In the digital age, businesses are continually exploring innovative ways to capture the attention of their audience and effectively convey their messages. One such captivating tool that has gained popularity is the whiteboard video. Combining simplicity, creativity, and visual storytelling, whiteboard videos have become a powerful communication medium for businesses across various industries. In this blog post, we will dive into what exactly a whiteboard video is and how it can benefit businesses in their communication efforts.
Defining Whiteboard Videos
A whiteboard video is an engaging form of animation that emulates the process of a hand-drawn illustration unfolding on a whiteboard or similar surface. Through a combination of time-lapse photography or digital animation techniques, these videos bring static images to life, creating an interactive and captivating storytelling experience. Whiteboard videos typically feature a hand drawing images, characters, text, and diagrams on a white background, accompanied by a voiceover or narration.
The Power of Visual Storytelling
Whiteboard videos harness the power of visual storytelling to effectively convey complex ideas, concepts, or messages. By combining hand-drawn illustrations, text, and animation, these videos engage viewers in a unique and memorable way. The process of watching an illustration come to life, step by step, captures the audience's attention and enhances information retention. Visual storytelling has long been recognized as an effective method to communicate ideas, and whiteboard videos provide a modern and dynamic approach to this age-old technique.
Benefits of Whiteboard Videos in Business
1. Simplicity and Clarity: Whiteboard videos excel at simplifying complex information into easily understandable visuals. By breaking down intricate concepts or processes into digestible segments, businesses can ensure that their message is clear and easily comprehensible to their target audience.
2. Branding Opportunities: Whiteboard videos provide businesses with the opportunity to showcase their brand identity and personality. By incorporating brand colors, logos, and characters into the video, companies can reinforce their brand recognition, create consistency across their marketing materials, and establish a strong brand presence in the minds of their audience.
3. Versatility: Whiteboard videos can be adapted to various communication channels and purposes. They can be used for product or service explanations, employee training, sales presentations, marketing campaigns, educational content, and much more. Their versatility allows businesses to convey their message effectively across different platforms and engage with a wide range of audiences.
4. Make your message memorable and engaging: As our research with Professor Richard Wiseman showed, whiteboard animations result in a 15% increase in information retention compared with a ‘talking head’ video. The use of storytelling combined with the visual language, voiceover, animation and onscreen text allows your whiteboard animation to work for a viewer whether they prefer an auditory or visual delivery.
This same combination allows you to make your message more entertaining and engaging. This is great news when it comes to holding a viewer’s attention in what is becoming an increasingly distracting world and means your calls-to-action can be more effective.
5. Connect with audiences and humanise your business: An important part of any whiteboard animation is the way it connects with your audience. In part, we have our old friend storytelling to thank for this but there are plenty of other ways whiteboard videos can resonate with viewers. The right choice of characters or voiceover can go a long way to helping people identify with you and your message. Using social or pop culture references that people will relate to takes this to the next level.
Drawing on humour and emotive responses makes this connection even stronger and this connection can extend to more than a character or a message. Large scale companies and some industries don’t lend themselves to being readily relatable, so you can use this connection and the visual freedom of whiteboard animation to present your business in a more personable and human way
6 . Tailor your whiteboard animation to your subject: It’s not just business perception where the connection and presentation strengths of whiteboard animation come in to their own. Every message and subject matter deserve delivery that will capture its fullness and nuance - but depending on your subject this can be easier said than done.
Working with a creative team, you can create the perfect illustrations and visual metaphors to present your subject or message in the exact detail it needs, while also making it engaging. Whether it’s a complex scientific process, a new piece of policy or a company update, whiteboard animations are well placed to tackle the abstract and the more concrete.
7. The role of video in the buyer journey: Our final point looks at the changing way people use video. We talked a little in an earlier blog about how our relationship with video has changed and today it isn’t just teaching us how to make planters. For many of us, video has an important role in our buying process. Research by Google and Ipos has shown that 55% of the 24,000 people asked actually used video in-store when deciding whether to buy something while more than 50% of people said that video had helped them decide which brand or product to buy.
We are firm believers in the power of whiteboard video to bring businesses to their viewers, whether they are staff or customers. From making difficult topics accessible and engaging to humanising and telling the story of a company, whiteboard animation has a lot to offer.
We feel proud to have watched the way whiteboard animation has progressed since the RSA Animates and to see the number of stories it has brought to the screen. Each project we work on is a new adventure and we love getting into the world and research of each client as we plan how to visualise their message and tell their story in the best way.
We’d love to talk with you about the ways whiteboard animation could tell your story and bring it to your audience, book a discovery call today!
Creating a successful explainer video takes detailed planning. Done well, they supercharge stories and messages, giving them a lasting impact and high engagement rates.