That video content gives you a lot of avenues to promote and build your brand is pretty established by now. However, there are a lot of styles of videos out there, and choosing the right tool for your particular goals can be a daunting task. Doubly so when your goal is to build brand permanence!
Well, we aim to assist you with that with the help of whiteboard animated videos 🙂
Whiteboard animation has earned a special place when it comes to delivering a lot of information in a way that is charming, compelling, and stays with your viewers long after they are done watching.
Their premise is simple – and honed to a fine edge by a number of explainer video companies that perfected the style. It employs a mostly black-and-white canvas where animations are seemingly brought to life in real-time!
It is a formula that, if done right, your prospects won’t soon forget! And today, we are going to tell you all about how to go about it.
Let’s begin!
Create Compelling Character Based on Your Target Audience
One of the major decisions you will make when creating your whiteboard animation will be defining the looks and personality of your characters. They are nothing less than your video’s masters of ceremony, who will lead your audience on a journey to your value proposition.
Crafting the perfect character for your video requires a great deal of imagination on your part. But generally speaking, your character should be:
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Relatable: Your main character should share very similar problems, concerns, and aspirations to those that drive your audience. For this, it’s crucial to do a lot of social listening so that you can imprint your viewers’ likes and dislikes on your characters.
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Unique: Crucially, your characters should not be an exact copy of your target’s outlook. Instead, you must give them individual personalities to express their own feelings and make independent choices. What’s more, characters should always have proper names!
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Stylized: As your video’s protagonists, characters should be visually appealing and vivid. There are a lot of esthetic choices to make, such as drawing crisp silhouettes and customizing them with nice hair, clothes, and accessories. Pick a style that you know will resonate with your audience!
Using Your Brand’s Color Palette to Boost Brand Recognition
The distinctive feature of whiteboard videos is their hand-drawn black and white style. More than unique, this feature is vital for the success of this kind of animation: the lines and images sketched on the plain background direct the viewer’s attention to your message’s visual core.
Still, as iconic as the black and white aesthetic is, including your brand colors in your video gives you a greater advantage than otherwise. The reason is that, in the right place and moment, a small degree of color can make your overall piece more memorable and visually appealing.
To give you an idea, you can use bright colors to:
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Bring your brand forward: By introducing your brand through, say, your logo, you can leverage your colors to make it stand out from everything else in the background.
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Highlight text lines: Not only to help you build brand recognition but to bring to life words that would otherwise go unnoticed.
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Represent your product: Painting your product with the same colors as your logo will help your viewers make a subconscious connection that will stick in their minds.
Use any or all these strategies together to see how your whiteboard video turns more and more into your brand’s signature product.
What Makes Up a Captivating Script?
Creating a gripping and convincing story is a pillar of any whiteboard video that works. Like any other story worth telling, your whiteboard video script should have a beginning, a middle, and an end. No surprise there.
Now, what specifically can you do to spice things up at these three moments of your story? Here, we give you three tools to keep in mind when composing your narrative.
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Beginning—Hook audiences with the familiar: As soon as your whiteboard video starts, you must grab your viewers’ attention with characters and scenarios that are easy for them to empathize with. To do this, include situations and/or questions that focus on their day-to-day challenges.
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Middle—Showcase your product as the problem-solver: Your solution should follow from the development of the problems faced by the video’s characters. This is what will dictate the details and features to show, which in essence are those that help solve your audience’s concerns most practically and effectively.
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End—Share a success story: Have your character test your product so that viewers can see how their lives change for the better after trying it.
As for the technical side of things, making sure you hit your strategies’ main keywords can be really helpful from an SEO standpoint and help you reach a bigger audience once you start sharing your video on different platforms.
Make sure these elements are present in your story and script, and you will see your persuasion skills skyrocket!
Branding Techniques to Make Your Whiteboard Video Easier to Remember
As we’ve seen, whiteboard videos are all about personal branding—from the overall design of your characters to the creation of your story and color scheme. However, there are other branding techniques that will take your video from good to great if you make the extra effort to implement them!
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Ask inspirational questions: At one or various points in your video, you need to raise reflective questions that compel your users to think. Thought-provoking prompts such as “What if I told you that…?” or “Have you ever felt that…?” are helpful cues that can be useful for coming up with an interesting question.
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Add a foundational phrase: What is the one message you want your viewers to remember? Be sure at some point to add a memorable and catchy phrase that sums up your proposal. In many cases, you don’t even have to look very far, as your brand’s tagline expresses just what you want to say.
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Lead the way forward: Another crucial branding element for your piece is to have a clear and actionable call-to-action. When including a CTA, try to keep it short: a simple “Try It Out” or “Visit Our Website” is more than enough to inform the viewer of the next best step.
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Tell them where to reach out: Along with your CTA, you should arrange for the last frame of the whiteboard video to include your most relevant social channels and website so that users can follow your work.
Ask—Sum Up—Lead. These are the three ways to make your whiteboard animation unforgettable for your audience.
Wrapping Up!
To get the most out of the whiteboard animation style, you need to fully grasp its formula’s potential. By understanding its basics — the black and white esthetic, colorful characters, and visual cues to add — you now have the tools to start working on your next video.
But additionally, your creativity is fundamental to make the whiteboard video a powerhouse for your brand. So, don’t be afraid to experiment with formulas of your own and lead your video marketing strategy as far as your talent will take you!
