so the potential is quite limitless.
Here’s an example of a product explainer we created for Charles Taylor:
Back to the guidebook…
We’ve structured the guidebook to go through the basics and then into the nitty gritty of how to make this content format work. By the end of this, you should have the bare bones of a solid brief that will help you take the next step.
You can skip to the section you care most about, or get ready for about 22 minutes of reading.
We’ll summarise each section too, you’ll notice these in the black boxes - so feel free to skim until you’ve got the info you need.
Part 1: Why do fintechs use product animations?
We’re sure you’re quite aware of this, as it’s likely why you’re here! But fintech is a space crowded with complex APIs, applications and beyond that can make understanding how products or features work more difficult for the person who might be responsible for sourcing your tech.
Product animations don’t just help better explain and demo products, they also tick another box - video content.
It’s widely held as the #1 way to sell products
According to HubSpot, "73% more visitors who watch product videos will make a purchase."
In other words: a landing page without a product video might get 3 in every 50 visitors converting. That same landing page, with a product video (on average), would have 5 in every 50 visitors convert.
If that page generated around 700 visits a month, adding a product video would take it from 42 conversions to 70; not an increase to sniff at.
It bolsters your product marketing efforts
While you might not be at the size to have product owners or product marketers in an isolated role, it doesn’t mean you can’t reap the benefits of strengthening your product marketing.
The goals of product marketing include:
- Increasing revenue
- Better engagement with customers
- Boosting brand & product recognition
- Improving your product’s market share
- Winning customers from your competitors
Increasing revenue
Showcasing your product benefits and features is only going to smooth the buyer journey, and with 55% of purchase journeys now including some form of a review video, it’s tried and tested.
Better engagement from customers
Video content is the most engaged-with content right now. So much so that every social media channel is scrambling to compete with one another over it.
But that’s not important. What’s important is that your clients are more likely to expect or want video content. And when there’s a motivation for something, matching that motivation equals much higher engagement.
Boosting brand and product recognition
We’ll talk about repurposing a little later in this guide, but cutting up and redistributing your content through video has plenty of benefits.
You can quickly showcase elements of your product across multiple channels effectively, and begin to quickly segment your audience into “passive” and “active”, with the first set getting introduction explainers, and the latter getting more specific use cases.
Improving your product’s market share
One of the best ways to increase your market share is to expand your customer base to include similar people who aren’t yet your customers. Sounds obvious right? But there’s very likely a segment of people who know you exist but don’t understand or value your product, so haven’t pulled the trigger on working with you yet.
Winning customers from your competitors
Similar to the above point, there could be instances where those people who weren’t yet your customers could have been married to legacy products from their vendors.
They might have been looking for more insight before they pulled the trigger, or maybe just needed a little more connection to the brand behind the product before they reached out. Or they could have just been looking for a slick and condensed way to sell your product to a stakeholder.
Part 2: What do you need to create a strong product animation
Aside from the team and the skillset, some foundational things come together to create a strong product animation.
Start by having a strong brand and product
Great foundations pave the way to awesome animations.
Because explainer animations are an extension of your brand and product - those things are going to need to be well-defined. That means positioning.
When we’re talking brand, you’ll get the best results by knowing:
- The big three (your purpose, vision and mission)
- Your position in the market
- Your audience
- Your voice
- Your value proposition and set of key messages
- Your visual identitysome text
- Logo
- Fonts
- Photography
- Colour palette
- Any other assets
When we’re talking product, you’ll get the best results by knowing:
- The market positioning
- Your product’s unique benefits
- Your product’s value proposition and set of key messages
- Your product’s route to market and any processes
- How you plan to promote your product
Really nail your script
Personally, we like to take ownership of the script for the projects we work on. Writing for animation and scripts, in general, is a skill, and although anyone can apply themselves to it, we think that a specialist's eye will help creatively.
However, if you’re looking to contribute, or are confident in your ability to write a script, we’ll give you an abridged version of the considerations we take:
First - the thinking
Know who you’re talking to
With your brand defined, you’ll have a hero audience segment defined. Assuming you’re looking to talk to those people, it would be good to think about:
- Where they’ll be consuming the video
- How much they know about your brand and product
- What they’ll want to get out of the video
Consider the goal of the video in your script
In some instances, this will be very straightforward. You’ll want the viewer to hit the “book demo” button. Or you’ll want them to have a better understanding of your product.
