An explainer video is a great marketing tool. And if you use it right, you will benefit your business.

The vast majority of the companies place explainer videos on their website to explain to prospective customers how their products work. However, this is not the only way explainer videos can be used in marketing.

Let’s consider five examples that show how companies from different industries use explainer videos to grow their businesses.

Focus on customer’s pain points

Do you want to draw the audience’s attention to your brand? Show your customers that you do understand their needs. Use an explainer video to prove that your product is designed to address these needs.

Name: Slack – Work, simplified

About the company: Slack is an app, a chat room for the whole company, designed to replace email as the primary method of communication and sharing. Slack eliminates the necessity to switch between the apps and helps to boost team productivity.

About the explainer video: The video consists of two parts. The first part shows how managers and team members suffer from dealing with constant emails, alerts, and meetings. This part of the video is drawn in grey, and it evokes negative emotions.

The second part of the video demonstrates how Slack can transform working life to be simpler, more pleasant, and more productive. This part is drawn in vibrant colors, and it evokes positive emotions.

This explainer video resonates with the target audience – managers who struggle to boost team productivity – and communicates a call-to-action. It helps Slack to drive conversion rates and increase sales.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=33&v=uGPXaDaNla0&feature=emb_logo

Present a new feature

Even if your company exists for many years, and everyone knows how your product works, you still can benefit from explainer videos. For instance, you can create videos to present new features of your product.

Name: Skrill – Buy and sell cryptocurrencies from your account

About the company: Skrill is a payment system that allows low-cost international money transfers. Skrill supports 200 countries and over 40 currencies and has over 40 million users worldwide.

About the explainer video: This summer, Skrill has released a short explainer video to present a new feature that allows to buy and sell cryptocurrencies.

The video helped the company in two ways. Firstly, Skrill informed current clients about new business opportunities. Secondly, the video attracted a new audience, cryptocurrency experts, who are interested in using Skrill not as an international money transfer platform, but as a cryptocurrency trading platform.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQf6XZo56N0

Share your vision

An explainer video is a great tool to communicate your company’s vision to a wide audience. “By using a simple graphics and narrative storytelling technique, you can explain to your customers who stand behind your brand and what values you promote. You can get people to fall in love with your products and your brand,” says Donna Torres, a marketer at Studicus and Wow Grade.

Name: Chipotle – One Man’s Quest for Better Tasting Pork

About the company: Chipotle is an American chain of fast-casual restaurants specializing in tacos and Mission-style burritos.

About the explainer video: In contrast to other American fast-food restaurants, Chipotle is committed to using the quality ingredients raised with respect for the animals, the environment, and the farmers.

The video communicates the company’s mission statement. It explains why Chipotle does not use cheap pork that comes from farms where the pigs are confined in gestation crates and given antibiotics. The video helps to improve customer loyalty and turn customers into brand advocates.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Azhry6BJP5I

Take your social media campaign to the next level

If you introduce a new product to the market and want to promote it on social media, you should consider using a short explainer video as an ad. Here is a great example to follow.

Name: Resume.io – How it works

About the company: Resume.io is an online platform that allows job seekers to build a perfect resume using professionally designed templates.

About the explainer video: Resume.io created a 27 seconds long video to explain how the platform works and used this video as a YouTube ad.

The marketing campaign was successful. The video helped the company to grab the target audience’s attention and convert ad viewers into platform users. Once job seekers understood that Resume.io allows building an excellent resume in a hassle-free way, they decided to sign up.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pLWYswbcDc

Create a strong visual brand

In the age of fierce competition, it’s important to build a strong brand. Here is an example of how you can use explainer videos to maintain a strong brand identity.

Name: KLM Airlines – Flight safety

About the company: KLM Royal Dutch Airlines is the flag carrier airline of the Netherlands.

About the explainer video: KLM Airlines strives to create a strong visual brand, and uses explainer video for this purpose.

The Netherlands is famous for its blue and white pottery, also known as the Delft Blue or delftware. As a national company, KLM uses the Delft Blue patterns as an element of its visual brand identity.

Naturally, the KLM flight safety video also was designed in the delftware style. This video perfectly matches the overall branding strategy of the company and help KLM stand out in the crowd.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGVlLZujgA4

Do you feel inspired to create an explainer video for your brand?

