How To Make An Explainer Video (Part 1)

Explainer videos are really powerful ways of introducing your business or service to a new audience. If you’re a business owner, entrepreneur, or marketer and you want to raise awareness of your business and what you do, then creating an explainer video is a great way to start.

Now, I’m going to walk you through the process of how you can make a live action explainer video for your business. Explainer videos are videos that would live happily on the homepage of your website, for example, or a specific sale or landing page, or on a prominent product page.

Writing an explainer video script

So, the most important element of an explainer video is the script.

For an explainer video to be effective, it needs to be crystal clear and get to the point fast. You’ll only have seven seconds or so to hook someone in or they’ll be off. So, it’s essential that you’re dialed into your product offering, and also more importantly, your audience’s pain points and how you can help them. If you haven’t done the video strategy legwork in terms of understanding your audience, creating the customer avatars, and also creating business goals for your videos, please, please do that first. If you don’t invest time in developing coherent video strategies, you risk making really ineffective videos which just won’t deliver your business any ROI.

Now, assuming you’re zeroed in to your audience’s needs, and you really understand their pain points then we’re good to start developing your script. The explainer video script needs to focus on your audience and how your product or service can help alleviate their pain points or issues. Think about the typical issues that your customers come to you with, put yourself in the position of those customers, empathise with them. What emotional state are they in? Do they feel frustrated, annoyed, hopeless?

If you start by empathising with your customers, understanding where they are right now, your potential customers will start to build trust in you as you’re really demonstrating that you get where they’re coming from.

Explain why your product exists

This is really powerful when it comes to building a relationship with your audience.

So, the first section of the script should be setting out the problem or issue that your product or services exist to help with. You could start, for example, by asking a question that speaks to the likely emotional state of the audience, and this really helps with rapport building. For example, imagine I offer accountancy services. You could lead with something like, are you always in a rush to get your tax returns done in time? Is it a source of stress when those deadlines loom? Just one more thing you wish you didn’t have to deal with. Well, at ABC Accountants, we offer a fixed price SME tax service so you can relax and concentrate on doing what it is you do best running your business whilst we deal with filing your accounts.

Now, I know that’s really unlikely to win any copywriting awards, but the point is, an effective script needs to be resonating with your audience on an emotional level. So, tell the story in your own words, be authentic and also be empathetic. Fundamentally start by setting out the issues and illustrate the fact that you understand the audience’s position, then move on to introducing your solution in the shape of your products or services. And at this point, it’s not a great, big, long list of features. Your audience really doesn’t care about that right now. They care about how they’ll feel once the problem they’ve got has been resolved.

So, spend time setting out what life is like for your audience once they’ve resolved their issues using your product or service. By encouraging your potential clients to visualize themselves in this future state without the pressing issue that they’ve got right now, it’s a really powerful driver to usher people down the path to deciding to engage with your product and service. Make sure you include a call-to-action. People need to know what they need to do once they’ve watched your video. Your CTAs will be directly tied into your business video goals, which is why you need to be dialed into those before you start the script writing process.

Broadcast trust signals

Another thing to do is to broadcast trust signals. Now, these are things such as client lists of well-known or respected organisations, media that you might have been featured in, things that bolster the sense of trust in you. What you’re effectively doing is borrowing credibility from these other places to illustrate your own trustworthiness to your audience. Underlining the fact that you’re a credible, honest business that will keep its promises, and look after its clients.

Like I mentioned before, the explainer video needs to be punchy and to the point. Ideally, these videos should be 90 seconds to two minutes long. You need to get to the point where you can solve the audience’s problem as soon as you possibly can, ideally within the first 30 seconds or so. This isn’t the time for massive verbose introductions or flashy graphics intro sequences, just cut to the chase. Demonstrate that you understand the audience’s predicament, and then tell them how you can help them. Have a friendly personable tone. Don’t speak in marketing jargon, use the second person – i.e. you and yours. You’re wanting at the end of the day to connect with your audience, not bury them under a ton of marketing or industry spiel that they won’t understand. Clarity is absolutely king in video. If you hide behind flowery and overly complex language, you’ll sound disingenuous and look like you’re trying to pull the wool over your audience’s eyes. The key to really connecting in video is to be authentic.

The other thing to remember when making explainer videos, is that people fundamentally buy from people. I know it’s a well-worn phrase, but there’s so much truth in it. If you can envisage that you’re having a conversation with someone who’s the other side of that lens, then you can come across as a bit more informal, a bit more human, as opposed to if you approach it as if you’re doing a formal, stiff sales presentation to an audience of 200 people at a conference.

So, once you bullet pointed and structured your script, the next stage is to then film it. Learn more on how to film using basic phone set up so you can get cracking on creating your video content straight away.

Final thoughts

I really hope you’ve got value from this post. To dive into more detail about how to create video for your business, do check out the other videos on our YouTube channel.