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What Makes Instructional Animation Videos Work?

What Makes Instructional Animation Videos Work?

Video is the chosen media option for a wide variety of circumstances these days. From marketing and advertising, to learning new skills or how to achieve specific goals, video is key! Producing instructional animation videos that hook your audience to deliver powerful education that they’ll remain focused on and remember long after the video is complete can be challenging at best. Not only do you have to target a wide variety of learning styles, but you’ve got mere seconds to grab the interest of your audience or else you risk losing them entirely!

What is it that makes some instructional animation videos work while others flop? In an effort to define what it takes to produce a successful instructional animation video that your audience is going to full resonate with, we analyzed several animated instruction video examples to look for clues that might tell us what works, and what doesn’t. This is what we found.

Motion Graphics Explainer Video

Focus is Incredibly Important 

It’s easy to get drawn into a bunch of different ideas and to have various thought processes when you’re creating content for your target audience, but when it comes to producing instructional animation videos, you need to focus! Focusing in on a single subject or topic and leaving out any details that do not directly apply is absolutely vital here. If you allow yourself to focus on details outside of the topic specific to your video, you’re going to create a mess that’s difficult for your audience to follow. Instead, choose one main goal for your video, or one main topic, and focus all of your effort on that – leave the rest for another video!

Simplify the Details

Instructional animation videos don’t have to be complex. In fact, the details of the video can be simplified such that the information being delivered is incredibly basic, really. While some of the best uses for animation revolve around explaining complex topics, don’t forget the fact that you can utilize animation to portray simplified details, too! An instructional video also doesn’t have to only instruct, it can motivate your audience, too! Creating a simple message, that has motivation behind it, is a key example of this.

Don’t Get Caught Up in Over-Delivering

The best instructional animation videos tend to have a single goal in mind and, while they focus on achieving that goal, they don’t get caught up on the tiny details. Instead, the best videos have a macro-approach in which they deliver an overall picture of the topic that’s more generalized than an audience might initially expect, but it works! Instead of getting caught up in over-delivering, the best instructional videos are sometimes those that take a step back to deliver a macro-view rather than a micro-approach.

Engage Viewer Attention

The best instructional animation videos do whatever it takes to engage the viewer’s attention. This means, the creator of the video has done their homework and knows who their audience is. It means they know what colors, tones, and style of content is most likely to “speak” to the user or to resonate with them. It means that they’ve thought carefully about what it takes to keep that particular audience interested & entertained. 

As with any other type of video content, you have about 10 seconds to hook your audience and grab their attention. If you fail to do so, the likelihood of them staying focused on the lesson you’re delivering is slim. As a content creator, your job is to find a way to connect with your audience, engaging them in such a way that they give all their attention to your instructional video.

Effective Messaging for Each Learning Style

Chances are, your audience will have a specific learning style, but there’s also potential for your audience to have different learning styles. Perhaps you’ll have some viewers that learn visually while others learn kinesthetically? The most effective instructional animation videos are those which take the various learning styles into consideration by providing content that connects with each individual learner to deliver educational content focused specifically on their learning style. 

In order to effectively engage each learning style, the messaging of the video must adapt as the content is delivered. While it may be easy to target the audio visual learners in your audience, producing instructional animation videos that focus on teaching the kinesthetic and social learners in your group can be a bit more challenging, particularly as these learners require interaction and even hands-on engagement. 

Obviously, you can’t always target every learning style with the videos you produce. Ideally, you target the learning styles that are most conducive to engagement among your target audience. Most importantly, you need to be sure that the instructional animation videos you create are speaking the unique language of your audience.  Often this means breaking down difficult to understand, technical concepts into easy to follow topics of relevance. 

Want to learn more about what makes some instructional animation videos work better than others? Give Beverly Boy Productions a call, today! We’ll put our more than 2 decades of experience to the test for your brand as we produce powerful educational video content that speaks to your audience. We can’t wait to produce instructional video content that exceeds your audience’s expectations!

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