Phase 2: Build the Utilities – Part 1 - Q4 2022 - 2023
Start Working on Twitter NFT Banner for all holders.
Build $PINZ Token smart contract
Establish a Voting Platform for all holders
Publish script for Pilot Episode of 2.5D Animated Short
Collect Votes and Setup Production Pipeline for Animated Shorts
Crypto Yoyo Club NFT holders to claim their $PINZ token
Finalize NFT Banners and Airdrop to all holders for free mint
Drop merch store for hoodies, T-shirts, Mugs, etc.
Phase 3: Build the Utilities – Part 2 - 2023
Start poll for creating 3d Animated Mecha/Ape NFT collection
Build DAO Treasury and a Multi-Signature TRX Ecosystem
Initiate working on the second and third episodes of 2.5D animated shorts
Initiate working on 3d Animated Mecha/Ape NFT collection (Free mint for all Crypto Yoyo Club NFT holders)
Initiate Deployment of Crypto Yoyo Club Marketplace
Learn About Crypto Yoyo Club NFT Whitepaper
Introduction:
Crypto Yoyo Club is a collection of 2,222 uniquely and randomly auto-generated Hyper Realistic 3d Animated Yo-yos, which have different body, decal, rim, string, and counterweight sets. Each part of the yo-yoshas a different rarity level and easily distinguishable visual aesthetics.
These animated yo-yos are not only 180 frames long turntable animated mp4 files but also are the key to entering the Crypto YoYo Club. All future NFT releases will be available to the original yo-yo NFT holders for free mint.
Our core intention is to empower our community to draft all our upcoming releases.
For example, when we initiate Community Directed Animated Shorts, we will set up a poll for all holders to vote on each part of the production pipeline. From selecting the script, creating each character, visual style, and every aspect will be decided based on the provided votes from the club member.
Phase 1: Build the Community
It is the most important Phase and can determine the success or failure of the project from the very beginning. Any project to succeed needs a strong and supportive community that shares the project's same vision.
Right off the bat, we plan to build our community solely based on polls. We will post polls to the community to vote for every step of our decision. Eventually, any holders of our NFTs will have the right to vote on the broader aspect of our project, such as the Decision-making process of DAOs, the Production Pipeline for Animated Shorts in 2.5D, etc.
No Obligation Whitelist Spots:
Crypto Yoyo Club offers 100 whitelist spots for the bare minimum purchase range. The entire process is first-come, first-serve and does not require any grinding to win the whitelist as the lottery.
We, however, will ensure the sales process is easy for both parties by collecting additional information and wallet verification before releasing the whitelist spots for sale.
Public Sale:
As we are focused on building a decision-making community around the club, we will launch a public sale based as soon as we have a broader community.
Our ultimate goal is to have members who actively participate in the decision-making process of our club and help each other expand the reach of the club further.
Phase 2: Produce the Utilities – Part 1
Crypto Yoyo Club was created by Artist Shoeb Mohammad. He had 12 years of on-field experience working as a Character Animator and CG Generalist. Initially, the utilities' focus will be around producing content based on community demands.
Eventually, after publishing 2nd set of 3d Animated Character NFTs Collection, the utilities will roll out web 3.0 apps, games, and marketplace.
Free-Mint Twitter NFT Banners:
As the community is the focal point of this project, artist Shoeb will release 2,222 NFT banners having 3000x1000 pixels. The project will be Free-mint only for the original Crypto Yoyo Club NFT holders.
A separate but linked smart contract will be built for airdropping the collection to the owners.
The duration of producing these banners will be finished within 4-6 weeks after all whitelist spots are sold out.
$PINZ Tokens:
$PINZ Tokens will be the second utility introduced as the Crypto Yoyo Club Metaverse currency. It can be used to transact within the Metaverse to interact with the contracts for future features. The token can also be used with other Ethereum ERC-20 tokens on decentralized exchanges.
SPINZ token is both a utility token and a governance token of the Crypto Yoyo Club Metaverse. The more tokens you have, the more authority and influence you have for future roadmap and features.
Community Directed Animated Shorts (CDAS):
This production utility is created for honoring the motto of the Crypto Yoyo Club, "we are all about our community."
Artist Shoeb will create a series of scripts with clear logs, then these scripts will be put up for voting. Club members will have options to choose a specific script or reject it.
Based on votes, the artist will pick the winning scripts. The production pipeline for creating a series of 2.5D animated shorts will proceed.
The club members will vote and direct each episode from character names, type, physical attributes, scene setup, props, and environment.
An entire production progress report will be publicly listed on the website.
Phase 2: Produce the Utilities – Part 2
3D Animated Character NFT Series:
As soon as 75% of our yo-yo NFTs are sold, we will start producing the 2nd series of our NFT collection. This collection will be free-mint for all original yo-yo NFT holders.
The art style, character/creature selection, and traits will be decided by the Crypto Yoyo Club members via polls and votes.
The production calendar will be public, and milestones will be announced to the club members exclusively.
DAO Treasury:
Our community is the fuel to establish a brand. To boost the brand value and create mass awareness, there needs to be a treasury created by the DAO members. As soon as the project sells there, we will create a DAO Treasury with a Multigeniture wallet.
The DAO members will decide how and where the treasury will be spent to increase the value of the Crypto Yoyo Club brand.
Metaverse Marketplace:
We intend to allow all club members to share a common goal and vision of the club, which is why we intend to create a web 3.0 marketplace where club members can interact with each other virtually, buy/exchange digital assets and create a healthy ecosystem to thrive the community further for the future.
We created the entire explainer video based on a detailed storyboard.
Canalyte Laboratory 3d explainer video was full of eyecatching cartoony 3d characters, props, elements in each scene.
Click to play
Below you will see how we converted the story panels to 3d explainer videos following all the instructions provided by the client.
Characters
We used 3d cartoony characters for the entire explainer. We created a total of Eight characters for this explainer.
Six scientist characters have lab coats, protective glasses, face masks, and gloves to turn on or off, as per storyboard suggests.
Additionally, we created two consumer characters for page 3 of the storyboard.
All these characters are rigged with fully facial expressions and inimitable body mechanics.
Page 1
This page has seven mini elements to pop up as the voice-over pronounces the keyphrase.
We are starting with the planet and the hemp leaves. We used the SVG import plugin in Autodesk Maya to bring in vectors directly from Adobe Illustrator.
In Maya, you can add extrusion and bevel to the imported SVG and give it a neat 3d look.
For the planet, we used a cute 3d planet model consisting of three brand colors.
We used primitives like cylinders and boxes to create the factory. The smokes coming out from the factory have a jiggle deformer to create a loop animation.
We used the characters popping from the laboratory to show that they are part of the research. We posed each character and rendered out a cut.
We used a low poly cartoony truck and painted it yellow. Added a bit of vertical keyframe animation to give it a motion.
Finally, we created the cannabis dispensary having small elements like shade, open sign, overhead signboard, etc. All of these elements were animated while the dispensary popped out.
Page 2
We created one part of the Canalyte laboratory on this page, adding two scientists testing specimens.
As this page uses nine federal requirements to show up, we ensure to keep free space on the top of the shot in the final animation.
