Why do people watch explainer videos? Simply put, we think we'll get to what we want, faster.
So do explainer videos "work"? The answer isn't quite as cut and dried.
If the explainer hooks, engages and motivates action. Then yes! It absolutely works.
If it's 3 minutes long and rams in every feature you have going, then no... it's very likley to fail.
As a tool, explainer videos can be a seriously potent marketing tool. They tap into the core principles of engagement: good storytelling, clear concepts, solid production, and memorability.
But, they'll only give you the results you want if you do the ground work.
Otherwise it's just more marketing noise in a fancier wrapper.
Over 15 years of producing explainer videos, we've learned what separates videos that convert from videos that get clicked away in seconds.
Whether you're working with professional animation services, or approaching the project in-house, this post unpacks how to make marketing explainer videos highly effective.
We explore timeless psychological insights, and real-world examples from our client work to show what actually drives results in practice.
Let's dive in.
Nowadays, online attention spans are brutal. Studies suggest we have 8 seconds to earn interest before a viewer clicks away.
In fact, videos that fail to explain their value in the first 10 seconds lose up to 65% of viewers.
That's not much time to make an impression. But it is enough—if you know what you're doing.
According to Forbes, short-form video content generates the highest engagement rate of any digital format, with most users deciding whether to keep watching within the first few seconds.
Hnere's what we've learned from producing hundreds of explainer videos: if the first 10 seconds don't show you understand their problem, they're gone.
Noft "we understand marketing challenges" generic fluff. Their actual problem, in language that they would use.
When we created the explainer for the Association of British Insurers—an animation called "Dad Comes Home"—we had a particularly difficult brief.
Insurance premiums had just risen across the board due to legislation changes, and people were annoyed. The traditional approach would've been to list the benefits of insurance, maybe throw in some statistics.
That would've been met with eye-rolls and click-aways.
Instead, we told the story through the innocent lens of a child whose father had a car accident. As the family goes through recovery, the child asks questions about why they have car insurance, what it pays for, why it matters. No corporate messaging. Just a kid being curious.
The video went on to win two awards and had exceptionally high engagement (PRCA Financial Awards Communications — Campaign of the Year, and PR Week Corporate Affairs Awards — Best Use of Content). Because in those first 10 seconds, we earned the right to their attention by approaching it from an angle they weren't expecting.
That's explainer video psychology. In the first 8 seconds, we verbally and visually demonstrate we understand the audience's pain point. If we fail to establish that understanding immediately, the viewer will click away.
Humans crave clarity. We've all got frustrated with an overly confusing instruction booklet or anything else really that should be simple… but isn't.
Generally, we turn away from things we find taxing.
There's nothing that protects explainer videos from this paradigm. If you produce a confusing explainer, people will switch off.
Or if you cram it with information or excessive design, you'll also wave bye-bye to your audience.
Good explainers do these three things well:
Take Mulberry Risk as an example. They had a new product called Ada—a highly advanced way of determining the value of insurance products.
The challenge? Their audience (niche insurance sellers) weren't insurance experts themselves. They were selling specialised products without knowing how to calculate risk accruately.
We could've crammed the explainer full of Ada's technical capabilities. Instead, we started by demonstrating we understood the audience's unique dilemma: you're selling a product where you don't know how many people will claim, or how big those claims will be.
Essentially, you're operating in a position that's very unique for a business where you don't know how much the product costs.
By demonstrating we understood their position, we immediately gain credibility to show how Ada can change the game. The audience give us trust by virtue of understanding their pain point.
From the get go, we want to make sure the message is free of jargon, simple and clear, and speaks the audience's language.
It's not about "dumbing down." It's simply presenting the information in a way that's most accessible. We make it easy for people to understand and buy-into.
This also helps create trust, builds brand credibility, and of course, increases explainer video effectiveness.
If you want your message to land, tell a story. You'll be tapping into the primal basis for how the brain understands and processes information.
Stories are how our brains have developed over thousands of years to make sense of the world. It's in our nature. Hard wired.
Stories are inherrantly engaging. They give context. They give us reason to be invested.
To clear up one point here that we get from time to time—a story doesn't need a central character. It doesn't need to follow Freytag's Pyramid. It doesn't need to be "Meet Dave. Dave has a problem. Dave found us. Dave is happy now."
No, no. A story in this context simply means it has a clear narrative arc. For example: a problem exists, there is a solution, the solution works like this.
A brilliant explainer story probably won't even feel like a story at all. It'll just feel like you're watching something that engages you.
