Custom whiteboard explainer videos are a familiar and fun way to convey a message to an audience in a memorable, entertaining, and accessible way. They have a friendly, personal quality in their simple, hand-drawn style that makes them easy to connect to, relaxing, and fun.
There’s a real (actual!) human touch in many of these videos, which commonly feature an artist’s hand appearing from out of frame, sketching images, and drawing words as a narrator speaks. These custom whiteboard animations are popular because they’re effective, fun, and can be incredibly attention-grabbing.
What Are Whiteboard Explainer Videos?
Whiteboard explainer videos are an immensely and perennially popular animation style—in a word, classic and cool. Ok, that’s two words. Well, technically, three, but the point is that this kind of video content has achieved iconic status and is an excellent choice to enhance and emphasize a variety of messages and many different types of information.
They’re instantly recognizable, with their signature, friendly floating human hand sketching out text and images in real-time that highlight key concepts or phrases in the information being presented. We’re drawn to visual information—especially moving images—and our innate curiosity (people are inherently nosey!) makes us want to see how an unfolding sketch develops.
It’s an engaging and entertaining way to capture and hold an audience’s attention. Often known as explainer videos or explainer animation, custom whiteboard animation videos have gotten even more popular in recent years and provide an accessible and on-trend way to reach an audience.
Why Custom Video Animation Has Become a Must for Marketing & Communication
Video animation isn’t just a nice option to have—it’s an essential part of a savvy and well-informed marketing or communication effort. High-quality video production can increase conversions in a targetted audience, enhance internal communication efforts, and the medium is a great fit for social media platforms.
Efficient messaging
Video animation is a more effective, efficient, and captivating method of reaching people to communicate a message, introduce a brand, or extol the (many!) virtues of the offered product or service. It’s a compelling method for getting across a significant amount of information in a memorable and easily consumable way.
Entertaining and Engaging
It’s not overwhelming because it’s entertaining and engaging. It’s literally hand-made animation being created before the viewer’s eyes, underscoring and relating to the narrated message to capture the attention and spark the imagination.
Increased Comprehension and Retention
Another reason it’s so effective is that it uses the universal, natural human language: moving images. We process visual information much more quickly than information conveyed in any other way. We’re visual creatures and have evolved complex systems to handle everything our eyes can take in at an incredibly rapid rate—as little as thirteen milliseconds!
We’re so adept at processing visual information that we not only pick it up incredibly quickly, we retain it for a much longer period than messages conveyed using speech or text, either alone or together.
Maximize Shareability
Social media containing video gets shared a lot more than any other form of content. How much more? About up to 1200% more often. A social media post without video content sees about 5.2% organic reach on average.
A post with video can see up to 62.4% reach—because motion graphic video is entertaining, engaging, and can be passively consumed. Whiteboard explainer video posts are among the most shared video content precisely because of their popularity. That little hand at the bottom of the screen can have some pretty impressive reach.
Provide a Clear Call-To-Action
Text is … well, text. Your message—no matter how precious, meaningful, and life-changing it may be—can look like nothing more than a wall of text to the average media-fatigued person. Trying to get a call to action through someone’s thousand-link-stare can be next to impossible.
What’s a better method of getting your all-important call-to-action the attention it deserves? Have an actual human hand write it out, add purely visual elements, and frantically point to the most important part of your communication if all else fails. For most purposes, frantic pointing may be a bit over the top, but it does illustrate the many possibilities.
Highly Cost-Effective, Easily Produced
Custom whiteboard explainer videos are some of the best ways to get the most out of your marketing or communication dollars for a variety of reasons. They have more appeal, more reach, and are a fantastic way to get even complex information in front of an audience in a way that they’ll connect with and remember long after.
Custom whiteboard animation is as effective as live-action video at getting information across, but it’s much more affordable—hand make-up is really cheap! That may not be the main factor, but it’s one of the many things that make whiteboard animation services a cost-effective option.
Custom Whiteboard Animation vs. Sites like Fiverr or Upwork
There might be a lot of apparent bargains on gig economy sites like Fiverr or Upwork, but bargains can turn out to be surprisingly expensive. Revisions on freelance sites aren’t always included and getting to a perfect finished product is rarely achieved the first time around.
Much of the work you see done by the average gig economy freelancer uses stock imagery and even stock animation—which is a thing. The work reflects the lack of original content and can be stale and boring. You and your message deserve better.
Use-Cases for Custom Whiteboard Animation Videos
Whiteboard animation services are an excellent fit for many different purposes and opportunities for communicating. It’s a versatile, flexible medium that makes it easy to meaningfully and effectively connect to your audience, no matter who they are or what your message is.
Internal Communication
Whiteboard animations are a great way to get critical information to internal team members in a way that they’ll be able to understand and remember long after its presented to them.
A custom whiteboard explainer video is also an incredibly effective way to get training or instructional material to the people on your team who need it. Whether training existing staff on new policies and procedures or bringing new hires up to speed in their fabulous new up-and-coming role in your organization, explainer videos get the information across in an easily relatable and highly memorable way.
External Marketing Campaigns
Whiteboard explainer animations aren’t just good for educational or complex information. While seeing an artist illustrate a history lesson will help you better remember who won the Battle of Hastings (William the Conqueror—imagine a lively portrait here, and you’ll never forget), they’re also great for marketing purposes.
Explainer videos are highly shareable, and a video that captures the many features and benefits of whatever you’re bringing to your market is a natural for social media platforms of any description. Well-made videos can incorporate branding elements like specific colors, logos, or other identifying graphic details which will make your brand instantly memorable.
They can be a bit of a secret weapon when used in more traditional pay-per-click video campaigns at the top of your awesome and inimitable sales funnel. You can track a specific video’s engagement with its audience and remarket those lucky consumers who came for the video and stayed for the explanation.
Product Rollouts & Updates
Custom whiteboard videos are a great way to introduce a brand to potential customers, and it’s also a fantastic way to introduce new products to either existing or novel markets.
Explainer videos can run down the essential how-tos of even relatively intricate and involved feature lists or operating instructions in a fun and accessible way. They can also be used to showcase new offerings to an existing customer base to quickly familiarize them with how what you’re offering works, what it does, and why they need it.
Anything That Needs to Be Explained
If you need to explain it, a talented whiteboard video production company can help you make it an entertaining and informative video to delight and educate the fabulous and intelligent people you’re trying to reach.
The possibilities are practically limitless—anything from why the sky is blue to why time seems to pass slower on a Monday can be broken down into individual scenes and sketched out by a talented whiteboard artist—and ours gladly accept challenges.
Get Started Creating Custom Whiteboard Videos
Because they’re so popular, there’s no shortage of whiteboard animation companies available, but finding the right one to work with isn’t as easy as clicking “I feel lucky.” Locating the right creative team and production company to entrust with your message and the ins and outs of whiteboard video production is essential in meeting your communication goals.
We pride ourselves not only on the quality of our finished product but also on our communication skills. We know when to listen and how important it is to capture the essence of each client’s voice and give their message the best chance to reach the broadest possible audience.
We’re grateful to have worked with companies like Marriott, General Electric, Coca-Cola, and even TikTok, and we’d love to work with you. Contact us today to discuss turning your message, lesson, or unbelievably good brownie recipe into a custom whiteboard explainer video like no other. We’d love to chat.
Interested in whiteboard video animation but need a faster solution?
Our timelapse animation voiceovers offer the same benefits as animated videos without intensive production.