Page 3
This was one of the tricky top pages that we had to deal with. The challenge was to have two characters consume different forms of marijuana while exaggerating the fact untested variations can cause illness.
We had to play with the lungs part and develop a creative solution where the lungs will appear once the consumers start using them.
The cookie was animated so that as soon as the character takes a bite, it changes shape accordingly.
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We used a bend modifier in Maya to add on top of the Certificate of Analysis. As this is the most crucial document for the business to produce, we kept it on the left with a small animation loop for making space for all the texts to pop up on the right.
Page 5
This is another tricky scene to undertake. Here we used a rigging system with joints on the hemp leaves to have a visual effect of wind blowing by.
We used bullet simulation on the gummy bears to collide with the ground plane and themselves, creating a realistic visual effect for the scene.
We used a popular after-effect plugin called "optical flare" for the scanning beams on the QR code on top of the smartphone screen.
In the second part of the animation, we used a scientist character to walk, holding the sign in stylized form using keyframe animation.
Page 6
Although the concept looks simple in this scene, many things are going under the hood.
The instruction was to make leaves fall on a see-through trash basket and turn them into dollar bills.
The challenge was the number of objects was too high for this shot. Luckily Maya has the powerful Mash tool, which allows you to manipulate a single entity on a grid in countless transformation variants.
Mash was used to laying out all the bills in a cylindrical grid inside the basket then used the same on the falling leaves.
We used the Bullet plugin for simulating leaves and converted Mash elements to rigid bodies while making the dollar bills as a passive collider.
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We modeled cartoony Thermo Fisher machines to align well with the characters on the following part of the explainer video.
In the second part of this scene, we have animated two scientist characters doing experiments using protective gears, such as face masks, gloves, and glasses.
Page 8
We reused the rigged hemp leaf and added an animated twig on top of the dirt to show that it is growing on palms.
Later adding a sparkle effect added more appeal to the scene.
Page 9
This was another challenging scene where we had to tackle two different parts of the laboratory and, at the same time, bringing in all the benefits as text popups.
We animated each shot separately and merged in a whole scene on post-production, animating all four scientists in such was so that even after all the texts are visible on the screen, they remain clear to the audience.
Page 10
We used Mayas SVG import tool to bring in vector graphics created in Illustrator for the puzzle pieces.
For the ropes, we used a MEL script to rig the bands so that it is possible to animate fluidly.
We keyframe animated both scientists for the scene according to the storyboard.
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In the first part of this scene, we mainly used character animation. The storyboard suggested having a scientist walk by, and the rest are looking at that character.
To make it more interesting, we improvised the scene and made all the scientists work on a specific station.
In the second part, we used many tiny elements to reinforce the script. Power keyphrases like "quality," "timely," and "educating" we visualized all with specific animation pieces.
We imported the Quality badge to Maya from vector design to create the 3d animation.
Similarly, we imported the speedy clock and rigged it using joints to have a tail deformation and animated the clock's hands.
Finally, we used the laptop animation with a couple of scientists pulling books out from the screen while the consumer is reading a book to get valuable information.
Page 12
This is the ending scene where we need to show two different shots, the first one is where someone is offering curated cannabis to the screen, and the second part is the call to action with all the scientists posing in one shot.
We did the first part by modeling cannabis buds, and then we layout the bunch on top of the hand. We used depth of field on the camera to give this shot a more exciting appeal.
In the very last frame, we did the character montage with all the scientists. We did this to make a close resemblance with the storyboard drawing.
Conclusion
3D explainer videos for the cannabis industry is increasing, and it was a fun but much intuitive experience to producing such animated video for Canalyte laboratories.
You are on a mission to set your brand digitally. Website's ready. You have to have that homepage animation up as soon as possible. But you do not want to blow up another thousand bucks on a templated garbage video like last time you hired someone from a random marketplace. Ah, the agony!
From my 10+ years of experience, I have seen many of my client's videos with almost no views. It's not that the design of the animation was terrible; a few of the homepage videos were impressive to see.
They tried boosting the video in social channels and end up getting tons of views but no conversion. In desperation, they started to hire consultants, SEO agencies, social media gurus, and many more. They end up paying thousands for a viable solution.
You want to have your explainer video animation perfect. It has to tell your brand's story, explain what benefits you are providing to the audience. It must capture your audience's attention so that they can remember your brand and visit your site to convert even after a month.
It is unnecessary to spend an excessive amount of money to make sure video somehow increases product sales. You can easily save thousands of your hard-earned dollars and still get a better result.
I find the root of the problem lies when you pick an incompetent "video maker" to do the job, but few tricks can fix this issue.
Consistent viewership
Suppose you pick an incompetent animation production company. Chances are they will put all their 'illusions' on your pocket, not on your 'potential customers' where they should focus.
The reason is simple here, lack of consistent viewership. First, let's find out why your video gets almost no views.
In today's world, the viewers have tons of content to consume. No matter how pretty your animation video looks, your audience will bounce to somewhere else if the script has zero research done in the first place.
Your homepage video animation must follow a script that uses organic search terms. It is because search engines nowadays can understand what your video is about. If people are not searching for any phrases that your video has, you will get no views.
Hence, the first rule of thumb is to pick an animation production company that emphasizes research before writing a script.
Pro Tip #1 of the day!
Unless you know how to find search phrases of your business or brand yourself, ask the animation production house to find it out on your behalf. Most of the good ones will do that before producing the script.
Suppose everything is done right in the script. Then, around 51% of the organic searchers will find your helpful video and look into your offering.
Now, if you hire an SEO agency to find all the key phrases separately, they might charge you around $800 to $1000 quickly. Where selecting the proper animation studio, you can bypass hiring gurus to help you with keywords.
Benefits over features
I have seen countless animated videos focusing on features only. For example, let's say your product is a brand of tea. Your animated explainer video shows the chemicals present in the tea. How old your brand is, what great packaging it has for 2 minutes, and then ends it with your logo. What do you expect to see in the result?
Suppose your video is creatively made and put few thousands on boosting your video over social channels. In that case, you will see views, but the footage converts no sale.
It is like dumping all the data on your customers' brains but never motivating them to take action to try the tea for themselves.
Due to focusing only on the features of your tea brand, you missed out on how it can benefit your customers. Will it make them feel energized? Will it give them to find themselves refreshed? Your animated video must answer questions like these.
A perfect animation production house must analyze your target customers and relate to your business model. Even if you have some of the features, you want to shout out loud. However, the game is all about how you have portrayed the benefits of selling your product.
Constructive consultation
Hiring a consultant is a good idea. You learn new things and see your business from a different perspective. Still, to produce a killer animated explainer video for your brand, you get to have that expensive consultation session for free.
An ideal animation production company will have a straightforward workflow of how to deal with their clients. They tend to follow a rooster that produces a result based on their previous positive work experience.
Comparing an individual artist with not understanding how to position your product or service into the market will only force you to flush more dollar bills down the toilet. It doesn't matter how many hours of consultation you had with that artist.
A good rule of thumb is to find out an animation production house that asks you some basic information about your business and do the rest of the actionable tasks by themselves. It doesn't mean that they will go radio silence until the final deliverables are ready. On the contrary, they will surely contact you once they need your approval or clarifications.
