Creating Animation For Multiple Use Cuts The Cost

Animated videos are increasingly surfacing across the internet. They appear on client websites and the multitude of social media platforms. It’s also fair to say animation is a favourite medium for corporations to make their internal communications more engaging. This is the beauty of animated videos. They are highly flexible and can be used in multiple ways. However, creating videos designed for a number of specific audiences becomes very expensive to make. Whilst every video will not satisfy every type of audience you want to target, it’s more cost-effective to create animated videos that run for around one or two minutes and chop it up to target a variety of audiences across multiple platforms.

Animated videos are typically more cost-effective and easier to make than conventional video footage. Shooting live action has become even more expensive because of the limited number of places you can film. To create an engaging video, you will need to spend time in an effects studio. And hiring studio space can seriously drain your budget.

On the other hand, when you work with a company that is experienced at making an animated video, we have a huge store of animated objects that are already built. Animation features can be used in videos for a number of clients and adapted fairly easily to fit your brand. All we need to do is adapt them so they are unique. This is a huge cost-saving compared in relation to creating animations from scratch – and far more cost-cost-effective than shooting live video footage.

At Sliced Bread Animation, we often create a number of films using the same assets to tell different internal or external communication stories. Take for example our project for the The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), they asked us to produce 2 films,  one being a general introduction, and then another about how they are funded. The films used the characters and some common assets to produce different environment settings. As well as enabling the films to be created in a shorter time-scale, it also brought down the cost too. Often animated films can be edited down to create short social media clips, so a 2 minute film, could be reduced to 5-10 second clips for say Instagram, Twitter or Facebook, and engage audiences with shorter attention spans.

Animated Videos Give You More Creative Freedom

The ability to customise animated videos gives us more creative freedom to include absolutely anything you need. This can be the minutest details including how characters move to background features. This also enables us to create videos that reflect your brand image. And because your brand personality is consistent right throughout the video, it makes it easier to break the video up for multiple uses.

Animated video also enables you to keep the setting but change the story or characters, for example. This enables you to adapt a video and repurpose the content for a similar video in the future without impacting the scope of your project or the budget.

Advertising Animated Video on Social Media

The human brain is visually orientated. It processes visual data 60 times faster than text and transmits 90 per cent more information. What’s more, the amount of content available across multiple platforms win the internet means consumers have raised their standard. They are only interested in content that engages them and does not absorb too much of their precious time.

It’s no surprise that more brands are using video across social media platforms. The problem is, social networks have different content requirements and audience demographics etc. Some platforms won’t allow you to use the same content you have already posted on another platform – the Facebook v Google feud for example. The cost-effective solution is to create longer animated videos that can be used for multiple purposes across different social platforms. It’s feasible to extract six or more pieces of content from two minutes of footage.

Animated Video on Landing Pages

When search engine users navigate to a landing page, it’s because they are looking for specific information. Oftentimes, they skim read to find the information they want. Only skimming is not possible with video content. What’s more, people are not always prepared to sit through two minutes or more of video footage when they are not guaranteed of finding the information they want. Yet Google has a tendency to rank pages with video content higher in search engines. Including videos on a landing page increases conversion rates by 80 per cent.

As video becomes even more widespread in the years to come, landing pages without video risk falling into the search engine void. So how do you find the balance? The compromise is to create videos with landing pages in mind. That means creating animated video content around your targeted keywords. It is possible to build this into a longer script that can be made into shorter videos as well.

Animated video on Banner Campaigns

Animated banner ads are a growing trend. However, because the run time needs to be kept short – typically only last between 10 to 15 seconds – producing several ad campaigns separately becomes very expensive.

The most cost-effective way is to extract banner ads from longer footage. Furthermore, animated video is mostly created in HTML format which is supported by all the major browsers. This means you can use the content for a variety of campaigns such as expandable banners and split-screen ads.

Creating animated videos makes good business sense in the current paradigm. It makes even more sense to create content that can be used to engage various audiences across multiple platforms and repurpose it for a variety of marketing campaigns.