In explainer videos, a story acts as a wrapper. It takes your message out of the abstract and into something human. A clear before and after. A problem. A journey. A better outcome.
Essentially the story is the delivery device for the message. It's your FedEx all-paid-up guaranteed delivery. Its only job is to make sure the message lands.
We created an explainer for the Chartered Institute of Physiotherapy about increasing conversations around unhealthy habits like smoking or weight. Many physiotherapists felt uncomfortable bringing these topics up, or felt it wasn't their place.
The story we told wasn't about a character (the physio and their struggle).
Instead it was a human conversation about recognising that we tend to continue with habits until something happens—a difficult conversation with a doctor, a wake-up call from a friend.
Some people never get those opportunities. But visiting a physiotherapist might be one of the rare occasions where one of these interactions could occur.
In showing this, we reframed the pysiotherapy session as a golden opportunity. A chance to change the course of someone's life from unhealthy habits to healthy ones.
hat narrative arc—problem, insight, opportunity—made the message stick without it feeling like we were "telling a story."
For more of a deep dive, check out our blog on how to create explainers people actually watch.
We like to think we make decisions based on logic. But really, emotion is in charge.
In fact, when someone damages the emotional centre of their brain, they can no longer make decisions at all. The logic's still there, but they can't compare options without emotional bias.
That's all fine and well, but what about B2B buying decisions? Surely when the stakes are high, logic wins out?
Not so fast. We're not talking about the whole decision-making apparatus here. We're just talking about the explainer video, and more specifically, what it needs to evoke.
So here's the more useful question:
Excitement? Confidence? Empathy?
Your message might be full of logical reasons to act, but how do you want someone to feel as they hear them?
Thinking about emotion this way is more strategic than you might think. Say we realise that trust is the key emotion. We can then go back and ask:
When designing a video brief, it helps to separate content from emotion:
Get both of those right, and you'll have something far more than a functional explainer. You'll have mastered the emotional impact of animated video.
You'll have a video that moves people, and moves them to act. As an aside, you might find our blog on how visuals trigger people interesting.
Of course trust is a huge buying factor too. But how exactly do you build it into a video?
The short answer is it's layered carefully into each aspect of production.
Firstly, does the script sound credible, grounded, and legitimate? Or is it making bold unsubstantiated claims, and big promises?
If the brand was a person, how are they coming across? Friendly, functional, conversational? Or is there just something about the voice over delivery that puts you off?
What about the design? Is it clean, uncluttered, branded and slick? Or does it seem to adhere to a stock style maybe? In other words—does it feel like your brand?
And finally, relevance. Does this video feel like it's speaking to the target audience, and their problems? Does it feel relatable? Or is it trying to impart a sales message?
Take HEKA as an example. Their business is about personalising employee benefits. Not everyone wants free gym membership, so why give everyone the same perks?
Their brand guidelines gave a nod to using shapes and colours to represent different features. However, the vast majority of brand guidelines don't include motion guidelines.
So often the explainer agencies job is to interpret the guidelines and develop an animation style that feels in keeping with the overall brand look and feel. This is the first trust marker.
The second trust marker is the tone of voice. How is the script and visuals coming across? Does it feel like HEKA? Does it match their ToV?
For HEKA, it wasn't enough just to explain the problem with employee benefits schemes and say "Hey, we're different". We needed this message to be embedded in the whole concept.
So we developed a visual language that gave life to the shapes in the brand guidelines—they became characters.
The whole concept became about matching character shapes with benefit shapes. A star-shaped character with square gym membership? Mismatch. A star-shaped character with star-shaped dental care? Match. The employee feels valued.
This wasn't just about making it look good. It was about building trust through a design that made the concept immediately clear and relatable.
Sometimes it is worth explicitly stating trust markers in a video. For example, how many countries you operate in, who your clients are, or case studies.
But building trust is much more intricate than simply relying on a line or two. It should very much be a pivotal part of your explainer video strategy and will improve your explainer video ROI.
After producing hundreds of explainer videos, here's what the data tells us:
Any shorter (60 seconds) and it's difficult to get enough of the story in to make someone excited enough to take action. You might not get them to the threshold where they really believe this product is right for them.
Any longer (2-3 minutes) and you're asking people to commit more time than they wanted to give an explainer video. They might start getting interested, but then you're talking about benefits that aren't relevant to them, so they have to sit through those to get to the ones that are. That's where you lose them.
