Why use whiteboard animation videos for branding

Why use whiteboard animation videos for branding

A huge reason behind video marketing's popularity rests in the mediums' effectiveness at achieving a relatively specific marketing goal—depending on the style, format, and type of video you go with.

You have a lot of room with the medium to craft something specifically tailored to what you need.

The Whiteboard animation style, for example, primarily excels at condensing information and communicating data in ways most viewers would find engaging and easy to follow. It's what the style is meant to do.

But beyond that core design purpose, whiteboard animation pieces lend themselves to some uniquely powerful branding techniques, too.

Using visual and design elements that help your content feel unmistakably yours, they can make viewers far more likely to think about and remember your brand.

So, to make the most out of your whiteboard videos, you should be taking advantage of those design opportunities. That's exactly what this article discusses.

• Content would usually jump at the top of the list. Whatever information you are sharing, you need to do so in a clear and compelling way.

• Relatability comes at a close second. The more personal and relatable your video, the better its chances of resonating and sticking with your viewers.

• Then, you have things like making your video distinctive enough to stand out and giving it some visual cues that give them that little extra branding push!

• Keep your language and definitions as simple as possible. Jargon is OK only if you think the overwhelming majority of your viewers already use it regularly.

• Talk directly to viewers, framing your script from a second-person perspective ("Remember when you...?"; "On your profile page...")

• Frame everything within a narrative or story that mirrors the core experience of most of your viewers.

What Makes a Marketing Video Memorable?

The more memorable you can make a piece of marketing material, the better the chances that your business will achieve the results you want. It's an essential marketing principle that's particularly important for video content, which tends to require significant amounts of time and resources to produce and get right.

But what makes a marketing video memorable?

What Are Whiteboard Videos, and How Do They Work?

Whiteboard videos are a type of explainer that uses particular aesthetic cues to get the job done.

In a nutshell, the style features a white background that emulates the titular "white board"; in the foreground, lines are constantly being drawn into shapes that animate and transition into the next drawing, helping you convey a narrative or message.

It's a purposely minimalistic style meant to limit distractions while using visual communication elements that help you get a complex message across in a very easy-to-follow way.

It has grown fairly popular over the years because it provides a reliable way to deliver a lot of data to the viewers in ways they'll remember.

The challenge, however, is that the streamlined nature of whiteboard videos might come across as "simplistic" to the untrained eye. Which can lead to uninspired pieces that fail to capture your audience's attention or portray your brand and message as well as they could.

Yes, at its core, the whiteboard video formula is pretty straightforward: Simulate line illustrations being drawn on a solid white background, which then animate and transition to help convey your narrator's message.

But how do those general principles for memorable branded videos we talked about translate into practical design elements that elevate your whiteboard videos' brand permanence?

Well, you embody them in your script, characters, colors, and iconic elements...

A Memorable Whiteboard Video Script Is the Foundation

Think of your whiteboard video script as the structure upon which you build everything else. As such, the script is the first major element you'll be able to customize to start polishing your video's branding capabilities.

The good news is that, because it's for a type of explainer video, the path has already been laid for you to follow!

The popular three-act structure that most explainer videos use—opening by showcasing your audience's pain point, introducing and explaining your solution in detail, and highlighting the potential benefits and a call to action—already gives you a tried-and-true template to follow.

However, as you work on adapting that structure to your needs, you'll want to adhere to a few vital tips to improve your video's recallability:

Fleshing Out Characters That Represent Your Audience

Since most marketing-oriented whiteboard videos rely on a core narrative to carry your message to viewers, most of them also use characters to bring that narrative to life.

Those characters, more than most other visual elements in play, give you a huge opportunity to craft something that resonates with your viewers on a personal level.

Yes, those cartoon characters are only abstract representations of generalities, but if you are making content to appeal to a certain audience, that group likely shares any number of commonalities and characteristics—which should inform how the characters in your video look and behave.

That's precisely why experienced video production studios tend to do a lot of audience research before developing the assets for an animated video. The goal is to truly understand those for whom the video is intended and to model its elements in ways that audience finds compelling and representative.

The better you are at crafting visually interesting characters that your viewers can see themselves in, the more compelling and memorable those characters and their message will be to your audience.

A Black & White Canvas to Help Color Make a Lasting Impression

Having animated black-lined illustrations on a white background is the staple recipe of the whiteboard video style. And there are good reasons for it!

