Making a Whiteboard Video for Business – 4 Ways to Ensure Its Success

Making a whiteboard video for business marketing and training is a well-established trend in video marketing. Explainer videos are an easily sharable way to introduce your business, your brand or a specific concept to the world. Businesses the world over utilize explainer videos as they’re much more engaging than a long page of text.

Be honest – if you had the option between watching a short video or reading pages of site copy, which would you choose?

Chances are you picked the video… Your consumers will do the same.

One type of explainer video that works incredibly well is a whiteboard video. Specifically, these videos utilize a whiteboard and a hand drawing, writing or moving objects on the board, illustrating the point of the video while a voiceover offers a more detailed explanation.

Take a look at a really early example of a whiteboard explainer video we produced for VideotoOrder.com some time ago:

If you want a good, easily accessible example of this phenomenon, go on YouTube and search for “Draw My Life.” In these videos, YouTubers illustrate scenes from their life on a dry erase board while narrating their life story. These videos were a hit because they were both personal and engaging – much more so than a person staring at a camera for 10 minutes, telling someone their history with jump cuts abound.

You have the chance to recreate this magic in a business context, but first, you need to know what it takes to take this concept to a higher level. You don’t want a whiteboard video – you want an excellent whiteboard video that meets the seven critical points of advertising with video.

Here are 4 critical steps to consider when making a whiteboard video for business:

Here we can quickly touch on some necessary tips to start forming your whiteboard video:

FIRST, CONSIDER THE PURPOSE OF YOUR WHITEBOARD VIDEO.

If you are making a whiteboard video for business purposes you should be considering the following:

• What real-world problem are you attempting to solve?
• Which of your customer’s pain point is your video addressing?
• What will this video offer your consumer?

What is the intended outcome after watching your video? Is it to teach, entertain, reinforce brand awareness, follow through with a call to action, build trust or something else?

Answering the question of purpose is where you start developing the script and you will definitely need a detailed script with both audio and action cues to eventually choreography the movement in your whiteboard video.

USE YOUR WHITEBOARD VIDEO TO ILLUSTRATE WHAT YOU’RE SAYING IN THE SIMPLEST WAY POSSIBLE.

For instance, if you’re spouting off lots of statistics, find a way to illustrate them with your board using pictures or examples. Don’t write what you say unless you’re blatantly illustrating buzzwords.

Your whiteboard should always illustrate something in a way that’s quick and easy. Don’t go into extreme detail with your drawings – even if you’re an incredible artist, the idea is to get an image out as fast as the audio moves. In that same vein, your video has to have a myriad of images that all move quickly, but they should also capture attention. This is why simplicity is paramount. Simple, attention-grabbing images work well in contrast to your detailed voice over.

ALWAYS UTILIZE THE QUESTION OF “WHY?”

“Why?” is the most common question consumers ask themselves:

• Why should I buy this?
• Why is this product or service a solution for me?
• Why should I choose this company over another?
• Why should I follow the included call to action? (You do have a call to action in your video, don’t you?)

Simply put, I think that the question, “Why?” is the most important question you can answer in your viewer’s mind when designing, scripting and making a whiteboard video for business.

DO MANY, MANY, MANY RUN-THROUGHS BEFORE YOU UPLOAD AND MARKET THE FINAL PRODUCT.

You have to make sure the audio, pictures, and movements sync up well and that the length isn’t too long. This means drawing, speaking, erasing – and doing it over and over and over again.

Did you happen to catch the spelling mistake in the whiteboard video I embedded above? Yeah, that happened to us and it can happen to anyone. Admittedly, the audio could be much better, too. The point is to check and re-check before going live with your video, uploading it and investing time and money into marketing your video to get the widest distribution, views, likes, comments, and channel subscribers.

A whiteboard video looks easy when you’re watching one for yourself, but don’t underestimate the talent and effort it takes when making a whiteboard video for business. Practice makes perfect, and if you keep at it, you’ll eventually have a beautiful finished product that you’ll be proud of.