Back in the day, when content marketing was mostly called “blogging”, I ran marketing for a little technology startup. My success was measured by how much “traffic” I could drive to our corporate website from our PR activity. Our web audience would arrive from other websites after reading articles written by reporters, analysts or by tech bloggers. When these interested humans landed on our front page, they would then go to the about page or the product page or the news page (fairly evenly distributed) to better understand if they should care about our company.

One day, I posted a crummy little hand drawn “explainer video” that demonstrated our services to the front page of our website. I had originally wanted to have it professionally produced, but the $20K – $30K price tag pushed it out of budget feasibility. So, I worked with our graphic artist to create some primitive illustrations, animated the images in PowerPoint and added a simple voice over. We spent about a day and a half pulling it together. The result was a concise, quick presentation of our service benefits — but I was worried the primitive drawings might not fit the rest of our slick high-tech branding assets or that people might not find it appealing.

Anyway, you can guess what happened next. Potential customers, partners, bloggers and reporters — all who had been to our website — started mentioning that they learned more about the company from the simple 90-second explainer video than any other part of our marketing inventory. The overwhelming “next click” path on our homepage was the silly little video — by a factor of 20.

That was when I started thinking more about the power of simple visual animations. People landing on our homepage were much more likely to ask for more information when a video was available and they learned a lot about what our company did in a very short period of time… which made them happy.