Establishing the ECP model
The "emotional connection pathway" is one of the most scientifically adored models. It directly measures how you can convert your customers to spend up to 70 times more than what they usually spend on your brand.
This proven method is hugely helpful for an animated brand storytelling video. You can put it everywhere online and make a drastic improvement on your sales and marketing department.
The perfect animation production house will assess your business and offer a brand that can create emotional impacts on your audience's minds. It eventually forms a pathway for them to convert from a brand-aware customer to a fully connected customer.
A fully connected customer will purchase your product or service, spending from 35% to 75% extra what they would spend on your brand yearly.
Ditching the templated videos
Many startups put brandings last, rendering all budgets allocated on product development. So they tend to go for the dreadful 'cheap' alternatives for producing a template video running out of budget. It gives uses the worst branding experience as nothing would be aligned and force audiences to bounce.
Every time a visitor bounces out from your site or social channel is losing a potential lead. Prolong the effect of losing leads will cost you thousands in no time.
Of course, you need a product or service that stands out of the crowd - not without establishing your digital brand, in any case. So if you pick a perfect animation production company instead, they steer clear from any templated bs. Instead, they will produce you an animated explainer that is 100% aligned to your branding.
You may ask what a templated video is. It is a generic animated content which uses the same visual elements such as characters, props, colors, motion graphics for hundreds of time. You may find them plentiful on the internet. They all look the same except for the logo at the end.
They are so dangerous for marketing your brand when users see no similarities between brand elements used throughout your web page, social channels, and product demo. So, naturally, they conceptualize your brand as a scam.
A great animated explainer video is not about a script glued to a voiceover and some stickman figures. Instead, it is a great canvas where you paint the bigger picture. It worth a thousand words and have the sheer power to inspire, motivate and emotionally move your audiences to convert.
Moodboards before storyboards
Hiring an individual artist will prompt you to provide your storyboard separately. They will not supply you with a mood board. It breaks the collective brand alignment and layout cohesiveness. Ultimately the result will be a poorly animated video with no clear direction to convert the audience to customers. Nevertheless, it will cost you thousands extra to outsource.
Any great animation production house will provide you with a mood board. It is a board with different types of visual art styles that pleases your eyes. It is crucial since your vision has to meet the explainer videos art style.
After selecting a suitable mood board, the artists will match it with your existing brand elements. It is important to note based on the mood board, companies often set their brand elements.
The work of storyboard only starts after the selection of the visual art style, not before that. Then, story artists start putting in detailed panels that contain elements that appear on the screen for your audience.
Pro Tip #2 of the day!
You can ask your production company for animatics. Animatics is a video cut that puts all the storyboard panels and plays all the voiceover audio on top. It will give you a much clearer vision of what will show on the screen and for how long.
Once all the panels are ready, the studio will send you the result. You can verify and check if things are in proper order. 10 out of 10 times, a good production house will get it right.
Aesthetics and timeliness
It is the last thing you should worry about; any animation production house is serious about its timeliness. After all, you're only to release the due invoice once the job finishes. However, visual aesthetics is something to consider.
If you have your brand set up with all the essential branding elements, such as the logo, copy, color bible, font, character, icon sets, that's great. If not, you can rely on a good animation production house to set all these vital elements. Nine out of ten times, you will be pleased by the result on the first draft.
In the world of arts, there are no suitable designs for animation. Therefore, it should always follow brand guidelines. Any excellent animation house will ask for an art bible and branding guidelines from you as soon as you hire them.
Pro Tip #3 of the day!
You are free to ask your production house to make you a branding guideline. However, it may cost you less if you do not have one to have it produced from elsewhere.
As long you have a well-researched script, a compelling voiceover, and a detailed storyboard, you can expect to have a fruitful and visually-pleasing animated video at the end.
Selecting an individual artist from random marketplaces might cost you three to four times what a full-fledged production company can offer. In addition, you do not need to run back and forth for hiring voiceover, storyboard artist, concept designer, scriptwriter, and animators. This process is also counterproductive as none of these individuals will sync up for cohort.
Conclusion: Serious business takes serious branding decisions, and setting up the right brand strategy pile up the overall cost fast. In the digital marketing department, one can save much money by picking up the perfect animation production firm.
Despite having a good product or service, many businesses lose tons of new customers by not having a digital brand presence. Brand storytelling video animation creates, aligns, and explains the brand story. Customers can emotionally connect—ultimately helping the business to get new customers every day.
Regardless of the nature of the service or product you sell, you have competitors doing the same. You worry about how you can improve your revenue, get your old customers to spend more, and gain new ones more frequently.
It's a true story for everyone swimming out there in the giant pool of business marketplace. So, what is a way out for you to stand out from your competition? How do you sell more? How can you get relief from not worrying too much about your yearly revenue?
There are plenty of methods that you can follow to grow your business. Here we will be showing you the formula that is easy to use, inexpensive for your marketing budget, and gets you the desired result no matter what.
We call it The Brand Storytelling Video Animation formula. There are few key reasons that this formula works.
Firstly it uses the most potent yet ancient tool that humankind has used throughout generations- The story. A story was first told in caves via painting, then through letters and alphabets on books.
It compels every customer out there who decides to purchase any product. It makes them spend big dollars on an exclusive brand that they adore in mind. And it makes the company grow and sprout like Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, or Toyota.
Secondly, considering the amount of revenue it will generate over time, this formula is inexpensive. Any business can opt into this model and apply this formula to get the customers rolling in.
Thirdly, this formula is a proven framework applied to thousands of businesses worldwide and scientifically worked like a charm to generate revenue in billions of dollars.
The Animated Story part is the core of this formula, which we will describe in extensive depth. However, the rest of the ingredients in this formula is essential to make everything work.
So the formula goes like this:
Animated Story + Good Branding = More Selling
Animated Story:
Animated story will have a character who will have a single problem. In the journey, the character meets a guide. The Guide provides a plan. The Plan induces a call to action, which helps the character avoid failure and succeed.
That was the summarised version of the formulation part. Now, this approach addresses the shared human need of survival, safety, relationship, and self-actualization.
Let's break down all the parts, so you understand this better.
The Character:
The character here is your customer, not you, not your service or solution. A simple secret to success in this formula is to focus on your customers more than anything. The whole story is about their journey. Your business or service will come into play pretty soon already.
Another reason to put your customers as the main character is that every potential consumer of your brand sees themselves as heroes. If your animation can show this, you have already hooked them for the rest of the journey.
So the story has the hero character now, now the question is, will that character ever find what he or she wants to achieve? It is elementary for all stories around us. The journey will end with or without reaching the goal of that hero.
Here we have to fill in the gap that what your hero wants to achieve. What is their goal? It is crucial to make it extremely clear for your audience to understand what the character wants.
Make the goal so important for that character as if the characters' lives suffer a lot by not getting what he or she wants.
Few sample sufferings are saving time, getting rid of the pain. Or conserve resources, avoid emotional stress, psychologically breaking down, etc.
Now, this part also can focus on rewards per se. Suppose gaining popularity, having peace of mind, accumulating more resources, building more networking opportunities, or just having a sense of meaning in your customers' lives.
The Single Problem of the Character:
Now that you have the character and a goal set, your story needs a villain—a root of causing painful traumas for your character. It should not be feelings like sadness, anger, fear, disgust.
