Four Reasons to Use Ad Animation for Saving your Business (and you) from Burnout

Almost 7 million businesses sprout per year in the US. Around 22% will fail by the end of the first year. Business owner burnout is real. It can affect your business in no time, especially if you haven't reached the five years mark in the field.

Burnout affects you as a business owner as well. It causes not only mental stress disorder but also physical aches. Weakening your immune response, inducing cardiovascular complications, and starting a hormonal disorder is common in burnout.

But how can animation videos help this? Since 2016, using video as a marketing tool has increased by 42%
 
A vast number of startups neglect the power of animated video marketing for their product and service. You may think having a website is sufficient for your business to count digital. In reality, if you are not utilizing resources efficiently to create broader awareness of your brand, chances of selling by large quantity shrink like a flat tire on hot sunny noon.

Animated videos are excellent trophy content. A trophy content is the nuclei of your business cell. It reminds audiences of the core benefit of the product or service you offer and how it can save your target audiences from pain and suffering.

An animated art form creates a clear sense of storytelling with data that grabs the audience's attention to the fullest. By 2023 around 92% of US citizens will have constant contact with a smart device. The number is around 5.3 billion users globally.

So, no matter you sell your product or services locally or all around the globe. You can avert a potential burnout by focusing down on a series of unique animated video content.

But, how important are animated videos are to your business? Are they a vital part of your brand? How much can your business suffer from neglecting a series of animated videos? Here are the top 4 reasons to use animated videos to save your business boat from sinking in the middle of the ocean.

1. A Compelling Animated Story Will Keep your Consumer Interested while Dumping Information will Drive them Away

If you explain how your business works through a story, you will create more chances to convert your potential clients. Animation is nothing but art with form. It works well for telling stories to an audience of any age. Toy Story, Finding Nemo, Megamind, Avatar, Brave, Ice Age, Tangled, Tintin all animated feature films that tell memorable stories. This is why fans remember characters from these stories for a long time.

Your business, product, and associated services also have stories to tell. If you can think deeply, you can ask a few general questions to start. Simple questions like;

Question 01: Why have I started this business?

We all start at some point. Importance of economic independence is what our parent teaches us from a very young age—our teachers emphasize healthy living. And a sound living requires a solid flow of income. Money is a number, and obviously, the number never ends. Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates each have enough money to end hunger all over the US or even send millions of us to Mars. Ergo, to make a living is not a valid reason for your business to sprout in the first place.

Think of the week when you first wanted to launch your professional service. What was going in your mind? What made to take the step to progress with your business idea? Find out the goodness of your thought, which led you to realize what you love doing?

A writer will pull all the compassionate parts from your answers to write a script. Based on the storytelling script, the storyboard artist will create visual cues for your audience. Your audience can relate to that basic feeling you felt when you first started.

Question 02: Which are my personal goals at work to archive from the services I am providing?

Here you can bring in the cringy part of earning goals. You want monetary values in return for your time and energy put into the service you provide. You wish to have business prosperity, talented employees, and a wealthy customer base. Addressing this part will help the video scriptwriter to conclude the returning part of your animated story.

Note, three parts of a hero's journey are a popular storytelling style. One uses three parts of a hero's journey, departure, to form a story architecture for your product or service. Either you or the service that you provide is the hero. A brand official will decide this based on few key metrics of your marketing structure. Oh, yes, you do need to have a brand manager.

Job description of a brand manager includes:

Ability to design your brand architecture: Brand is what you feel using your unconscious mind. Your product or service must have a unique aspect that communicates to your consumers—arranging all these elements in designing your brand architecture.

Provide you with brand name ideas: Your brand touchpoints, promotional offers, services need names. Your brand manager will communicate with the copywriter or existing copies of your brand and provide a trendy, catchy name for business services.

Creating plans for increasing the brand value of your business: The brand manager must submit written plans. It indicates the forecast of both local and international value of your brand quarterly. The programs may include brand strategies and implementation, selecting a brand color, sort brand imagery, direct brand logo design, etc.

Question 3: Whom am I selling it to?

It would help if you had a clear idea about your prospective consumer. Your target market is essential to define. You can do simple target market research by using the internet. At least this will give you some new ideas for businesses to pick the right strategies for target audience. Be in the customers' shoes, their age, demographics, gender, buying journey, etc.

This information will help your story author develop trendy verbal clues that trigger your potential customers. In animation, without a compelling story, users will switch off. They will bounce somewhere else, which is why a concrete script will aid your animated content a lot.