Sounds obvious right? But a number of scripts come to us including heavy jargon or absolutely no inclusion (even subtly) of the next steps. It’s worth reviewing the goals as you draft the script.
Product explainers should tell your audience exactly how a product works and shares the story behind your brand using a combo of audio and text. Often, explainer videos are what convince a human to purchase.
Think about the narrator
We’ve all listened to something where we’ve struggled with the narration, and we’ve all listened to David Attenborough narrate his way to our hearts. Just us?
Still, think about who’s going to read your script, and specifically their:
- Gender
- Tone of Voice - formal/conversational
- Accent
- Age
Get stakeholder sign-off or buy-in for your approach.
Once the initial script is locked in, it’s much more difficult to change direction. Everything the designers and animators do will rotate around your script, from storyboard to animation. So, avoiding u-turns or dramatic changes will avoid adding a time delay to your project.
Then - the writing
After the initial brainstorming sessions (the above points), we normally get stuck into the script for our clients. But if you’re looking to have a go at the first draft, or you have an in-house team looking for some advice, here’s what we’d suggest:
Outline your script thinking of the big things first
Your animators are going to be looking for imagery and verbs (doing words) in your script to build a series of stills from. Those stills (the storyboard) will turn into your animated video. So try to paint a picture in your script; help your animators pick out key language and focus points to work on.
Write drunk, edit sober.
Ernest Hemingway said it best. Try and get your first draft out all at once instead of trying to perfect it in one go.
You can come back later to edit it. And we’d recommend you do that after a time away from looking at it. A sleep, maybe two. If you sit and obsess over it for the whole day, you’re far less likely to see little mistakes and sentences that don’t read right.
When you come to your edit, read it out loud. You’ll find you naturally trip over clunky sentences and will hear when something doesn’t work. Amend as you see fit! Of course, leaning on a specialist or another team member is an option too, but we’d suggest making sure a draft you’re happy with is in place first. Edit intentionally for the voice you’re trying to achieve.
Let your script lead into your storyboard
There aren’t many instances where your animators or creative wouldn’t be taking care of storyboarding, but in case you’d like a crack at it or want to learn the process here’s our advice:
Think about your key messages or scenes first
The storyboard is a series of thumbnails that should flow like a comic - painting the picture of your animation to come. They’re generally rough sketches that pull the story of your script together:
Animation is built around key messages or images. Once your script is finalised, you’ll have an idea of where and what these sections are. By splitting your script into sections of imagery you can begin putting together your ideas.
Focus on sentences with a clear image, or verbs (actions) that can be brought into motion. For instance, you might talk about “flipping reality on its head” or “building a strong community”, both of which have strong animation potential.
Make sure each thumbnail flows into the next
As we mentioned above, you want to think of the storyboard as if it’s a comic. With one action flowing into the next. So make sure that your ideas aren’t completely contradictory, or form stills that look unnatural next to one another; a series of disconnected thumbnails might lead to your animation feeling a little stilted.
Remember, you don’t need to capture everything.
See the first point! You need to think about key moments of messaging and imagery. Any transitions or in-between narration can be handled by your animation team; if they’re not already handling the entire process!
Focus on your audience’s problems and jobs to be done
If you know what jobs your target audience is trying to do, you’ll know exactly how your product or service helps them. Try to make both your script and animation as relatable as possible in that sense:
The above animation we worked on for Andaria does a few things, it:
- Outlines the market problem
- Situates the product offering within that problem
- Details the product features and crucially the expected outcomes
It achieves those things by hyper-focusing on the customer it’s trying to reach, the problems they might be facing and their jobs to be done.
Keep it short ‘N’ snappy
We’ve put another guide together about the length of video vs engagement if you want more detail.
But the rule is short and snappy wins the… video? Wistia’s research across YouTube (also backed up by Hootsuite’s research) revealed the sweet spot is 2 minutes. After the 2-minute mark, videos tend to see diminishing returns on engagement.