A sample of a villain can be an outdated, slow process that kills time or financial barriers that disallows one to have a functional life.
It also could be an inefficient process that creates irritation or a sensory discomfort inducer that makes one unpleasant.
Based on your business model, you have to pick the villain or a problem here.
Pro Tip #1 of the day!
Even though your business sells or provides multiple products or services. For each animated explainer video production, focus on only one problem. Create more videos separately following the same formula, and this will exponentially work for growing your brand.
This villain needs to be real, implying that your customers will only purchase your product or service if they can relate to the problem. The relatability of the problem fulfills the story and makes the situation sound authentic.
It would be best if you never induced fear in your customers using this villain or the problem. It has to be relatable enough for your audience to connect.
Three layers of the problem:As you are showing, the problem that the hero or character faces can have three different layers.
The first layer is the External Problem. It is a real-world problem that a character faces. For example, let us think our hero needs to meet the minimum earning goal.
The second layer is Internal Problem. Most of the business misses out on this as they focus only on external problems. As a result, they generate less revenue in the long run.
Internal problem resemblance the doubt and the question where the hero character asks this to himself or herself. Can I do this? Do I have enough to make this work?
The third and final layer is Philosophical Problem. It simply deals with justice, fairness, good vs. evil, which means how humane your service or product is. Does it affect anyone unjustly? Does any wrongdoer profit from it?
Let's see a real-world example and map the problem partly to clarify further. Let us think your business is moving and packing service in the Los Angeles area. Your target group is house owners, students, schools, stores, or offices who need to relocate.
Your story's character would be one from that target group, let us think, an office owner.
The office owner is the hero. He is facing the external problem of not finding a moving company that treats them friendly and does everything on their behalf.
The character's internal problem here in the example is not finding enough information about a moving company that does professional office relocation. And the hero is also scared of what if he fails to see that company soon to avoid monetary punishment.
Lastly, the hero's philosophical problem is that it should not take forever to find a suitable office relocation service that treats them like real human beings.
Character Meets a Guide:
It is the part where you come in. Your service or product is the Guide. Before dumping all your company's information, you need to understand two vital characteristics your company needs.
The first characteristic your company must have is Empathy, which is not pity, but an in-depth understanding of your character's problem. Also, the openness of helping out the hero to succeed.
The second and final characteristic your company must show is Authority. The ability to do what you say that you do - aka competence.
You need to provide proof that your business has helped heroes like the office owner before. It'll create trust in your audience's mind for your brand.
Once your company fulfills both characteristics, you can call yourself the Guide in the brand storytelling video formula.
The Plan:
Now that you are the official Guide, you ought to give the hero character a The Plan. Now Plan can break down into two parts.
The first type of Plan could be a Process Plan. This Plan will take your customers through a process where they buy your service and be part of the business. For example, for the moving company, it can be - place a call or send a quotation.
Through this process, you can get your customers to explain their needs further. Mentioning of job execution and Keypoint indicators happens in this step.
Pro Tip #2 of the day!
A handful of business misses the correct way of handing out the planning process to customers. Always focus on calling customers for action in your ad animation, even if you think you're already doing it.
The second type of Plan would be an Agreement Plan. It is the place where you guarantee you customers three to five reason to believe in your brand. You can think of it as a straightforward service-level agreement.
So for our example here, you can enter the story animation being another character representing your packing and moving company.
As the hero character is frustrated by the problems, the Guide character then explains the viable solution to get rid of the problem. The Execution of handing off the Plan depends on your business model.
Once you as the Guide have successfully handed the plan to your hero character - the customer, you are free to move to an essential part of this formula, call to action.
Calls to Action:
The end goal for your storytelling formula is to challenge your customers to take a specific action. Customers will never magically realize that they should buy your service. You have to force the subconscious mind of your customers gently to take the necessary step to convert.
For our example, after handing in or explaining the Plan to the hero to overcome pain. The Guide character can ask the hero to take a specific action.
You have to make it evident and straightforward for your character in this formula to buy your product. Or opt into your service.
There are two different types of Calls to action in this formula.
Direct Calls to Action:This is the natural selling process, the ever-popular "Buy now" slogan. Or the "Call Today" to schedule an appointment. In your story, the Guide is to call the hero to take action.
On your website, social media channels or promotional emails should have direct calls to action embedded directly underneath your video animation.
Transitional Calls to Action: Your storytelling video animation itself is a transitional call to action. After watching the entire story, your audience is hooked and ready to convert.
The message of Direct Calls to Action should also stick for 5 seconds at the end of the animated video. There should be no confusion whatsoever using the direct calls to action.
Once your Guide character calls the hero character to take action, it is time to reach the story's end. It will reveal if the hero finally got what he or she wanted or failed to do so.
Avoiding Failure:
After the character opts into the calls to action, there are only two possible outcomes in the story. The first outcome is what would happen if the hero doesn't purchase my product or service.
Helping the hero character to avoid failure shall be subtle. Not to scare the character too much by inducing fear. In that case, the story may lose its grip, and the formula might not work correctly.
Also, not showing the stakes to the hero will have almost no impact on converting to a customer of your business finally. You ought to balance this out evenly.
The story should point out the stakes if the hero does not pick up the CTA. In our example, if the office owner wouldn't make a call to book an appointment or asks for a quotation from the moving company. He or she is to suffer again by going back to the root of the problem.
Now to the last part of the animated story, part of the formula is a happy ending.
The Hero Succeeds:
There are three types of happy ending in this formula.
The first one is the winning power or position. In our example, the owner will win the trust of his or her employees. Retain the excellent reputation by successfully relocating office by choosing a suitable moving company.
The second type of happy ending is the union that makes the hero whole. By choosing the right company, he has put almost no pressure on his employees, making the workforce happy. The owner doesn't have to sweat much and focus on his essential task.
Finally, the third type of happy ending is philosophical self-realization. The hero understands that he or she has what it takes to get the job done.
In our example, the office owner accepts that they have finally selected the right candidate for relocation service, boosting their morale.
Pro Tip #3 of the day!
It can easily be a daunting task for you as a business owner to put all these details and run this formula for your business, which is understandable. It is the job of animation production companies to determine who is the hero character and who is the villain and produce a compelling animated brand storytelling video.
All you have to do is pick a professional production house and answer few simple questions for the team to do all the heavy lifting for you.
It wraps up how you can apply the Animated Story part of your business to the formula. Now let's move to the second and final part of the equation, good branding.
Good Branding:
There are tons of business do not understand branding, and that is fine. Not every business owner is supposed to go to a business school to learn to brand. Or become an expert on managing brands but provide their service to the community.
That is why many creative agencies, animation production companies, and branding consultants out there to help you build perfect branding that goes with your business.
Good branding must have a few criteria, starting with cohesive brand elements. It means you have to have a set of colors, icons, images, fonts, slogans constant all across your website.
All your pages, packaging, emails, videos, blog posts must have similarities. For instance, the brand Nike uses "Just do it" as a slogan. Black, green, red, and orange as their brand color.
You must use a logo for sure for your brand that has your name or slogan in it. Your brand also needs a motive, a set goal that is to inspire your target audiences. A vision is also a must for your brand to have. It is something that you want to achieve over a long time.
