3 Reasons Why You Should Use
Video Animation on Your Website

Why Animation?

There are many reasons to have a website, there are a large number of business websites, advertising services, personal blogs that people update with interesting news or stories, as well as forums, community interest sites and many other types of websites. What is important, is that the targeted community stays around once they have found the site they are looking for!

So how do you keep people engaged on your website? Well, the content you show should always be valuable to the visitor. However, people love pretty things. A page full of text, however valuable the content in that text, would be hard to read through it all, without having a visual break, traditionally in the form of an image or graphic. This helps break the page up a little and displays some context to the text.

There is also a new weapon in the armory that is becoming ever more popular – Video Animation!

Animation to make your website pop!

Animation adds something extra to your website, almost making it come alive. It gives users something to look at, and in some cases, interact with. Animation can be something as simple as text transitions or text flying into the scene, but it can also go as far as moving characters, motion graphics, animated objects and shapes, as well as explainer videos for educational type content!

In fact, these days animation can be controlled by the user, by having clickable or scrollable events which trigger from a specific interaction. The question is, however, why should YOU use animation on your website, and is it worth hiring a professional animator to create custom animation for you? Let’s go over our top three reasons why we think it’s a great idea to incorporate animation somewhere on your website.

1) Video Animation represents ideas that can’t be explained in the text

Let’s say your website is fairly educational based – you might know the struggle of getting your ideas across in words, as eventually, those words become paragraphs, then pages, then walls of text – which just overloads the person reading it.

You need an easy way to project an image from your head in a way that users can understand it. Luckily, that’s an area where animation can greatly help. How about we use an abstract idea such as explaining the atom.

Unfortunately, you can’t just point a camera at an atom and hit record – yet it still needs to be shown visually for someone to understand – this is known as visual learning. Animation can represent whatever you want it to, as an experienced animator can create anything from your imagination, even if it doesn’t exist.

2) Easier to Grasp

A visual representation is often much easier to understand than a page of text. The human brain processes image 60,000 times faster than text. A two-minute animated video could explain the equivalent of a 5000-word essay.

The engagement rate with animated videos is also much higher than text, images, or even standard videos. The stats show people are far more likely to click on an animated video than they are to read the text content.

But what about SEO?

This is a valid point. Google works by reading and understanding the content of a page, it can’t really understand the meaning or value of all the content on the video. A way around this is to add the transcription of the video underneath!

That is helpful for people who would prefer to read, as well as helping Google to understand the page better. The content is not duplicated as the video content is not indexed on Google so it is a win-win.

3) Cost-Effective

Creating a normal video may seem cheap and easy. Everyone has a video camera on the back of their phones, just use that right? Unless you are a video blogger (vlogger) talking from your car or part of your charm is filming whilst walking up a hill or something similar, trying to create a professional video on your phone is a no-no.

The quality difference between a professional video and an amateur video is night and day. If you want your product or services to be as good as they can be, the cost of hiring a professional videographer, lighting rigs, sound mics, green screens, actors, or props soon adds up into the thousands if not tens of thousands.  There is nothing wrong with this if that is the best way to demonstrate your services but to do it will be costly.

Animation often requires only one person or a small team depending on the scope of what needs doing.  Scenes can be created without having to travel to a location and professional voice-over artists can be hired for a small fee to give your animated video an even more professional feel.

Video animation isn’t cheap, but it is much cheaper than a professional video.

What Do We Conclude

Introducing animation to a page helps to reduce bounce rates, which indicates more engagement with the page. The more engagement the higher the chance of a conversion!

Animation is easy to update or change and can be done in software easily. In fact, you can even copy over certain animation and add it to a new scene for a new webpage! Over time, people will begin to learn your animation style and eventually, you can incorporate a common character or theme in these videos, which users will remember your brand from in the future!

Video animation is not a fad and is becoming more and more popular. If you have not introduced it to your marketing mix, it is well worth the time and effort to create a story and explore the possibilities available.

Interested in having your own bespoke animation created for your website? At Interact, we make anything from motion graphics to explainer videos, character animation and billboard graphics! Get in touch with us via the contact form underneath, or call us on 01257 429217