How Animaker uses Animaker?

Animaker is an online animation video maker. It’s a DIY tool created with the sole aim of simplifying the video creation process. With over a million users from across the globe and 2 million videos created so far, we can safely say that Animaker has been quite successful in its endeavour so far. It all started with a small 6 member team and today it has evolved into a 60 member company. The passionate work of our dedicated team, coupled with drastic rise in the consumption of video content across the globe paved way for this growth. As passionate advocates of video, we endorse the power of videos whenever we can. Several of our customers have always enquired how we use videos inside Animaker! So, we decided to come up with this post to open the curtains and give you an inside view of "How Animaker uses Animaker?"

Marketing

Video is the preferred content format of the Internet today. So it is only natural that we create most of our marketing material using Animaker. Video requirements for the marketing team are split into 2

• Pro
• Novice

All of the pro requirements that really require an eye for detail are handled by dedicated designers who work exclusively on Animaker. All of the novice requirements are handled by our own team.

Landing page:

Almost all of the Animaker landing pages come with an explainer video or at least a video loop on top. This is a standard example of the “Pro” requirement. The marketing team comes up with a kick-ass script and let our dedicated designers work their magic on the Animaker app. The result is an explainer video that engages, entertains and entices our audience. Here is a video that we created for our Animaker whiteboard landing page Every single metric from page time, conversion etc. drastically improved after adding this video. But the most interesting metric to note on our pages are the bounce rates. Our best performing landing pages have bounce rates as low as “19%”. When a user lands on the page, they tend to spend time watching the video. This simple addition ensured higher on-page times, higher engagement and lower bounce rates for all our landing pages. As you know, Google considers a page’s bounce rate as one of the most important ranking metrics. Our low bounce rates have made Animaker landing pages rank on the first page of Google SERP results for several highly competitive keywords. We created a post to share what we learned during this process. Click here to check out the secret formula that helped us reduce our bounce rates!

Social media:

Video is the favorite content format for all the major social media platforms today. From Facebook to Quora, every platform wants users to create and share high quality, engaging video content. The Animaker facebook page is a total fun area. We let our imaginations run wild and create content that contextually entertains our fan base. We create that content too with Animaker! First, we have a brainstorming session and come up with some interesting theme for the video like, “Top myths about Animation videos broken!” Then we create a simple script and hand it over to our design divas. Another interesting aspect worth mentioning are the vertical videos. We also use vertically optimized videos in several channels in order to cater to the ever-growing mobile audience. Statistics reveal that mobile users hold their phones vertically 94% of the time so it’s high time we start creating videos that fit into their phones right? Here is a simple vertical video that we created for our facebook page. This video is also available as a template on the Animaker app. Paid advertising is a recent addition to our marketing strategy and I should say it has been working pretty well for us. We fundamentally depend a lot on video ads for brand building on social platforms such as Facebook, YouTube and Instagram. Video ads help create an immersive and engaging form of advertising that is non-intrusive. Using video advertising has two advantages:

• Your ad really blends into the social media wall of the users thereby reducing the obtrusive experience of encountering a paid advertisement
• If your ad starts gaining organic traction the CPC of your ads will be very low (We have had CPC as low as $0.002)

Product demos and feature update communications

Animaker is an ever-evolving ecosystem that keeps moving forward while also rapidly improving the functionality. We bring about numerous feature enhancements for each of these products every few days. But how do we keep our users updated about all the latest changes? You guessed it right! Videos! All of our latest updates and features are communicated to our audience through videos created on Animaker. We have witnessed an increase in reach and awareness about our latest product updates after implementing this video strategy. Here is a video that we created for the launch of Arab characters and RTL text in Animaker. Videos are a really effective communication tool. They not only helped us improve our communication with the audience but within our teams as well. For example, whenever the marketing team needed a video, we used to come up with a long document explaining our requirement. But now we decided to create a simple, crude video using Animaker and pass it on to our design team. This simple process change led to amazing results as there was little to no chance of miscommunication. Here is the first draft of the template created by our marketing team with our limited design skills. This video worked wonders in communicating our idea to the designers. And when they worked their magic on it, the output is truly remarkable.

Sales

The sales team at Animaker consists of a group of motivated youngsters with the zeal to excel. They work on the concept of 3 C’s

• Convey
• Convince
• Convert

Convey:

The first step in any sales cycle is identifying and shortlisting your prospects. There are several tools in the market that helps you identify and manage your prospects. We use pipedrive to do it.  

