3 Ways to Spice Up Your Content with Motion Graphics

Why should you use motion graphics in your brand’s content?

Motion graphics add another layer of sophistication to brand identity. They can help deliver your info in a more digestible format, making it easier for people to remember what they learned...which helps to meet your marketing goals. Viewers retain 95% of a message when they watch it in a video compared to 10% when reading it in text, making it an effective strategy for communicating your message.

These visuals help your brand stand out, catching and maintaining a viewer’s attention, especially if you can cater your design to your brand’s audience. After all, content with relevant images gets 94% more views than content without relevant images.

Motion graphics can also add more character to your content, which is important because you want your audience to relate to what you publish. This means people will engage more with your content and brand, which means more will know about the service or product. Twitter noted that tweets with video get ten times more engagement than those without. This just shows the amazing benefits of using motion graphics in your content.

Think about how many designs there are out there that combine photos, illustration, graphics, and text in a still format, and consider how you might add some animation to your visuals. Here are a few ideas for questions to ask yourself:

• Where do you want the viewer’s eyes to go?
• Should the text animate, and how slow or fast should it go?
• What kind of style should your graphics and animations have?

For now, we’ll explore three quick, simpler examples to add some extra oomph to your social media content and then share some great industry examples that will inspire you in your next brand campaign.

How to use Callouts in your Content

One of my favorite ways to identify and call attention to certain objects or info is using Callouts. Instagram and social media apps already have several built-in options to add text and even roughly track it to moving objects, but why not design something more to your brand and message?

In the above example, the client wanted a modern design for advertising new renovations to the neighborhood, so we used simpler callouts and switched out the colors to fit their branding. If the client had been looking more to show historic preservation, we would have chosen a serif or woodblock style font and more intricate borders and graphics, but this worked for them.

There are two ways to track movement in your shot. One way to do this is with the 3D camera tracker (“Track Camera” under the “Tracker” tab). School of Motion has a great tutorial on this here. The other way is using the “Track Motion” option under the “Tracker” tab in this video. I used the second option in the earlier example as I did not need the callouts to look 3D in this case.

To engage your viewer, animate your messages

The easiest way to animate your message is simply to animate the text and time it in a way to keep your viewer engaged. To do this successfully, you want to split your message into smaller digestible blurbs, keeping one or two phrases on the screen at a time. Otherwise, someone might look at the wall of text, get overwhelmed, and keep scrolling.

Apple's "Don't Blink" ad is a masterclass in economic type animation. The pace and movement keep you engaged with the message.

Most of the animation in this example is a linear movement in position and text fading in. Imagine having all of that text in one place in a still image- it would not be as easy to remember and could appear too overwhelming. Where this brief clip shines is in the timing of animation and a simple message, anyone can comprehend.

If you want to learn some more about text animators in AfterEffects, you can see School of Motion’s tutorial here. It is a great introduction to some tools to animate your text.

Make some stickers for a fun add-on to your content, and engage with your audience

Stickers are a great way to engage your audience. It makes your content more accessible to share and adds that character and interest to both your content and your audience’s if you make it available to them as well.

Uploading your sticker designs to GIPHY is the standard since they integrate well with Instagram. GIPHY has some best practices for uploading stickers here.

Furry Little Peach, an artist popular on YouTube and more, created custom sticker GIFs for her audience to use on Instagram. I see these on her posts and also see them pop up with other smaller artists since they are cute and easy to pop onto any kind of social post. They match the style of her illustrations and services and give her audience a fun way to engage with her art. She made her art more accessible and shareable.

You can animate this in Procreate on the Apple iPad or similar drawing programs with frame-by-frame animation capabilities. You can also design the stickers in a regular illustration program and animate them using After Effects or Photoshop. Ben Marriott has a great tutorial on how he animated one of Furry Little Peach’s illustrations on YouTube if you want to see the process.

Does this still seem too complex? Here are some options to learn more.

MOTION DESIGN TRAINING FOR YOUR ORGANIZATION

School of Motion has exceptional team training, making it easy to take your team’s digital advertising, social media, and web design to the next level. This is a great way to distinguish yourself from competitors, enhance your digital presence, and improve your organization’s bottom line. There are some incredible brands and studios that School of Motion has worked to train in the past, so it is worth checking out to advance your team’s skills.

HIRE AN EXPERT TO YOUR TEAM

Consider creating an account and posting a job on our School of Motion’s job board, creativecareers.io. Employers from around the world post their job openings here, and if you need someone with motion design experience it is one of the best resources around.

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