Question 4: Who is the person who helped me to pursue establishing my brand?

Emotional touchpoints are the basis of any excellent script. In animation, good script writing is the basis of support for conveying the right message to your audience and invoking curiosity. Your brand or business operation never started from nowhere. There must be faces behind it. It could be your mother or father, could be one of your best friends or even a relative who had a great chat with you long ago.

When you start a new business, you may not have a digital marketing budget that will allow you to hire a full-time customer success manager. Many ad agencies are giving out options to conduct surveys through electronic mails to contact your potential customers on your behalf.

Your scriptwriter will take advantage of all these tiny details to make your animation more appealing to the audience. There is a one percent rule that applies here to outrun your competitor. All these small advantages over time will accumulate and will ensure you more customers than your competition.

Question 05: How do my product and service help my customers?

Customers are fuel to drive your business for the long run. Every big company has a group of CRM. What customer relationship management does is it talks directly to learn what customer wants. Customers will give you an honest opinion about your product and services. Without reaching out to them, you can't know how your service is doing in the real world.

Good knowledge about how your product is helping your potential customer is gold. Your screenplay writers will use this information and hand over their writing to great animators to create a compelling and detailed storyboard. Ultimately this storyboard will come alive as animated series.

Question 06: How does my product or service help the environment and impact the future of this planet?

We are living in post covid era. And we know how neglected our planet is. Your business must have some standards to give back as much as you can to mother nature. It can be a small donation to scientific research. Or a social awareness project dedicated to reducing anthropogenic climate changes or any other idea you want to support.

Your final animation will have at least a few seconds dedicated to addressing the subject, eventually creating a soft corner in your potential customer's heart.

You can mix it up with philosophical questions as well, like "Why do you think nature has selected you to have you sell service of this nature?"

Gather all the answers together and shuffle them to get yourself a storyline of your product or brand. This story is the most powerful tool for you to reach customers efficiently.

2. Animated Video Saves your Business by Introducing you to Digital Marketing.

In 2021, 87% of businesses use video as their marketing tool. 84% of video marketers see user bounce rate reduces by a significant margin using animated explainer videos.

I cannot hold myself from telling you stories from my professional life here. I started a decade ago as a freelance CG generalist. Throughout my career, I worked with dozens of CEOs, founders, presidents, and owners. My target market was the USA, Australia, New Zealand, and English-speaking countries. A significant part of my client base was new to the business, ranging from 4-8 years of experience. I could only divide the clump into two different groups.

Clients who understand digital marketing.
Client who do not understand digital marketing.

Only 5% were from the first group. Clients who understand digital marketing will have a clear understanding of the project scope. They would hire me for a long-term contract aiming to produce a series of animations. They would also ask for fragments of designs from the animation video.

Meaning images or snapshots from each episode will be used for their social media marketing. I have found a gradual increment of products and services for their business over time.

Clients who did not understand digital marketing lacked a vision for what they would do with the animation video. A misconception that having one video content will get them the golden herrings was one to be noted. Despite having a quality product or service, this group had almost zero video contents strategy setup.

Their web pages lacked optimization for search engines, making their web presence almost invisible on the world wide web. As a result, I never found those businesses thriving over time.

Initially, after rendering my clients' animated video explainer, I saw them uploading it. And then they waited. Nothing particularly happened. Just a piece of well-crafted content, no matter how well prepared it is. Without placing it right on the internet and without robust digital marketing goals, your product or service will never take off.

What digital marketing is all about? How it relates to animated video content? A couple of very sensible questions to address here.

Digital marketing creates a series of bridges that establishes a connection between your product and your potential customer. Harnessing the power of the internet, digital marketing, or online marketing is the future for every business that wants to survive in a competitive world.

The digital marketing service list includes; digital marketing video, aka explainer videos, social media marketing, email marketing, web-based advertising, copywriting, multimedia content as a marketing channel, etc. When you hire a professional animated video explainer production house to create your trophy video, these 1-3 minutes long videos will work as a multifunctional swiss knife.

An ideal digital marketing video will have few qualities such as:

Introducing the stressful problem that your prospects face and showing a solution around it:

You would be amazed to know how stress affects the brain. Your consumers also have a stress graph. They tend to keep that graph flat as possible all the time. But because it is not entirely possible. Somehow, your product or service can help out to wipe out the stress mark from your customers' forehead.