Of course, this changes across different social media platforms, and if you’re looking to use the same video across channels, we’d encourage you to take a look at the guide we’ve linked above before you do!
Focus on key features (maybe one at a time and create a series)
Sometimes you can’t get all of the features of your product into one snappy animation. And there’s no use in trying to fit EVERYTHING in when that information would be much better communicated across multiple videos.
Not only will you be able to showcase multiple product benefits, or explain multiple complex features. You could even demonstrate a series of differentiating use cases.
Part 3: How should you use and distribute product animations?
Product videos are excellent at aiding conversion on a landing page. But don’t just feature it there. Think about how you can repurpose and redistribute the content over and over.
Get the most out of your video on your website
When using your videos on your website, make sure you’re doing it right. Use techniques to highlight your video, use it to entice your visitors, and increase your on-page engagement and conversions. There are a few different ways to host videos on your landing page including:
Hero videos
A hero video does what it says on the tin. Generally found as an overlay on loading, or right at the top of the screen as a standalone piece of content, this video instantly grabs and engages the viewer before they see anything else on the page. Great for brand and product videos alike.
Banner or background videos
Videos embedded in the banner, or auto-playing on the banner (or in the background), are a good way of capturing attention. If your video works well with an overlay these can be paired with your value prop or copy.
Supporting videos
The most common way videos are embedded on landing pages, is as support. Generally sitting near the top of the page but totally separate from copy, titles and so forth. Or they can be found further down the page in the information section. They don’t act as the focal point of the page.
Pop-up videos
Not our favourite form of video embedding, but an option all the same. Your video could pop up when visitors scroll a certain amount through your page or have it pop up via an interaction.
Here are some examples of how other fintech brands have used videos to support their pages:
RobinHood hero animation:
RobinHood’s hero animation excellently showcases their product and app and is there first thing visitors see once landing on their page. The animation does well to incorporate relevant copy and animated assets that perfectly showcase their product.
Cash App background animation:
Cash App’s background animation is on loop and works to highlight their value prop and call to action (which in itself is a clever QR code).
Spring’s support animation:
While Spring’s animation is light-touch, sitting next to the value proposition in the banner, it helps give the visitor context and doesn’t distract them from the hero copy. It perfectly blends with the brand’s colour palette too.
Create individual assets
Really like some of the assets within your animation? Well, you can have those designed to keep. You could create an icon set, or take your animated product UI as a separate asset (similar to the RobinHood example above) and have it used across other pages, written content and beyond.
Turn your video into snippets
One 2-minute animation could also give you four 30-second video snippets that are usable across multiple social posts, emails or ad creative. Find the key messages or sections from your video and split them up, coupled with some supporting copy, and you have multiple content opportunities.
Take the snippets as an opportunity to extend your explanation of each section, go into more detail, or even use the snippet as a pull into a client story, testimonial or similar. The opportunities are wide and varied.
You don’t need to use the script for your snippets either. Just the visual animation could serve as a prompt, or a brand asset for the future.
Splice up your script for use across social and email
Your script is likely going to be a creative execution of your product landing page or a reimagining of benefits and features. Therefore, why not make use of it?
Perhaps you could use it in a series of social posts, recycle lines into customer emails or even create some landing page variations for testing with those lines. Working really hard on a script, to then have it remain solely in your video, would be a waste!
Make sure you share the full animation on a cycle
What we mean here is that you don’t do one round of sharing the full animation. For instance, we’d assume when you get your animation you’ll be doing some (maybe all) of the following:
- Upload your video to YouTube, Vimeo or another form of hosting.
- Adding the video to a landing page - we’d presume a product page, maybe a homepage.
- Create some social media buzz around the video - either through a paid campaign or organically (always upload social media videos natively).
- Adding your video into your asset bank for a Google performance max campaign.
- Sending your video via email - perhaps in an announcement email or newsletter.
What you’ll find with content that’s only hyped at launch is that it spikes at the start and then dies out. Its effectiveness may be seen through the solo page it lives on, but it has little impact anywhere else. That’s why we suggest sharing on a cycle.
That means having a series of paid campaigns that use it on an ongoing basis and using it in relevant comms consistently in the future. While the copy that accompanies such comms might change, the animation will always have the desired impact. That’s one of the great things about animation, it has longevity.