Meant to emulate a similar vibe to the typical "classroom explanation," this signature minimalistic approach is meant to minimize distractions and focus the viewers' attention on what's being explained. That way, you create a piece that makes it far easier to condense and communicate a lot of data in a short amount of time.

But, even though this particular style hinges primarily on this B&W setup, color still plays a vital role.

You can, and should, choose from your brand's color palette, particularly the main color that represents your company across most of your marketing content. Then, use it as an accent or highlight for important on-screen elements that are intricately tied to your company, solution, or message.

That simple technique lets you start building a visual narrative that subtly injects your brand into your video's story and establishes an implied connection in your viewer's mind between your content and your company.

Introducing Your Logo in a Meaningful Way

Just as you want your primary branding color to be displayed in meaningful ways, introducing your logo at the right time and in the right way can do a fantastic job of tying your whiteboard video to your brand.

Going back to the three-act structure that most whiteboard videos follow: it has become a common and useful practice to use your logo as part of the illustrations that represent your product or solution when transitioning to the second act of your piece.

By doing so, you are placing your brand front and center without making it forced or tacky. What's more important, by tying your company's logo to the video's narrative in this way, you get to form a connection between the two in your viewer's mind—making recall of you product and brand as a unit more likely long after viewing.

The Gist of Whiteboard Videos for Branding

Every type of marketing video has unique attributes that make it better at some particular tasks than others.

Whiteboard videos are primarily a medium that excels at engaging and conveying lots of information to your viewers in a short amount of time.

But with the right visual and production elements to brand your piece the right way, you can also make whiteboard videos carry your company's banner and ensure that viewers will keep you in their thoughts long after watching.

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If you need help with your email, web site, video, or other presentation to promote your company, product, or service, please give me a call at 440-519-1500 or email me at john@x2media.us

Until next month. . . .remember. "you don't get a 2nd chance to make a 1st impression." Always make it a good one!!

 

Surveys, Polls, Forms, and Progressive Profiling: How to Write Questions That Deliver Valuable Insights

Surveys, Polls, Forms, and Progressive Profiling: How to Write Questions That Deliver Valuable Insights

As third-party cookies come to an end, brands are focusing on collecting more zero-party data directly from their customers and prospects so they can better understand their needs and wants.

Although larger surveys will play a role in that process, most brands will gain insights a few answers at a time through signup forms, profile pages, polls, and other forms of progressive profiling.

It sounds simple, but writing a good question and collecting reliable answers is harder than it seems. Things can go wrong...

1. Before you write a question
2. When writing the question
3. When writing answer choices
4. Around the timing
5. When analyzing the responses
6. When repeating data collection

Let's talk about best-practices and things to look out for during each of those six steps.

1. Before You Write a Question

It's possible to go entirely wrong before you even begin with your progressive profiling efforts. Consider the following two things.

Always start by understanding exactly what you want to learn from your audience

What's your objective? Why do you want a certain piece of information from them? How are you going to use or operationalize that data point? Does that data give you the insights you want?

That last question gets at a disconnect that many brands struggle with. The goal isn't to collect data. Not really. It's to gain insights you can use to drive the desired outcome. Yes, you need data to get insights, but the two aren't the same thing.

A favorite example of data vs. insight is from B2C marketers who ask customers about their gender. Most of the time that data is used to personalize message content about products for men or women. However, a person's gender doesn't tell you what kind of products they want to buy, because they could be buying primarily for someone else or they could be interested in products for the opposite gender or both genders.

So, the better question is the more direct one: Are you interested in products for men, women, or both?

Don't ask questions you won't act on

Simply asking a question sets an expectation that you'll use that information to make the customer experience better in some way—even if you're just sharing it out with the community.

If you don't do anything with it, however, that can lead to disappointment. And it can lead to lower response rates for future progressive profiling efforts.

Also, gone are the days when you'd collect information because you might need it in the future... at some point... maybe. You don't want the liability of retaining data you're not using, so don't collect it in the first place.

2. When Writing the Question

Once you're clear on your objective, then it's time to craft your questions. Here are some things to keep in mind.

Craft questions that are universally understood

To the degree that it's appropriate, avoid jargon or technical language. If it's needed, consider providing quick definitions in parentheticals.

If your audience is international, think about non-native speakers, who might struggle to understand some long words, colloquialisms, and cultural references.

And finally, use unambiguous time windows, such as saying the past 12 months instead of the past year, which some might interpret as the previous calendar year.