If you want to use an explainer video to boost your marketing efforts, you are moving in the right direction. Here is a short guide on how to get an excellent explainer video:

• Think about how you will use your explainer video. Set a specific goal you want to achieve: raise brand awareness, drive traffic to your website, improve brand loyalty, etc.
• Brainstorm ideas with your team. Think about what type of video fits your brand the most: whiteboard video, infographic video, etc.
• Hire a storyteller or video scriptwriter to write a script for your explainer video. Check out online writing services like TrustMyPaper and WritingJudge or freelance platforms like Upwork and Fiverr.

Now it’s time to take the first step! Create an explainer video and take your marketing strategy to the next level.

This guest article was written by Bridgette Hernandez, a Master in Anthropology who is interested in writing and is planning to publish her own book in the near future. She works with professional writing companies such as BestEssayEducation and GrabMyEssay as and as a writer, Brid also does some editing work SupremeDissertations.

Everyone knows video has taken center stage in digital marketing.

And as more marketers start producing videos, the question becomes less “How do we do this?” or more “How do we do this well enough to stand out?”

Making something memorable — whether it’s a video, a tagline, or a billboard — is marketing’s oldest and most critical mission.

So how do you make a memorable video? The camerawork, lightning, script, and acting are all important.

But there’s one thing new video makers often overlook: the background music. And that’s a shame, because music plays a significant role in how people react to any type of visual content.

In this article, I’ll explain why quality music is so important for your videos and where you can find affordable stock music for your work.

Why Background Music Matters

Humans are musical creatures — we’ve actually been making music for thousands upon thousands of years.

When we hear music specific parts of our brain react and our mood changes. This phenomenon is so strong we often use music to regulate our emotions. When you’re feeling low, you put on something joyful. When you need to focus or relax, you put on something calming.

All around the world, this happens like clockwork.

Anyone who aspires to succeed with video marketing should take note. Music directs people how to feel, and it heightens our emotional reaction to media of all kinds.

The power of music is immediately apparent in ads that go straight for the heartstrings, like Budweiser’s 2014 puppy commercial or Coca Cola’s “Wonder of Us” spot.

But background music plays just as important a role in less dramatic marketing.

Slack’s 2018 spot is almost completely devoid of dialogue. Instead, the video relies on sound effects and background music to drive the story forward.

Notice how calm the music is in the beginning. We find Geoff the lion in a moment of reflection. As soon as inspiration strikes, he messages the team. Then the music springs to life.

The tempo picks up, the song expands to include new instruments, and the audience understands innovation is underway.

The entire commercial hinges on this song, and yet the music itself isn’t that spectacular. It’s working in the background to create a mood that enriches the visuals.

Quality background music can be found in almost every successful marketing video — not just big production ad spots.

Take Acorns’s animated explainer video. These videos are a dime a dozen, but Acorns succeeds by scoring the animations with a track that builds as the explanation moves along.

Even though Acorns itself is a very interesting idea, this video isn’t dynamic by nature. No explainer videos are. So the background music adds some energy to what would otherwise by a pretty dry piece of content.

Finally, let’s look at a talking head video from Drift.

Like animated explainers, these videos are very en vogue on company YouTube channels.

The problem is, watching a person stand in front of a camera and talk to you is pretty awkward. It becomes even more awkward when they aren’t trained actors.

Like in the previous scenarios, background music helps a lot. It papers over the uneasy pauses or not-quite-right inflections that happen when you shoot with actors who aren’t seasoned veteran.

So whether you’re filming a full-fledged commercial or simply producing some educational content, you’re going to need stock music for your video strategy to excel.

How to Find Quality, Affordable Stock Music

Licensing music used to be unbelievably complicated.

To get permission to use one song, you had to negotiate with all of the right holders, which was typically a smorgasbord of label exces, songwriters, artists, and publishers.

Suffice it to say, the process is complicated and expensive.

That left marketers with little recourse.

You could’ve hired musicians to record original music, but that’s still expensive — and time consuming.

You could have scoured the internet for free music, but we all know those results are going to sound like bad remixes of Keyboard Cat.

Thankfully, a combination of entrepreneurial spirit and technology has made the entire endeavour much simpler.

These days, you can pick from a number of stock music providers. These companies have essentially transformed music licensing into Netflix.

All you need to do to access troves of royalty free music is sign up for a subscription and pay a monthly fee.

The songs are dubbed “royalty-free” because you don’t have to pay fees to the rights holders every time your video racks up more views. Your membership fee takes care of that.

In most cases, you’ll be able to license an unlimited number of quality songs from the audio library, and you’ll retain permission to use those songs forever. (That’s important to protect yourself from copyright infringement.)

So whether you’re making a commercial, an explainer video, a podcast, or even a slideshow, you’ve never had more choice for quality stock music.

And that matters, because the better your music, the more powerful your message.