Part 4: How to measure and incrementally improve product animations
If you’re interested in the numbers and want to learn how to measure the ROI from your videos, we’ve written something for that here.
You can measure your animation’s performance qualitatively and quantitatively. Depending on the goals you originally set, this can be fairly simple or quite complex. For instance, your measurement might include metrics such as:
- Engagement on page before vs after video added
- Demo bookings on page before vs after video added
Or they might be a little more complex and involve some more determiners such as:
- Source = Google CPC → Product Landing Page engagement → Leads → MQLs
While the way you choose to measure or attribute value to your animations is going to differ depending on your goals, there’s always a way to incrementally improve the performance you’re getting from them.
Initially, this doesn’t mean changing the animation! We’re talking about experimenting with the way you’re using it. However, we will get into some instances later where you could look for feedback to help you steer the direction of your next product animation.
Measuring your product animation
Goals for product/service videos
There are two different buyer stages these videos work well for: those who are already considering/comparing your product or service and those who already own it and want to get more out of it.
Depending on which journey stage your audience is on (and hopefully your videos for these two stages will be different too) you’ll want to look at different goals. Here’s what we think:
Consideration stage:
- Lead generation (including form completions, quote requests, calls and similar)
- Demos booked (with prospects asking questions or airing concerns)
Client/Customer stage:
- Increased satisfaction rate
- Upsells/referrals
- Increase in lifetime value
Let’s go through these in a little more depth:
Consideration stage
Increase in lead generation
You’ll want to make sure you can tie lead-gen back to your video in some capacity. So if your conversions are coming via an ad, make sure you’re using UTMs to capture them accurately. If you have social ads make sure you’ve connected them to your analytics etc.
For websites, you could have a different content page per product or service, but that can get pricey quickly, so experiment with a section on your form that has the visitor specify the product or service they’re enquiring about.
You can also make use of a tool like Vidyard to add calls to action directly to your video.
Increase in demos booked
Demos booked and contact forms filled out can also be a place where you can find prospects who have questions or concerns and aren’t ready to be a lead yet - they’re not sold. By having more contact forms coming through you’ll be able to see a potential increase in demand along the line, but also an uptick in those considering your offering.
Client/customer stage
Increase in customer satisfaction rate
Customer satisfaction could be the most highly underrated metric going. But if you’re putting out an explainer video that showcases how to better use your product or get the most out of your service, or troubleshoots common questions, you’ve got an opportunity to see how that positively impacts their lives (or at least use of your stuff).
The only way you’re going to collect this data is qualitative. Surveys, either plopped at the end of the video to gather further feedback, perhaps sent via email or even embedded into the page could give you the insight you need to see whether your explainer is having the impact you desired.
Increase in upsells or referrals
Showing how your video contributes to upsells or referrals can be as simple as asking your client/customer, or as complex as a series of events triggered in your analytics. But understanding how your explainer videos contribute here can be very valuable, especially if you’re looking to create more or understand the return on investment you're getting from your animation.
While this might feel like a strange goal to aim for, it will be a positive symptom of creating a video that gives your client or customer what they need. You’ll be making it easier for them to recommend your products.
Increase in lifetime value
The golden chalice of metrics. Customer lifetime value. How much, on average, is a customer worth to you over their average lifetime using your product or service?
CRMs are brilliant at joining the dots here and giving you some figures. Once you’ve started bookmarking this metric, watching the value increase as you produce more bottom-funnel content is a big win, and something a lot of companies aren’t doing.
There you have it...
Product animations can easily be a piece of staple content for you. They can help sales, spread the word, and increase your conversion rates. So long as the right stuff goes into them, and they're promoted and measured properly. We're hoping this guidebook has helped you pave the path to product animation glory. If not, let us know what it missed!
We're firm believers in the power of video as part of your content marketing mix. And yet animation is still vastly underutilised. And for fintechs, there's no better medium to explain, engage, retain and convert your customers.
If you’d like help creating a killer animation for your fintech, or you’d like to talk to us about getting started, or even want some help in where your video fits within a wider marketing strategy, reach out to us.