Provide any needed context before the question

The primary concern here is that some people, once they've read a question, will skip to the answer choices because they're in a hurry. (And everyone's in a hurry.)

Another reason is that in the absence of immediate context, people bring their own context to questions, which forces your post-question context to work harder to override the respondent's initial thinking.

Avoid context and introductory statements that might impose a bias on answers

For example, you shouldn't ask, Given the current state of the economy, do you think now is a good time to change supply chain management software providers? You'll get more accurate answers without that introductory clause.

Ask judgment-free questions

Marketers are great at asking leading questions in marketing copy, but you don't want to do that in polls and surveys if you want meaningful results.

Sometimes that means you need an introductory statement or clause that gives the respondent cover to answer truthfully about something that might otherwise make them look or feel bad.

For example, you might preface a question with a clause like Recognizing that you don't have full control over your program... to make it easier for respondents to answer truthfully.

Recognize that people are bad at remembering past behavior

People provide the most reliable answers about now and the recent past. When you're asking about the actions of their organization, things can get even hazier, because the respondent may be relatively new to their company. Consider asking about actions or behaviors from the previous 12 months, at most.

Avoid redundant questions

The more questions you ask, the lower your completion rate will be. So try to ask as few questions as necessary. For example, a recent B2B lead-gen form that asked for both the person's country and world region. If you get the person's country, you can figure out the region of the world, so that question was completely unnecessary.

3. When Writing the Answer Choices

Most likely, the vast majority of the polling or surveying you'll be doing will involve answer choices rather than open-ended questions. So consider the following when crafting those answer choices.

Make answering easy

While this has a lot to do with the questions you ask, the answer choices you provide also have a major impact on how easy a question is to answer.

For example, here's a recurring question asked of marketers:

What percentage of your company's email marketing revenue is generated by automated and transactional emails?

• Less than 20%
• 20% to 50%
• More than 50%
• Not sure

Ranges make answering the question much easier, because the chances of knowing the exact percentage is low—and you absolutely don't want people to go hunting for information, because they probably won't come back.

Five- and three-point rating scales (e.g., Always, Sometimes, Rarely) generally produce the best results while keeping things easy.

Be careful when using subjective measures

Sometimes, beauty is indeed in the eye of the beholder. Other times, it's not. For instance, some people think that an email deliverability rate of 50% is good, but it's actually horrible.

So, if you asked about brand' email deliverability, you'd likely get very different distributions if you ask whether their inbox placement was Excellent, Good, or Poor versus Over 95%, 90%-95%, or Below 90%.

Provide an N/A option

Even if answering a question is optional, give people the option to not answer the question by selecting N/A, Not sure, or Don't know—or a combination of those, such as Not sure or don't know. Otherwise, they'll guess or put down the answer they think you want to hear, degrading the accuracy of your responses.

4. The Timing

When you ask your audience questions depends on several factors, but the most consequential is whether the responses are useful long-term or short-term.

Answers That Are Useful Long-Term—for Many Months to Years

These include demographic information, such as a prospect's company name or industry, and technographic information, such as details about their tech stack.

That type of information doesn't change often, so answers are useful over a long period of time. It also means you can collect it throughout the year, over the course of multiple campaigns.

Answers That Are Useful Only in the Short-Term—for a Few Weeks or Months

These include, for example, whether prospects are attending a B2B Forum this spring and whether they're interested in attending an email marketing meetup. This kind of information is incredibly valuable.

However, such questions need to be asked close enough to the event to ensure respondents are certain they're going, but not so close that you don't have enough time to act on their responses.

5. When Analyzing the Responses

Get it all right up to this point... and you can still stumble when it comes time to interpret the results. Consider the following four issues.

A. Whether to Report N/A, Not sure, and Don't know Responses

Generally, such answers aren't meaningful, so it's best to remove this noise from your reported results.

However, it can be telling if, say, most or a plurality of respondents select those types of answers. That can signal that the technology, tactic, product, or whatever else you're asking about has low awareness, which can be interesting in and of itself.

It could also signal that your question is confusing.

B. Look for Opportunities to Simplify the Story

Just as you don't have to report your N/A answers, it's OK in some cases to roll together responses to tell a cleaner story.

For example, say you asked respondents to respond to a statement using a 5-point Likert scale of (1) Strongly Disagree, (2) Disagree, (3) Neither Agree nor Disagree, (4) Agree, and (5) Strongly Agree. In some circumstances, it might make sense to combine the two disagree answers and the two agree answers when reporting results.