Your animated explainer video will address all those switches that trigger stress and anxiety wearing your clients' shoes. A character can play a crucial role in the animation. Not being able to differentiate stress vs burnout, your product or service appears on the screen to save the world. This method creates familiarity with the stress diagram for your customer. And a clear path to how the animated character can mitigate the stress level.

Aligns your existing brand imagery, message, visual feel, and aesthetics correctly:

Your brand identity is crucial. Everything improves your brand value overall, starting from your brand name, branded logo, brand color, and brand architecture.

Animated video templates can hurt your brand alignment and ruin your digital marketing strategy.

A unique, well-crafted piece of art can easily pick on your brand signals. Which means do you use any characters in your web pages for branding? If so, use the same characters in the video. What is the look and feel of your branded imagery? Are they flat 2D? 3D? Minimalistic design or has photorealistic art in them? Please take advantage of mimicking all these design factors and use them within your animated explainer series.

Multi-purpose animated video content usage across all your marketing channels: 

You must take advantage of all your marketing channels like social media, emails, digital paid or free ads, etc. Using the newly achieved animated video of your brand, you can apply several customizations and broaden your digital asset from the video.

Starting with an animated video logo, you can use this asset in your social media channels to increase brand awareness. You can also reuse the same part as an animated video intro which you will add at the beginning of your video content.

Your animated video editor can also extract out 10 seconds of your total video describing a specific key benefit of your product to the customers. This extracted video data is helpful to append to any related blog post that you want to publish for your readers. Or, pull a 15 second YouTube video ad that your customers will see between videos on the platform.

Providing proof that your business is genuine and authentic:

Animated videos for business should have a scene dedicated to proving the product's authenticity or service. Competition is high for most of the products in today's world. Credibility is vital to showcase what other content is better than animated video to explain why your potential client should trust your service.

Ability to initially clarify your product's unique selling points:

USP paints a bigger picture for your audience. It shows how your product and service can save your prospects time and money. Example of unique selling points; using our service will ensure none of your item breaks during a home relocation. This one is for a moving company. But no matter what you sell, your USP can always help attract a potential buyer.

Your animated video must contain a shot where the audience starts seeing how your service differs from others? They can clearly understand the edge of your product over your competitors. That also has to be memorable. Many animation studios associate an event where the central character faces a grave consequence where only the USP comes to save—dedicating a full 1-2 minutes episode for this.

Ability to reach out to new prospects and nurture existing customers:

What does prospect mean in marketing? A person regarded as likely to succeed or as a potential customer, client, etc.

Your animated explainer should show all the features of your business in a brief video. It not only updates your existing customers but also provides all necessary information to your would-be customers.

Good business storytelling examples include all the features or benefits of your product throughout the video submissively. Audiences' subconscious minds should always understand that the story needs a hero. Your product or service brings them that sigh of relief once this happens.

Power to wrap every end of your product features without exceeding human attention span:

Timing and spacing are crucial concepts in animation. It is equally valid for persuing someone over the internet. Script writer for movies has specialized how to tell a long story under three minutes video. They also can stretch a light novel to a five-season long television show.

Your animation video should be short and concise. It would help if you also produced as many as your digital marketing budget allows. Each episode of your animated videos can explain one particular feature of your service. You are drawing a clear conclusion after each video will attract different groups of prospects.

Animation duration longer than 4 minutes will unplug your potential customers. Day by day, the attention span is decreasing for human beings, so the shorter, the better. But make sure not to miss out on showing critical features to cut times.

You have the animated video broken down into parts featuring different aspects of your business. You can quickly enter the world of digital marketing through a business story and focus on these aspects efficiently.

3. Animated Video for Marketing Ignites your Branding - Strong Brand Awareness is Mandatory to Keep your Business from Falling Apart.

Brand awareness in marketing works as oxygen for your business. Without a substantial brand value, the burnout of your business is imminent. Branding has evolved over hundreds of years, and any successful business you see around you has used it efficiently.

Watching a well-branded animated video, 84% of people convert to a customer from the audience.

You can integrate animated video explainers into your core strategies for brand awareness. You can set a clear kpi for brand awareness. You can analyze traffic flow from animated content as a key point indicator. Tracking earned media value and comparing your earned media value with your competitors are also popular key point indicators.

Like other branding companies, animated video production companies will go through your business details to diagnose the best possible strategies for target market. Based on your existing branded design, the consultant will provide you with plans to improve your branded design. Techniques will include animated video content, aka brand video content, brand imagery, brand color, etc.

It is vital to take this step seriously. Many founders and owners from small business groups often possess unnecessary faith in products than its branding. It creates a gap between consumers with service; hence, it fails in no time unless the product is revolutionary.

