Your own animation Explainer video is ready. That’s fantastic of course! But what to do now? What will you do with your animation video? Will you post it on your website? Of course. Social Media? Obviously. Email it to potential customers? Not a bad idea either.
In this article, we answer questions that we received from our customers after delivering their animation video. We know it is a very long text. Sorry about that. However, we wanted to address a number of points as complete and dummy proof as possible.
So put all distractions aside for 10 minutes. We are sure you will learn something from it.
How to put your video on your website – Host on own website, embed via YouTube or Vimeo anyway?
The first question you must ask yourself is whether you will upload the video directly to your website or whether you will publish it indirectly on your website through another platform, such as YouTube or Vimeo.
An advantage of hosting videos on your own website is that you may generate extra organic traffic to your website when, for example, the video is found in the search results. This way more people will visit your website, which Google generally likes. The disadvantage here is that not every website and server is designed to play videos to your visitors and that this often entails extra loading time, which Google is less of a fan of.
Uploading your video to a dedicated platform such as YouTube or Vimeo is therefore usually the better choice in terms of user-friendliness. Both platforms allow you, to embed your video on your website after you have uploaded it. Simply put, you receive a code snippet from Vimeo or YouTube that you can paste on your website to display the video.
Turn off suggestions at the end of the video.
By default, YouTube will show suggestions for other videos that the viewer can watch after they have watched your video on your website. Your competitor may be displayed among these suggestions! That is certainly not your intention. Also, when they click on one of these suggested videos, your visitors are redirected, away from your website. A shame and completely unnecessary.
This is how these annoying suggestions at the end of your video look like.
Turning off suggestions after videos have been watched works differently on both platforms.
Youtube
On YouTube, go to your uploaded video, click on the “Share” button and then embed and copy the code snippet you get from YouTube. It looks like this:
Next, suffix the following code immediately after the YouTube video link: ?rel=0
Then it should look like this:
Your video will then still be displayed on your website, but it won’t show any of those annoying suggestions to your visitors.
Vimeo
Do you prefer Vimeo instead? Personally we think this is a more professional platform than YouTube and for this reason we also use Vimeo on our website.
Go to the settings menu after you have uploaded your video. On the left you will see a button in menu called “Interaction tools”. Click it and you will see three options appear: “Before video”, “During video” and “After video”. Not all of these options are available to free Vimeo users. We have a subscription for the cheapest “Plus” plan which allows us to adjust both the “During video” and “After video” actions. We chose to show suggestions of OUR own videos to the viewer after playback. Would you rather show a CTA or a specific image? You can easily set this up within Vimeo. The choice is yours!
Where to show / display your video on your website
It is important that you publish your video on the right spot on your website. For example, is the purpose of your video to immediately give new visitors a good first impression of your company? Then don’t hide it by placing it on a nested subpage. Give the video a prominent place on your homepage and have a look at Google Analytics to see which landing pages generate the most visitors. Make sure that your video is immediately visible on screen so your visitors do not have to scroll down or search for it.
Optimize your website for your video
Make sure that you have your website is prepared for you to publish your video. It is important that the landing page where your video will be published is properly arranged so that all parts of the page work together to entice your visitor to take action. If, after watching your video, your visitor is enthusiastic, you also need to provide the right actions so your lead can contact you or easily find his way to your webshop.
In addition, it is also important that your website functions optimally from a technical perspective. You will lose many if not all your visitors in no time if your website is slow, unresponsive or not user-friendly, regardless of how beautiful your video is. For mobile users, the tolerance level is even lower than on desktop, so make sure you have the basics in order before you launch your video campaign.
How to publish your video on Facebook and LinkedIn
Facebook still has a huge organic reach and we also are still enthusiastic about the advertising opportunities it offers. In terms of advertising, we are, however, slightly less enthusiastic about LinkedIn, but do like the organic and network aspect of the platform.