C. Reporting Statistically Significant Results Across Segments

Particularly with demographic questions, brands often provide a long list of answer choices because they want more granular data. For example, they might ask about company size and provide lots of choices, such as Fewer than 10 employees, 11-25, 26-50, 51-100, 101-200, 201-500, 501-1,000, 1,001-2,000, ,2001-10,000, More than 10,000.

Reporting those responses is fine; it gives your audience valuable perspective on your respondents. However, sometimes, brands then try to report how each of those groups answered other questions. Depending on your brand's audience and how the survey or poll was fielded, you might have a relatively small number of respondents in some of those buckets—too small for the results to be meaningful.

In many instances, it makes sense to combine some answer choices. For example, in past surveys, I've rolled together respondents by company size into two buckets: 500 or fewer employees and More than 500 employees. That dividing line created two groups that were fairly evenly powered and provided interesting insights about the differences between what smaller companies and larger companies were doing.

D. Understanding Intent

Just as people are bad at remembering things that happened more than a year ago, they tend to be bad at predicting what they and their organization will do in the year ahead.

Experience show and depending on what you're asking about and how much effort, cost, and buy-in is required—fewer than half of respondents follow through on what they say they'll do in polls and surveys.

Needless to say, that's totally fine. Your respondents are answering to the best of their ability. That said, when you report the results, you shouldn't overstate the results of such intent-related questions.

6. When Repeating a Question, Survey, or Poll

Collecting data on the same question over and over (e.g., every year) is powerful, but there are a couple of issues to be mindful of.

Be mindful of changing previously asked questions and their answer choices

Doing so will likely render historical answers useless for comparison or trend purposes. Even changing an introductory statement or clause can change the responses so much that you can't compare them to past responses.

That said, if you've identified a serious flaw in the wording of a previous question, don't hesitate to reword it so you get more reliable answers next time.

Similarly...

Be mindful of controlling your audience

For example, if you promoted a poll question to your email and social audiences last year, but then this year you work with partners to have them also share your poll question, the poll results could be materially different because of that audience change.

That's not to say that expanding your audience is bad, but don't disregard that change when analyzing results.

As Privacy Protections Strengthen...

Companies need more ways to collect information about their customers and prospects so they can understand their audience better and create more relevant experiences.

Asking your audience questions through forms, surveys, polls, and other progressive profiling mechanisms is a highly valuable way of staying close to them and serving them better.

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If you need help with your email, web site, video, or other presentation to promote your company, product, or service, please give me a call at 440-519-1500 or email me at john@x2media.us

Until next month. . . .remember. "you don't get a 2nd chance to make a 1st impression." Always make it a good one!!

'Subtractive Innovation': Four Steps for More Efficient and Effective Marketing

'Subtractive Innovation': Four Steps for More Efficient and Effective Marketing

The concept of "less is more" has permeated our personal lives in one way or another, at least in part because of the rise of minimalism and the widespread popularity of Marie Kondo's philosophy of purging things in your home that don't spark joy.

In marketing, however, we often tend to veer down the path of "more is more"—addition, rather than subtraction.

Because we marketers are pressured to show the value that our marketing brings to a brand, that value often tends to be proven through addition: onboarding a new measurement partner to provide additional metrics, adding more data segments to an audience, adding new creative to a campaign to avoid fatigue...

We often find ourselves hyperanalyzing processes, documents, products, and resources in search of what can be added to make up for what is lacking.

It's almost as if it's hardwired in our DNA to think that problems stem from shortcomings and the only way to overcome them—to solve those problems—is to figure out what is missing in ourselves or our organizations.

Why do we default to addition?

It actually is natural instinct, it turns out: Humans instinctively gravitate toward additive approaches, even if it means more work, a study by two University of Virginia academics, engineer Leidy Klotz and social psychologist Gabrielle Adams, uncovered.

In one exercise for that study, participants were asked to make a pattern symmetrical by either adding or removing squares. Only 20% of participants opted for subtraction, despite fewer squares' requiring removal rather than addition.

So, just because we naturally gravitate toward a certain behavior doesn't mean it's the ideal or most efficient choice.

Enter the practice of subtractive innovation.

What Is Subtractive Innovation?

Forrester Research defines subtractive innovation as "a mindset and process aimed at improving a company's business through subtraction rather than addition."

Organizations that opt for a subtractive approach can often experience stronger performance from their employees (and increased happiness from simplification rather than overcomplication) as well as better end products and results.