You can hire a designer for your logo and a copywriter for a slogan. But ideally, if you hire a creative production house to do all these for your brand. You can save thousands of top dollars and avoid all the frustration marching all the brand elements back and forth.
Good branding also needs a marketing strategy set. Without marketing, there will be no advertisement. Without ads, you could never reach out to people to tell them about your product.
Your brand must have an annual marketing budget to develop website content, email marketing, inbound marketing, and whatnot.
To determine all the budgeting, you can always reach out to your creative ad agency or content production company. They can provide you a free assessment showing how much your marketing budget should be.
On top of that, they can also offer you options of various marketing methods you can apply for your brand to grow. Based on your ability, pick the suitable one.
Now that you have both ingredients figured out for the formula apply it in your business and see how the selling improves.
Conclusion: Animation story has the power to visualize your brand's story for your target audience. Good branding makes the audience have faith in your brand. When you blend in both together, you will see a drastic improvement in your sales. This method is popular and used daily by thousands of companies worldwide. So why not try it for yourself?
How often do you see a good brand using various visual elements in almost all its marketing campaigns? There is only one answer, always. Because scientifically, we primates tend to bounce as soon as confusion arises. Think of the times you landed on a product page from a link and thought of yourself, "golly, what are they selling here?"
Branding is essential to retain your customers' attention. The longer you keep their attention, the better chance you can control their purchasing decision.
Good branding also creates authenticity of your product. 86% of consumers think they must support or make a purchase based on this factor. 81% will only purchase from the brand that they trust.
A handful of companies fail to explain to their target audience what experience they are offering—making the top of the funnel prospects baffled long enough to bounce. There goes one lead!
Notice I used the word 'experience' here. Companies do sell expertise. Customers do not 'purchase' a product but a relationship, a connection with your brand.
Marketers find that by using animated explainer videos, you can generate 66% qualified leads annually. It is enormous considering how easy it is to establish your branding elements.
Branding is the starting stone of your digital marketing castle. You can only build it up using a particular brand strategy—otherwise, crickets.
Now digital marketing works as the blocks of cement for building up your digital brand fortress. And the cement is made of few key ingredients where animated video production is critical to have present.
Let's see the top five reasons how animated video production can set up your digital marketing process to sprout your brand finally.
1) Animated Explainer Videos are a Box of Pandora:
There are two possible scenarios here, either your business has proper branding, or it does not. Eligibility of correct branding includes brand elements aligned—your logo, color bible, arts, visual elements, typography, tone, etc.
You also have to have a brand strategy. But for the sake of argument, let's stick to brand elements. Either way, an animated explainer video will require a story. A story is nothing without characters. Characters will have specific visual distinct features – so that your audience can recognize your brand.
Producing an animated explainer video will introduce you to all those elements. Upon finishing the production, you still have the chance to reuse those elements over and over. On your web banner, on your monthly newsletter, your social media post, and whatnot.
It is highly effective – why? Remember I told you about the confusing primate part in the opening? You certainly do not want your audience not to be able to detect your brand within few touchpoints.
Suppose you hire a professional production house to produce your animated explainer video. In that case, the team will automatically offer you all these extra design elements. You can ask your web guy or person who manages your social channels to take advantage of all those scrap designs extracted from the animated explainer video.
This process boosts your brand awareness. Anyone from the top of the funnel will start relating and establishing that invisible bond with your brand almost instantaneously.
2) It Saves you Thousands of Marketing Budget:
But isn't animated explainer videos cost thousands of dollars to produce? Yes, but a product with a market price of more than $10/piece can get a return of several hundred times using that piece of content strategically.
Landing pages with explainer videos convert 88% more than a page with no animation at all. It means using landing page tactics to generate leads will return your investment within a few weeks.
If you think boosting social media is digital marketing, then think again. Prominent marketers think promoting your digitally broken brand on social media is flushing thousands into the toilet. It sounds eerie, and I know it - but it is true.
A well-constructed animated explainer with correct search engine optimization, aka SEO, will bring you 160% more organic traffic. Using other methods to gain such a number will cost you at least 30 times more than what you would spend on an animated explainer video.
Any competent animated video production company would do particular tasks before handing over the rendered video files. The team will research your product or service positioning first and then your top five competitors. The scriptwriter from the team will gather all researched focus keywords and deploy a content strategy that will reflect on the storyboard. Using all these keywords, the wordsmith will develop the final script – just like a short movie.
Management will ensure that you as a client are happy with that, even though you can rely on the team's expertise on this as this is what they do professionally, after all.
After this, the concept artist will match your visual brand elements to the characters and props to give enough visual aid for the storyboard artists.
Storyboard artists will create hundreds of panel arts, indicating what the viewers will see on the screen and how long. Throughout the process and the project manager, the art director, will peek above the shoulder and ensure everything is going smoothly.
Storyboard artist hands over the drawing to the editorial, who will run the audio and sequence the storyboard to create an animatic. The manager will show that to you and take my word on this. After this many rounds of work, you would only love the animatic.
Upon your approval, the team of animators and designers will create all the elements and bring your explainer video production alive.
In this entire process, you will gain valuable information, art pieces, contents, characters, ideas on setting the tone for a campaign, and unlimited resources for other parts of digital marketing, like ad campaigns, email marketing, social media promotion, ad animation, etc.
You do not have to hire gurus for thousands of consultation bucks to get all this data. The crew of your trusted animation video production company has done all the heavy lifting for you.
You also do not need to hire different artists from here and there. Thinking you are saving amounts of money but, in reality, compromising the brand structure and repaying again for producing your video from scratch.
3) It Creates the Emotional Connection Pathway:
Harvard University published a paper, "The New Science of Customer Emotion." In the article, they used the term "Emotional Connection Pathway."
It is a model that aligns your brand with your prospective high valued customers using emotional motivators. Few emotional motivators are "stand out from the crowd," "feel a sense of belonging," "feel a sense of freedom," "enjoy a sense of well-being," etc.
Once aligned, the ECP model creates a transition of your unconnected customers to fully connected customers.
It is the only scientific model where consumer behavior is analyzed based on their emotions. It shows how a brand can connect to a customers' emotion and boost up to a 70% chance of being a fully connected loyal customer.
Animated explainer videos have the sheer ability to move the audience emotionally. The critical ingredient is the story here. All explainer videos will address a problem and a gradual solution that shows how it can save time and money for potential customers. It requires a clever way to introduce a character or a protagonist who embarks on this journey.
The journey will show that your solution is the savior for the protagonist. That is where the emotional bond arises. It is a delicate balance of arts and science.
The model shows that your fully connected customers are 52% more valuable than those who are just highly satisfied. Their corresponding value seems beyond various metrics, such as shopping and repetition of purchase of your product.
Thus an animated explainer video production directly influences the high impact motivators, reflecting on the emotional connection pathway, which scientifically improves sales and revenue of your company.
As a result, if your brand does not have an ECP set, it is broken and expects almost no customers anytime soon. To change the scenario, believe in animated explainer videos to fit your brand's digital marketing.
4) It Gives your Brand a Purpose:
Your brand is something close to your heart. It has personal values to you. Your brand is also a reason why you belong to the universe. We often think it is not, but let me prove it to you.
