Advantages & Disadvantages of White Board Animations in Website Ranking

1 - Make the complex simple and the dry entertaining

The foundations of whiteboard animation lay in storytelling and one of the most powerful benefits this brings to whiteboard animation is the ability to make complex ideas easier to understand and to make dry topics more entertaining.

Visual storytelling in business can make complex messages and abstract ideas more understandable by using devices like visual metaphors to translate the subject into something more familiar. In a similar way, visual storytelling techniques can take what are important but not necessarily engaging topics and repackage them into imagery and narratives that are memorable and entertaining.

2 - Personality, Tone and Branding

Whiteboard animations begin life as scripts, which creatives use to create the storytelling and explanatory visuals we might be more familiar with. The script then forms the basis of onscreen text and gets brought to life by a voiceover artist.

All these stages give you plenty of opportunities to add in your personality, tone and branding. From the choice of words, colours, characters and images to the choice of font and voiceover artist - whiteboard animation is overflowing with chances to reflect you and your brand in a complete and natural way.

3 - Whiteboard animation is versatile

Cisco has found that mobile video consumption has increased 17-fold since 2012, which highlights the growing dominance of mobile phones in how we engage with information. Depending on your audience, your message needs to be able to work on the small screen as much as it does in more traditional settings.

Whiteboard animation videos are the ideal format for this. They can pack in a lot of information into a small amount of space and time while also making it informative, entertaining and aesthetically pleasing. And they can do it whether they’re being viewed on a smart phone or a smart TV - or a monitor for that matter.

4 - Make your message memorable and engaging

As our research with Professor Richard Wiseman showed, whiteboard animations result in a 15% increase in information retention compared with a ‘talking head’ video. The use of storytelling combined with the visual language, voiceover, animation and onscreen text allows your whiteboard animation to work for a viewer whether they prefer an auditory, kinesthetic or visual delivery.

This same combination allows you to make your message more entertaining and engaging. This is great news when it comes to holding a viewer’s attention in what is becoming an increasingly distracting world and means your calls-to-action can be more effective.

5 - Reduce bounce rates on your website

Not content with just making your message more engaging, whiteboard animations can reduce the bounce rate from your homepages or landing pages. The team at Wistia did some research which found that people spent 2.6 times longer on pages which included a video. Whilst we can never be sure of every factor feeding Google’s algorithm, Google have said that page experience metrics will be contributing to ranking criteria:

“The page experience signal measures aspects of how users perceive the experience of interacting with a web page. Optimizing for these factors makes the web more delightful for users across all web browsers and surfaces, and helps sites evolve towards user expectations on mobile. We believe this will contribute to business success on the web as users grow more engaged and can transact with less friction."

6 - Connect with audiences and humanise your business

An important part of any whiteboard animation is the way it connects with your audience. In part, we have our old friend Storytelling to thank for this but there are plenty of other ways whiteboard videos can resonate with viewers. The right choice of characters or voiceover can go a long way to helping people identify with you and your message, while using social or pop culture references that people will relate to take this to the next level.

Drawing on humour and emotive responses makes this connection even stronger and this connection can extend to more than a character or a message. Large scale companies and some industries don’t lend themselves to being readily relatable, so you can use this connection and the visual freedom of whiteboard animation to present your business in a more personable and human way

7 - Tailor your whiteboard animation to your subject

It’s not just business perception where the connection and presentation strengths of whiteboard animation come in to their own. Every message and subject matter deserve delivery that will capture its fullness and nuance - but depending on your subject this can be easier said than done.

Working with a creative team, you can create the perfect illustrations and visual metaphors to present your subject or message in the exact detail it needs, while also making it engaging. Whether it’s a complex scientific process, a new piece of policy or a company update, whiteboard animations are well placed to tackle the abstract and the more concrete.

We recently worked with CEA Consulting on an animation explaining how the ocean can play a role in absorbing atmospheric carbon and attention to scientific detail was essential.