A great example of the concept is the revered Dyson vacuum. Dyson noticed the inefficient experience of dust collecting with a vacuum bag. Instead of looking for parts to add to strengthen the suction or exploring alternative vacuum bag materials, the company instead invented a vacuum that removed the bag, which led to the creation of an effective product and a sustainable solution that generates less waste. And, by many people's account, Dyson is still the gold standard of vacuuming today.

Similarly, marketing teams often don't need to reinvent the wheel or build something new to improve a campaign or measurement. Instead, it's often the process of elimination that can engender true creativity and productivity.

Four 'Less Is More' Steps to Thinking and Acting Substractively

So how can you get started down the path toward thinking subtractively? Here are four key steps you can take as a marketer to lean into a "less is more" approach.

1. Pause and evaluate

The first step toward subtractive innovation is to start by stopping, which may seem counterintuitive at first.

However, it's important to pause and evaluate the tools and processes currently in place and whether and how much each contributes to the day-to-day success of your business or your marketing campaigns.

One way to simply conceptualize that process is to think about grocery shopping. To be an efficient shopper, you take stock of what you already have in your pantry and identify a list of ingredients you need before heading to the store. That helps you avoid unnecessarily accumulating three containers of garlic salt or wasting time and money looking for the garbanzo beans that don't actually have a place in your selected recipes.

The same concept applies to your organization: Take note of what you have and determine what you need before you start shopping for something new.

2. Consider what can be done with less

When Apple removed the earbud cord and released AirPods, consumers got to experience firsthand how having less enables them to do more. You can apply that approach to identify things that get in the way of efficiency.

Think of a current process that's in place and consider what removing a step in the process could result in:

• Does eliminating a step remove red tape that prevents team members from taking ownership over projects?
• Does it improve efficiency by decreasing the process timeline?
• Does your organization have multiple analytics or research tools that have similar capabilities that accomplish the same business need?

Those are the types of questions you must start posing so that you can see the opportunity that subtraction offer for streamlining and freeing thinking and behavior.

An overly complicated marketing undertaking with a plethora of audience segments and creative versions doesn't necessarily mean it's the best approach to take.

Marketing initiatives that have the media budget sliced and diced in a million ways to run across multiple DSPs and myriad inventory sources, or that utilize every single creative type available, tend to result in cost inefficiencies and limited campaign learnings.

Opting for a more streamlined plan that focuses on the brand's core audience and message, and selecting platforms and inventories that best align with the goal, can be a more efficient and effective way to achieve success.

Negative targeting is another subtractive strategy to utilize to ensure media dollars are used as efficiently as possible. For example, maintaining an advertiser blacklist of sites and apps that are either not brand-safe or prone to suspicious activity ensures that impressions are being served where they matter most.

3. Implement guardrails for addition

The goal of subtractive innovation isn't only to remove but also to be mindful about what gets added.

To create a practice of thoughtful addition, develop a framework of conditions that must be met in order to add.

For example, if you want to adopt a new measurement tool, it's always important to keep the "why" at the forefront and consider how the addition of a new tool would help solve a business need. Also, take note of what measurement tools your organization already has and consider whether those tools have untapped capabilities that could solve your need without your having to pay for something new.

These are some thought-starters to use as a guide before adding:

• Is there an applicable business case for this addition?
• Does the organization already have a resource that can be used to fulfill the business need?
• How will this addition improve efficiency or effectiveness, or both?
• Can the problem be better solved through subtraction?

4. Encourage your organization to think subtractively

To weave a subtractive mindset into the ethos of your organization, you need to create a culture that applauds not only creation but also subtraction.

We live in a society that perpetuates the idea that addition is incredibly valuable. It's critical to recognize individuals or departments that have improved strategy or campaign efficiency through a subtractive approach; doing so prompts others to view subtraction as another avenue toward success.

A subtractive approach to innovation—and everyday work—can help unlock a new realm of possibilities for producing better end results. Removing extra steps in a process or streamlining your product by removing an unnecessary bell or whistle can lead to less friction and even cost savings.

Challenge yourself to go against the natural instinct of solving a challenge through addition, and instead take a moment to pause and shop your pantry first.

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If you need help with your email, web site, video, or other presentation to promote your company, product, or service, please give me a call at 440-519-1500 or email me at john@x2media.us

Until next month. . . .remember. "you don't get a 2nd chance to make a 1st impression." Always make it a good one!!