What makes you feel every morning when you wake up? Is it your family members? Is it your friends? Or the party that is about to happen this weekend? None of them are suitable. You think about your work, your job, your brand. No matter how hard we want to deny, we mammals find no reason to live without purpose.
Your brand is very much like yourself. It needs a purpose to serve others, solve issues and ultimately try to make this world a slightly better place to live for everybody. Animated video production is like a hand-crafted artifact with infinite value to you. It also serves the purpose of telling your brand's story to the rest of the world. As soon as you develop one for your brand, you would use it to attract people to convert them into your loyal customers.
Well, a polished animated explainer video will attract potential customers and intrigue you to market the video in every way possible. You can start by telling your newsletter subscribers that you have published a new animation on your site. You can use it as your email marketing strategy to gather even more leads.
An email with an animated video will have 300% better click rates. 73% of emails with interactive animated content embed will have a successful click-to-open rate. The click-through rate aka CTR of a video containing email is 96%
Furthermore, an animated explainer video intrigue you to plan your brand's digital marketing strategy, which is equivalent to test your brand's market value and popularity at a time.
Conclusion:
Animated explainer videos possess the power to fix or start your brand's digital marketing journey and create trustworthiness in your customers. It is far more than just a video that you want to upload. But it provides you a guide to project a long-term financial plan using your brand.
Almost 7 million businesses sprout per year in the US. Around 22% will fail by the end of the first year. Business owner burnout is real. It can affect your business in no time, especially if you haven't reached the five years mark in the field.
Burnout affects you as a business owner as well. It causes not only mental stress disorder but also physical aches. Weakening your immune response, inducing cardiovascular complications, and starting a hormonal disorder is common in burnout.
But how can animation videos help this? Since 2016, using video as a marketing tool has increased by 42%
A vast number of startups neglect the power of animated video marketing for their product and service. You may think having a website is sufficient for your business to count digital. In reality, if you are not utilizing resources efficiently to create broader awareness of your brand, chances of selling by large quantity shrink like a flat tire on hot sunny noon.
Animated videos are excellent trophy content. A trophy content is the nuclei of your business cell. It reminds audiences of the core benefit of the product or service you offer and how it can save your target audiences from pain and suffering.
An animated art form creates a clear sense of storytelling with data that grabs the audience's attention to the fullest. By 2023 around 92% of US citizens will have constant contact with a smart device. The number is around 5.3 billion users globally.
So, no matter you sell your product or services locally or all around the globe. You can avert a potential burnout by focusing down on a series of unique animated video content.
But, how important are animated videos are to your business? Are they a vital part of your brand? How much can your business suffer from neglecting a series of animated videos? Here are the top 4 reasons to use animated videos to save your business boat from sinking in the middle of the ocean.
1. A Compelling Animated Story Will Keep your Consumer Interested while Dumping Information will Drive them Away
If you explain how your business works through a story, you will create more chances to convert your potential clients. Animation is nothing but art with form. It works well for telling stories to an audience of any age. Toy Story, Finding Nemo, Megamind, Avatar, Brave, Ice Age, Tangled, Tintin all animated feature films that tell memorable stories. This is why fans remember characters from these stories for a long time.
Your business, product, and associated services also have stories to tell. If you can think deeply, you can ask a few general questions to start. Simple questions like;
Question 01: Why have I started this business?
We all start at some point. Importance of economic independence is what our parent teaches us from a very young age—our teachers emphasize healthy living. And a sound living requires a solid flow of income. Money is a number, and obviously, the number never ends. Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates each have enough money to end hunger all over the US or even send millions of us to Mars. Ergo, to make a living is not a valid reason for your business to sprout in the first place.
Think of the week when you first wanted to launch your professional service. What was going in your mind? What made to take the step to progress with your business idea? Find out the goodness of your thought, which led you to realize what you love doing?
A writer will pull all the compassionate parts from your answers to write a script. Based on the storytelling script, the storyboard artist will create visual cues for your audience. Your audience can relate to that basic feeling you felt when you first started.
Question 02: Which are my personal goals at work to archive from the services I am providing?
Here you can bring in the cringy part of earning goals. You want monetary values in return for your time and energy put into the service you provide. You wish to have business prosperity, talented employees, and a wealthy customer base. Addressing this part will help the video scriptwriter to conclude the returning part of your animated story.
Note, three parts of a hero's journey are a popular storytelling style. One uses three parts of a hero's journey, departure, to form a story architecture for your product or service. Either you or the service that you provide is the hero. A brand official will decide this based on few key metrics of your marketing structure. Oh, yes, you do need to have a brand manager.
Job description of a brand manager includes:
Ability to design your brand architecture:Brand is what you feel using your unconscious mind. Your product or service must have a unique aspect that communicates to your consumers—arranging all these elements in designing your brand architecture.
Provide you with brand name ideas:Your brand touchpoints, promotional offers, services need names. Your brand manager will communicate with the copywriter or existing copies of your brand and provide a trendy, catchy name for business services.
Creating plans for increasing the brand value of your business:The brand manager must submit written plans. It indicates the forecast of both local and international value of your brand quarterly. The programs may include brand strategies and implementation, selecting a brand color, sort brand imagery, direct brand logo design, etc.
Pro Tip #1 of the day!
A creative marketing firm offers you a consultation to establish your brand. This way, you could skip hiring a brand manager initially.
Question 3: Whom am I selling it to?
It would help if you had a clear idea about your prospective consumer. Your target market is essential to define. You can do simple target market research by using the internet. At least this will give you some new ideas for businesses to pick the right strategies for target audience. Be in the customers' shoes, their age, demographics, gender, buying journey, etc.
This information will help your story author develop trendy verbal clues that trigger your potential customers. In animation, without a compelling story, users will switch off. They will bounce somewhere else, which is why a concrete script will aid your animated content a lot.
Pro Tip #2 of the day!
An excellent animated explainer should contain the images of your prospective consumer, their friends. It introduces familiarity. The person who is watching your animated video will relate to the character instantaneously.
Question 4: Who is the person who helped me to pursue establishing my brand?
Emotional touchpoints are the basis of any excellent script. In animation, good script writing is the basis of support for conveying the right message to your audience and invoking curiosity. Your brand or business operation never started from nowhere. There must be faces behind it. It could be your mother or father, could be one of your best friends or even a relative who had a great chat with you long ago.
When you start a new business, you may not have a digital marketing budget that will allow you to hire a full-time customer success manager. Many ad agencies are giving out options to conduct surveys through electronic mails to contact your potential customers on your behalf.
Your scriptwriter will take advantage of all these tiny details to make your animation more appealing to the audience. There is a one percent rule that applies here to outrun your competitor. All these small advantages over time will accumulate and will ensure you more customers than your competition.
Question 05: How do my product and service help my customers?
Customers are fuel to drive your business for the long run. Every big company has a group of CRM. What customer relationship management does is it talks directly to learn what customer wants. Customers will give you an honest opinion about your product and services. Without reaching out to them, you can't know how your service is doing in the real world.
Good knowledge about how your product is helping your potential customer is gold. Your screenplay writers will use this information and hand over their writing to great animators to create a compelling and detailed storyboard. Ultimately this storyboard will come alive as animated series.