Organic reach of your animation video on Social Media
Let’s first talk about organic traffic. It is important that you upload your video directly to Facebook or LinkedIn when you create a post. Do not copy paste a YouTube or Vimeo link. The main advantage of uploading your video directly to these platforms is that your video then immediately starts playing in the timeline of your audience without having them to press the play button. This ensures considerable stopping power when scrolling through a timeline and ensures that your video is viewed more often. Consider how you yourself would react when a video plays automatically and catches your attention. Exactly: you keep watching.
Video Advertising on Social Media
What about advertising? Facebook still offers very interesting opportunities in this regard. Even for B2B companies, ads are still very effective. In our opinion, it is big nonsense that B2B advertising does not work on “private” platforms such as Facebook and Instagram. In this time and day, there are no boundaries anymore. Work and private life no longer have the clear separation as it used to be. If you see something interesting on Facebook that can be of professional use to you, then you take action. Whether you are an employee or entrepreneur: it makes no difference.
We certainly do not completely eliminate advertising on LinkedIn, but it is a lot more expensive compared to its bigger brother that is Facebook. Keep this in mind if you have to make financial decisions. ROI is always the most important thing to aim for. Every invested euro must be earned back. Are you failing in that regard? Perhaps you should discuss your case with us, we are happy to help!
Video as a re-marketing tool
Among the visitors to your website are also leads who are interested in your range of services or products, but will eventually leave your website without making a purchase or contacting you. They need a little more time to decide or may want to compare your offer with other providers.
You can target these specific visitors again through a remarketing campaign with your product or service. Video is a particularly suitable media for this. A good video ensures that your offer is in their thoughts again and lowers the threshold for them to turn back to you and make a purchase.
In order to make your campaign even more successful, we recommend you to use a video that is specially made for remarketing. Leads that are already aware of what you have to offer but still need to be convinced have different questions and considerations than leads that came into contact with your company for the first time. That is why both groups should be targeted with a different type of video.
Want to know more about this? Let us know if we can help you with this.
Advertising in general
Social media channels are ideally suited to ensure that your video is seen by more people. Each platform has its own qualities, so it mainly depends on your offer and target group which is the most suitable for you.
Whatever platform you choose, they all offer increasingly sophisticated ways to target audiences very specifically when you promote your video. You can also link a conversion goal so that you can generate more traffic to your website, for example. Based on various criteria, you can set up a target group that exactly matches your offer. Because this continues to work better, your ads also become more cost effective and you can achieve more with the same budget.
If you want to be sure that you get the most out of your ads, you can of course leave this to an expert. Let us know if we can do anything for you in this regard.
Attach your explainer video to your e-mail signature
Attaching your animated explainer video by default to every e-mail you send is also a great way to make your video work for you. However, you do not want that you always have to manually add it to your e-mail messages. Not just because of the hassle, but also because of size of the attachment that you have to send every time. And perhaps your video is even too large to send as an attachment – then it doesn’t work at all!
The solution is fairly simple. Go to your YouTube account and upload your video there (Vimeo does not support this). After you have finished uploading it, click the “Share” button on the video page and copy the YouTube link. It looks like this: https://youtu.be/YLG5vSMD3kA
Then, you go to your e-mail signature settings in Gmail and put an accompanying text in your signature under your name. This can be something like: “View our animated explainer video here” or “How it works? Find out here.”
Then select this text and add the copied link via the “Insert link” button. This way, the YouTube link of your video is automatically added to every e-mail you send out.
And the best thing about this is that the video is shown as an attachment in every e-mail you send because Gmail embeds your video directly in the e-mail.
Do you want to see an example of how this course? We also use this marketing technique, so please feel free to send an e-mail to eva@explainer-video.agency and we will e-mail you our example so you can see it for yourself!
Finally
Do you have any questions after reading this article: ‘Top tips: how to use your animation video successfully? Contact us and let us know. We are happy to help!
Good luck with your animation explainer video!
Cheers, Eva
This article was created through a collaboration between EVA Explainer Video Agency and Bureau Independent. Bureau Independent offers independent advice on the effective use of video marketing and guides companies in their investment through strategic support, project management, finding the right producer and more.
