How to Create Explainer Videos: The Ultimate Guide for 2024

Explainer videos help SaaS businesses explain their product’s features and benefits in a simple way that drives user action.

These succinct, engaging videos are instrumental in breaking down intricate concepts, enhancing product understanding, and ultimately boosting user engagement.

However, creating such educational content can get challenging.

Recording videos, adding the right visual effects, enhancing the viewer’s experience, etc., are some of the resource-intensive action items in the entire workflow of creating explainer videos.

This is where building the right process with the right tools becomes essential, particularly for growing SaaS brands with limited hands on the deck.

In this article, let’s look at how you can create engaging explainer videos that educate your audience and help your customers get the most out of your products.

1. Determine topics

The last thing you want is to put energy into an explainer video that your audience doesn’t care about.

To avoid this, you need to choose the right topic for your explainer video and set a purpose.

Do you want to inform your audience about a particular concept related to their field of work or do you want them to adopt a new feature?

For instance, ClickUp gives simple titles to their videos, making it easier for the audience to know whether it will be useful to them:

Explainer videos can serve various purposes:

As you can imagine, they also come in different formats:

2. Define purpose and scope

When you clearly understand your aim—to drive sales, educate customers, or onboard new users—you can guide all subsequent decisions and make your content more impactful.

A clear purpose and scope allow the explainer video creation team to visualize the flow of the narrative and place it on a storyboard for collaborative analysis.

Typically, visual storyboards contain sketches and illustrations that represent what each scene will show and tell to the viewer. It is often accompanied by the talking points which form the precursor to the explainer video outline.

A typical explainer video outline includes:

The script should then expand on this outline, detailing exactly what will be said and shown at each point in the video. It's crucial to keep the language simple, engaging, and tailored to your target audience's understanding.

HubSpot, for instance, uses simple language while explaining the seemingly technical functionalities of their product:

Additionally, they clearly mention the benefits of the feature in the description, followed by the breakdown of the content with timestamps to help the viewer navigate through the explainer video:

3. Produce the video

Creating explainer videos, particularly for B2B SaaS businesses, requires a variety of tools, each serving a distinct purpose in the production process. Moreover, the nature of tools within your stack depends on the kind of explainer videos you produce.

For instance, if you are looking to create conceptual animated content that highlights the value your product brings, a tool such as Powtoon or Animaker is almost always necessary.

Explainer content also comes in the shape of screencast videos where the presenter shares their screen to show how to use software or run a workflow. These kinds of explainer videos are quite popular considering their ease of production and a broad range of applications.

Whether you are explaining to new team members how you get things done, creating a virtual demo for your product, or helping your customers understand features, simply recording your screen and walking the viewer through can be very effective.

You might only face challenges like speaking professionally, avoiding missteps, keeping the audio quality clean, and adding visual effects like zoom-in.

Clueso does all of that for you in minutes.

Just record a screencast video, explaining what the audience needs to do and upload it to Clueso. The platform will extract and enhance the script, give an AI voiceover, add zoom effects, and insert your brand markers in the intro and outro.

In a few minutes, you can go from raw screencast footage to a studio-quality explainer video.

Some best practices that can help you streamline your video production process even further:

• Focus on Storyboarding: Invest time in defining visuals for your video at select timestamps or chapters, minimizing the need for revisions during production. Free tools like Boords and Canva can be effective for this task.
• Create checklists for all phases: Apart from keeping your workflow quick, this will decrease the chances of oversights and inefficiencies.‍
• Avoid overediting the explainer video: Ensure all cuts, visual effects, etc., aid your content’s overall message and improve information recall. Adding too many elements can make your video appear inauthentic and take the attention away from the central topics.

4. Share it everywhere

Creating an explainer video itself doesn’t deliver value to your audience and clients unless it reaches them in their desired platform.

Depending on the nature and purpose of your explainer video, you can distribute it through your website, knowledge base, social media channels like YouTube, and paid ads, or share it on platforms like YouTube to reach a broader audience.

If you are creating explainer videos for marketing or educating your potential prospects, leveraging public video streaming platforms can be better. It is essential to use relevant keywords in the title, description, and tags to maximize visibility.

At the same time, create an attractive thumbnail that makes it easier for your video to stand out among others on the recommendations page.

Other ways to promote these videos include newsletters, embeds in blog posts, social media clips, and paid advertising.

If it is a dedicated product video that will help your existing users and clients get more out of your brand, upload that explainer video to your knowledge base or help center.

You can complement the explainer videos in your help center with an accompanying step-by-step how-to article. This can help you make your support content more accessible to users who prefer text-based content with images.

Clueso can help with that too!

The platform writes professional step-by-step how-to articles with perfectly trimmed GIFs in seconds.

Wrapping Up

Explainer videos have become indispensable for B2B SaaS businesses, serving as a powerful tool to demystify complex products and services, enhance user understanding, and boost engagement.

Creating such videos that hit the mark involves learning about the needs of the audience and customers, preparing a storyboard, recording the video, polishing it, and sharing it via various platforms.

To simplify this workflow and create such videos quickly and effectively, you can rely on Clueso, an AI-powered platform that can streamline this entire process, reducing hour-long tasks into minutes.

All you need to do is upload screencast footage of you presenting the steps. Within seconds, you get a polished, studio-quality explainer video that’s ready to go live.

Interested in giving your explainer video creation workflow a push?

Let's talk.

FAQs

Which software can you use to create explainer videos?

You can use any simple screen recording video to create an explainer video. Clueso stands out with its AI-powered features that can edit and polish your raw footage into a professional video in minutes.

How do you record an explainer video?

Recording an explainer video typically involves scriptwriting, storyboarding, choosing a format (e.g., animation or live-action), recording voiceovers or live footage, and then editing these elements together with suitable software.

What is the structure of an explainer video?

A typical explainer video structure includes an introduction to a problem, a presentation of the solution (your product or service), how it works, its benefits, and a call to action encouraging the viewer to engage further.

How do I make an online explainer video?

To make an online explainer video, select a platform like Clueso, choose a template or start from scratch, customize your video with text, images, and animations, and then edit and share your final product.

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