We've found that 140 words per minute is the optimal length to pace an explainer video to. It allows just enough time to absorb the message without rushing through it.
Zero amends extremely rare in our industry, but if you get the foundations right and the build a robust collaborative process, it's absolutely possible. How do we know? Because this is exactly the set-up we've honed over the last 15 years.
By the time we get to the final animation, everyone—including all stakeholders—is on board about the purpose, who we're talking to, why we're saying what we're saying, and why we're showing what we're showing. There are no surprises because we've been aligned every step of the way.
70% of our clients come back to us year after year. Many of our clients' explainer videos are still getting results years later, still driving conversions, still sitting on homepages. Once they see how well it works, they want more—more strategically across their broader marketing landscape.
But it's not all smelling of roses. We learned the hard way many times. For example, we worked with Wellcome Trust on a video around scientific research. The client wanted specific, hefty bits of text from the report demonstrated within the video. We devised creative ways to show these statistics visually.
But here's what we learned: video isn't the best format for simply showing granular information. It's much better at storytelling, giving the gist, the higher meaning, the bigger picture. Looking back on this article, we failed on many counts.
We also used this to get better and refine our approach.
From then on, when we approach report-based videos with clients, we always orientate it around what's the bigger story the report is saying, and leave out the granular detail.
Here's something clients don't always realise: writing for a website is fundamentally different from writing for an explainer video.
We learned this years ago working with a client whose copywriter had written the script. The copywriter approached it from the perspective of making things understood through writing alone. It was good writing—formal, structured, grammatically perfect.
But good explainer video scripts break those rules. They talk in language that wouldn't pass a copywriter's test. Sometimes they don't even make grammatical sense.
Why? Because the way we speak is rarely how we write. The skill in writing a compelling explainer video script comes in knowing how it will sound when read.
And also fully ultilisng the medium. Meaning, voice and visual. You could say "look at this" in a script whilst showing the desired visual. You simply can't do this in an article, so copywriters aren't even thinking along these lines.
Yet, it's a highly effective way of engaging our brains.
One of the biggest mistakes we see in briefs is trying to target multiple audiences in a single explainer video.
For example, if you're targeting both CTOs and marketing managers, you're already in trouble.
Here's why: video is linear.
The pain point of a marketing manager is often different to the pain point of a CTO. The marketing manager might want a more streamlined, easy and effective approach to their work. The CTO wants cost savings.
You're essentially trying to make one thing (the video) all things to all people. This goes against the principals of what makes explainer videos such a potent marketing asset.
One of the upsides of animated explainer videos is they feel very personal. A well-written script feels like it's talking directly to you and your pain points. But if you're trying to speak to two different people with two different problems, how do you tell a personal, relatable story that speaks to the viewer?
It's very hard. If not impossible.
The solution? Choose one audience with a clearly defined pain point and desired outcome.
That's how you create high engagement.
Over the years, we've found that if we don't cover certain discovery questions early in the process, there will be misunderstandings and miscommunications later.
These can (and have) created huge issues, including reworking previous creative, endless amends, frustrated stakeholders.
By clarifying the brief early on (and asking the questions we've outlined in this article), we significantly reduce amends. In many cases, to zero.
Why? Because everyone understands what we're trying to acheive, who we're talking to, what they will relate to, and in turn, what message needst to be delivered.
You'd think clients come in knowing the answer to this. Maybe they even think they do. But when you start probing, the answer isn't always that clear.
It's not a failure of the client at all. It's simply that often we equate the outcome (in this case an animated video) with the solution. Our job is to dig a layer deeper.
For example, if success looks like more conversions, fantastic. We're definitely in explainer video territory—that's what explainer videos are designed to do.
However, if the goal is to gain more traction on social and build brand awareness, then actually we should be pivoting towards a brand story. That's about building connection with your audience, not going into product or service benefits.
By being clear on this from the start, we create an understanding and framework that prevents costly pivots later.
Explainer videos are by their very nature beasts of engagement. But so too is a sports car a beast of speed—it still needs a good driver.
You'll find endless stats on how effective explainer videos are. We clearly love them. And we see them do some heavy lifting for our clients.
The trick is to ensure all your ducks are lined up and you maximise every stage of production. Write a solid brief, produce a good story, use well-thought-out visuals, and slick animation. Engagement will take care of itself.
Want to see these principles in action?
Check out 11 of the best animated explainer videos we've handpicked—each one showing how psychology, clarity, and storytelling come together to drive results.