You, as a captain of your branded ship, must keep critical points below in mind to survive the tidal waves of competitors drowning your business to the bottom of the sea.

Animated content enables the three Rs of marketing:

Reach, repetition, and relevance. These three are the building blocks of progressive marketing strategy.

A. Reach: Without telling your audience a compelling business story, you will never reach out to your customers. Without reaching, the chance of converting potential buyers goes to nil. Animated contents are an excellent way of storytelling with data.

B. Repetition: Repetitive sales work as a lifebuoy for your business facing stress and anxiety. Loyal customers are far better than new customers as they are more likely to buy from you regardless. Repetition also ideal for sending out your marketing messages to potential buyers.

If your product is digital software, tools, or an app. 79% higher chance that people will make a purchasing decision after watching your product's animated video.

Using a custom-made animation video, you can reach out to your loyal customers and update the group about the new and existing features. A fun story can implant a hook inside your customers' minds. You can control emotional triggers and upsell your product or service using this method, ultimately keeping it afloat.

An animated story provides direction to branding your service:

A brand constructs your business base. Branded video content guides your internal business structure to maintain consistency.

The theme of a story also sets the overall theme of your brand imagery. If you are not a one-person show and have at least 3-5 employees, your animated content can demonstrate the brand message.

Entertainingly, animated assets can also train your employees, boost morale and improve productivity.

There are a couple of other ways an animated video is capable of directing your brand,

i) Visual Branding directs memory of your consumers: Consumers tend to process visuals around 60,000 times faster than plain text or copywrites. An animated form of art is nothing but visuals of your product and services. It creates a visual impact on your audience and makes them fish for information when needed.
 
ii) Animated content directs your brand's conversion rate: Digitally, websites are your headquarter. All your prospects will pop in and out; when the users see a video on a branded site, 100% chance that they will not bounce right away. Note here that it works well with brands that are aligned correctly with your product or services.

Additionally, 64%-70% of users will interact with your call-to-action button. A CTA button is a link to a landing page where your users can explore more features of your product. They can also place a phone call, shoot an email or make a purchase online.

4. An Animation Series about your Business Defines your Goal and Help you Dodge Burnout

Our society has evolved to recognize working relentlessly for an infinite amount of money and customers as success. Sacrificing health, family time, and personal grooming is harmful and even can be fatal at times. However, if you work more efficiently to establish your brand, you surely want to avoid burnout.

Splitting different services and features of your business works as a blueprint of your business's success. You can easily define a goal for keeping your business from losing customers.

It is nearly impossible to describe your product or service features to your customer using one single video. The attention span of a human is merely 12 seconds. And every 15 years, it is dropping by whooping 8 seconds. Successful businesses are taking advantage of this and using shorter animated content to avoid burnout.

Scriptwriters will do an exceptional job vetting out all the fluff and focus on a specific feature of your service. Later on, based on the script, animators will produce your animation series. It will also help you to apply the 1 percent rule.

What is the 1 percent rule?

You can outrun your competitors for any business by adding a fraction of improvement to your product and service over time. If you accumulate all the advantages, you will always maintain a lead in your industry. You do not need to improve yourself twice as much to achieve double results.

Ergo, this rule keeps you busy improving your product or services and reminding you about the goals to achieve the fractional winning edges.

Besides defining goals, you can manage business owner burnout using two other techniques using animated videos.

Celebrate minor achievements:

As the business owner undertaking an animated video project will require a list of task for you. Scripts, voice-over, characters, dimension, art style, background score are few important ones.

Your selected animated video company will ask for feedback on every step. In each phase, when you like what they are doing, you should celebrate the milestone.

Waiting forever to have a humongous success is not ideal. Hence split achievement is what keeps you happy and victorious.

Cut Down Unnecessary Tasks:

Animated video explainers will do the explaining parts to your potential customers. Instead of taking your customers to the learning curve every time, you can send them a link to one of your relevant animated videos.

How your product saves time and money for your clients? You can prove that point through another short animated video. Explaining things over a call or long email is inefficient. End of the day, using video marketing, you can reduce up to 43% of support calls. It will save you time, let you focus on more important things on your to-do list, and finally avert burnout.

Conclusion:

Business owner burnout can lead to devastation. It is equally dangerous for your startup and your physical well-being. Animated video content is the future of video marketing. Using animated video series to educate and explain your product and services to your customer can help you save your business and make your life easier.