As a startup, it might be challenging to build an initial stream of visitor traffic for your website, especially if there is barely any valuable content to offer.
However, while other factors might cause the lack of organic traction to your website, the amount of time visitors spend on your website (dwell time) is one of the ranking factors that Google uses to gauge the value of your content.
Due to their effectiveness in grabbing visitor’s attention and keeping them longer on your site, explainer videos have gained popularity among startups in the past few years.
Among many other problems that your business might face in its early days, audience retention is only one of the ways that explainer videos can help your startup.
Here are six other reasons explainer videos can improve your startup.
1. Increase Brand Awareness
Videos, in general, are a much more versatile type of content that you can produce to enhance your marketing strategy. But, on the other hand, Explainer videos are potent tools to introduce your brand and product to a broader audience.
While there isn’t a cookie-cutter way to achieve it, videos are more likely to go viral than blog posts or images. If you’ve been keeping up with the startup industry, you might be familiar with Dollar Shave Club’s infamous explainer video below:
DollarShaveClub.com – Our Blades Are F***ing Great
Not only did they gain a ton of awareness, the unique and personified take on promotional content makes the brand name stick as a top-of-mind product in the men’s grooming niche.
Of course, the company’s product and service quality also play a significant role in their success. But thanks to the explainer video they made, they were acquired for $1 billion by Unilever.
2. Provides better information retention
It’s been reported that you can only retain 10% of information by reading it. If you pack that same piece of information using a video, the retention rate shoots up to 95%.
Having search-engine-optimized articles is essential to growing your organic traffic to your site. But if you want your audience to remember your product, explainer videos are the way to go.
It’s also worth noting that 7 out of 10 consumers prefer watching videos about the product rather than reading an article, infographic, or other promotional content about it.
3. Explainer videos grab your audience attention
Traditional web content is acceptable – there’s nothing wrong with writing a well-researched blog post on your startup’s niche. But you can only go so far before your audience starts skimming your articles and eventually not even bother clicking it.
While you can improve your site’s visual appeal by adding flashy animations, pictures, and colorful buttons, it can negatively impact your site’s user experience and load speed.
Nevertheless, the idea is going in the right direction: use visual appeal to grab the audience’s attention, but the better way to implement it would be using animated explainer videos.
Animated explainer videos have all the attention-grabbing properties: colorful frames, flashy animations, and an overall engaging visual. It keeps you from slowing down your site and keeping it clean from unnecessarily flashy features.
4. Clarify the purpose of your product
It’s known that most startups aim to fill the gaps between existing products or provide a ground-breaking solution. Either way, it’s more likely that your value proposition will require some explaining to your target audience.
Product pages and FAQs on your website might cover everything a potential customer needs to know about your product, but it doesn’t mean that they’ll ever go out of their way to read it. Text can also be tricky since your audience can interpret them differently.
You can instead present your product neatly in a compact and visually appealing explainer video. Explainer videos can help you deliver a close explanation of your product, regardless of how complex the concept.
The visual element of an explainer video plays a significant role in providing an answer that breaks down how your product works and what problem it can solve.
5. Build a better engagement across platforms
Did you know that videos on social media generate 12 times more engagements compared to text and images? So an explainer video is great content to share with your followers, not only on social media but other channels like YouTube and blog posts.
Source: Instapage.com
The high engagement rate of video content is not news. As many as 72% of marketers made explainer videos to promote their brands in 2021; the following most popular video types are presentation videos, testimonial videos, and sales videos.
Explainer videos are also an excellent way to increase your brand awareness through social media.
Facebook reports that native videos (instead of YouTube links) gain ten times better organic reach. In addition, Facebook viewers are 23% more likely to recall the brand behind a promoted video if it appears within the first three seconds, therefore assure to keep that in mind while creating your explainer video.
6. Liven up your value proposition
The value proposition is what all startups and businesses use to put their products above the competition. But let’s face it, shoving a bunch of ad copies and blatant promotion is getting a little bit old for today’s market.
You can use explainer videos to brighten up how you approach your target audience with your product’s value propositions. A well-produced video can create a concise yet enticing example of your product’s value and real-life usage with a more relatable context.
In addition to the brighter and more exciting way to sell your products, explainer videos can become a medium to personify your brand. You can introduce your brand’s persona through an animated explainer video by using memorable characters, a unique visual style, and captivating voiceovers – or even better, all at the same time.
Apart from improving the overall marketing performance of your startup, explainer videos can become a breakthrough in developing a solid brand identity. It’s not a coincidence that massively successful companies like Dollar Shave Club and DropBox started by creating an explainer video for their products. If you haven’t already, you should look into creating an explainer for your startup now.
Author Bio
Andre Oentoro is the founder of Breadnbeyond, an award-winning explainer video company. He helps businesses increase conversion rates, close more sales, and get positive ROI from explainer videos (in that order).
