You’re Doing Animation Wrong if You’re Only After One Deliverable. Use a 360-Degree Strategy Instead.

It’s your job to seek out and leverage the best methods to market your product and connect with your users — while also keeping spending at a minimum. So we understand if animation seems expensive. 

In terms of the cost to develop the creatives for a marketing campaign, animation is a big investment. There’s also the time investment; animation production tends to take upwards of 10 weeks for most motion studios. 

But here’s the thing: An animation project can be so much more than a single marketing campaign or one video deliverable. In fact, if your motion project only results in a single output, you are leaving money on the table and missing opportunities to foster a consistent, memorable brand experience across platforms. 

You need a 360-degree animation strategy instead. Read on to see how a comprehensive view of animation can reveal new ways to market your product, strengthen your brand, connect with your audience, and save you money.

What a Holistic Animation Strategy Entails  

A 360-degree, holistic approach to motion means planning ahead so you can leverage elements of your animation across your marketing channels far beyond the initial release of your hero video. 

In other words, your one video gets infinitely repurposed. Pieces of it can be extracted and used for: 

• Static illustrations in-app
• Animated elements in-app
• Social media animations (Instagram feed, Stories, and Reels, plus TikTok videos, Facebook posts, and more) 
• Design and illustration elements for your website and social media
• Your brand signature in additional video content
• Alternate, bit-sized versions and formats from the hero piece 
• Out-of-home (OOH) design assets
• Signature music and/or sonic branding for other marketing materials

And the list goes on. Whatever marketing collateral you need for your next campaign (and beyond), there’s a portion of your animation that can fill those gaps. 

Achieve Brand Consistency and Recognition with Universal Animation Elements

The kind of cohesive marketing described above — wherein elements from your animation are leveraged everywhere users see your brand — is truly impactful. 

Someone might see your ad on YouTube. Later, when they visit your site, they’re treated to the same visual messaging and tone. Once they download your app, they again have a consistent, branded experience with your product. This is all thanks to repurposing your animation in different forms in all of these places. And it leads to brand recognition, which means better customer awareness. 

As a solid digital health example, Headspace does a fantastic job employing a 360-degree motion strategy. They use elements of animation throughout their website, app, social media, and beyond. It makes for a whimsical, cohesive brand and product experience, no matter where users encounter Headspace. 

Save Money and Maximize Returns with a 360-Degree Animation Approach 

With a comprehensive animation strategy, you’ll likely reduce the need to outsource other marketing functions. You can also lighten the load of your internal marketing and branding teams. 

As a part of creating your hero video, a studio like MOWE can also provide you with static images, bit-sized animations, OOH design assets, etc. These can be used on social media, in your app, on your website, or on a billboard — all without having to consult another agency. And without having to conduct an entirely new project. This streamlined process not only saves time and money, but also ensures brand consistency from platform to platform. 

MOWE also crafts toolkits for our clients as a part of a 360-degree strategy. These toolkits come complete with brand guidelines on using the elements from your animation and/or templates to actually create new assets. For example, we can separate elements from your hero animation and make them ready to pop into a static social post. We can just as easily pull out pieces to run natively on your website within the code. 

TL;DR? The variety of external assets created as part of the hero piece are prime materials ready to be adapted for other mediums, at a fraction of the cost. This way, you don’t just get marketing assets, you end up creating a whole interconnected brand experience that resonates with your users and ensures your investment in animation is worthwhile.

A 360-Degree Animation Strategy Is a No-Brainer 

A 360-degree animation approach elevates the impact of animation and its many possible elements across multiple channels of your product — without breaking the bank. There’s truly no reason to create a single animation output when there’s so much possibility in leveraging a holistic strategy. For help envisioning all of the places animation can work to market and brand your product, reach out!