Question 06: How does my product or service help the environment and impact the future of this planet?
We are living in post covid era. And we know how neglected our planet is. Your business must have some standards to give back as much as you can to mother nature. It can be a small donation to scientific research. Or a social awareness project dedicated to reducing anthropogenic climate changes or any other idea you want to support.
Your final animation will have at least a few seconds dedicated to addressing the subject, eventually creating a soft corner in your potential customer's heart.
You can mix it up with philosophical questions as well, like "Why do you think nature has selected you to have you sell service of this nature?"
Gather all the answers together and shuffle them to get yourself a storyline of your product or brand. This story is the most powerful tool for you to reach customers efficiently.
2. Animated Video Saves your Business by Introducing you to Digital Marketing.
In 2021, 87% of businesses use video as their marketing tool. 84% of video marketers see user bounce rate reduces by a significant margin using animated explainer videos.
I cannot hold myself from telling you stories from my professional life here. I started a decade ago as a freelance CG generalist. Throughout my career, I worked with dozens of CEOs, founders, presidents, and owners. My target market was the USA, Australia, New Zealand, and English-speaking countries. A significant part of my client base was new to the business, ranging from 4-8 years of experience. I could only divide the clump into two different groups.
Clients who understand digital marketing. Client who do not understand digital marketing.
Only 5% were from the first group. Clients who understand digital marketing will have a clear understanding of the project scope. They would hire me for a long-term contract aiming to produce a series of animations. They would also ask for fragments of designs from the animation video.
Meaning images or snapshots from each episode will be used for their social media marketing. I have found a gradual increment of products and services for their business over time.
Clients who did not understand digital marketing lacked a vision for what they would do with the animation video. A misconception that having one video content will get them the golden herrings was one to be noted. Despite having a quality product or service, this group had almost zero video contents strategy setup.
Their web pages lacked optimization for search engines, making their web presence almost invisible on the world wide web. As a result, I never found those businesses thriving over time.
Initially, after rendering my clients' animated video explainer, I saw them uploading it. And then they waited. Nothing particularly happened. Just a piece of well-crafted content, no matter how well prepared it is. Without placing it right on the internet and without robust digital marketing goals, your product or service will never take off.
What digital marketing is all about? How it relates to animated video content? A couple of very sensible questions to address here.
Digital marketing creates a series of bridges that establishes a connection between your product and your potential customer. Harnessing the power of the internet, digital marketing, or online marketing is the future for every business that wants to survive in a competitive world.
The digital marketing service list includes; digital marketing video, aka explainer videos, social media marketing, email marketing, web-based advertising, copywriting, multimedia content as a marketing channel, etc. When you hire a professional animated video explainer production house to create your trophy video, these 1-3 minutes long videos will work as a multifunctional swiss knife.
An ideal digital marketing video will have few qualities such as:
Introducing the stressful problem that your prospects face and showing a solution around it:
You would be amazed to know how stress affects the brain. Your consumers also have a stress graph. They tend to keep that graph flat as possible all the time. But because it is not entirely possible. Somehow, your product or service can help out to wipe out the stress mark from your customers' forehead.
Your animated explainer video will address all those switches that trigger stress and anxiety wearing your clients' shoes. A character can play a crucial role in the animation. Not being able to differentiate stress vs burnout, your product or service appears on the screen to save the world. This method creates familiarity with the stress diagram for your customer. And a clear path to how the animated character can mitigate the stress level.
Aligns your existing brand imagery, message, visual feel, and aesthetics correctly:
Your brand identity is crucial. Everything improves your brand value overall, starting from your brand name, branded logo, brand color, and brand architecture.
Animated video templates can hurt your brand alignment and ruin your digital marketing strategy.
A unique, well-crafted piece of art can easily pick on your brand signals. Which means do you use any characters in your web pages for branding? If so, use the same characters in the video. What is the look and feel of your branded imagery? Are they flat 2D? 3D? Minimalistic design or has photorealistic art in them? Please take advantage of mimicking all these design factors and use them within your animated explainer series.
Multi-purpose animated video content usage across all your marketing channels:
You must take advantage of all your marketing channels like social media, emails, digital paid or free ads, etc. Using the newly achieved animated video of your brand, you can apply several customizations and broaden your digital asset from the video.
Starting with an animated video logo, you can use this asset in your social media channels to increase brand awareness. You can also reuse the same part as an animated video intro which you will add at the beginning of your video content.
Your animated video editor can also extract out 10 seconds of your total video describing a specific key benefit of your product to the customers. This extracted video data is helpful to append to any related blog post that you want to publish for your readers. Or, pull a 15 second YouTube video ad that your customers will see between videos on the platform.
Providing proof that your business is genuine and authentic:
Animated videos for business should have a scene dedicated to proving the product's authenticity or service. Competition is high for most of the products in today's world. Credibility is vital to showcase what other content is better than animated video to explain why your potential client should trust your service.
Ability to initially clarify your product's unique selling points:
USP paints a bigger picture for your audience. It shows how your product and service can save your prospects time and money. Example of unique selling points; using our service will ensure none of your item breaks during a home relocation. This one is for a moving company. But no matter what you sell, your USP can always help attract a potential buyer.
Your animated video must contain a shot where the audience starts seeing how your service differs from others? They can clearly understand the edge of your product over your competitors. That also has to be memorable. Many animation studios associate an event where the central character faces a grave consequence where only the USP comes to save—dedicating a full 1-2 minutes episode for this.
Ability to reach out to new prospects and nurture existing customers:
What does prospect mean in marketing? A person regarded as likely to succeed or as a potential customer, client, etc.
Your animated explainer should show all the features of your business in a brief video. It not only updates your existing customers but also provides all necessary information to your would-be customers.
Good business storytelling examples include all the features or benefits of your product throughout the video submissively. Audiences' subconscious minds should always understand that the story needs a hero. Your product or service brings them that sigh of relief once this happens.
Power to wrap every end of your product features without exceeding human attention span:
Timing and spacing are crucial concepts in animation. It is equally valid for persuing someone over the internet. Script writer for movies has specialized how to tell a long story under three minutes video. They also can stretch a light novel to a five-season long television show.
Your animation video should be short and concise. It would help if you also produced as many as your digital marketing budget allows. Each episode of your animated videos can explain one particular feature of your service. You are drawing a clear conclusion after each video will attract different groups of prospects.
Animation duration longer than 4 minutes will unplug your potential customers. Day by day, the attention span is decreasing for human beings, so the shorter, the better. But make sure not to miss out on showing critical features to cut times.
Pro Tip #3 of the day!
When you own animated trophy video content, you can easily reuse it in different marketing channels. For this, you have to consider creating more channels to communicate with your customers. You are bound to learn about some essential requirements for your business to have a digital presence.
You have the animated video broken down into parts featuring different aspects of your business. You can quickly enter the world of digital marketing through a business story and focus on these aspects efficiently.
3. Animated Video for Marketing Ignites your Branding - Strong Brand Awareness is Mandatory to Keep your Business from Falling Apart.
Brand awareness in marketing works as oxygen for your business. Without a substantial brand value, the burnout of your business is imminent. Branding has evolved over hundreds of years, and any successful business you see around you has used it efficiently.
