How to Educate Users by Combining Animation With Live-Action Videos?

Combine Animation and Live-Action videos to educate, raise awareness, engage and sell effortlessly.

Video content is the most popular end efficient today. Businesses, consumers, influencers, and various platforms have already acknowledged that people are most responsive to videos and find the most engaging and informational. No wonder Video content is becoming more and more complicated and multilayered today. We can distinguish between two concepts: Animation and live-action videos.

Though both types of videos are most efficient, informative, and engaging compared to any other content types, they have their pros and cons. But what if you could gey only the most from Animated and Live-action videos, excluding most of the pitfalls, and create ultimately innovative videos?

Today’s users claim that visual content appears to be most informative and engaging. In other words, if you want to inform people, educate them, raise awareness about your brand or any matter, a video will work much better than even the most engaging text file with infographics. No wonder more and more content creators are now exploring the concept and possibilities of videos and trying to combine each type’s best features.

And while animated videos appear to be most attractive for a larger auditorium, many businesses, educational platforms, and whole industries appear to be concerned about the animation’s character and perception. Looking for ways to make animation more relatable, and therefore more engaging, they experiment with different combinations between animated and live-action videos.

Creating such content requires some advanced analytics and skills to determine the elements that really work for each given brand, industry, or topic and combine them proportionally to make the final video engaging, relatable, and inspiring for each particular auditorium.

In this article, we shall explain how to determine those most efficient elements in animated and live-action videos and find a perfect ratio between them to create content that would help engage and educate your auditorium.

Why combine animation with live-action?

Before getting down to how a brand can combine and use the benefits of animation and live-action, let’s talk about why anyone would want to go into such advanced matters of content creation.

Here are the most popular uses of combined video content:

• Breaking the ice. People are naturally reluctant towards new products, knowledge, and information. When they understand that they look at promotional content, most of them can develop a certain level of prejudice towards the brand. It happens because today’s content is indeed overflowing with product placement and commercial promotion. At the same time, animation still calls for positive association in people’s minds. It looks friendlier, more informative. When you combine live-action video with animated elements, your auditorium automatically feels that you want to entertain them, provide some new helpful information without imposing a new product;
• Animation makes live-action more informative. While live-action videos remain most relatable for the bigger auditorium, animated elements help to create an atmosphere, a unique style of the video that will call for the viewer’s world vision personally. Animation makes videos more expressive, helps emphasize and highlight most essential details, and therefore turns any video into informative and educational content;
• Raise brand awareness. People see commercial videos all the time in their social media newsfeed, on the TV, on street billboards, and even in movies. Eventually, consumers’ auditorium starts to filter this kind of information and pay less attention to it. Animation makes such videos look fresh, engaging, and original. It catches the viewer’s attention and holds it long enough to inspire communication and raise awareness about the brand.
• Animation sells. When video content is made to sell, its primary purpose is to convert a viewer into a consumer. And while the process becomes more complex as soon as the viewer understands that the video is “selling,” animation still manages to hold users` attention and encourage credibility, making the selling process effortless.
• Building long-term relationships through video content. Hardly can one video be efficient enough to sell or educate right away. Most probably, it will be a part of a multileveled content plan and marketing strategy. Combining animation with live-video content, you retain viewers, build relationships with them and encourage mutual communication. Eventually, the viewer makes most of the job, becoming interested in the topic and getting the information clearly and quickly from your content. It means that by putting a bit more effort into creating combined videos, you simultaneously liberate yourself from the necessity to go into advanced content creation schemes.

Combining animation with live video content, you talk to your viewers directly, giving them information in a straightforward, relatable, and engaging manner. Eventually, users see your content as the most informative one and prefer to address it and, therefore, tour the brand rather than looking for information from other sources. It is the main benefit and idea of a combination between live-action and animated videos.

How to combine animation with live-action videos?

Now that you understand the purpose and efficiency of combining animation with live-action videos, let’s talk about applying such content.

It is essential to understand that the efficiency of combined videos depends on various factors such as:

• The target auditorium, its demography, interest, habits, etc.;
• Your brand or industry;
• The final goal and expectations from the content.

Therefore it is not enough to create a high-quality video that combines live-action with animation in a perfect ratio. Its proper placement and use determine the efficiency of such content.

Combined videos in Social Media

About 3.5 billion people use social media every day. These statistics make platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Tik Tok, and others the most efficient fields, where you can reach your auditorium effortlessly.

By placing videos that combine animation with live-action, you get a chance to stand out in the users` newsfeed and catch their attention most efficiently. Being most expressive and engaging, those videos also have a significant competitive advantage on social media platforms since most users watch social media video content mute. It means that content creators have to rely mostly on informative visual elements, and animation remains the most efficient one.

Videos and blogs – the perfect marriage of content.

Including videos in blog posts makes the most informative, educational, and attractive for users, especially if those videos take the informative feature to a whole new level combining relatable live-action elements with animated ones.

Moreover, including combined video content into a blog, you kill two birds with one stone:

• Educate users most efficiently;
• Boost the traffic towards your website, blog, YouTube channel, etc.

This combination makes blogs most efficient. It gives readers a break and offers them an alternative way to receive and process the information. At the same time, it boosts activity around your posts and therefore ranks your website in top searches of Google and other search engines.

Combining animation and live-action videos works best for educational platforms and those brands that aim to promote their products and services by demonstrating their practical value.

Videos on landing pages

If a user got to your landing page, it means that he or she is looking for the information about your brand or product precisely. In this case, you get a chance to hit the spot immediately with an engaging, informative, relatable video that can become a decisive factor and turn a user into a consumer.

Combining animation and live-action in one video will allow you to summarize the product or service you offer, make a viewer believe that you want him to make a genuinely informed decision, and therefore inspire trust.

Those combined videos are so effective that placing them above all the rest of the information you traditionally provide on a landing page will turn it into the main decisive factor and instantly minimize your selling efforts.

Combined videos in E-mail marketing

While e-mail marking remains relevant today, it seems to have used all its resources, being one of the oldest promotion tools. Many businesses and educational platforms mistakenly deprive themselves of the apparent benefits of e-mail marketing, thinking that it is a field that has already been overused and exhausted.

Inserting video content into your e-mail marketing materials, you automatically raise the chances for your e-mail to be opened at all. And suppose the content is truly valuable, being informative, engaging, and entertaining at the same time. In that case, the user won’t only get interested in the current product, but he will most likely check out your following mailing. In other words, combined video content initially improves the efficiency of your e-mail marketing campaign.

The combination of animation and live-action videos is more than just an experiment with content. It helps animated videos become more relatable due to live elements and adapt them for various industries. At the same time, animated details in live-action content broaden its communicative qualities, making it acceptable for a larger auditorium, instantly informative and applicable for various fields, from corporate training to social media platforms.

While the importance and share of video content are only growing today in various fields becoming most competitive, it is crucial to take the next step now, before today’s fresh ideas became mainstream.