  But once you have identified and shortlisted the right prospects, you have to reach out to them. This is the tough part. The initial pitch is the crucial first impression of your product and it can make or break your deal. Our sales team decided to test the power of Animaker at this point. We added a simple Animaker video into the first email that we sent to our prospects. The content of the email remained pretty much the same. It was a simple pitch explaining how our product can add value and solve a real-world problem for the prospect. The only difference was, this time the pitch was converted into a simple, engaging video instead of just plain text. This simple change produced some drastic results for us. The click-through rates for our CTA buttons drastically increased There was also a big jump in the total replies that we got from potential customers. Thereby opening the window for further communication. We realized that video pitches worked wonders in breaking the initial ice and pitching your product or service in a simple and engaging fashion to your prospects. Here is one of the templates that our sales team utilizes for their pitch:

Convince

Animaker reached an important milestone in 2017 by hitting 1 million users. Throughout this journey, we have acquired a huge number of happy users who want to share their experience with the rest of the world. Testimonials and case studies are a very effective way to leverage the stories of our existing customers to acquire more customers. Whenever we hear a happy experience, we create an animated video expressing the happiness of the customer with an engaging visual and user’s own text. The users are also happy to share this video with their friends. This way we were able to influence both the convey and convince part of the sales funnel thereby directly boosting sales conversions by almost 30%.

Convert

This is the stage in the sales process where the buyer has made a mental decision to buy your product or service. But don’t count the sale closed until you have delivered the product or service. Depending upon the nature of the product and the total cost involved, the customer might take from 1 day to several weeks before actually closing the deal. Your job as a salesperson is to analyze and understand the attitude of your prospective clients and tailor your closing style according to them. Some clients eagerly listen to every word of your pitch and you have already established a good relationship with them. This is not always the case. A less enthusiastic client will need a more nuanced approach. Our sales team decided to test the power of Animaker exactly in this scenario. Whenever a prospective client takes some time to consider our proposal before taking a final decision, we saw an opportunity for a real relationship. During this time, our salespeople create simple, personalized messages that help us build a relationship with the client and also served as a subtle reminder about the pending deal. We found these subtle reminders to be a much more powerful push to close the deal rather than traditional reminders! Here is a simple video greeting that we use to wish our prospective clients during the Christmas season:

HR

The Human resource department is the unsung hero in every successful startup story. They are entrusted with the task of finding the right talent to help take the business to the next level. At the beginning of the experiment even we weren’t really sure of how Animaker could help the HR team. After some serious brainstorming, we came up with a few ideas. Let me show you the ideas one by one.

Resource on-boarding and Company culture

One of the most boring aspects of joining a new company is the lecture on company culture but Animaker really shines in that area. All of our policies are represented in the form of Animaker videos! Apart from this we also have some really interesting and personalized greetings. Everything from birthdays to work anniversaries are celebrated with an exclusive video and the beauty of the entire process is that they have a simple hack for it. They have simple base templates on which they edit the text, add a few personal images along with some amazing screen effects from Animaker and it becomes a brand new personalized video!

Hiring

Hiring is another important function of the HR department. It’s also the most challenging. We look for the cream of the cream when it comes to creativity. So attracting the right talent is a daunting task. What we’ve learnt is that the best way to attract creative people is by having a creative recruitment process. We replaced boring descriptive JDs with cool visuals. A video JD is a great way to promote job vacancies. It helped us promote the vacancies in a fun and engaging way. The next important step in the hiring process is screening. Finding the right people who have the right IQ and EQ to fit into our company culture is a difficult task. We solved this difficult problem using a recruitment puzzle video. A simple animated video explaining a problem statement. We shared the video with all the aspirants and asked them to solve the problem to take their application process forward. Here is the video that we created: This innovative approach to hiring gave us a dual advantage. The problem statement allowed us to filter applicants with the right IQ and the video helped us communicate the innovative approach that we expect from our employees in every task they are assigned.

Finance

The finance department is the pillar on which every successful company is built. Especially for a startup with an aim to compete with the giants in video space, every penny is worth a million! The finance department in Animaker plays the crucial role of controlling the ever-increasing expenses that come with managing a deep technology company like Animaker. The best fit for Animaker in the finance ecosystem was to “Ease the spreadsheet!” We observed that the finance team was creating a huge number of spreadsheets to showcase the numbers. Of course spreadsheets are very important but our finance team was so dependant on them that they even used the spreadsheets directly during their weekly meetings to present findings to the management. As you would expect, they had a tough time communicating the inferences of the data to the management. That was when the team decided to make a complete switch to visual representation of data. And what better way is there than to represent data than Animaker’s Video Infographics. Creating simple animated infographic videos to represent their data turned out to be fruitful as It created a more meaningful association with the company data for the people involved.

Conclusions:

Through this journey, we found several new applications for the Animaker tool. It's just the beginning. Every day our users come to us with several interesting stories of how they used Animaker in creative ways that we never even imagined when we built the tool. These stories become the inspiration for our team to keep building and improving the product! Do you have any more interesting ways in which you can use Animaker? Share it with us in the comments below!