Watching a well-branded animated video, 84% of people convert to a customer from the audience.
You can integrate animated video explainers into your core strategies for brand awareness. You can set a clear kpi for brand awareness. You can analyze traffic flow from animated content as a key point indicator. Tracking earned media value and comparing your earned media value with your competitors are also popular key point indicators.
Like other branding companies, animated video production companies will go through your business details to diagnose the best possible strategies for target market. Based on your existing branded design, the consultant will provide you with plans to improve your branded design. Techniques will include animated video content, aka brand video content, brand imagery, brand color, etc.
It is vital to take this step seriously. Many founders and owners from small business groups often possess unnecessary faith in products than its branding. It creates a gap between consumers with service; hence, it fails in no time unless the product is revolutionary.
You, as a captain of your branded ship, must keep critical points below in mind to survive the tidal waves of competitors drowning your business to the bottom of the sea.
Animated content enables the three Rs of marketing:
Reach, repetition, and relevance. These three are the building blocks of progressive marketing strategy.
A. Reach:Without telling your audience a compelling business story, you will never reach out to your customers. Without reaching, the chance of converting potential buyers goes to nil. Animated contents are an excellent way of storytelling with data.
B. Repetition:Repetitive sales work as a lifebuoy for your business facing stress and anxiety. Loyal customers are far better than new customers as they are more likely to buy from you regardless. Repetition also ideal for sending out your marketing messages to potential buyers.
If your product is digital software, tools, or an app. 79% higher chance that people will make a purchasing decision after watching your product's animated video.
Using a custom-made animation video, you can reach out to your loyal customers and update the group about the new and existing features. A fun story can implant a hook inside your customers' minds. You can control emotional triggers and upsell your product or service using this method, ultimately keeping it afloat.
An animated story provides direction to branding your service:
A brand constructs your business base. Branded video content guides your internal business structure to maintain consistency.
The theme of a story also sets the overall theme of your brand imagery. If you are not a one-person show and have at least 3-5 employees, your animated content can demonstrate the brand message.
Entertainingly, animated assets can also train your employees, boost morale and improve productivity.
There are a couple of other ways an animated video is capable of directing your brand,
i) Visual Branding directs memory of your consumers:Consumers tend to process visuals around 60,000 times faster than plain text or copywrites. An animated form of art is nothing but visuals of your product and services. It creates a visual impact on your audience and makes them fish for information when needed.
ii) Animated content directs your brand's conversion rate:Digitally, websites are your headquarter. All your prospects will pop in and out; when the users see a video on a branded site, 100% chance that they will not bounce right away. Note here that it works well with brands that are aligned correctly with your product or services.
Additionally, 64%-70% of users will interact with your call-to-action button. A CTA button is a link to a landing page where your users can explore more features of your product. They can also place a phone call, shoot an email or make a purchase online.
4. An Animation Series about your Business Defines your Goal and Help you Dodge Burnout
Our society has evolved to recognize working relentlessly for an infinite amount of money and customers as success. Sacrificing health, family time, and personal grooming is harmful and even can be fatal at times. However, if you work more efficiently to establish your brand, you surely want to avoid burnout.
Splitting different services and features of your business works as a blueprint of your business's success. You can easily define a goal for keeping your business from losing customers.
It is nearly impossible to describe your product or service features to your customer using one single video. The attention span of a human is merely 12 seconds. And every 15 years, it is dropping by whooping 8 seconds. Successful businesses are taking advantage of this and using shorter animated content to avoid burnout.
Scriptwriters will do an exceptional job vetting out all the fluff and focus on a specific feature of your service. Later on, based on the script, animators will produce your animation series. It will also help you to apply the 1 percent rule.
What is the 1 percent rule?
You can outrun your competitors for any business by adding a fraction of improvement to your product and service over time. If you accumulate all the advantages, you will always maintain a lead in your industry. You do not need to improve yourself twice as much to achieve double results.
Ergo, this rule keeps you busy improving your product or services and reminding you about the goals to achieve the fractional winning edges.
Besides defining goals, you can manage business owner burnout using two other techniques using animated videos.
Celebrate minor achievements:
As the business owner undertaking an animated video project will require a list of task for you. Scripts, voice-over, characters, dimension, art style, background score are few important ones.
Your selected animated video company will ask for feedback on every step. In each phase, when you like what they are doing, you should celebrate the milestone.
Waiting forever to have a humongous success is not ideal. Hence split achievement is what keeps you happy and victorious.
Cut Down Unnecessary Tasks:
Animated video explainers will do the explaining parts to your potential customers. Instead of taking your customers to the learning curve every time, you can send them a link to one of your relevant animated videos.
How your product saves time and money for your clients? You can prove that point through another short animated video. Explaining things over a call or long email is inefficient. End of the day, using video marketing, you can reduce up to 43% of support calls. It will save you time, let you focus on more important things on your to-do list, and finally avert burnout.
Conclusion:
Business owner burnout can lead to devastation. It is equally dangerous for your startup and your physical well-being. Animated video content is the future of video marketing. Using animated video series to educate and explain your product and services to your customer can help you save your business and make your life easier.
None of you 3d artist had a flawless day working on a 3d software without having an issue, let’s be honest, every program coded has a bug or at least a strange way of functioning which artists like yourself find awry.
3ds Max is a powerful tool which is being used in the industry for a quite a long time now, yet this program has limitations, one great feature it has the UVW modifier stack, which allows to layout and edit UVW texture map for an object.
Let’s get back to the limitation which we were discussing, once you want to import any foreign 3d element such as .fbx, .obj or even good old local Teapot from 3ds Max itself, the UVW information will be messed up in the editor window
You may wonder what causes this, there is a simple explanation, every 3d program calculates the texture information from Z axis up or down, most of the time 3ds Max guesses the calculation in a upside down method, resulting the script running the editor stack out all the geometries one above another, hence the entire editor will be filled with polygonal faces instead.
The Issue
For finding out a messed up UVW on a regular old Teapot, let us do a hand on,
Create a teapot from command panels Create Tab > Geometry > Standard Primitive > Teapot
Apply an Unwrap UVW modifier from command panel Modify > Modifier List > Unwrap
Go to Edit UVs > Open UV Editor
Scroll back and see the messed-up situation at Edit UVs window
The Fix
Luckily 3d max ships with bundle of scripts which are super helpful for you in special occasion like this, those can be found under Utilities tab in command panel.
Let us reset the scene,
File > Reset > Don’t Save
Draw a teapot once again
Right click on teapot, find and click covert to: convert to editable mesh
Instead adding a modifier let’s find Utilities from command panel
Under Utilities twirls, click on More, this pop open list of utilities {list}
Let’s find UV Remove
While the teapot is selected click on Remove
Apply an Unwrap UVW modifier from command panel Modify > Modifier List > Unwrap UVW
Go to Edit UVs > Open UV Editor.
Voila! See the UVW are laid out perfectly for you to work with!
Conclusion
It is important to convert your foreign object or 3d element in editable mesh before using this method, 3ds max has unique way to calculate the UVW information and removing any previously built in information can allow max to calculate the geometry from scratch fixing any texture mapping issue that you may face.
Bonus:
Here is full video tutorial how to troubleshoot UVW unwrap issue in 3ds Max.
