To Sell Animation, Education About Its Benefits Is Key

Animation is powerful and capable of grabbing the attention of audiences of all ages. Being such an effective marketing tool, why can it sometimes be so hard to sell to a client?

Clients oftentimes assume that it won’t work for their industry, or that it’s too expensive. This article will teach you the key selling points of animation to help you address these concerns, and better communicate with your clients.

The Selling Points of Animation

The best way to start selling animation is to understand its strengths when compared to other types of marketing and advertising solutions. The obvious comparison for motion graphics is live-action.

So, what are the benefits of animation when weighing against live-action? Here are four primary benefits:

• Uniqueness
• Scalability
• Adaptability
• Predictability

Uniqueness

What animation has over any other medium is uniqueness. The vast range of possibilities in terms of visual style, storytelling, and movement means that no two pieces are alike. Especially when compared with live-action an animation gives you total control over the elements. It allows you to emphasize the branding of the business throughout the entire video while contributing to strengthening and differentiating a brand as no other medium can. 

Animation allows you to create something unique, that hasn’t been seen before and can match your brand perfectly. Due to the limitless possibilities of animation, you can leverage and add new dimensions to your business’s branding.

Scalability

Another strength of animation is the ability to scale things up faster – and cheaper — in the long run. A campaign can start with just a single 15-sec ad, which can then scale easily to multiple videos, or a bigger format without the need to match up actors’ schedules, location’s availability, etc.

You also have the ability to repurpose your assets by going back to something already built and creating more on top of that. Most importantly, everything can be done inside of a single motion graphics studio, guaranteeing the same tone and vibe.

Adaptability

Animation is adaptable because you’re often working from finished materials and adapting to different types of media. This flexibility allows you to increase the ROI of a campaign’s budget by moving from print to digital or vice versa. Since animation gives you full control of what is being created, you can expand on the pieces you have and create multiple variants for different outlets.  A 90-sec video can be repurposed as a short 6-sec ad for youtube or 15-sec social media stories, but it can also turn into individual graphic pieces for printing campaigns or websites. 

Predictability

As everything in animation is built from scratch inside a motion graphics studio, the factors that influence its development are much more predictable than with live-action. You can have more confidence that your production timeframe and budget won’t derail your initial plan, as there’s an overall lower risk factor when working with animation.

On top of that, the process of pre-production and conceptualization in animation allows businesses to better understand, in the early stages of a project’s development, how things will look in the end. The style frames combined with the storyboard give a high-fidelity visualization of the proposed final result — before starting any animation.

Why Animation is the Perfect Innovation Medium

Some of the most effective KPIs of animation are customer engagement and brand reinforcement. Both of those are great metrics to present the effectiveness of your animation projects to new clients. However, even armed with those success metrics, some clients may think animation simply doesn’t work in their industry – and that’s ok. The fact that they haven’t seen it before among their competitors is usually what makes them feel that it’s not suitable for them.

The tech and startup scenes are good examples of companies using animation to either advertise or teach people about their brand and technology. That’s because animation is a great way to bring more “humanity” to the cold environment of technology while at the same time connecting with innovation. No wonder Apple has long been using animation to introduce most of its events and products. 

Presenting animation as a tool of innovation for your clients will help to prepare them for the future and allow them to get ahead of the competition. Animation can be a powerful way to differentiate a company in an industry – especially one in which animation isn’t commonly used yet. A great example of this novelty is Headspace’s unique twist of bringing animation to meditation – something that at first may seem totally unrelated but that was a groundbreaking factor to turn them into leaders in this field. This approach allowed them to reach new heights by creating a series about meditation on Netflix.

Not Every Animation Is the Same

Besides selling on the more concrete strengths of animation (time, budget, etc), it’s important to stress that not every animation is the same. One big misconception when someone hears about the possibility of using animation for the first time is the memories they have of the old Saturday morning cartoons or dated animated campaigns that they didn’t like so much. In regards to the former,  we are far from doing that here. Animation in the commercial context is about framing a message in a way that is compelling, attractive, and memorable. And in regards to the latter, like every single project from the creative field, different teams will create different outputs. 

When talking about using animation to leverage a client, you should present the four most common types of commercial animation:

• Animation for Advertising
• Animation for Product Launches
• Animation for Education
• Animation as Content

Showing the different usages of animation and how it supports different goals is a great way to showcase animation as a viable tool for your client to achieve their goals.

Be creative

Not every client is ready and open for innovation. Any substantial innovation involves some sort of risk, so your role is to facilitate a discussion that leads the client in the direction that feels most aligned with what they want to achieve. Many of the points we have made here can help you to sustain your argument and not only present something that looks good and that is enjoyable to produce and watch, but also something that will make an impact and make a difference in your client’s company. 

At the same time, you don’t need to do all the heavy lifting alone. Partnering with the right studio early in the process will help you overcome initial objections and understand other possibilities beyond what’s in front of you – increasing the chances of closing a deal or winning an important pitch. 

In the end, it’s about selling on the value and the opportunities animation can bring to a campaign. Arm yourself with the right points and you’ll be better prepared to implement more and more animation work with your clients.